Go Meet Your Neighbors and Fight Despair
A Reflection on loneliness, corporatism, and alienation
In a society of despair, especially one that profits off of despair, the society will feed you fake solutions to your problems that will only make you despair even more. It will tell you that pornography can replace intimacy. It will tell you that buying things will make you feel whole. It will pretend that it is feeding you a medicine to your illness, but instead it seeks to maximize your disease and profit off of your hopelessness. This system has built a generation of hyper-individualistic, insecure, depressed, and alienated people.
One of the saddest things I saw when I lived in San Francisco, besides the poverty and opiate addiction, was a billboard advertising a service that, for a not-so-small fee, yuppies like me could meet up with other yuppies and do pre-programmed “fun events” like sky diving, so that people could meet each other and make friends. In the absence of a civic society that once existed, where there was real community and neighborly love, there is now a business that is (maybe even earnestly) seeking to profit off of the isolation we all feel. And people, who have forgotten how to be neighbors, to be members of a community, to be engaged citizens, to look someone in the eyes, see no alternatives. San Francisco is no longer a community; it has become a hotel for yuppies with its streets as hallways that people try to walk or “uber” through as quickly as possible. This destruction of community, facilitated by a corporatism that is unrelenting in its bastardization of anything that is organic and free, is happening everywhere. Soon, there will be no libraries, there will only be Amazon stores, Dollar Generals, and Walmarts.
Yet still there is hope, but only if people are willing to step outside and open their hearts. My biggest reprieve in SF from a cold individualism was found not just in the friends I had from college, but also in the parks and community centers where I played pick-up basketball for free. On the court, there is total egalitarianism. It does not matter who you are — anyone can be friends. The same went for the community center as a whole. In the community center, there were free yoga classes, free meditation sessions, free tennis courts, free ping pong tables, and potlucks etc. It was a place where kids, the elderly, teens and adults could just be people. There is absolutely no reason more places and civic organizations like that cannot exist, except that no profit can be derived from them.
If you are unhappy, depressed, or lonely: you are NOT alone in that feeling. It is an intentional byproduct of our society’s logic. The logical conclusion of a society predicated on profiting from despair is increased suicide, violence, and drug use. It is one of the reasons why people fall lock-step into conspiracy cults, because those at least give people some sense of meaning, power, and community. It is incredibly depressing to think that these trends will continue unabated unless something is done. But something must be done, or else this country is doomed. We must stop looking for “strong”, charismatic people to do something instead of us. We must take it upon ourselves to rebuild the communities and sense of love that has been stolen from our society. The first step in my opinion: get to know your community. Go visit a community center if there is one. Get to know your neighbors, and who knows, maybe something meaningful will come from that. Maybe you’ll have a picnic or dinner party. Maybe you will feel whole. Maybe you will be able to change your community for the better. Even if things don’t work, at the very least you will have kept your humanity. You will be a whole person for trying.
-pkc
