LONELINESS

LONELINESS
(Tito Marquez-Elizan Jr.)



Do you think loneliness is a growing problem in this modern society?

Loneliness is not growing. Loneliness has always been there around us. It’s one of the most essential, philosophical and ontological problem about human being. The growing thing is not loneliness itself but the tendency to avoid it or to depend only on others’ salvation not knowing how to deal with it for ourselves.

Ironically, because of fear of being left alone, we make ourselves isolated with fear to get hurts by our beloved ones or we make them leave us by causing repugnance to our excessive dependence.

Everyone in the end is alone. Nobody can replace our own life. However, it does not mean that every attempt to make social relationship is meaningless. If we isolate ourselves from others, there is nothing to prove our own existence. Although it’s true and we let not ourselves shared by others and must not, it’s also true that, in order to make ourselves precious individual, we need other’s existence.

If you choose to be alone by keeping distant from others, your life will be empty. If you choose to charge the whole of yourselves to others, you will also lose yourself overwhelmed by others.

We have to accept ourselves as an individual. It means we have to keep a self- boundary firmly. However, after building it, we have to expand it by experiencing someone’s life. If we refuse it, there is only spiritual degradation like death. True empathy is the only way to grow ourselves continuously and accept our loneliness inherent in all human beings as the gift prepared for solitary introspection and endless self-expansion.