I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach. - Mary Roach (American author)
Isolation is painful. More painful than most people imagine. You can choose between the pain of isolation or the pain of opening up. The difference is once you face the inner pain, it’ll end eventually. Isolation doesn’t.
Isolation messes with your mind, and it has various other damages that amplify with time.
1) No Social Skills
If you don’t talk to people, you won’t have any social skills. Any social skills will fade with time. If we have been away from the community for a long time, we’ll find ourselves less and less in sync with our community. While we have been away from the community, it changed while we stayed the same.
Also, a huge part of social skills is based on emotional maturity. If we are not comfortable feeling through our emotions, we naturally can’t express ourselves fluently. Emotional control is the foundation for self-expression.
Without social skills, even if we knew the same language, it’s easy for us to be ousted, because our unintentional lack of mannerism. Social skills are only picked up within the individual communities.
2) Not Emotionally Matured
When we are away from people, we lose in touch with our ability to manage emotions. We actually learn a good portion of our emotional intelligence based on how other people respond to our emotions. We need to see examples. We need to see how other people express emotions and how the community responds to it.
If we don’t have a chance to practice emotions, we lose that ability.
Emotions are part of your body language. When we want to be fluent in body language and emotional maturity, we have to have at least a partner. We can’t have a conversation by ourselves. Even just being around people and not talking to them helps us regress from being isolated completely.
Losing that emotional mature might look like not having control of our emotions.
If we’re angry, we blow up.
If we’re scared, we withdraw.
Our emotions have more control over us than we have over it.
It’s trainable. Just much harder in isolation.
3) Pain of Regret
Without a doubt, one of the top reasons for isolation is regret. We are the only ones standing still while other people are getting job promotions, getting married, having a family, taking trips, and etc.
We regret why we weren’t more courageous. We blame our personality. We criticize our background. We want what others have so badly and now we have lost time and there is this huge gap between us and others.
When we try to go back into the community, we have no shared experiences to talk about.
“What have you been up to these 20 years?”
Nothing.
4) The Pain of Being Left Behind
Now this leads to the pain of not being able to catch up. When other people are sharing about the stories and experiences that they have, but we have nothing share.
We feel awkward, excluded, and out of place, because for a portion of our lives was just blank, and we have done nothing. No progression. No accomplishments. Just struggling to hold onto to what we already have. Sometimes, we feel guilty or ashamed for not having the same experiences, so we just avoid those social settings altogether.
5) Develop A Habit of Dreaming Life Instead of Living Life
Isolation makes us passive. We lose our ability to reach or strive for something. We sit, receive and let the world happen to us instead of we going to it.
We start to take less and less action and try to imagine what the experiences would be like through people’s facebook posts or instagram feed while in real life, nothing has changed for us.
Passivity and dreaming become a lifestyle.
6) Wasted Life/Time
This one speaks for itself. Time never turns back for anyone and to waste your time is always painful. We’ll always be able to look back and wonder blame ourselves for the things we didn’t do. Then on top of that, social media makes everything worse by making it so easy to compare ourselves with our peers.
“I should have done more.”
“I should have said something.”
“Why didn’t I try harder?!”
In return, this just gives us more reason to criticize ourselves. We hide from people even more, making it a vicious loop.
7) Unable to Adapt
When we are isolated for a long time, we are used to our environment. We feel very comfortable in our own bubble and place, so it might feel incredibly exhausting and out of place to have any kind of routine change.
When we have gone solo for so long, a place with a lot of people might be overwhelming. Places with too much attention might make us feel uncomfortable. We will want to withdraw back to what we were used to.
Why? because it’s comfortable.
No social pressure.
No people to deal with.
We’re not forced to talk or be put into awkward situations.
But is that really what you want?
8) Your Past Becomes Your Present And Future
Isolation locks us in our past time.
This is the same with emotional walls. The time never stops, but OUR time stops. Everything we do is the same. All our thoughts, memories, routine are all the same. Nothing changes. It’s as consistent as our annual taxes.
Our past in this sense becomes our present and our future. If we do the same things over and over, we can expect the same things. If we were dissatisfied before, we will be now and in the future too.
Take Action
I might sound like a drill sergeant right now, but this is important!
No one is coming to save you.
Not trying to be harsh.
The feeling of loneliness is an inside job.
No one can do it for you.
It’s not like we haven’t tried to surround ourselves with friends only to push them away. The feeling of loneliness stems from our first rejection of ourselves as a person. If we hate ourselves deep within, we are already pushing away the first person that is willing to be friends with us - Ourselves.
Take action and not let time waste away. We can get work done with a therapist, books, coaches, etc. There are all different ways for you to break out of isolation. If you want, you can also join me too.
- Augustus
Losing Interests, Losing Relationships [Free PDF]
- Understanding the 5 CAUSES for an emotional wall between you and everyone else.