Clark E Moustakas : The Power of Loneliness

Edvard Munch - Night in Saint-Cloud (1890)

Clark E Moustakas

Loneliness

THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING LONELY

There is a power in loneliness, a purity, self-immersion, and depth which is unlike any other experience. Being lonely is such a total, direct, vivid existence, so deeply felt, so startlingly different, that there is no room for any other perception, feeling, or awareness. Loneliness is an organic experience which points to nothing else, is for no other purpose and results in nothing but the realization of itself. Loneliness is not homelessness. There is no departure or exile, the person is fully there, as fully as he ever can be.

Loneliness involves a unique substance of self, a dimension of human life which taps the full resources of the individual. It calls for strength, endurance, and sustenance, enabling a person to reach previously unknown depths and to realize a certain nakedness of inner life.

Being lonely is a reality of far-reaching social consequence, yet it is distinctly a private matter. It is an experience of raw sensitivity. It is so entirely pure and complete that there is no room for anything else or anyone else. Feelings of loneliness take root deeply and unfold in varied directions. Being lonely involves a certain pathway, requires a total submersion of self, a letting be of all that is and belongs, a staying or remaining with the situation, until a natural realization or completion is reached; when a lonely existence completes itself, the individual becomes, grows from it, reaches out for others in a deeper, more vital sense.

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The loneliness of modern life may be considered in two ways: the existential loneliness which inevitably is a part of human experience, and the loneliness of self-alienation and self-rejection which is not loneliness at all but a vague and disturbing anxiety.

Existential loneliness is an intrinsic and organic reality of human life in which there is both pain and triumphant creation emerging out of long periods of desolation. In existential loneliness man is fully aware of himself as an isolated and solitary individual while in loneliness anxiety man is separated from himself as a feeling and knowing person.

Loneliness anxiety results from a fundamental breach between what one is and what one pretends to be, a basic alienation between man and man and between man and his nature.

Insidious fears of loneliness exist everywhere, nourished and fed by a sense of values and standards, by a way of life, which centers on acquisition and control. The emphasis on conformity, following directions, imitation, being like others, striving for power and status, increasingly alienates man from himself. The search for safety, order, and lack of anxiety through prediction and mastery eventually arouses inward feelings of despair and fears of loneliness. Unable to experience life in a genuine way, unable to relate authentically to his own nature and to other selves, the individual in Western culture often suffers from a dread of nothingness.

Why is it that so many individuals in modern life yearn for a fundamental relatedness to others but are unable to experience it ? What is it that stands between man and man? Why is it that in face-to-face meetings man is unable to be spontaneous, truthful, direct with his fellow man? What makes so many people today act in opposition to their own natures, to their own desires and requirements ? Why is self-estrangement and fear of loneliness so common in modern life ? Margaret Wood in one of the few significant studies of loneliness, has asked, “What is there in us, or in the society of our time, that makes each of us a solitary individual, separate and apart, alone, yet needing others and needed by them?”

Loneliness anxiety is a widespread condition in contemporary society. The individual no longer has an intimate sense of relatedness to the food he eats, the clothing he wears, the shelter which houses him. He no longer participates directly in the creation and production of the vital needs of his family and community. He no longer fashions with his own hands or from the desires of his heart. Modern man does not enjoy the companionship, support, and protection of his neighbors. He has been sharply cut off from primary groups and from family and kinship ties. He lives in an impersonal urban or suburban community where he meets others not as real persons but according to prescribed rules of conduct and prescribed modes of behavior. He strives to acquire the latest in comfort, convenience, and fashion. He works in a mechanized society, in which he is primarily a consumer, separated from any direct and personal contact with creation. Modern man is starving for communion with his fellow man and with other aspects of life and nature.

The fear of loneliness is an acute problem today because man has lost his world and he has lost his experience of neighborliness and community life. He experiences a feeling of alienation from the human world about him and he suffers from a corroding feeling of estrangement.

Without intensive ties which have genuine meaning, modern man maintains an essential anonymity in society and in his community. Associations often are on a contractual basis and the person is treated as an object or thing or commodity. The individual fulfills his role in order to attain a higher reward, not because there is intrinsic value in being one’s self, but because there is an economic value toward which one is directed. With advances in production, with the development of mechanical and automatic devices, with the change from rural to urban living, with the emphasis on making others’ services indispensable, man has become increasingly competitive, exploitative, status conscious, and suspicious of his neighbor. He seeks group adjustment rather than group solidarity and enters into relations on the basis of formal agreements and contracts rather than trust. In modern life, much social interaction is between surface figures or ghosts rather than real persons.

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Loneliness anxiety is a defense against an unloving world, the pain of isolation, and the yearning for tenderness and security. Underneath this defense, the individual reveals an excessive and repressed sentimentality and experiences immense anxiety that his weakness will be exposed. Much of the loneliness anxiety in our society is not the psychiatric loneliness which results from rejection or abandonment in childhood. It is possible to live too much in the world, to try to escape loneliness by constant talk, by surrounding one’s self with others, by modeling one’s life from people in authority or with high status. Alienated from his own self, the individual does not mean what he says and does not do what he believes and feels. He learns to respond with surface or approved thoughts. He learns to use devious and indirect ways, and to base his behavior on the standards and expectations of others. Cut-off from his own self, he is unable to have communal experiences with others, though he may be popular, or to experience a sense of relation with nature.

Many of these individuals love truth, yet their lives are predicated on appearances and false ties; they do not concentrate their energies enough to be able to become in fact what they are in inspiration. Literally millions of adults who are protected and loved, who experienced intimate relations in their early years, suffer the consequences of an impersonal, competitive world of self-denial and alienation. They often go to great lengths to escape or overcome the fear of loneliness, to avoid any direct or genuine facing of their own inner experience.

What is it that drives man to surround himself with the same external double-talk, the same surface interests and activities during his evenings at home as during his days at work? It is the terror of loneliness, not loneliness itself but loneliness anxiety, the fear of being left alone, of being left out. It is absolutely necessary to keep busy, active, have a full schedule, be with others, escape into the fantasies, dramas, and lives of others on television or in the movies. Everything is geared toward filling and killing time to avoid feeling the emptiness of life and the vague dissatisfactions of acquiring possessions, gaining status and power, and behaving in the appropriate and approved ways. The escape from loneliness is actually an escape from facing the fear of loneliness.

Cultural interests and activities and community pursuits provide a powerful antidote to the fear of loneliness. But all the while, the person experiences loneliness in a vague and undifferentiated form — the loneliness anxiety of feeling alone even in a crowd, of talking incessantly with others while not saying anything meaningful or productive, of discussing the same subjects in the same ways in different groups — the loneliness anxiety of being a member of a club or organization without any true identity or relatedness to others, of acquisition without satisfaction — the anxiety of consuming where there is no essential tie to creating — the anxiety created when real desires and interests are abandoned in favor of social, economic, and vocational rewards. The other directed person is a lonely person who tries to assuage his loneliness in the crowd, in the poker game in the back room with its praise of masks, at cocktail parties afternoon and night.

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In contrast to the loneliness anxiety of modern life is the inevitable, real loneliness of genuine experience. Thomas Wolfe regarded loneliness as an intrinsic condition of existence. (...) Wolfe believed that loneliness is an essential condition of creativity, that out of the depths of grief, despair, and the shattering feeling of total impotency springs the urge to create new forms and images and to discover unique ways of being aware and expressing experience. The vastness of life itself produces the emotional climate of existential loneliness, the mystery of a new dawn, the endless stretches of sea and sky, the immense impact of air, and time, and space, the unfathomable workings of the universe. The constant, everlasting weather of man’s life is not love but loneliness. Love is the rare and precious flower but loneliness pervades each new day and each new night.

The deepest experiences the soul can know — the birth of a baby, the prolonged illness or death of a loved relative, the tortuous pain or the isolation of disease, the creation of a poem, a painting, a symphony, the grief of a fire, a flood, an accident — each in its own way touches upon the roots of loneliness. In all these experiences we must perforce go alone.

It takes creative courage to accept the inevitable, existential loneliness of life, to face one’s essential loneliness openly and honestly. It requires inner fortitude not to be afraid or overwhelmed with the fear of being and the fear of being alone. The experience of separation or isolation is not unhealthy any more than any condition of human existence is unhealthy. Ultimately each man is alone but when the individual maintains a truthful self-identity, such isolation is strengthening and induces deeper sensitivities and awareness. In contrast, self-alienation and estrangement drive one to avoid separation.

The fear of loneliness is a sickness which promotes dehumanization and insensitivity. In the extreme, the person stops feeling altogether and tries to live solely by rational means and cognitive directions. This is the terrible tragedy of modern life — the alienation of man from his own feelings, the desensitization of man to his own suffering and grief, the fear of man to experience his own loneliness and pain and the loneliness and misery of others.

Loneliness is as much organic to human existence as the blood is to the heart. It is a dimension of human life whether existential, sociological, or psychological, whatever its derivatives or forms, whatever its history, it is a reality of life. Its fear, evasion, denial, and the accompanying attempts to escape the experience of being lonely will forever isolate the person from his own existence, will afflict and separate him from his own resources so that there is no development, no creative emergence, no growth in awareness, perceptiveness, sensitivity. If the individual does not exercise his loneliness, one significant capacity and dimension of being human remains undeveloped, denied. A fear of despair, an agony of aloneness replaces the real experience but strategies of escape and alienation can never substitute for the growth-inducing, deepening values of a genuine, vital, lonely experience.

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