A few days ago I came across an article from The Atlantic, The anti-social century(The antisocial century) that develops the idea that what we have in the 21st century is defined by increasing loneliness and the lack of shared and community activities, in part due to technological advances, and that this loneliness is changing our personality, politics and relationship with reality. It happened that I was reading two recommended books, Map of solitudesan essay by Juan Gómez Bárcena, andThe Lonely Centuryby the British economist Noreena Hertz; Also, on the same day I got into a somewhat superficial debate on a social network about whether human-shaped robots (usually big-breasted blonde female human shapes) are a remedy for loneliness or perfected blow-up dolls (or both). ) and ended up talking to a friend about incel culture and the reality that single men are the social group that spends the most time alone and the growing trend boysober that Terelu practices, and that it is nothing other than abstaining from dating and sex.
Loneliness is one of the great current issues, although extensive and complex and approachable from too many angles. The English differentiate between solitude and loneliness, although here we talk about loneliness and its faces, the desired and necessary and the imposed and harmful, the joy of a life, or pieces of life, without witnesses or ties and the sadness of disconnection and invisibility. It is as easy to aestheticize loneliness as it is to denigrate it. It is now commonplace to say that it is the epidemic of the 21st century, and that we promote illusory and virtual bonds to the detriment of real, warm, emotional and necessary ones. That houses are already built and decorated so as not to leave them, that we go to the movies less and less, to the library or to church, we do not unionize or associate, families are smaller, that teenagers do not look up from the screen (they spend a third of their lives this way) and reconfigure their lives around their cell phones, which increase anxiety and depression as a consequence of isolation. Sociologist Patrick Sharkey assures that the economy is being reoriented to make it easier for people not to leave our four walls. Have we managed to atrophy the ability to establish associative links?
#antisocial
