Loneliness Has Scaled In The Modern World. What Now?
First thing to discuss: We need to stop ignoring loneliness as a topic
I’ll begin with a story.
On March 3, 2017, I decided to get incredibly drunk during the day, and that was one of the catalyzing events for the end of my marriage at the time. I’ve looked back on that day numerous times over the past couple of years, and I really don’t fully understand the rationale … the relationship was not good at the time, and we would have reached that conclusion at another point (we probably should have by then, honestly), but I had a hand in the final poker lay-down of our deal, and I wonder why it was that day and that sequence sometimes. And when I think about that, it’s usually about how lonely I felt at the time.
The ironic thing about that day is that, in the middle of this bender I was on at 2:45pm on a Friday for some reason, I was texting with a new shrink I was considering going to … who I did end up going to for a while. He does rapid eye movement theory. You can Google that if you want, but basically you go into a room with a shrink, you focus on a laser pointer type deal, and you talk about stuff and walk through a sequence. The first 7–8 times I did it…
