of loneliness, you couldn't do better than this. A woman sits by herself at a table in an automat. It's important to note that this is an automat - a place where you get your food from little doors after placing coins in a slot. If she'd gone to a regular restaurant, she'd have to interact with other people - a waiter, perhaps a cashier. Here, there are no waiters. Only the white floor and the round tables and food that comes from little doors. The window behind her shows only the reflection of lights marching off into the nothingness. No more than that. The solitary woman is the only person in the picture. She nurses a cup of coffee under the harsh lights. She wears her coat. The room must be cold.
And this is about the point we've reached today. Lonely people, living out their lives in isolation, longing to touch someone else, but having forgotten how. In our solitude, we've mixed things up. We've mistaken eroticism for intimacy, sex for love. We fear closeness. Closeness involves obligations, commitments. It means that you have to think about what someone else wants, put their happiness ahead of your own. That smacks of sacrifice. Now there's an ugly word. In the entitlement society that we've created - where we feel we deserve everything we want - we don't do sacrifice. We don't do commitment either. That requires too much from us. It requires us to give something of ourselves. That's too heavy of a burden to bear.
Did you know that marriage rates are down in this country? Birth rates too. Young people aren't getting married, aren't having children. They offer excuses - they want to finish their education first, they want to get their careers off the ground, and besides, the world's too chaotic to bring children into right now. When wasn't it? I think the real reason they remain single, childless, is that marriage and children tie you down, cramp your style, limit your options, demand your time and your money. Much easier to raise a SimFamily and have Facebook relationships. Of course, they don't go a log way towards easing the loneliness and the isolation; they only increase it.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote:
"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"I know all too many who have chosen lightness, thinking that it will make their lives more real.
They fling themselves into one moment of self-gratification after another, never forming any real bonds with anyone, always looking for the next real experience. They're everybody's friends, anybody's lovers, but nobody's spouses or parents. They eschew anything that even remotely hints at those old-fashioned concepts like duty and obligation and commitment. They've chosen loneliness, which they've mistaken for freedom. They're on the long train to nowhere, sitting by themselves, feeling the weight of their own isolation, and telling themselves over and over, "This is okay. This is all right. I'm fine just the way I am." And they believe the lie.
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