Page 40 - Retail Pharmacy Assistants - November 2020

The following is an excerpt from Sarah Wilson’s latest book, This One Wild and Precious Life, pages 18-23. 38 BOOK EXCERPT all the lonely people 8. Right, so first I needed to identify this disconnect. To say it’s an itch, a nebulous feeling, was not going to cut it. It often presents as loneliness. At least that’s how we tend to describe disconnection – it’s an accessible entry point. You can point at loneliness, study it. Also, there is no denying that just navigating this gargantuan topic – the everythingness – is lonely. How many times have I called out during a sleepless night into the dark, is anyone else feeling this existential clusterfuck as I am? Is anyone seeing what I am, willing to question things as I am? 9. ‘Loneliness is a populated place,’ literary critic Olivia Laing wrote in 2016 in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. In just a few short years, however, the joint has reached bursting point. It’s now an epidemic, say the headlines. In the 1980s scholars estimated 20 per cent of people in the United States felt lonely; now it’s half of all Americans. In 2018 the British parliament appointed a Loneliness Minister following news that Britain is the ‘loneliness capital of Europe’ with its inhabitants the least likely to know their neighbours or have strong friendships in all of the EU. Australia has a Coalition to End Loneliness and I read Dutch supermarkets have a ‘conversation’ checkout where people can chat to the cashier to combat the issue. Which is so Dutch and really rather lovely. One study found loneliness is ‘contagious’. People are 50 per cent more likely to experience loneliness if someone they are directly connected to feels lonely. A causation that is just a bit ironic, right? And, goodness, it gets worse. Loneliness now kills twice as many of us a year as obesity does. One report found that smoking fifteen cigarettes a day is a healthier option than living on your own, a state of being sociologist Hugh Mackay calls the ‘global warming’ of demographics. But then we learn that 60 per cent of married people feel lonely. Seemingly we are all lonely, regardless of the number of up-close humans in our lives. Indeed a 2019 study rated Australians as the third most ‘socially connected’ people in the world, yet we are feeling lonely at unprecedented levels with millennials reporting both the most ‘connection’ and the greatest loneliness globally. But then, funny creatures that we are, we increasingly claw over one another to be on our own; we actually seek aloneness in a hectic, hyper-socially connected world. The Pew Research Center found that 85 per cent of adults seek more aloneness. One major international travel company reports that more than half of its bookings – more than 75,000 – are solo travellers. Nearly 10 per cent of US travellers are married people with kids wanting to get away on their own. I read the other day that in Japan a growing number of car share app users don’t actually drive the car they’ve booked. They hire them to simply sit in them. Alone. And just to muddy things further, when given the option to be on our own, we freak. A series of studies by University of Virginia and Harvard University psychologists found that the bulk of us will opt for an electric shock over being left alone with our own thoughts for as little as 15 minutes. In the study, participants were given the option to break the discomfort of merely sitting solo in a chair in a room, with no phone and nothing to read, with a self-administered painful jolt. Two-thirds of men and a quarter of women in the study chose to press the button. So where do we land? COVID-19 aside, we are feeling lonely, possibly more so than ever before. But this isn’t about not having enough humans around us, right? Not anymore. What we’re feeling is deeper and more original. And wonderfully nuanced. 10. And so I think the beautiful and courageous – and richer – question here becomes: what are we lonely from? The magnificent artist Patti Smith wrote, ‘A newborn cries as the cord is severed, seeming to extinguish memory of the miraculous. Thus we are condemned to stagger rootless upon the earth in search for our fingerprint on the cosmos.’ As Anton Chekhov wrote, ‘If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.’ RETAIL PHARMACY ASSISTANTS • NOV 2020