JANUARY 22, SATURDAY

INDIVIDUALISM AND LONELINESS

I want to write a short post about loneliness and togetherness. The very odd thing for me is that very often when we, as Americans, are constantly with people we have a great need to be alone. And when we are alone for very long we want to be with with other people. I wrote about that when I wondered about never being satisfied.

But I am not sure that is true in every country. In the joint families I have observed in India where the children often live with the parents until the parents die in one house with each family having a room, people are never alone. They must feel comfortable with that and there are many benefits. Often a man can go away for work for months at a time and his family is well cared for at home by the family. It really is a joined family as the name joint family implies.

It seems to me that because Americans put so much emphasis on individualism and personal freedom they encourage their children to be independent from an early age and then to leave home after high school for four years of college as a way of getting out on their own with a supporting community and with a great social life in order to practice independence. Residential college seems to be as much about teaching independence as teaching subjects in the classroom. Children are becoming our version of adult by learning to be independent and are then encouraged not to come come back home at the end of the four years but to stay independent. This is just the opposite for a traditional Indian joint family where the children are encouraged to stay home for life, although things are changing rapidly in India.

And then the children as adults build a nuclear family, two parents, two children, and follow the same pattern, with their children leaving at home after high school to be independent.

Often American children live far away from their parents and only see them on family vacations or on holidays. And then the parents, empty nesters for a long period, if they have enough money, finally move to a retirement community where they will have plenty of company and a social life when one of them dies. If they can’t afford a retirement home they live into old age together until one of them dies and then the other either lives alone or moves in with a child or near a child, often in a distant city where they know no one, or move into a retirement home or health care facility where they have company and are taken care of.

There are many possibilities in between but these two examples are in stark contrast to each other: the American family living independently and the Indian joint family living together within the family until they die. There aren’t many retirement communities in India and not many joint families here.

But the issue I wonder about is the issue of living immersed in a family for twenty-five years and then living alone for the rest of our lives, first as a couple, and then completely alone which we have set ourselves up for. As I mentioned, Indians don’t seem to need to be alone as much as Americans do. And Americans have a great need to be independent with a lot of alone time. This makes Indian arranged marriages make sense to me. Even now, most Indian marriages are arranged marriages, arranged by both families as well as those getting married in a cooperative way, while American marriages are based on individual choice without parental input, often determined by romantic attraction. Each of our cultures determines how much individuality we feel we need.

So part of my wondering about loneliness and togetherness is a cultural thing. The more individuality you insist on the more likely you are to live alone at some point, and the more likely you are to at times be lonely.

I am thinking about what we as Americans have gotten ourselves into and how to deal with it because this is certainly something that I face in my old age, something that most of us will face in old age. But it is also something Americans face at every stage in their lives as less and less people are getting married and more and more people are living alone, either before a late marriage or after a divorce or in old age. Living alone is something that many Americans, men and women, choose. People at every stage can have a rich social life so there seems to be no reason to be lonely at any stage in life.

But the thing that I wonder about, that this preamble doesn’t really lead up to, is the tension between the loneliness of living alone and the togetherness of communal living.

If you live in an Indian joint family all your life you probably don’t have the same need to be alone that Americans, who have been trained to be independent from birth, have. Togetherness must feel good and its absence uncomfortable. But I think Americans have a built in tension. Americans can feel smothered by family or being in group. We are Huck Finn types who want to get away from Aunt Sally and “light out for the territory ahead,” with our pioneer spirit that took us away from smothering culture in Europe and then sent us West when we got here. Susie, living in her cabin in her holler deep in the woods with an outhouse and an outdoor shower without a neighbor in sight or hearing, is living this American dream, impossible in India. One of the first things I noticed about America when I first came back here from India was that you could often stand outside and not see anyone. You could be alone. That had never happened to me in India just as I’d never seen tall grass at the edge of a road because it was all grazed away.

What I am wondering about is what we have built into ourselves. As Americans when we are in a group we can be smothered and need to be alone, have to be alone or we go stir crazy, and yet we have organized our lives so that we spend long times alone at various times in our lives but particularly in old age. Being independent, being alone, is what we have trained ourselves to do and yet, often, when we are alone we want to be around other people.

As more and more of us live longer and longer this is probably something that we should in some way be preparing ourselves for, but it seems to me that because we put such emphasis as Americans on individuality and independence, this is going to be very difficult to do. It is very hard to live a life of independence and then to suddenly become communal when we near the end and suddenly want company.