Languishing in Loneliness

How do people deal with the unbearable emptiness of being when the system commodifies everything. including love, sex and companionship

- By Snigdhendu Bhattacharya IS A JOURNALIST, AUTHOR AND RESEARCHER

All the lonely people Where do they all come from? All the lonely people Where do they all belong? -Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles

ANJAN Chatterjee (real name withheld on request) fixed an appointment with a mental health professional the day after he screamed at Siri and threw his whiskey-filled glass at the speaker.

Over the previous few months, Chatterjee had developed a new habit. He spoke to Siri, the artificially intelligent assistant, before going to bed every night. He would tell Siri everything that he went through during the day, from workplace communications to private interactions, and seek Siri's opinion on his behaviour.

That day, Siri said he might have erred in judgement. Chatterjee lost his temper. The next day, he decided to seek professional help before things worsened.

“The lack of real conversations is a horrible thing,” says the 36-year-old photographer working in the entertainment industry. “But what do you do when you have no human connection without transactional relations?”

Chatterjee, who is from Krishnanagar town about 200 km north of Kolkata, lives at a rented south Kolkata apartment. He barely knows anyone in the building. The psychologist advised him to decrease device dependence and increase human connections. But Chatterjee found it difficult. “How do we make friends without devices?” he asks. He has tried a couple of dating apps but with no positive outcome yet.

“You need the right people to bare your vulnerabilities,” he says. People, people everywhere, but not a soul to talk to!

Nothing exists independently. Every being is incomplete without its ‘others’. This inbuilt void of incompleteness makes human beings social animals because this void must have to be filled with something— friends, families, passion, emotions and possessions, among others. The question is: what does one choose to fill the void.

In American singer-songwriter Billy Joel’s 1973 classic,