The great empty

The last 18 months have been tough for everyone. I got thinking about the psychological and philosophical impacts a few days ago. Here are my conclusions. 

The unique circumstances people have experienced in the last year or so are tough. Very tough when you think about the potential impact on psychological well-being. Emptiness in a strict psychological sense means a sense of boredom, social alienation, and apathy; the last year or so ticks the box on social alienation and boredom one hundred percent. The results of this are interesting.  This sense of alienation has been suppressed while working, due to the routine nature of work tasks. People have extended the working hours into  leisure hours and or during the weekend. We have used this extension of working hours into personal hours to overcome the sense of "existential vacuum" and emptiness. Huge cost on a psychological scale but tiny on a philosophical scale.  

Psychologically the cost is huge because people have gone into a default mode where they don’t even know that they suffer from boredom, social alienation and apathy. Humans are a social species and the lack of social contact creates a situation where apathy becomes the default go to emotion. One is just not interested and as work has crept into leisure hours and down time people have started to become robotic. Apathy is the first step towards clinical depression. Depressed people are those who "...cannot seem to make [themselves] do anything", who "can't complete anything", and who do not "feel any excitement about seeing loved ones". The other issue with this situation is that apathy can give rise to anxiety in the right circumstances (this pandemic being a good example) . The lack of human to human contact which has resulted in apathy also creates a situation where once things get back to normal, some people would have forgotten what it takes to have a normal interaction; they will try to shy away from any social situation and keep to themselves. It’s going to be tougher on kids most especially the ones that would have been in high school/ college - a huge amount of experience that is collected in those few years is now missing. Queue in the teen psychologist and young adult psychologist; they will have their hands full. 

What about the adults ? I guess it starts with an honest analysis of ones behaviour over the last 18 months, some amount of contemplation and course  correction before it’s late and one has to visit a psychologist. 

My sanity ( if I can call my self sane; a couple of my friends will differ on this) is intact because of a couple of things 

1. I contemplate weekly 
2. I blog - helps in articulating feelings 
3. course correct when needed 
4. Finally I don’t substitute my emotion for happiness by opening my wallet (I will write about this concept at some point)

There is no great empty at a psychological sense for me. The philosophical empty is a whole different animal on a whole different planet in a different solar system. That too is worth writing about some day. 

C