‘I just want to be alone now’ – you have probably said this at least once in your lifetime. It’s easy to get mentally drained when you are socializing, especially when you don’t feel comfortable around someone. Expressing your emotions requires a lot of effort, that’s why you might feel down after family dinner or the best party of your life. So, it’s perfectly fine to take a day off and spend it with the best person on Earth – yourself. However, can you imagine being isolated from people for longer than one day? If all people on Earth disappear, how long will it take for you to go completely insane?
Isolated living
Technological progress gave people a lot of possibilities, including learning resources, tons of remote jobs, and Internet relationships with people from all over the world. It also made it possible to live alone.
Theoretically, nowadays you can satisfy all your basic needs without other people involved; all you need is access to the Internet. So, you can work remotely, pay for rent, order groceries, and other supplies online. Staying in your flat behind a strong door can create an illusion of safety. Chatting with multiple people on different social platforms can make you feel loved and needed to a certain extent (belongingness and love are basic psychological needs of an individual).
You can even satisfy your sexual needs while being completely alone. People have been doing it for a long time. Advances in technology brought sex to another level. Technosexual individuals can have sex by using computers, phones, virtual reality headsets, advanced sex robots, or a realistic sex doll.
Isolated leaving is the reality of our days. Presumably, anyone can limit contact with other people and live alone. So, why do we still want to be with other people?
Effects of isolation
Newborn babies have enough amount of fluid storage and glucose in order to live for one or two days without feeding. However, all abandoned infants don’t have a chance to survive unless someone takes care of them.
Even if you cover babies’ basic needs such as nutrition and shelter, it’s still will not be enough for them to develop and be healthy. Mom’s touch is very important since it can set off cascades of hormones in the baby’s body that help regulate the temperature, lower stress, and promote healthy growth.
At the beginning of the XX century in the United States, infant mortality was on the rise. At first, doctors suggested that an unknown virus was the reason for these deaths. However, they didn’t find anything. In 1915, Dr. Henry Dwight Chapin compared the data from ten hospitals – it appeared that only one hospital in New Your State had high survival rates among infants. Newborn babies in that hospital had the same meals, beds, and blankets. There was only one ‘unusual thing’ – local nurses were cuddling infants and talking to them.
Only in 1942, doctors understood that infants were dying because of loneliness. Human contact is very important in the first weeks of their lives; the lack of it leads to severe health problems related to deprivation.
Adults just like newborns can’t live without contact with others. There were a couple of scientific experiments on the effects of social isolation; in all cases, the results were the same.
In the 1950s, researchers from McGill University Medical Center in Montreal invited ten paid volunteers to see what extreme isolation could do to participants. Each of them had a single sound-proof cubicle. Eventually, all participants became acutely restless after a few hours of the experiment; some of them had hallucinations. Nowadays, this kind of experiment is considered illegal since it is proved that it causes a harmful health risk.
Experiments are illegal, but solitary confinement is not. At the moment, 80.000 men and women in the United States live in single cells. The prison system isn’t perfect – some guards exceed their authority and place prisoners into solitary confinement because of a personal grudge. In some cases, the Court decides whether a criminal deserves relative social isolation or not.
In the case of a far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, Oslo District Court couldn’t let him share a cell with other people. He killed 77 people, most of them teenagers.
The mass killer has a private bathroom, gym, personal computer, and video games (Norwegian prisons are considered ‘ the best in the world’). Despite all this, he still reports going crazy without communication with other people. Several years ago Anders Breivik wrote an open letter where he stated that his human rights were violated.
By choice
Even though social isolation leads to gaps in memory, time loss, high blood pressure, hallucinations, anxiety, and depression, some people live in isolation by choice. According to the latest statistics, approximately 500,000 of Japanese youth are social recluses. This way of isolated living is called ‘hikikomori.’
People who live according to hikikomori, spend most of their day in a single room and mostly rely on online interaction; they don’t want to build relationships and even see others. Psychologists explain that hikikomori is caused by the fact that young people can’t get used to being adults, so they prefer to hide from the outside world to escape their obligations. Instead of treating their anxiety and low self-esteem, many young Japanese worsen the situation by isolating themselves.
Nowadays a lot of people live in isolation since it became possible thanks to technological development. However, humans need others in order to survive, stay physically and mentally healthy. You can spend some time with yourself in order to relax, do what you like, and organize your thoughts. Isolating yourself for more than two days leads to stress and anxiety. Humans are social animals, and prolonged lack of contact can even cause permanent brain damage.
