The Emotional Costs of Being Around Others

In characteristically postmodernist fashion David Foster Wallace's much-remarked essay "E Unibus Pluram" meanders in a very patience-testing way. Still, in this case at least the reader is rewarded for bearing with the meandering with an occasional nugget of insight (however tangential it may be to the thesis, which Foster, well aware of how much he meanders, explicitly assures us he does have well into the text).

One such insight is Wallace's remark that the "[l]onely tend . . . to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans."

Wallace doesn't develop this thought at any great length, but whatever he had in mind here, it seems to me that there is something to be said about the reluctance to bear that cost--and in particular how it isn't the same for everyone, just as the rewards of being around others aren't the same for everyone.

Some people have relatively high status, and power, and others--frankly, the great majority--don't. Some people fit in with the crowd around them easily, while others don't. Those who are powerful, or who readily fit in, or even more so, those who are powerful and fit in, are likely to find that the emotional costs aren't too high, that people don't mind having them around, that in fact around them others will mind their manners, and even take the trouble to make them comfortable. Not being powerful, and not fitting in, is likely to mean a higher emotional cost--enduring more mistreatment, or maybe for those who don't fit in and deal with the fact by attempting to "fake it," bearing the burden of pretending, which entails emotional costs of its own.

At the same time not everyone derives the same satisfaction from human company. Some would rather be treated badly than be alone--while for others it is the opposite. For some a shallow relationship with people with whom they really share nothing is enough, while others in the absence of a real connection think "What's the point?"

Especially if the costs of being around others are higher.

When the costs are high and the rewards low it hardly seems unnatural for people to be alone that much more, even at the price of being lonely (with some actually feeling less lonely alone than when they are with others, on the edge of the group, watching others interact as they are physically there but ignored), the choice least-worst. For some it may even be the only way they can protect themselves from a world they see as mean not because they have been imbued with a "cognitive bias" which has them unwarrantedly perceiving the world as mean, but because the world really has treated them meanly in the past, and does treat them meanly now, while showing no promise of being any more hospitable than that as things stand.

Those commentators who wring their hands over people choosing to "bowl alone," the traffickers in psycho-babble purveying one-size-fits-all advice about "stepping out of your comfort zone" and "getting out there" without the slightest consideration of the possibility that they may in fact be telling the abused to subject themselves the more fully to their abusers in the name of sociality should take a good, hard, look at the reality of a society that faces so many of its members with these unpalatable and unsatisfying choices. Alas, such things rarely occur to respecters of conventional wisdom in a society where that sort of human trash describable as "the apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality" are the respectable makers of opinion.