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 renounces the one thing which 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.