Tag: loneliness

A Ramble Through Little

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I was doing so well living the life of oblivious bliss. No news for ten days, suddenly the world felt like a beautiful place. When you have no idea what is going on outside of the bubble you live in on a daily basis then things can very easily start to appear relatively calm. It helps that the bubble is a small seaside village and despite peoples best attempts at creating them, there are few genuine regular issues worth being demoralised over. That doesn’t mean things don’t happen but certainly little worthy of national attention let alone global and geopolitical. Saying that in places like this all you have to do is scrape below the surface and you’ll find something worth getting carried away with. It does explain the propensity for gossip in places like this though.

It’s interesting to see how we respond to moments of drama. I know I could live in a small village and life would be relatively stress free, likely it would be safe and although there wouldn’t be many people around I would know enough of them to not experience loneliness. Living in a city is far more exciting, there are things to do, places and people to see and there would be enough action to absorb you attention as required. Life though would probably be more intense and potentially more stressful, also in my experience far more lonely than any small village I’ve ever lived in. I’ve never quite understood that, and suspect the lonely feeling in cities is something born out of not being brought up in one and knowing how really to exist within them.

Perhaps a balance between the two. Always a balance. Always a fence to sit on. A sleepy but interesting and cultured city beside the sea. That’s the dream. I imagine if that existed so many people would have moved there in search of it they would destroy it in the process. It’s like being a tourist and wanting to visit the idyllic spots and being oblivious to the fact your presence helps in destroying any sense of idyllic you once had. We just can win. But we should never give up. What kind of life would that be. Too busy, too noisy but never settle. Or does that just miss the point for acceptance and appreciating what you have. Perhaps that’s for another time when I fancy another little ramble. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.

Ten Days Free Falling Tree

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

This then is day one of ten without the news. It doesn’t feel a great deal different from yesterday except I missed listening to the two daily Economist podcasts I would usually listen to while driving. Not checking the BBC feels like absolutely zero loss which is quite a pleasant and reassuring feeling and without access to my Facebook wall I am unlikely to come up with any articles from independent or alternate media sources. Life doesn’t feel much different then as I said after one day, but then I wouldn’t expect it to, it’s after five or six days that I’m curious to see the affects.

This is not my first time without any access to the news. There have been plenty of opportunities for me to be ignorant of the worlds ignorance’s when travelling and either being away from the internet or just with better things to do. It is probably important then to get this straight; there are many more important things in life than knowing what is going on in the world, or a version of the world people you don’t know want you to see. When I have been away from the internet for a bit though my first thought is not to check the world or local news but is to find out what the score in the football was. That’s my weakness, everything else is secondary.

These moments of no internet are incredibly rare in modern times. We have access to the internet in ways unthinkable just ten to fifteen years ago. I do remember a time before mobile phones let alone phones with all this infinitely accessible information. I have no idea of the figures and will perhaps expose my ignorance but I imagine the majority of houses in the UK have wifi or at least access to a neighbours. Failing that a trip to McDonalds is the norm for some and even public transport has wifi these days. We’ve come along way from dial-up connections and it taking a minute to download one image.

It is probably a good thing. Long term it is unclear but then what the people of the future think is good will probably be different to what I do now. We apparently have less ability to remember information because we have Google as a surrogate memory bank. Our lack of real face to face connection has been shown to create feelings of loneliness which is surely the opposite of what a world of connectivity is supposed to do. Maybe we need to refine our understanding of the nuances of connection. On the flip side, unless we switch off our devices which can genuinely be really difficult, we are never fully alone and able to relax in our own company. We seem to be in a middle ground that does nobody any favours.

But I started out with discussing taking a break from the constant barrage of news not a one-sided take on the ills of technology. The news then makes us excitable in all the wrong ways and feeds into some primordial survival network going on in our brain. It undoubtedly leads to increases in anxiety and it’s only real benefit seems to be in allowing for a good conversation with someone about, well, the news. Yet being able to share information of massacres, injustices and private and state corruption is invaluable even if it does get drowned out by all the rest of the bullshit. In these ten days though I’ll be fine, as will the world without my observations for I suspect it is true; a falling tree does make a sound in the woods even when nobody is there to hear it.

To Help Others And Alleviate The Loneliness Within

Hamar Williams1 Comment

One of the pleasures of my day is strangely enough the five hours I spend working. Not always, but one of my current jobs is a little home renovation for a friend and I find myself in a flat just working away at fixing and building while listening to podcasts. I’m in my own little world with whatever I want to listen to. It’s a real pleasure. Today I was listening to one of The Economist‘s podcasts and part of it was about loneliness and how helping people can alleviate this sense of loneliness, but more importantly boost our immune system. Apparently it leads to the down regulation of inflammatory genes, which are their words and I’m guessing a good thing. It was in relation to this current virus and the paradox of quarantine, loneliness and our health. As I said they discussed how helping people can alleviate our sense of loneliness but they also discovered that helping people can make us happier and more connected with those who we help. They used two groups of people for this study, one who helped themselves and one who helped others.

This made me think of a period in my life when I helped people. I spent six months in Greece about three years ago working with refugees crossing from Turkey, having come from countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I don’t like the word helped because it is loaded, patronising and self aggrandising. I prefer to just say I handed out food and clothes, fixed things, drove my van around a lot and played football even more, as well as just hung out with people and tried to make them feel like human beings. The group I was doing this with generally left around the same time and I remained in contact to varying degrees as we all spent the next year trying to get over everything we had seen and felt. It feels and sounds self indulgent, and I don’t even like writing these words because of that, but it’s true, as is the fact I’m sure some people left with what I would describe as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. My point though is that I have discussed with some people and we agreed there was a sense that this was a good time, in the moment we had been truly happy. I always put this down to the fact it was a real true moment and you were needed urgently, there was no time for this fake bullshit we live in our regular existence. I always thought that it was life in the true sense that made us feel this strange paradoxical happiness but perhaps it was just the fact we were helping people and feeling more connected on a human level. I still don’t know the answers or the truth and I don’t always feel comfortable talking about it as I feel self-indulgent considering everything else that was going on to others and is still going on, but these were my thoughts and what better than this daily monster I’ve created to share them on.