The Paradox of Isolation

[edu0z]

"Isolating yourself from the world is the way in which the human being deals with pain" ... said a good friend of mine. Of course she told me because she wanted to continue having sex with me on a daily basis while I preferred to be alone in my room programming in front of the computer. So maybe she was just trying to influence me, but the fact is that that phrase left me wondering.


Many times to escape pain we isolate ourselves. It is as if we are trying to run away from the world and from everyone. We want to stop time and we do not realize that it continues along with the rest of the people ... while we remain anchored to the past.
However, you have never asked yourself what is the true objective of your isolation? ... the reason is clear: to flee from pain.
You may feel remorse for something from the past. That you feel guilty or simply, it costs you too much to look into the eyes of the people you love ... maybe alone, and like me many times: you simply wish that time stops so that you can spend the rest of your life in your room doing what you love more ... of course this one, never stops no matter how hard you try.
...
Well let's move on. The reason: to flee from pain ... but what is the goal of isolating oneself? .... millions of years of evolution with the most sophisticated brain in the animal kingdom, we all know that nothing our brain does is in vain ... each and every one of your emotions has a purpose.
Nowadays it is very fashionable that of "Negative and positive emotions". But the reality of psychology is that all emotions are positive, they all have a therapeutic purpose for you ... (After all, our brain is created to survive, not to torture itself)


I'll give you an example of something that happened to me just a few days ago:
A friend calls me on the phone to go for a run. The first thing that comes to mind "Damn, how lazy" ... it had not been especially one of my best days, in fact I would dare to say that quite the opposite ... I had been weeks without appearing on a social network, and days without leaving home. So long that most of my acquaintances had simply stopped caring about me (usually they only care for a few days)
I was disconnected from the world and from everyone ... happy, happy in my loneliness ... or so I thought.
I tell my friend that I can't come up with some silly excuse ... "Eduardo you have changed" ... he tells me right after a long sigh ...
"Of course I've changed, I'm making an incredibly gigantic effort just talking to you and restraining myself so as not to tell you that I can't stop thinking about taking my own life ... I could try to be the one from before, and maybe no one would notice ... but it's no use anymore" I thought and I was silent. He said goodbye formally and hung up.
Later, analyzing the situation, I realize what is behind it: it is a cry for help ... all this, my isolation, the change ... the fact of losing even interest in sex and sports ... my subconscious was trapped in some loop past that I'm not able to get out of, and he yells at me to ask someone for help.
No loneliness, no personal growth. All he wanted… was attention.


Ask yourself, take a moment to think and answer below: what do you think is the reason for your isolation?
And if you are alone and you need a friend ... well, here in this forum you have many (note that I do not belong to the staff, still hahaha)


PS: I'm new to the forum and I like it a lot, they all seem nice ... excuse my English but I'm Spanish jj, if you don't understand something, tell me :).

 

[whywere]

HI! Welcome, it is so nice having you join.

Have a great upcoming weekend and stay safe.

All my best,
Walter

 

[one.way.out]

I know people will reject me. The loneliness hurts, the social anxiety hurts. Can't win.

 

[Fakereality]

I have isolated myself from everyone to protect myself I live under a cocoon made of hard cold personality and only talk or speak when it's strictly necessary I have stop giving my personal opinion or thoughts to anyone.
When I think about it my reasons are purely just based on my weakness I am too weak for this world I have suffer too many betrayals from humans I thought were my "family".
For now I just wanna live under this cocoon personality until the day I die. my nightmares and past still haunts me in my dreams but I have started thinking them as just some small movies my brain creates to mess around with me just like it always do even my body has started falling apart my body is getting weaker day by my short term memories are becoming more and more hazy and difficult to remember and many more.

 

[edu0z]

HI! Welcome, it is so nice having you join.

Have a great upcoming weekend and stay safe.

All my best,
Walter

thanks

I have isolated myself from everyone to protect myself I live under a cocoon made of hard cold personality and only talk or speak when it's strictly necessary I have stop giving my personal opinion or thoughts to anyone.
When I think about it my reasons are purely just based on my weakness I am too weak for this world I have suffer too many betrayals from humans I thought were my "family".
For now I just wanna live under this cocoon personality until the day I die. my nightmares and past still haunts me in my dreams but I have started thinking them as just some small movies my brain creates to mess around with me just like it always do even my body has started falling apart my body is getting weaker day by my short term memories are becoming more and more hazy and difficult to remember and many more.

I sometimes think that too... tha I'm too weak

 

[jing]

Hi there, I too am an isolationist. I have always resonated with the hedgehog's dilemma that Schopenhauer describes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog's_dilemma).

It's also escapism but we have the freedom to choose whatever floats our boat. If it cuts off any ties, that's a consequence we have to face or weigh in our decision. Though having friends or family that doesn't give up on your relationship helps (eg, when you reply your friends' texts one year later or I had a friend that that left me texts as if I was dead).

And with solitude comes peace. And people have did that since ages ago, like Henry Thoreau who went to live by himself in the woods. You don't have to feel bad about it. Anyway I'll leave you with his writing on his own isolation here:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For)

 

[edu0z]

Hi there, I too am an isolationist. I have always resonated with the hedgehog's dilemma that Schopenhauer describes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog's_dilemma).

It's also escapism but we have the freedom to choose whatever floats our boat. If it cuts off any ties, that's a consequence we have to face or weigh in our decision. Though having friends or family that doesn't give up on your relationship helps (eg, when you reply your friends' texts one year later or I had a friend that that left me texts as if I was dead).

How interesting I'm going to read it right now, thanks ... I quite like psychology

 

[Midgardsorm]

To me, I always thought about the classical snowball rule:

You isolate yourself from people, because of that, people often find you strange, unsociable, apathetic. That makes people isolate themselves from you.
So people isolate themselves from you, that causes you to be lonely, the more lonely you are, the more people isolate themselves from you and so on...

Obviously that wold start all that talk of: "You need to go out there and make friends to break this chain of reaction"
Yes. you do. But often this happens when we are kids. Often this happens when we have already established a "satisfactory" life isolated from the outside world. Simply "Going out there and making friends" is a huge effort, sometimes, difficult, and not rarely, unpleasant.

A bit difficult to break the rule.

Also: Welcome to the forum !

 

[NoPointToContinue]

There have been many moments I loved the isolation. At those moments it was not loneliness, it was solitude. Giving me life, joy, depth and richness. Other times I was just lonely, plain human loneliness that kills everything good within you and makes you non-human. Maybe it was fleeing the pain and but it was fleeing to pain also, trying to stay with it, saying fuck everything else when I am not happy, giving it my full attention because I was never able to ignore it successfully. And as you say, when I tried to do all these things life moved on silently and when I opened my eyes, when I clearly saw how I stuck in imaginary pasts, how all my life was about pain and will be like that forever everything broke at once.

 

[Dear Agony]

Avoiding people, I avoid pain. I avoid humiliation, betrayal, bullying. Avoiding the bad things though, you also avoid the good things. That's why being alone sucks sometimes. But I try to tell myself it's for the best. I'm not sure if I'm right, but even if I'm wrong about this, I am sure of one thing: I can't handle any more pain. I've had enough of people and how much they hurt me.
Having that said, I do agree with your friend in parts. We all have different reasons to isolate ourselves, but for better or for worse, we do that to avoid more pain because we're already hurt inside.

 

[IWantToGoFast]

Isolation: my depression is intertwined with anxiety, like space is intertwined with time (spacetime), although I would like attention to fill my loneliness I think that fear is above craving attention. So in my case I'm scared of asking for help, with good reason, because my past experiences with help have been bad. The more I isolate myself the more anxious I get, to a point I don't like people anymore. And people being people they tend to forget I exist after a while. There's one positive out of my depression, I actually seen that I never had real friends. I stopped trying to figure things out a while ago, now all I hope for is a swift, quick and painless ending.

Just venting now: I've been very unlucky when it comes to endings, and you know what, I'm getting anxiety about that as well.
Life is one big tragic comedy, I can tell you that.

 

[demuic]

In pre historic times, if a human being was to isolate themselves that would surely mean certain death. We lived in tribes for a reason. We need other people in order to survive. In the physical sense and in the emotional sense. We needed other people to help gather our food and and fight off predators. But in this modern world, instead of dying due to starvation or being mauled by some animal, we're forced to stay alive and endure the suffering that isolation brings. To me, I feel like it's a slow death itself.

 

[FuneralCry]

I isolate myself from others, as to me people are tiring. I only ever feel relaxed in my own company. I do not get lonely. It stresses me out being around other people. I need to isolate myself to avoid feelings of irritation that I get from being around others. Others are capable of causing us lots of pain and disappointing us so by being on my own, I will avoid that.

 

[GreenMile]

Hi there, I too am an isolationist. I have always resonated with the hedgehog's dilemma that Schopenhauer describes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog's_dilemma).

It's also escapism but we have the freedom to choose whatever floats our boat. If it cuts off any ties, that's a consequence we have to face or weigh in our decision. Though having friends or family that doesn't give up on your relationship helps (eg, when you reply your friends' texts one year later or I had a friend that that left me texts as if I was dead).

And with solitude comes peace. And people have did that since ages ago, like Henry Thoreau who went to live by himself in the woods. You don't have to feel bad about it. Anyway I'll leave you with his writing on his own isolation here:

"whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble or annoyance" Schopenhauer, I think, gets the heat and light generated by the suicidal.

 

[slyna]

That's a stupid conclusion

It doesn't have to do with pain at all

 

[SentientCreature]

There's something about the state of being observed by others that completely changes my subjective experience. It's almost as if I lose a part of my own subjectivity in that state, I turn outwards and try to see myself from the other person's perspective, in a sense. And I generally don't like what I'm seeing.

I'm reduced to the aspects of my mind that are accessible to the other person. In my narcissism I consider it a limitation, in my insecurity I want to hide even more.

The more I turn to pessimistic/life-rejecting philosophies the more I find my whole identity to be at odds with my primal social nature. I can either create a fake, socially acceptable persona or reject at last the life script imposed by my parents and society and take a realistic look at what all of these activities are really for.

What it seems like from my perspective is that people's desire for social interaction stems mostly from the desire to be perceived and validated by others, to leave a mark in some sense, to be part of a larger social network. There's a reason most people love going out in crowded places and engaging in group activities.

Isolation, in my case, stems from that fact that I feel like an outsider in all but a few online places, possibly because my formative years were spent in isolation, so at a psychological level I'm closer to my hunter-gatherer ancestors who would be bewildered if they got thrown into this modern world of hyper-sociality.