Everybody says I’m fine.
Everybody has a different life journey and a different story. All of us have seen days in the sun and cloudy days as well. No two people’s life experiences are the same. At any point of time, a person might be riding on the crests of life or trudging through the troughs. However, there seems to be one constant across all people: Everybody says I’m fine!
Last weekend, I finished listening to an audiobook version of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, written by Gail Honeyman. The story follows the life of its main protagonist, Eleanor Oliphant, who is a socially awkward, finance clerk, who is academically intelligent, thinks highly of literacy and yet, seems to find it difficult to wrap her head around social practices. She always describes herself as “absolutely fine” and she comments on other people’s underdeveloped social skills whenever she experiences obvious moments of awkwardness in her interactions with people. Soon, the reader finds out that she is, in fact, not completely fine.
This is not a book review. I am not going to be talking about why I liked the book or how it beautifully discusses the new cancer of society — loneliness. But what I want to do is reflect on the conversation that this book starts — one of social isolation in modern times. We live in the era of Facebook bringing the world closer together. We live in times where we can find people across the world with a few strokes on the keyboard. It was never this easy to connect with people, given the plethora of apps in the market to do so! However, we also live in a world flanked by loneliness and social isolation. We could think of a number of reasons for this: longer work hours, time spent sitting in traffic/commuting, deep in-person conversations replaced by chats on the phone, periods of separation from family for work reasons, etc. I am neither an anthropologist nor a psychologist, so I don’t think I can comment on the history of this issue or on how to clinically resolve it. However, I am an engineer and as an engineer, I pride myself on creative problem-solving and joining the dots!
The second dot here is my observations about the book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. Among other interesting things about the book, a persistent theme throughout the book is happiness. He draws on established research that shows that human happiness has remarkably little to do with material circumstances. Thus, even though we have more resources available to us than any of the previous generations before us, we are also more alone. This is because, he observes,
happiness depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. If happiness is determined by expectations, then, mass media and advertising industry are to blame for depriving us of contentment.
A celebratory post or a positive experience shared on social media platforms receive positive reinforcements, whereas negative experiences — such as arguments or reading negative comments — can quickly escalate to deep hurt and trauma. This can lead to people feeling isolated and lonely.
The third dot in my plot is my observations through the book, A Man Called Ove, written by Fredrick Backman. It is the story of a man called Ove, who is initially portrayed as a loner, a grumpy old man, who is lonely and suicidal after the loss of his wife, who was his bridge to other people and community. I won’t spoil the book for those of you who might read it later, but this book emphasises the importance of human connection and community.
What I see as a common thread of discussion is the importance of human connection, real human connection, in-person, face-to-face interactions and not 1’s and 0’s transmitted over a network. The fact of the matter is that nothing can replace human connection and real communities. After reading the books Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and A Man Called Ove, I have become more aware about this epidemic of loneliness that plagues society and I proactively started reaching out to people, doing a random act of kindness everyday and looking out to comfort any Eleanor’s or Ove’s I come across. I encourage you do the same and to listen to the silent “not” when someone says, “ I’m fine!”.
