Our civilisation (if that is the word) is good at satisfying people's material wants. Well, some people's. But it is extraordinarily bad at keeping us happy. Because happiness doesn't come from material things. It comes from love and affection and friendship. In the US, one-person households has gone up from 17% in 1970 to 27% in 2012. In Sweden 47% of households are inhabited by one person. Some of that is later marriage, as young people leave home but don't get married as they used to 40 years ago. But there is also, offsetting that, the boomerang phenomenon: adult children who return home, like my eldest, after having lived away for many years.
We weren't meant to live alone. Our ancestors in the African jungles, and primitive people in many places still today, live in tight-knit communities, where old people had an important place in the life of the community.
I see so many pensioners alone. "Sheila" wanders round our little shopping centre talking to everybody because she has no friends and is desperately lonely.
We've got it all wrong. Maybe we should trade our glossy oversized cars for friends. Instead, we have dogs. Or goldfish. Tragic.
“Alone. That’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and Hell is a poor synonym.”
| — | Stephen King |
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