Seek You

“I want us to use loneliness—yours, and mine—to find our way back to each other. I want us to play songs for each other on the radio. And when we call out across an airwave or telephone or a chat room or an app or a city street or an open field or our bedroom, I want us each to hear , miraculously, a voice calling back.”

Overall, this book contained a lot of insights about the biological and evolutionary reasons behind human psychology. There's one section, about the US gun problem, which seemed a bit off-topic to me, because it doesn't relate to the main theme of loneliness. It's kind of sad, that the gun issue is so ingrained in American culture that it just has to be commented on.

“Loneliness is one of the most universal things a person can feel” It's become all the more clear as this graphic novel drops in the midst of a pandemic that has seen folks physically isolated from one another. But Radtke argues that loneliness isn't just “tied to having a partner or best friend - it is the gap between the relationships you have and the relationships you want.”

And the stakes are incredibly high. Across 70 studies examining over 3 million subjects, what becomes clear is that isolation kills. Those experiencing feelings of loneliness were more likely to be dead by the time the studies were over. Radtke also cites political philosopher Hannah Arendt who notes that loneliness is the common ground for terror. When we lose contact with one another, so too do we begin to perforate ourselves from reality. The feelings of being alone can morph into the more antagonistic “everyone is against me”. This can lead to defensiveness and an inability to try and connect meaningfully with others, evolving into extremism, partisan rhetoric and even violence.

Radtke is happy to explore this idea of loneliness into whatever nooks and crannies her research takes her. From the advent of the laugh track and it's triggering of the premotor cortex releasing endorphins and maybe unconsciously “coaxing a solitary viewer into a sense that she isn't, in fact, alone.” To our culture's fixation on bootstrap ideologies and the stoic loner staring off into the middle distance, the gritty cowboy riding into town alone. And the pioneering, and massively problematic not to mention wildly unethical studies of Harry Harlow who nonetheless changed our understanding of affection and “quite literally proclaimed the power of love.”

It's an intimate journey, beautifully rendered.