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| Loneliness - Relationships Therapy |
The Effect Of Technology To Our Social Life
Relationships - A New Type Of Loneliness.
While the world is growing smaller, the gaps between us are expanding (Loneliness). We have extended the quantity of life but not the quality of life. When everything becomes disposable, nothing remains eternal. We have learned the facts of history without learning its lessons. We have learned the secrets of science without learning the responsibility that goes with it.Nearly everyone have struggled with loneliness at some point in time; you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t suffered at least a short stint of painful loneliness.
Loneliness is no longer characterized by rejection from the group, friends, family or an inability to find a mate. Today, isolation is often experienced by highly functional people who have no apparent cause for feeling separate. This type of loneliness is hard to pinpoint, even by those in the throes of it. It’s a new type of loneliness, one that is not typified by a lack of people in our lives. It’s an internal loneliness, a loneliness of the heart and mind.
This troubling type of loneliness is not only elusive; it’s becoming increasingly common. Most, if not all, of us have felt it at one point or another.
Emotional Intelligence (EI) Vs Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
Closeness is the experience of having direct access to another person’s inner world. When you have this access to another ’s inner world and she has access to yours; you share the feeling of closeness.
A person’s inner world includes his/her thoughts, feelings, beliefs, preferences, rhythms, fantasies, narratives, and experiences. When two people are close, they know their beliefs and appreciate each other.
The more you gain access to someone’s inner world, the closer the relationship with that person becomes. The more closeness you generate, the farther you move away from a persons feelings the farther you drift apart. And since loneliness is essentially sadness caused by distance, the more access you gain to another person’s inner world, the less lonely you will feel. In other words, closeness works as the antidote to loneliness by nullifying distance and the sadness that comes with it.
Two Vital Ingredients To Closeness (Knowing and Caring)
1. Knowing.
Knowing is the act of understanding another person from that person’s own perspective. It’s the ability to recount another person’s experience of the world in his own words. Knowing someone well creates the cognitive component of closeness. It is the thing that, over time, allows you to sit next to your business partner and know exactly what she’s thinking.This way of knowing is substantially different from how we usually “know” people. We tend to think we know someone when we’ve interacted with him a lot and formulated a theory about “how he is.” ie Peter is a really nice guy, Mary is truly a generous Lady.
Caring means being able to feel and show that the other person’s well-being matters to you. Well-being encompasses the whole person, from his health and safety to his fulfillment and happiness. Caring about the whole person creates the emotional component of closeness. It is what allows you to look into your sister’s eyes and feel what she’s feeling.
The Effect Of Technology To Our Social Lives
Our default mode of interaction is through a mediator - a device. This is the first way in which personal technology is putting up roadblocks to closeness: it is making mediated interaction the norm.
Mediated interaction, by definition, is not direct access to one another. Remember, closeness is defined as direct access to another person’s inner world. The more we replace in-person closeness with mediated interaction, the harder it is to understand anyone else’s inner world or for them to understand ours, hence loneliness is experienced.
One type of mediated interaction that deserves special attention here is social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, to name just a few. In some ways the combination of mobile phones and social networks is the perfect storm of mediated interaction. It feels so much like you have people around. You can feel as if you are carrying people around in your pocket at all times. But is this ability really making you happy?
Have you not been disappointed when someone close to you posts on your Facebook wall instead of calling to wish you a happy birthday. Have you not felt annoyed when someone repeatedly “likes” your Facebook posts while simultaneously ignoring your attempts to hang out! (Modern-day Type of Loneliness)
These are the barriers the mental and emotional ones we sense even after all practical barriers have been removed. It feels as if there are barriers because of Lack of direct access to one another.
You cannot feel what another person is feeling over Instagram. You cannot understand what our friend is thinking over Pinterest. We cannot embrace each other over Tweeter. You cannot really know and care through a screen. Modern-day Type of Loneliness.
The value of voice tone, body language, facial expression, and emotional signals should not be underestimated. For this reason it is vital to reconsider the way we nurture our relationships by reviewing how we communicate.
Technology should be reserved for maintaining an already close relationship, as opposed to using technology to create one. It’s extremely difficult to do the work of knowing and caring if you and the other person are not in the same physical space. But devices do remove many of the limitations of distance, travel, time zones, and overall busy lives. If used in the right way, they can help keep your hearts and minds close while your physical selves are distant.
