An Epiphany on Loneliness

The other night, I was watching a movie called "The Outsiders" (which is basically a film on the class differences in the late 1950s), and at one point, the main character's two best friends are dead. And so I thought, "He must be feeling really lonely right now. All those happy memories that he and his friends share, no longer being able to talk to someone who was there with him, remembering too." And then it hit me. I realized I had a half-definition for loneliness. It's the inability to confirm your reality with another intelligent human being.

Now, that definition doesn't cover the entire cause and feeling of loneliness, but it's a start towards that. You see, according to David Hume, a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, all reality is simply a

David Hume

series of sensory inputs colliding with your consciousness in an alternate dimension, and therefore nothing is really real. In his words: "To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive. What a particular privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought." Thing is, there is no way that I know of to prove or disprove this theory. And not being able to either confirm or deny such a fundamental question tends to upset my perception of reality. And whenever I start to question reality, I tend to get lonelier than usual.

No mean feat, considering. But anyway, questioning that sort of basic human assumption leads us to want to find an answer to the said question. It's within human nature. And when we are unable to even definitively say that anything physical is actually as we experience it, it leads us to question even the existence of people around us, and ultimately humanity as a whole. And that, in my experience, tends to distance ourselves from any sort of social interaction, if not physically, then at least emotionally. And that feels like loneliness to me.