Loneliness

The symptoms of loneliness are feeling empty inside and thinking like unloved. We live in group or in community to avoid our loneliness and to avail socio-psychological security. Communities create institutions like family, marriage and kinship etc. to address loneliness in a personalized way.    The social institutions are changing and community does not have much control on individuals, loneliness is spreading and becoming an epidemic.

Unhappy, unloved and dissatisfaction are the new buzz words to rationalize loneliness. This also creates a form of social isolation. There is a very thin line between loneliness and depression. Loneliness is very personal whereas depression is a pathological and psychological term.  Both the terms are so widespread that they become a shared experience. Even we consider it as very normal.

Loneliness is gendered. Loneliness of women in general is underrated, less valued, less discussed and trivial in nature as like women’s anger. For example, as a woman if you show your anger and dissatisfaction or if you cry and sit alone or you are feeling unloved and feeling empty, these attributes actually negative. But these bad traits are considered and treated as very normal, in some extent these are also ignored by your family, friends and peers. Surprisingly, in case of men all those negative attributes mentioned above for women are valued and respected including anger. Male anger and loneliness is respected and labelled as masculine. Loneliness is always being a neglected factor for housewives .They are the target audience. Their loneliness is less discussed as it does not provide any economic benefit. As mentioned earlier, loneliness is an epidemic now. Most of us are affected by this but as per the need of institutions we have to show our loyalties by hiding our loneliness.            

This loneliness is created by us. Modern society believes in diversity. When we are in social diversity we help people to become individualistic and to create a sense of separateness or else we will become similar.  The more we become individualized, the more it becomes difficult to find a friend or a mate with same values and interest. We become very selective and choosier in our social circle; automatically it leads to weak social ties. Loneliness is colonized and modernized also. Now our aloofness depicts our status.  We impose a sense of loneliness among our children by selecting, deselecting and re-selecting their peers, choices and freedom.

Loneliness is a market economy. It is huge business. Travel, entertainment, night clubs, drugs, alcohol, bars, prostitution and above all Social media and Apps (Dating apps) are rising up. These mediums eradicate individual loneliness for a time being.

Loneliness is not sadness or depression. The opposite of loneliness is not happiness; it is liveliness .It is a condition. Don’t overreact to this. We are all human beings and are not so perfect.   We all are having some unmet needs, unfulfilled desire, far reaching dreams and recurring problems.  If we are conditioned to loneliness for a long run, we shall become meek and may become mentally ill.

Love: Confused or Conditional

I love your eyes, your cherry lips

The love that always lingers

Your way with words and random blips

Your skilled computer fingers

 These lines are written by John Denver, a famous lyricist. The last line is a thought provoking one, which depicts the future of love and future of mate selection. Denver tries to say love and working skills both are important. 

Social change is unavoidable. It changes our socio-personal dynamics and social institutions. It allows us to think something unimaginable.

Can you imagine that your children will prefer to live as childless parents? Can you imagine a family with several husbands and one wife? (The craze for a boy still dominates and also a genetic tinkering is on the way to pre select the sex of your child)  Finally, can you imagine homosexual’s families with children as their own?  

We can ignore these permutations but cannot deny its possibilities. We have noticed many types of changes in our conventional institutions. The family has changed, from extended to joint then joint to sub-nuclear. In case of institution of marriage, traditional form of marriage converted into trail marriage and Dual career marriage (both husband and wife are in jobs) transformed into Dual career marriage with no children which is trending form of marriage now.

What about LOVE then. Is love also changing its dynamics and having a new spectrum?  In the pre-industrial era, physical strength, compatibility, submissiveness and level of tolerance were the attributes of partner selection. Love was more biological or physical.  In the next era, physical love converted into Meta physical and psychological.  Romanticism was dominated by songs, poems and imagination. Companionship, sex (not for progeny), warmth and support became the features of love. Finally, the modern era comes. Love is in the air and everywhere. Love overshadows the barrier of caste, color, class and income; these were previously played a vital role in love and marriage.

New era lovers fall in love, they prefer to working rather than simply waking –up. They prefer weekends rather than weekdays. They prefer reciprocal gift exchange. Modern day love has added sexual and psychological need plus a sound rational brain plus conscience, responsibility, self-discipline and work matter virtues. Love birds discard the single minded logic also.

Love has been a confused entity for society.  For example :  If I love myself then I am selfish or narcissist, If I love other then I am self-loathing or dissatisfied and if I love my opponents or enemy then my love is ineffective.  

The structural changes of love may look like rational but selection of a mate is purely emotional and hormonal. The evolution of love explains us to be more skilled and innovative in practice. But, Love doesn’t have any nomenclature. Above all, love is blind.

Are you healthy or free from disease?

The term health is multidimensional and vague as well.  Health or being healthy does not mean the absence of disease or absence of preventive, curative and diagnostic services. WHO defines health as an embedded state of physical, mental and social well-being. Well-being is a combination of both subjective and objective components such as standard of living, level of living and quality of life. Health is a state of life with continuation.

The zenith point of health is positive health and the bottom is death. In between positive health and death, we shall find many spectrum such as better health, freedom from sickness, unrecognized sickness, mild sickness and severe sickness. Positive health is state in which the individual capacities for participation in the social system are optimal.  Since positive health cannot be achieved because it is influenced by many peripheral factors including emotional breakdown, which is still a dominant part of our lives.

We generally analyze health only in physical and mental dimensions.  We ignore the other dimensions such as emotional, vocational and spiritual.  Mental health is not emotional health.  We can find that these two dimensions are closely related but in reality they are two different entities. Mental health is all about KNOWING or COGNITIVE POWER, while emotional health is all about FEELING.  The modern era is facing a new challenge in health that is vocational dimension of health. For example, if somebody loses job or if he or she is forced to have a mandatory retirement, there is a maximum chance that he or she will be trapped in vocational health crisis.  Another dimension what most yoga gurus opt is spiritual health. It is all about searching the meaning and purpose in life defying the health and disease.

We can define health but cannot define disease.  Disease has many aspects. Some diseases are because of their extreme nature  such as food poisoning, some are insidious like mental illness or arthritis and some are carriers like typhoid, where individual seems to be healthy but can infect others. There are plethora of diseases from short term to long term and visible to invisible.  Let’s define the terms which connote a state of unhealthiness. Illness and sickness are the two widely used terms. Illness is all about a subjective sate of the person who feels aware of not being well where as sickness is a state of social dysfunction, means the role individual plays when he or she feels ill.  Above all, disease is all about physiological and psychological dysfunction.

Like health, disease has also changed its dimensions. Each decade produces a new pattern of disease. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, respiratory infections, Alzheimer and other dementia, lung cancers and diabetic are new emerging and top rated diseases since 5 years. TB, diarrhea and HIV/AIDS have dropped down rapidly.

Being healthy is a continuous process; it is not a single time achievement, whereas the nature of diseases is an ever changing phenomenon. In future we may define health and disease in our way which suits our ecology, technology and demography rather defining them in a stereotype and rhetoric. We are aspiring for being healthy simultaneously we are less immunized to modern diseases. Such a contradiction!!!!