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  1. The New YorkerJill Lepore3/30/2015 min
    14 reads6 comments
    9.0
    The New Yorker
    14 reads
    9.0
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    • DellwoodBarker2 years ago

      Love this:

      Home can be anywhere. Human societies are so intricate that people have meaningful, intimate ties of all kinds, with all sorts of groups of other people, even across distances. You can feel at home with friends, or at work, or in a college dining hall, or at church, or in Yankee Stadium, or at your neighborhood bar.

    • sjwoo2 years ago

      Zoom; we all have found out by this point; is indeed a poor substitute for the real thing...

      • bill
        Top reader of all time
        2 years ago

        Agreed!! Not even close. It's like watching a TV show about Barcelona and then thinking you've been there. Or putting on a VR headset of a wilderness scene and believing you just went on a walk in the woods. No. You didn't.

        It peeves me that we use interchangeable language ("meet," "hang out") because it degrades the real thing. Real world eye contact, physical touch, exchanging the same air, the subtle sounds and smells of shared space - this is what makes a meet a meet, a hang a hang. Disembodied, flattened faces staring at black mirrors from hundreds of miles away - that's something else entirely. "Ghastly" is a good word to describe it. Because, well, ghosts.

        My favorite thing about real life meetings is that I can't see myself, so I can lose myself. I love having all of my senses tuned in to another person. What a pleasure.

    • Pegeen
      Top reader this weekReading streakScoutScribe
      2 years ago

      The opening of this article was heartbreaking concerning the primates in the zoo. I almost couldn’t continue. Zoo’s are another topic all together! Where I see this loneliness to really hit home in the human population is when you are older, single and in declining health. I have witnessed that the isolation of this does cause one to become frightened, self absorbed and not a fun person to be around.

      • jeff2 years ago

        Same thoughts about the chimpanzees! That was brutal.

    • Jessica2 years ago

      People who are not lonely are so terrified of loneliness that they shun the lonely, afraid that the condition might be contagious. And people who are lonely are themselves so horrified by what they are experiencing that they become secretive and self-obsessed—“it produces the sad conviction that nobody else has experienced or ever will sense what they are experiencing or have experienced,” Fromm-Reichmann wrote. One tragedy of loneliness is that lonely people can’t see that lots of people feel the same way they do.