On accepting and overcoming psychological asymmetry through community and vulnerability.

Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…”
“It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.

For the last two years, I have spent New Year’s Eve alone.

There are certain occasions where loneliness is acceptable to society: the first hours of a Sunday morning, Wednesdays after dinner, or a few solitary hours on retreat. Our societal rhythms allow it. Yet, New Year’s Eve? I would turn on the television and see the masses gathered at various cultural epicenters only to return to the silence of my home and then to bed.

To be honest, I actually enjoyed the solitude. However, I convinced myself that I must be missing something. The discerning voices of my cultural imagination reminded me that I am not supposed to be alone during such a time.

Being alone is bearable when expected. Most of the time it is a subtle reminder that something is wrong with us.

That’s the stigma, at least. At best, loneliness is an ailment for introverts. We lean on Jung’s Psychological Types from 1921 to offer a clean category that there are those who need some isolation for self-integrity, but others who thrive in the company of others. The ideal, however, is company. Extroversion is the expectation. Loneliness, therefore, happens because of poor social skills or laziness and we surmise that no respectable person should be lonely.

If we are lonely, it is because the world has analyzed us and found that we deserve it. We aren’t capable of belonging.

Being alone leads to shame. Feeling alone around other people leads to guilt.

It is worth noting that being alone and being lonely are different. Even the extrovert on New Year’s Eve, huddled amongst the masses, might still encounter the asymmetry of their life amongst others. We can be surrounded and still solitary.

It might be true, therefore, that no matter where you were on New Year’s Eve, your experience and mine weren’t so different.

To Be Human is to Be Lonely

The stigma of loneliness is fair. Loneliness is something to escape because the human desire is to be known and be liked. We need others to survive and our very existence is symbiotically entangled with those around us. We need each other — both existentially and biologically.

However, the guilt and shame of loneliness expose a human predicament:

We want to matter to others. We want to know and be known. But we never can.

The escape from loneliness is futile.

Because we cannot be liberated from the constraints of ourselves.

Overcoming loneliness is not our only prerogative. Not escaping the reality reveals some benefits — again, both existential and biological. Alas, the stigma may not be so necessary.

However, the negative experience of loneliness — whether the literal moments of isolation or the inevitable feeling of separation amongst the crowd — is a symptom of a larger issue.

Loneliness is ubiquitous.
It is normal.

Everyone is eternally inaccessible to us; which means that everyone is far more like us than we may otherwise assume.

Any journey to redress begins with accepting that component of human nature. Addressing the reality is a bit more complicated.

The Psychological Barrier to Human Connection

The short, yet complicated theoretical version is that the empirical constraints of human consciousness are phenomenologically limited. One’s perspective is restricted to what one can physically, emotionally, and mentally experience, and that experience will, therefore, be uniquely different from any other human being.

You are not anyone else.
You cannot fully understand anyone else.
You are destined to be and feel different.

This is why you can be surrounded and still feel lonely. This is also why being surrounded can make you feel even more lonely. Relationships actually propagate our loneliness because they reveal the inherent constraints and differences that are inevitably unavoidable.

Loneliness is the natural outcome of being alive.

Which brings us to the long version — sometimes referred to as psychological asymmetry.

This is the phenomenological issue: you know yourself with full, internal access but you only know others externally in part. You know yourself from the inside, but you can only know others from the outside. You know your fullness of thoughts and emotions. You see the complexity of your weathered soul. Yet, with every single other person, you have a very limited data set; which is also a very edited data set.

There is not (yet) a form of technological advancement that allows you to get inside of someone else’s being and consciousness. Therefore, you can only access what they choose to share. If there is anything that they aren’t capable of sharing, that is forever unknown. If there is anything they choose not to share, that part of their life is now left veiled, as well.

You can never know someone else like you know yourself.

And you are left with seeing your intense interior while being concealed to the ambiguous exterior of everyone else. Everyone is a stranger. If you could have full, shared knowledge then this would only be an obstacle to overcome. But complete empathy is impossible. Another’s life is a land to which you cannot travel.

As a result of these psychological barriers, a couple of mental processes unfold:

We begin to think that we are more peculiar than everyone else who seems so normal.
We also might assume that if they see the fullness of us that we see in ourselves, they will be offended.

The human condition is one of everyone thinking they are the outcast.

Often our response is to remove the possibility of our knowable presence because we assume that we can’t be both honest and accepted. We can’t be completely known and still liked in comparison to the cloaked and modified person before us. Sharing as much as phenomenologically possible would be ideal, but we assume it would also be disturbing. Vulnerability would press the edges of human finitude, but if we were truly powerless with another person, they might destroy us. There is a fear of being known.

We hold on, then, to what we have.
We put a lock on the door.
We double the knot to our lives.

Because our complexity and pain and apparent strangeness are ours to endure alone.

The only options are to be fake and enjoy a shallow connection or to accept the unavoidable defeat of loneliness.

We can get people to like us by incessantly keeping our identity obscure or we can accept our fate.

Complete connection is impossible. We will never understand anyone and we will never be understood. We can be objects to one another, satisfying our longings through the offerings of external existence, but we cannot be amongst anyone the same as we are with ourselves. No one is like you. No one can fully compensate for your obvious weaknesses. More importantly, no one will ever like all of you.

Romanticism attempted to provide an answer — love promised an escape from this futility. The modern world, rife with disconnection among the masses, could be overcome in the mingling of souls. Romance became a hopeful adventure toward full-knowing. We could reveal our internal selves to someone with pure vulnerability and still survive that powerlessness. This childlike desire of pure acceptance was in reach where we could be tolerated despite our worst. The mandatory requisite to our inescapable loneliness was a partner. The elusive meaning we craved could happen if only we could get someone to be the cruelest of things — everything.

Yet, even the intention of romantic love could not overcome the psychological barrier of another human being. The outcome of romanticism might even be worse. We have asked another person to supply every social need and every internal desire through their presence which is still external to us.

Psychological asymmetry makes it impossible to know and be known.

Are we, therefore, destined to be lonely forever?

The Role of Real Community & Complete Vulnerability

We’re left with limited options and an impossible task. But we can still do something.

In the wake of our heightened amount of self-knowledge and a limited amount of other-knowledge the result is our assumption that we are weirder than everyone else and the world is full of strangers. No one can know us as we know ourselves and no one can both know us and like us.

So, one option is to just not share anything. It would offensive and these normal people can’t possibly relate to me. Consign ourselves to exile, then.

Another option is to mimic the conventions that we assume are normal based on the externals we see with everyone else. The limited and edited data set must be what normal people do. Maybe they will accept us if we are like them. And we consign ourselves to living out a fiction.

Are we wandering around with shame and guilt from a stigma that doesn’t take psychology seriously?

Is everyone pretending to be like what they suspect is everyone else?

Are we hiding from strangers all the while becoming strangers to ourselves?

Those are two ways to approach the unconquerable barrier of a human being. However, there is a third; one honest about the impossible task.

The antidote to psychological asymmetry is community — the technical definition of a small group of people who interconnect their individual lives as interdependently as possible. In contrast to the overused and ambiguously understood phrase, there are, of course, four technical components required for actual community:

Shared History
Proximity
Permanence
Shared Vision

There is a process, though, that necessitates these postures. In order to accomplish the four components of community, two or more people must be transparently and authentically present and still belong. They must be in physical, mental, and emotional proximity enough to reveal their deepest selves while being handed the deepest self of the other. They must use direct communication to generate shared knowledge of as much of the internals of another as they can.

The real antidote to loneliness is vulnerability — it is the act of making oneself powerless in the hands of another while knowing they will not use your powerlessness to destroy you.

When this transpires, we begin to see that we aren’t that different. We begin to know that our complexity and pain and strangeness are not ours to endure alone. Certainly, it will not eliminate the psychological barrier; we will never fully know another being as we know ourselves. We cannot ask someone to be what they cannot be or do what we cannot do ourselves.

But in belonging together with them, there is a chance that we will find a world more suitable for the likes of us who would otherwise be alone.