In 2021 the World Health Organization declared Loneliness to be a worldwide epidemic, impacting one in every six people. And it’s only gotten worse since then. At the same time, ironically, lonely people, and those experiencing unwanted isolation, are all in extremely good company.
To paraphrase Krishnamurti, ‘it is no good thing to be well-adjusted in a sick society.’ As with any event in society, any action will also generate an equal reaction of some type. This means that any adoption of things like computer or video game use, smartphones, or streamed binge-watching, all of these screen-based activities necessarily subtract from the total life time available for living and being.
It is only recently that people have begun to consider the Opportunity Costs associated with screen time. This has led to questions about the time and attention required to truly maintain healthy, beneficial social relationships with family or friends.
Many people were in school, or had jobs that either stopped, or were greatly affected by the two years of isolation, (four years, if they were high risk), associated with the COVID pandemic. For the most isolated, re-connection with others continues to be challenging even for formerly gregarious, social people.
Fortunately, the reasons for peoples feelings are very logical, which means the solutions can be equally practical. But before we can achieve those simple solutions, we must first learn how to become more aware of our moment-to-moment thought-analyses of ourselves and the world around us.
Once we are better able to see and appreciate the nature of thought itself, then changing the content of our thoughts, or the value of their importance, is much easier. But first we must learn to see and accept our Personal Thinking as the fabric of what some Buddhists refer to as ‘the illusion’ that creates all of our unnecessary suffering.
Do not deprive the world of yourself or your ideas. Learning to truly appreciate your own true value will result in a natural motivation to share your abundance with others. And thanks to the unselfish purity of that specific type awareness, we also get to experience a profound sense of joyous enthusiasm that naturally emerges while we’re in the act of helping others.
If you would like to connect more with the people and world around you—and in turn, with yourself, then drop me an email at scottis@relaxandsucceed.com. We can arrange to have a no-obligation conversation where we can discuss how we might approach showing you how you can meaningfully engage with others in a way that leaves both you, and the world, better off for it.
