In our subscriber chat I asked y’all what you thought was the single most challenging aspect of being human right now, and your answers really capture where we are in this moment. I responded to some of you individually in the chat already, but wanted to write a more general response to share our work with all who are within earshot.

Four themes emerged from your responses. We are 1) feeling isolated and alienated; 2) overloaded with info we are unsure how to process; 3) finding it hard to communicate and to cooperate in order to build connections and community; and 4) our frustrations are sometimes rising to misanthropic levels.

The good news first: All the difficulties that we are having are human problems (at the moment) and this means that we have everything we need to solve for these problems. No amount or type of tech will help us solve our human problems without doing the humanning work. The big tech companies do not have the solutions, science alone doesn’t have the solutions, you cannot buy these solutions. Only you and I can create solutions, together.

1. Isolation

"…breathing through a straw called the internet in my blue silo—disconnected from the humanity, the biology, the souls of the billions of others in the same isolation" ** — **

“Isolation.” Thus reads one persons single-word response, capturing the first strong thread running through so many responses. Someone else adds context: With industrialization came the breakdown of extended families into the nuclear family structure—a first step toward where we find ourselves today: the deepening isolation of the lone individual. Our society's emphasis on individualism exacerbates this separation, pushing us away from community and shared experiences. As "emergent observers" we may find ourselves caught in a web of competing ideologies, lingering in indecision and inaction, frustrating our efforts to reach others.

Technology offers the illusion of infinite connection to others all over the globe, but in reality it has furthered social fragmentation and estrangement. Tenuously connected to others—not those in our immediate vicinity but abstract anyones, anywhere—through non-physical digital lifeworlds, we find ourselves siloed and dependent on the internet, that straw through which we are now forced to breathe, as brother Michael so beautifully puts it.

Let’s explore this feeling pervading so many of our lives right now. What is the quality of this feeling of isolation? Is it unlike the feeling of isolation of yesteryears? In the early stages of industrialization, when (mostly) men left the extended-family compound and he ventured to the city in search of wage labor in factories, perhaps a new kind of loneliness was born. Being able to walk among so many, sleep and live in very close proximity to strangers, and yet feel alone because of displacement. It seems to me that the isolation we are feeling is an intensification of this — the displaced alone-ness of being in a group, but unseen and unaccounted for.

Beauvoir has a beautiful passage in America Day By Day where she describes herself roaming the metropolis of New York City (1947) as a ghostly self:

“I’m no longer in Paris, but I’m not here either. My presence is a borrowed presence... This crowd I’m jostling, I’m not part of it; I feel invisible to every gaze. I am traveling incognito, like a phantom. Will I manage to reincarnate myself?”

And just below this,

“No one here is concerned with my presence; I’m still a ghost, and I slip through the city without disturbing anything.”1

It is a being-unaffected and not-affecting others, even when in close proximity. If you’ve ever woken up in a strange city, perhaps in one where others speak a different language from your own, you will recognize this feeling. The closer you want to become to these others, the more the chasm of the foreignness between you deepens.

Our loneliness, isolation, and alienation is an expression of displacement. If so, then we are no longer at home in our own lives, perhaps not even in our own skins. We have lost possession of ourselves, and our loneliness is a forlorn recognition of this at some deep down level. Hannah Arendt also addressed the implications of isolation, particularly in the context of totalitarianism. She argued that loneliness could render individuals more susceptible to oppressive political regimes by eroding the bonds that form the basis of communal life. This is not Arthur Schopenhauer’s positive loneliness, the one that allows for deeper reflection and understanding. Nor is it an existential isolation — the inherent feeling that each individual's experiences are fundamentally unique and cannot be fully understood by others — from which our need for human communion springs eternal. No, this seems to be solitude turning upon itself, deformed into a political weapon of an oncoming techno-totalitarian state.

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I sometimes like to imagine, when I am writing my posts for Substack, that I am sitting at The SubPiccaro Cafe that is modelled, in my head, after those cafes where I spent my youth in San Francisco circa 1988. Time has created a rosy aura and I no longer remember the sticky tables and rickety chairs, the burnt bagels with too little cream cheese, or the bulky, tasteless muffins. Maybe we sat there together and did our thing. I am looking at you, scribbling intently in a sketchbook. Yes you, I am trying to reach you, look up from the page.

Of course now it is screens, and we are never in the same place, even if we happen to be sitting next to each other on the subway. Space is no longer a medium that we can easily traverse.

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Sometimes I think that the root of our isolation is really self-alienation. Being very disconnected from ourselves makes it very difficult to connect to others. When the men of yore left their farms to go to the city in search of wage labor, they cut themselves off from the context that gave their lives meaning. Easy meaning, hand-me-down traditional meanings. For some, displacement is also a liberation. It was an opportunity to reinvent yourself. Women cross-dressed as men in order to be able to make the journey out and into the city, to travel in any way, to find themselves.

Some might remember, before we were compelled to be ourselves online, how exciting it was that one could be anyone one wanted to be. I have never been myself online, have always guarded my given name, but paradoxically, there are moments when I have been most genuinely myself as well. In the dial-up days, I became a regular in a chat room. It was my first experience with an online community, and it was heady. I ended up meeting a couple people from that chat room in person and made some fast and fabulous friends. It was a lot easier to be seen how I wanted to be seen, online. I find Mona Mona, my writing pseudo-name, to be more me than the desiccated shell of an all but abandoned analog-life. I cosplay at agoraphobia, and would not leave my tiny apartment if it were not for needing to walk my dogs, who do all they can to keep me human.

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Recommendation corner, as much for me as for you dear reader: Start with identifying something you want to share about yourself with another person, practice with the stranger in the checkout line, it can be something very small. Focus on how you feel when you feel heard. Then turn around and train that listening ear on someone else who is sharing something with you, and make them feel heard. Or vice-versa. The idea is to learn from the positive interactions you experience and extend those successful moves to others, and in this way grow a way to connect across silos. In an economy where everyone is dying to be seen and heard by someone else, anyone else, being a good listener is gold. I know it seems counterintuitive, but if you want to be seen and heard, learning to do that for others is the fastest way to getting out of the siloed isolation. Do this and then come back and report how it went:

On Substack, which is a writers economy where so many of us want to be read and noticed among the every growing population of writers (I am so excited about there being so many writers working on this platform!), I spend at least half of my time reading what others have written, and when I am moved I am sure to write a response to their piece. I am here to make connections and frens (what I call my internet friends). This is my place on the internet right now, and I want to do everything I can to build a sense of community and togetherness. Without the human investment, Substack will not become the kind of place I want it to be. My only problem is that this is a private platform and at any time I can (and probably will be) rugged. I have decided it is worth that risk.

Wherever you are currently, that is where you start digging, and dig as deep as you can.

Note that what you share doesn’t need to be pretty, nice, or even polite. If you’re mad as hell, express it and observe the range of responses. Expressing anger intentionally can be incredibly instructive—believe me you. Start with the assumption that no human emotion is unacceptable; all emotions are necessary and deserve to be communicated.

As you get in touch with yourself and express that to the world, you may find that some people don't like or jive with you. Unless you are a politician or your livelihood depends specifically on being liked, it doesn’t really matter. A few people will like how you show up in the world; cultivate those friendships first (not exclusively, but first). As a human, you have very limited attention and energy, so having a small handful of people around you is plenty. Adjust numbers to taste, personality, and astrological sign.

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The last thing I wanted to say is this: I don’t know about you, but when I start hearing the same thing repeated over and over by many people, I begin to question its authenticity. Because I worry that repeating the idea that we’re lonely and isolated like a mantra might reinforce that belief and make it feel inevitable and overwhelming. So I start asking who benefits from us feeling this way… but I’m suspicious like that.

No matter what, if you feel this way, it is valid, regardless of its grounding or lack thereof. If you are lonely, you can change that—and it’s not even that hard. Say hello to someone, go outside, do something—anything. Then you might encounter a different challenge: fear of rejection. Okay, now that’s another problem, and it’s one you can figure out because it’s a human problem, and you are (I presume) human. You are a human surrounded by other humans, all of whom know what it is to be rejected.

Don’t forget this: Even when your focus has shrunk to the distance between your face and your phone or computer screen, you are surrounded by other humans in a human world.

You may also discover that you enjoy your own company and like being alone, and perhaps you need to work through some guilt about that—or some suspicion of underlying misanthropy (I’ll come back to this). Once again, congratulations—you’ve moved past your loneliness problem and found a new human problem to pass the time.

This piece has gotten too long, so I will publish it in sections. Consider this part one of what I imagine as a four part series.

To Be Continued…

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Continue to part two: Everything All At Once: On information overwhelm and the difficulty knowing what is true, real, and good online. Part 2 of thinking about the most challenging aspects of being human right now.

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