“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr
I have been thinking about loneliness a lot this past month. Not just personal loneliness, the kind that creeps into everyone’s life at times, but communal loneliness, the type Vonnegut is talking about. So many of the people we know have no real community. They might know people at work, and keep in irregular contact with extended family, but basically their family lives in physical isolation, reaching out usually through their phones and computers, and often only to stem the tide of seclusion they feel.
I am not bringing this up to highlight how sad people’s lives are. I bring it up because of the difference I have seen here in Vancouver Island. Most of the people in our Family Sessions are First Nation’s, and Stacy and I have been convicted by the stories they tell, and how much they miss their family. What we noticed from the First Nation’s people was their interconnectedness. Despite so much trauma and evil they have had done to them, they stay in relationship with their friends and family and they don’t generally write people off. They do this because they have no other choice. Stacy and I realized that we have chosen to avoid difficult relationships, limit our time around family because of the difficult feelings and most of all protect ourselves from being affected deeply.
I think so much of this comes down to the myth of choice. Barry Swartz, in his excellent book Paradox of Choice, (watch at TED here) talks about how most westerners value choice over everything else, to our great detriment. Our societies and families are isolated because we choose to live this way. We avoid difficulties and write people off because we can. We choose to live where we do for a huge number of reasons, from jobs to liking the city to appropriate distance from family. Many of my friends have talked about wanting to be just far enough away from family, like if they were a 3 to 5 hour drive it would be perfect. What if we couldn’t make choices like this? What if we had to solve our relational problems instead of running away from them? What if we stayed in relationships for the long haul, not leaving when a convenient reason/excuse comes up? I think we would find that our societal loneliness and isolation would start to fade away.
