I wrote most of this essay as a post in the Vibing With Peter crew of Emergent Commons. And I will be adding this content to My Personal AI, a new project that I have not yet described on my website. Writing an essay on this topic has been on my mind for quite a while.
One thing that lights me up about Peter Limberg is his radical personal transparency. And something Peter is radically transparent about is his loneliness. It may be surprising to some that the Steward of The Stoa could be a lonely man.
April 26, 2020 Oh man. This has been a rough week, but we Stoics do not have the proclivity to complain. I do not know what I am doing and I want to stop, but there is no stop sign in sight... Right now, I feel a deep existential loneliness...
This morning I read RACHEL HAYWIRE Can’t We Be Friends? The Issue is Loneliness.
I learned about Rachel Haywire from Peter. She is one of the Philosopher Queens: Feminine Archetypes w/ Rachel Haywire and Raven Connolly feat. Alyssa Polizzi who has been on The Stoa. She is a player in the SPACE.
Rachel writes,
I’ve recently found myself becoming increasingly offline, seeking more in-person interactions. The digital world has become a shell of its former self, with astorturfed celebrities taking over spaces I once sought to cultivate. Making offline friends was my way to get away from it all and stay sane, yet since I had been forced to temporarily relocate to South Florida, it was especially challenging to get people to meet me in person. This loneliness caused me to make a post on Instagram, outright asking for people to meet with me face-to-face.
Her article flooded me with thoughts that I am processing by writing, writing for myself more than for others. This too is an approach to life that I share with Peter. And for some of us, writing reduces loneliness.
As a teenager, I experienced years of intense loneliness which I processed in My Diary, a project which remains unfinished. About twenty years ago, during a difficult period in my life, the pain of loneliness led me to seriously consider suicide. Nowadays I rarely feel lonely but the memories remain.
It seems to me that Emergent Commons would be a good place for a collective inquiry into loneliness. I once posted about starting a new crew, Only the Lonely, and it seemed to resonate strongly with a few members. My sense is that we have a few intensely lonely members at EC, and they are probably not highly active.
I will not be sharing this post in the Commons at Emergent Commons. There are two members who would probably hijack my post and take the discussion in a direction that would help no one. In fact, imo, their comments would probably be harmful to our lonely members.
And we have some wonderful, big-hearted members who would perhaps post from their own narrow perspectives. Some lonely people are not helped by reducing all loneliness to unprocessed emotional trauma. Some lonely people are not helped by the Buddhist philosophy that we really are all One. These are valid perspectives but they paint a very incomplete picture. We, the we of the whole world and the we of Emergent Commons, need a metamodern solution to loneliness. I have a piece, a tiny piece.
The pandemic was a strange time for me which I wrote about, My Enhanced Well-being. My wife and I are both introverts and living mostly in quarantine in 2020 was a restful experience for us. But it was very difficult for our extroverted friends. It was difficult for Rachel Haywire, an extrovert. We understand, but we are skeptical that we ourselves are understood.
I am now occasionally experiencing new, strange emotions that can best be described as moments of weepy joyfulness. They are not in the same league as what mari b has experienced and shared, but they lean in that direction. At such times, feelings of loneliness are far away.
One trigger for these wonderful moments is what EC is bringing me next week. EC has given me numerous, wonderful, new online friends. Next week I will have my first in-person experience with an EC member. Initiated by him, Kevin Triplett is coming to visit me. Just thinking about this brings me tears of joy.