The Loneliness and Anxiety of Modern Man
*In Man’s Search For Himself *Rollo May writes about a feeling of emptiness common to all. But what does it mean to feel emptiness?
A human being is not empty in a static sense, as though he were a storage battery which needs charging. The experience of emptiness, rather, generally comes from people’s feeling that they are powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the world they live in.
When an individual feels powerless in directing his own life, or change what people think of him, he feels empty. He gets a deep sense of despair and futility.
And soon, since what he wants and what he feels can make no real difference, he gives up wanting and feeling. Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers he is powerless to overcome, his final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers.
Erich Fromm saw this coming. He observed that people no longer live under moral laws or the authority of the church.
The authority is the public itself, but this public is merely a collection of many individuals each with his radar set adjusted to finding out what the others expect of him.
The corporate executive is on top because he and his wife were successful in adjusting to public opinion. The public is just made up of individuals who are slaves to the authority of public opinion.
Riesman makes the very relevant point that the public is therefore afraid of a ghost, a bogeyman, a chimera. It is an anonymous authority with a capital “A” when the authority is a composite of ourselves, but ourselves without any individual centers. We are in the long run afraid of our own collective emptiness.
The danger of this situation is that it leads sooner or later to painful anxiety and despair, and then futility and blocking off one’s most precious qualities. The person is then psychologically impoverished.
Loneliness
Another reason for feeling lonely is that society emphasizes the importance of being socially accepted. It is how we stave off anxiety, and our chief mark of prestige.
Thus we always have to prove we are a “social success” by being forever sought after and by never being alone. If one is well-liked, that is, socially successful—so the idea goes—one will rarely be alone; not to be liked is to have lost out in the race. In the days of the gyroscope man and earlier, the chief criterion of prestige was financial success: now the belief is that if one is well-liked, financial success and prestige will follow. “Be well-liked,” Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman advises his sons, “and you will never want.”
What if being alone made us lose self-awareness? If people think of being alone for very long, with no people or radio, they fear losing the ability to orient themselves. They wouldn’t know the difference between waking life and sleep, between the subjective self and the objective world around them. And the worst fear is that one becomes psychotic as a result.
Social acceptance, “being liked,” has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay. A person is surrounded with comfortable warmth; he is merged in the group. He is reabsorbed—as though, in the extreme psychoanalytic symbol, he were to go back into the womb. He temporarily loses his loneliness; but it is at the price of giving up his existence as an identity in his own right. And he renouncesthe one thingwhich would get him constructively over the loneliness in the long run, namely the developing of his own inner resources, strength and sense of direction, and using this as a basis for meaningful relations with others.
Anxiety
Those years in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Europe was inundated with anxiety in the form of fears of death, agonies of doubt about the meaning and value of life, superstition and fears of devils and sorcerers, is the nearest period comparable to our own. All one needs to do is read fears of atomic destruction where historians of that twilight of medievalism write “fears of death,” loss of faith and ethical values for “agonies of doubt,” and one has the beginning of a rough description of our times. We too have our superstitions in the form of anxiety about flying saucers and little men from Mars, and our “devils and sorcerers” in the demonic supermen of the Nazi and other totalitarian mythologies.
In each age, it seems, we have our bogeymen and different sources of anxiety. The names may change, but the feeling remains the same. Divorce and suicide rates continue to go up, and so do mental and emotional disturbances. It is without question that we live in the age of anxiety.
We shall live amid upheavals, clashes, wars and rumors of wars for two or three decades to come, and the challenge to the person of “imagination and understanding” is that he face these upheavals openly, and see if, by courage and insight, he can use his anxiety constructively. It is a mistake to believe that the contemporary wars and depressions and political threats are the total cause of our anxiety, for our anxiety also causes these catastrophes.
We are anxious because we are not sure what roles we should pursue or what principles we should believe in.
Shall a man strive competitively to become economically successful and wealthy, as we used to be taught, or a good fellow who is liked by everyone? He cannot be both. Shall he follow the supposed teaching of the society with regard to sex and be monogamous, or should he follow the average of “what’s done” as shown in the Kinsey report?
Anxiety is the feeling of being caught or overwhelmed, it dulls or blurs our senses rather than sharpens them.
It may be a mild tension before meeting some important person; or it may be apprehension before an examination when one’s future is at stake and one is uncertain whether one is prepared to pass the exam. Or it may be the stark terror, when beads of sweat appear on one’s forehead, in waiting to hear whether a loved one is lost in a plane wreck, or whether one’s child is drowned or gets back safely after the storm on the lake. People experience anxiety in all sorts of ways: a “gnawing” within, a constriction of the chest, a general bewilderment; or they may describe it as feeling as though all the world around were dark gray or black, or as though a heavy weight were upon them, or as a feeling like the terror which a small child experiences when he realizes he is lost.
The threat of death is the most common symbol for anxiety, but of us don’t face the threat of death very often. There are other causes.
Tom, the man who will go down in scientific history because he had a hole in his stomach through which the doctors at New York Hospital could observe his psychosomatic reactions in times of anxiety, fear and other stress, gave a beautiful illustration of this. In a period when Tom was anxious about whether he could keep his job at the hospital or would have to go on relief, he exclaimed, “If I could not support my family, I’d as soon jump off the dock.”
Failing at earning a wage threatens one’s sense of self-worth.
Every human being experiences normal anxiety in many different ways as he develops and confronts the various crises of life. The more he is able to face and move through these “normal crises”—the weaning from mother, going off to school, and sooner or later taking responsibility for his own vocation and marriage decisions—the less neurotic anxiety he will develop. Normal anxiety cannot be avoided; it should be frankly admitted to one’s self.
The Roots of Our Malady
The pursuit of competitive enterprise was a magnificent and courageous idea in its heyday. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries considerable changes occurred. In our present day of giant business and monopoly capitalism how many people can become successful as individual competitors? There are very few groups left who, like doctors and psychotherapists and some farmers, still have the luxury of being their own economic bosses—and even they are subject to the rise and fall of prices and the fluctuating market like everyone else. The vast majority of workingmen and capitalists alike, professional people or businessmen, must fit into broad groups such as labor unions or big industries or university systems, or they would not survive economically at all. We have been taught to strive to get ahead of the next man, but actually today one’s success depends much more on how well one learns to work with one’s fellow workers. I have just read that even the individual crook cannot make out very well on his own these days: he has to join a racket!
May describes the new world as interdependent and individualism must now take a different guise than “every man for himself.”
As this hostility has come closer to the surface in recent decades, we have tried to cover it up by various devices—by becoming “joiners” of all sorts of service organizations, from Rotary to Optimist Clubs in the 1920’s and 30’s, by being good fellows, well liked by all, and so on. But the conflicts sooner or later burst forth into the open. This is pictured beautifully and tragically in Willie Loman, the chief character in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Willie had been taught, and in turn taught his sons, that to get ahead of the next fellow and to get rich were the goals, and this required initiative. When the boys steal balls and lumber, Willie, though he pays lip-service to the idea that he should rebuke them, is pleased that they are “fearless characters” and remarks that the “coach will probably congratulate them on their initiative.” His friend reminds him that the jails are full of “fearless characters,” but Willie rejoins, “the stock exchange is too.”
Willie tries to cover up his competitiveness, like most men of two or three decades ago, by being “well liked.” When as an old man he is “cast into the ash can” by virtue of the changing policies of his company, Willie is caught in great bewilderment, and keeps repeating to himself, “But I was the best-liked.” His confusion in this conflict of values—why does what he was taught not work?—mounts up until it culminates in his suicide. At the grave one son continues to insist, “He had a good dream, to come out number one.” But the other son accurately sees the contradiction which such an upheaval of values leads to, “He never knew who he was.”
The second central belief in our modern age (other than individual success) has been the faith in individual reason.
This belief, ushered in at the Renaissance like the belief in the value of individual competitiveness which we have just been discussing, was magnificently fruitful for the philosophical quests of the enlightenment in the seventeenth century, and served as a noble charter for the advances in science and for movements toward universal education. In these first centuries of our period, individual reason also meant “universal reason”; it was a challenge to each intelligent person to discover the universal principles by which all men might live happily. But again a change became apparent in the nineteenth century. Psychologically, reason became separated from “emotion” and “will.” The splitting up of the personality was prepared by Descartes in his famous dichotomy between body and mind—which will dog our tracks throughout this book—but the full consequences of this dichotomy did not emerge till last century.
For the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century man, reason was supposed to give the answer to any problem, will power was supposed to put it into effect, and emotions—well, they generally got in the way, and could best be repressed. Lo and behold, we then find reason (n