I keep thinking about this essay:
Research on prisoners, hermits, soldiers, astronauts, polar explorers and others who have spent extended periods in isolation indicates social skills are like muscles that atrophy from lack of use. People separated from society — by circumstance or by choice — report feeling more socially anxious, impulsive, awkward and intolerant when they return to normal life.
Psychologists and neuroscientists say something similar is happening to all of us now, thanks to the pandemic. We are subtly but inexorably losing our facility and agility in social situations — whether we are aware of it or not. The signs are everywhere: people oversharing on Zoom, overreacting to or misconstruing one another’s behavior, longing for but then not really enjoying contact with others.
I know I feel it. Like many of you, I have spent the last six months in near isolation. My wife was with me at home for most of that time — thank God — but even when she was here, we stayed tight in our little bubble, leaving the house only for grocery shopping and the occasional errand. When I could strike up a conversation with a (masked) stranger in a supermarket line, it felt like a victory.
Contrast that to a normal day, pre-Covid, something I took for granted as “life.” Even aside from going to work — where there were colleagues to talk and joke with — places seemed active. I may have been alone, but I could join in the flow. People ate in groups, kibbitzed in lines, mixed with other human beings without fear of accidentally picking up a dread disease — a disease, it doesn’t have to be said, that automatically isolates you, whether at home or in a hospital.
Worse, it’s a disease that forces you to die separated from loved ones. It’s a disease that goes against everything we need to be — strive to be — as people. It destroys community in the purest sense of the word.
I tell myself that most of what we consider normal goes on. This isn’t Europe in 1942.
Still: I feel anxious. Solitude is different from solitary.
Even the most introverted among us … are wired to crave company. It’s an evolutionary imperative because there’s historically been safety in numbers. Loners had a tough time slaying woolly mammoths and fending off enemy attacks.
So when we are cut off from others, our brains interpret it as a mortal threat. Feeling lonely or isolated is as much a biological signal as hunger or thirst. And just like not eating when you’re starved or not drinking when you’re dehydrated, failing to interact with others when you are lonely leads to negative cognitive, emotional and physiological effects.
I know this ugly era will end (or at least be somewhat controlled by a vaccine, much as many diseases are), but man, this is a long damned tunnel. (And though Europeans and Canadians have also had trying times, what we’re going through in the United States has an added layer of fear and frustration that should have been unnecessary.)
All I know is, if you want to reach out, feel free to drop me a line. Trust me: I’ll welcome the connection.
Ephemereality 