Topic : the age of loneliness is killing us

Hello, everyone. Here is the second topic, loneliness. You have to open the linkage "http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/age-of-loneliness-killing-us" , and finish reading the passage, and then provide your analytical and innovative opinion. Thank you. Fighting.

I haven't read the article , but this topic reminded me of a book I read this Summer. It's A SOCIETY WITHOUT HUMAN BONDS　by NHK Project Team. It is worthy of reading.

I can lend to book to you, if you are interested in it. Cheers!

By the way, the Chinese title of the book is "无缘社会"

Thanks Stephanie.
I have not understood how lonelyless kills people. But I agree with the article money doesn't always equal to happiness, especially for rich people. Since their life quality can not be leveled up only through money. However regard poor man, money still can provide happiness in a large distance.

I have been to some places. I have met some people.   When I was travelling, I walked through the unfamiliar environment  for no reason in particular. I am talking with strangers just for fun. We share sad rather than happy. We discuss the meaning of life. This time, I think human is a kind of animal. From a certain extent, What We have experience, what we need, there is no difference between animals.
    Someone once said to me: Human created this crazy world, Crazy world make everyone crazier. I agree with. Modernization has brought the life convenient. Also let us lose the original pure. Money, fame, status, what we really want? Internet and mobile are instead of original communication. When we pick up the mobile phone, I realized that if I should talk on social media first. This is a kind of progress or retrogression. In the face of the cold screen, formatted fonts and images，We lost the opportunity to face to face. These false media let us lose sense. When we are accustomed to face the screen, we cannot communicate face to face. Face to face communication bring us a world of the holographic, we can listen, talk, smell, touch and fell. These will bring us closer to nature. Natural will let us physical and mental peace. When the desire to occupy our hearts (pay attention to heart rather than not brain，Western research always attaches great importance to the brain and ignore the effect of the heart. But the ancient Chinese scholars have developed heart have feelings), We will feel empty. Empty will lead to loneliness. This is the source of the loneliness.
    If you don't want to be alone, go outside and watch the real world, talk to the sincere person. Put down your mobile phone, shut off your PC, laptop, tablets whatever electronics. Maybe it's just lying on the grass enjoy sun. it Will let you leave alone, feel the happiness.

I agree with LI that we should take an open attitude and communicate with others in person with sincerity, as most virtual communication is of low efficiency, they would bring you nothing but more loneliness, misunderstanding and hypocrisy. Besides, real-life communication provides you a way to be honest to yourself. I myself find that when I talk with others, sharing the ideas and feelings, I get my thoughts clearer and come up with something new and interesting.

Though we are living a result-oriented world that keep everyone busy with competition, we still try to be patience and show empathy to others, as no matter how fierce the competition is, cooperation comes first. No one can live alone.

Speaking of which, I'd like to recommend "The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement" to you, hope you can enjoy it.

Meanwhile, I also think we do need some time to “being alone", as today's society is full of bullshits.

It is true that the digital era makes it easier and more quickly for us to get the information, however, you may find that, most information is fragmented, and delivered in a fast-food way: much in quantity, less in quality; most pieces are re-posted again and again, and thus cost us much time to delete them. More importantly, these information won’t provoke you to think deeply and integrate all in one, as they are already there—tips, recommendations, highlights, why bother to discover more? Let alone you don’t have enough time, your life is occupied with too many things; that’s the case for most people, and that's the human nature.

Therefore, try to slow down your pace, find a inner peace of your mind by reading a real book, going to the art exhibition or simply going out for a walk in the sunshine... anything that helps you to be a true person, you will discover more about yourself and the world.

Cheers!

Yes, it is true that with the development of China’s economy and urbanization, it demonstrates an increasing trend that more and more people are getting self-centered, such as you have no idea about your next-door neighbors.

According to the explanation in Wikipedia, Loneliness is a complex and usually unpleasant emotional response to isolation or lack of companionship. Loneliness typically includes anxious feelings about a lack of connectedness or communality with other beings, both in the present and extending into the future. As such, loneliness can be felt even when surrounded by other people. The causes of loneliness are varied and include social, mental or emotional factors.

And I would like to remind you all about the severe results caused by loneliness. To begin with, it has negative influence on mental and physical health. That’s why a large number of Chinese people suffer from depression and suicidal tendency.
In addition, people have difficulties to communicate with each other and establish and maintain a relationship due to loneliness. Later it is not a surprise to see people keep themselves isolated from the society and barley live their own world.
Last but not least, loneliness can be contagious. It’s not a joke. Loneliness, to some degree, works as an infectious disease and spreads among groups of people. According to the research at the University of Chicago, the University of California-San Diego and Harvard, they used longitudinal data from a large-scale study based on the following health conditions for more than 60 years, a team of scholars found that lonely people tended to share their loneliness with others. Gradually over time, a group of lonely, disconnected people moved to the fringes of social networks.

We all heard from our parents that the world is becoming crueler, people were purer and warmer in the old days and the society is like a bigg family. Why? People are basically earning similar wages and making money is not the only destination of one's career.
It is the accelerated world with technology evolution that pushing us to go faster and faster without a chance to slow down and think about happiness. We are trapped in the digital toys we made and eventually the digital tools are transforming us and turning us into machines.
In such a money talks world, nobody can escape from it. But we need to figure out a way to balance and do't become the slave of it.

2014 GB Fendy

I think this "loniness" phenomenon comes from social value change and the way recent generation are educated.

As the economy moving fast and the whole world becoming more seductive, people spend all their energy and time on chasing better education, better jobs, higher positions, more money, bigger success, but leave very little time to think about how to care others, to be with others without any purpose, just to communicate and relax. The whole social value is changing, a good person, a helpful person doesn't necessarily mean a successful person.

And from the 1st day we entered school, we are told to be smarter, independent, get higher score, be more excellent than others, but very little was mentioned to us to be more caring others, to learn to compromise and tolerant.... only those who have the best scores are promising. The generally, our value sysem is set up and it be with us for the whole life, then affect our behavior.

Recently, we have more communication channels than ever, such as cell phone, web... and transportation is more convinient than ever, but more and more people are suffering loniness.
it really needs social value adjustment to prevent this phenomenon to deteriorate.

There is the popular sentence: The longest distance in the world is I’m right in front of you, but you are looking at your mobile. It reflects a prevalent phenomenon in modern society that people are over-indulging in mobile devices. We don’t bother to look around the real world, either in subway, restaurants or a family get-together. We have many familiar strangers on social networking, commenting under their post every day without really knowing each other.  Many of us have a long list of contacts and haven’t really talked to each other for long. We would rather check out Google map for directions than consulting a stranger. It’s time to put down our mobile and walk into reality.

Nowadays, many says that high tech. makes people isolated from group. We watch movies in Youtube rather than going to cinema, we would like to text in smart phones but not talking to others directly. However, sometimes I cannot help wondering what is loneliness mean? It is kind of personal feeling or a surface of some one being alone? People like to post their life pieces in internet, even what they post is just a delicious dinner, a cute baby, or serveral simple words to express the motion. They do it by single but do they feel loneliness when they got reply from "freinds" in list even they have not contacted for long time with such friends? If someone like to do things alone, what he/she got is oneliness or confirmatable?

"This is the Age of Loneliness." Ture, especially in cities, rapid working pace, heavy study pressure, etc. all such causes are making us lonely. Not only us, we also leave the old at home, which siege them at home. Loneliness is really become anepidemic amone people in cities. The age we are entering is no more like the one that's gone before.

I still remember clearly that when I was a little fellow, I more often crossed through neighbourhoods, playing with my fellow mates. By contrast, we even don't know each other with our neighbours next the door! Or even we don't say Hi when in one lift.

"People travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema."  The life-denying ideology is fastening, enforcing and celebrating our social isolation. How to salvage the age become pretty matter.

My thinking is as below:
First, build a habit that DO NOT touch hand phones during any public activity, such as during a team lunch or meeting.

Second, I think it is pretty important and basic, that bring up children an open and sunning heart to each other. Create a beautiful world for them from very little.

I really like point from GB-Tang Yu. Social media often ease our feeling of loneliness, rather than bring us loneliness. Nowadays, we are all busy with working and spend much time on transportation. Communicating with friends through social media is much more convenient.
But the problem is social media can not replace communication face to face entirely but only partially. We really need to have a good attitude toward new technology. New technology brings us more convenience and more choices. But it also has defects. For most people who feel lonely, I think they need to arrange their life better and allocate their spare time better.
In addition, mostly we just keep working to earn more money. We do not be aware of how important it is to keep work-life balance. We do not think about what really values in our hearts. This kind of sacrifice lead to more anxiety and confusion.

I agree with Bao Xuejing and Fendy that aggravated competition with deviated social value should stand as a major cause for this loneliness. China has pursuit very rapid economic growth in past decades while paying little attention to the deforming social values, and to be successful in terms of wealth and fame has almost become the sole value that our generation are preached and programmed to pursue as our life goal. From kindergarten to university, and in our job places, the endless competition persists almost everywhere. Consequently, people, especially the young adults, are prone to develop self-centered characters and not willing to share. Competition at all levels brings along individualism that cut off one’s connections with others, and give rise to loneliness.

Another deep cause for the loneliness may come to the fact that our society has not shown enough inclusiveness of diversity. As a result, people tend to go with the crowd to play safe, and a “Bang” happened when this trend met the thriving social media. The social information explosion makes people busy coping with anytime popped-up messages and updates from friends, while at the same time maintaining their own virtual spaces. However, in this virtual society, people tend to care much about how others would comment and see them, from time to time, they refrain from expressing their true feelings and thoughts, and over time, they feel depleted and not really connected with their virtual friends, which cause the loneliness eventually.

Spending some time alone for introspection to find your true self, and pursuing some real purpose is essential for one’s health and happiness in this restless society.

I agree that social media and digital devices have some negative impact on this phenomenon. Social media and digital devices cause much distraction. People cannot focus attention to achieve their preset goals. It could hurt self-esteem and distant people in a way. Seriously, we must learn to manage our time on social media and digital devices.

The self-centered tendency is perhaps resulted from the current social conditions – extreme imbalance of both the regions and individuals, and the new definition of the key word fairness. The fairness we are talking about now is to win everything by your own effort. You have to fight for what you want. Because of the implantation of this concept, many people even question the fairness of the social income tax system (why to take money from the rich to feed the poor), which suggests the indifference in the society now.
Due to the fast changing pace, the feeling of financial insecurity is haunting people. The more insecure we feel about ourselves, the less we are left to care about others. For those rich countries with better social insurance(eg. Switzerland, Norway), people tend to be more caring and more willing to join public welfare organizations. But in most of the countries in the world, people feel more pressure due to the instability (high unemployment rate, layoffs). With the appearance of digital devices and social networks, people feel even less happy. People spend so much time and effort worried about themselves and their social/financial status that they don’t think of “connect”. This drives the loneliness in them. And people now are more and more lost in loneliness/isolation.
When people stop engaging in their busy daily routine work, they shall spare some time to force themselves to think about such questions. Am I HAPPY? Time flies! Nobody can take away anything after death. What is the meaning of life? Is there any higher-level happiness besides making more money?
However, when people are living in this real world filled with competitiveness, they easily get lost and lose themselves again. This is a new social phenomenon that might be good for human development in some way (competition drives productivity), but a sad thing for people themselves. With the development of society and new-techs, the age of loneliness is gonna last, and it's pretty hard to reverse the trend.

In real life, almost all of us can not escape the pain of loneliness. if you don't want be alone, I have some recommendations for you. First, make a lot of friends; Second, try to avoid one person alone; Third, take part in social activities as much as possible to expand your social circle; Fourth, cultivate an optimistic, cheerful extrovert. five, handle good interpersonal relation. Of course, to do them, there are still difficulties.

From my view of point, the major reason of the age og loneliness now is there are many electronic devices that deliver too many information and provide more convinience service that people is reluctant to go outside and get involved in the society communication. Now people is losing the fun to have face to face bargin on the price , but try to search in the various ecommercial stores to compare the price.
However, electronic devices let people receive the information passively and there is few interactions or less efficient communication.
But we need to bear in mind that human being is in the society and everyone of us could not have happiness by ourselves without getting together with other people. I believe you could feel happiness if you have fun together with friends and you could get more creative idea if you have brainstorm together with team member , and even you could resolve the issue more effectively if you talk with the customers face to face instead of just communicating with email.
So why not we just spare some time everyday out without any electronic device and join the family or freinds ?

If you don’t expect more, nothing to lose and fear, you feel more peaceful and happier.

I totally agree that social media and digital devices have much negative impact to us. People are getting "closer" by these devices, but caring less for each other in the real life. Actually, being longly doesn't mean you are alone all by yourself, the saddest lonelyness is that, you're among a group of people, but no one really care about you.30 years ago, when there's no television in Chinese family, there's not so much to do by oneself, so family sit together after supper, talk about their day, amused by each other and enjoying it. Maybe it's just because that there are too many things,too much informations going on out there today, that people lose interests in the ones who are closest to them in their life. They forgot the real life is not far away, but beside.

Loneliness is not about how many friends you have, how richness you are, how people think of you. It's about if you think you are happy or not by yourselves.

Does loneliness kill people? It may or it may not... It depends on what kind of people you are. It depends on what kind of childhood you have been through.
You pay money for comfort life and show love and care for friends and lover.
Being lonely or not indicates your current life state. If you feel lonely, maybe it is the time to review your life style and improve it

I think what lies behind the loneliness is the lack of communication and trust.

Technology do make life more convenient, however, at the the cost of the inter-personal communication and caused the stereotype, misunderstanding, mistrust among the people.

I would say let's us join some complicated and strenuous offline activities, such as hiking, modelling and group sport events, from which you will find it is great to help others and accept the help from others.

This article makes one wide awake, society tends to ossify and close, for example, the dwelling male and dwelling female are becoming more prevalent. How to avoid it? I have an idea, Let people, especially younger generation, love playing sports. If the people loved playing sports, he will love the social aspects of life and be more happy.