Updated Feb. 2, 2024 at 12:35 p.m.
–OpEd–
BERLIN — Being lonely is a basic human experience. There are lonely children — brooders, readers, dreamers. The kids that no one wants on the team. Hardly anyone can go through puberty without experiencing a feeling of existential alienation from all other people and especially from adults.
This loneliness is the stuff good pop songs, young adult novels, works of art and poems are made of. “Ah, look at all the lonely people,” sing the Beatles in “Eleanor Rigby”. One also thinks of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Edvard Munch’s Scream or Friedrich Hölderlin’s deeply sad poem “Half of Life”, which ends with: “The walls stand / Speechless and cold/ The weathervanes rattle in the wind.”
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Since Galileo Galilei, we have also known how lonely we are in the cosmos. Added to this is capitalism, which has replaced the musty warmth of the extended farming family with the phenomenon of the “lonely mass” described by sociologist David Riesman. From the point of view of goods production and consumption, a society of singles would be ideal, everyone as Homo oeconomicus concerned with increasing their material advantage through work and consumption.
And if you have to have children, take them to daycare so that mom can continue to contribute to the gross national product. Sometimes you see entire daycare groups full of lonely children running around as if they were survivors of a terrorist attack.
Privileged youth
Now the government has also discovered loneliness. Family Minister Lisa Paus has even developed a “strategy” against it . They want to examine the “funding of university chairs on the topic of loneliness” and create a “loneliness barometer” from which you can see which people are the loneliest and where; and create a “coalition against loneliness” with “companies, unions, associations, initiatives, foundations, clubs or religious communities”. Oh yes, and “shorten waiting times for psychotherapeutic treatment places.”
To start with the waiting times: People with serious mental illnesses are particularly affected. And why? Because people with completely normal feelings — loneliness, fear, overwhelm, boredom — imagine that they are sick.
In Britain, 57% of university students — the country’s most privileged young people — reported suffering from mental health problems. Three quarters of all British parents of school-age children sought mental health advice or treatment for their child in the last year alone.
Loneliness for the elderly
There are no figures for Germany, but there is no reason to assume that this trend of pathologizing any feeling that does not fit into the image of always happy people painted by advertising only affects the British.
Yet anyone who thinks that loneliness or sadness, laziness or impudence are an illness, is blocking therapists’ practices and preventing those who are really sick from getting help.
And then there are the lonely old people. For many it is probably too late. A dog might be able to help. But you can say to today’s kids: Have children! There is nothing better than grandchildren to give meaning to old age. And after a day with your little ones, you’ll be happy to enjoy the evening alone with a bottle of Primitivo wine and a good streaming service. None of this require a ministry or national barometer, university chairs or psychotherapists.
