Welcome to 'Let's Start a Pod' – My First Newsletter
This ‘season’ this newsletter is about loneliness – as a feeling, a social phenomenon, a public health concern, and creative fodder.
This is Issue #1
Art: Veer Misra
Some background
A while ago you signed up to get my thoughts on Stuff. It was meant to be a project to help me stay connected to myself (and things I liked about myself) during my year-long MBA. However, the usual reasons and accompanying despair got the better of me. So here I am, post MBA, hopefully pre-employment (although I’m often convinced I’ll stay jobless forever), launching this belated newsletter.
I’ve written and scrapped a few versions of this over the last couple months because I didn’t feel like I arrived at any clarity about what I was trying to say. The thing is, I felt like I had to begin by talking about the MBA, and all the drafts inevitably came out bitter and garbled. I didn’t want to let it suck up more space than it already had – in my mind, my texts with friends, and the daily chatter with my boyfriend. So I’ve decided to face it and then move on.
I have a core course and an elective one for next month. And my choices have led me to:
1. capitalism in debate
2. business finance
In the same month.
Please applaud my consistency in pursuing intellectual dissonance
What does loneliness feel like?
Earlier this year, I decided to pare back my Instagram usage in a desperate attempt to reduce the dissonance that was consuming me. My Instagram had been riddled with posts of MBAs partying on yachts, taking international vacations, breaking UK lockdown rules even as the number of deaths in the country climbed to terrible highs.
Then, as the second wave engulfed India, my social media feeds became a nightmarish mishmash of pleas for oxygen and extravagant partying. I found myself neither here nor there – unable to put the news out of my mind and repulsed by my supposed cohort, whose half-baked attempts at charity somehow annoyed me even more than the collective deficit of social empathy and sympathy. So I spoke to a therapist about my guilt and my grief, and took her advice to simply phone in the MBA. I’d known it wasn’t going to be a great social or cultural fit for me, but I hadn’t expected it to feel as bad as it did. The thing, I think, that made it more difficult than I’d anticipated, was that I valued some of the individuals I met, had friendships I genuinely enjoyed, and so I wanted to resist writing the whole thing off.
Wonder why people don’t like MBAs 🤔 https://t.co/lrwiXlSPML
I was lonely. Told like this, it’s a plain fact, but at the time it was obscured – and dulled – by the fullness of my life outside the MBA. I was living with one of my closest friends from undergrad, dating someone wonderful, keeping up with family and friends in India, working on a new publication, reading, going on walks, doing yoga, cooking something new almost every day. Life felt full, satisfying, and with coursework and job hunting added in, there really wasn’t an hour in a day where I was truly alone.
Same same, but different
As so many of us already know, loneliness isn’t a physical state of being, but a subjective emotional experience. It is a lens that colours our perspective of the world, shading in ‘belonging’ or ‘unbelonging’ over sections of our lives. I’d recognised my loneliness in other situations – having a free evening but nobody to spend it with, for instance – but I didn’t expect to feel professionally lonely. I missed the unspoken and shared values of the newsrooms I’d worked in. Which wasn’t to say journalism is a perfect socially conscious utopia, but I missed seeing eye to eye with people. I missed not feeling ethically conflicted about the company I was in.
I wonder if loneliness can also be ‘not feeling at home in oneself’ – out of place not with the world, but mismatched with your own idea of who you are. Maybe loneliness includes the inability to reconcile our external lives with how we’re feeling inside. Like going through the motions at work while grappling with grief.
We are in a ‘lonely’ moment. The pandemic’s isolation foregrounded the specific yet universal nature of loneliness and accelerated the emerging discourse about it. There are now books about the physiological aspects of loneliness, government departments and ministers dedicated to battling it, podcasts about loneliness in the workplace, mental health apps to tackle it personally, and an increasing amount of content about it. Just think how many of us must be lonely to drive such a widespread cultural response to it.
I think about this everyday https://t.co/YL18tpoO7L
Strange, counterintuitive – yet totally normal
It’s difficult to think and write about loneliness when I am experiencing it, and hard to revisit when I feel I am past it. I’m fascinated by how amorphous it is and have found myself diving into this newfound tub of ‘loneliness content’ with increasing interest. Loneliness is a slippery feeling, it comes to me in the form of annoyance and frustration with the world around me, making me feel like everything is pointless.
Rather than feeling alone, loneliness makes me feel trapped. I’ve only come to recognise this by experiencing its opposite – these days I spend most of my hours alone, taking in the world at my own pace, seeing friends in limited amounts, and as a result my mind is quieter than it’s been in years. My life feels full. It’s strange and counterintuitive, yet totally normal. Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent several hours catching up with old friends and found myself filtering their stories through a lens of loneliness, trying to find coherence in our experiences.
Over the next few weeks, I want to go further down this road and pick apart the difference between being alone and feeling lonely; dive into friendships and connection as antidotes, and – if you’re willing – learn more about what loneliness (and connection) feels like to you.
I want to dive into serious academic books about it, listen to pop psychology podcasts about it, read articles about friendship and relationships, and take in all the movies, songs, poems, novels, essays about it that come my way. I don’t have a timeline for this, so pop in and out of this chat as you please.
So, Let’s Start a Pod – About Loneliness.
By Nehmat Kaur
This 'season' I'm thinking and learning about loneliness – as a feeling, social phenomenon, public health concern, and creative fodder.
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