Loneliness tends to be classified as something that an individual faces that people find to be a problem in someone's life. As someone who has been alone for quite awhile (more than 5 years), and has become increasingly isolated from the world intentionally, I have to say the exact opposite. Loneliness is an artificial problem that is imposed on single people through societal beliefs. What I mean by this is that loneliness is never an issue until someone else points it out. I live perfectly fine and healthy on my own yet I never feel "lonely" until someone says that I am.

Studies have shown that in modern society if you are alone, you are statistically more likely to be sick or have medical issues. I can attest that if you are obsessed with the idea or are constantly reminded about the idea, this is definitely true. I used to be sick all of the time when I was completely surrounded by people who treated me as an invalid due to my aloneness, and it became a chronic loneliness. After isolating myself from those individuals in my life, my immune system was significantly bolstered, my health improved, and everything in my life became better.

Yet Facebook has turned us into this society that if you aren't with someone, you must be deficient. The entire point of the site initially was for college students to be able to figure out without much effort which of their friends were single or not. Many people can excuse their Facebook usage as a way to share photos with friends or a way to keep up with people's lives they would have never kept up with before. Yet that is a huge problem as well.

Studies have shown recently that the more you use Facebook, the more you are likely to be depressed about your own life regardless of your marital status or success in life. The current theory behind it is that if you are using Facebook, you are only seeing the best moments in someone's life and not their issues in their life, and you become depressed about that particular deficiency in your own. You aren't likely to post a picture to Facebook when you have a bad hair day or when you are treating a wart on your foot, so when you are using Facebook to keep up with more and more people, the more and more you see all of your friends succeeding in ways that you are failing.

I propose an additional theory to this, another reason why Facebook can be a bad influence on your life is a concept of depression called "rumination". You've probably heard of it before but in case you haven't the basic idea is that if you are focused too much on the past you can't move forward and creatively come up with ideas to solve your current problems. Facebook can lead to exactly this, through focusing on the fact that you are single, you are poor, you are constantly making mistakes, or you are obese, you can't find a way to get past those issues and move on with your life. The thought process can go, "If I've been overweight all of my life, how can I possibly expect the future to involve a version of myself that is at a healthier weight?"

The real thing is, you can solve your current problems. Also, if you don't solve your current problems, you can't move forward to solve the problems that will face you later. This has led to so many people I know who eventually plateau in their careers rather than continue to move forward, continue to learn new things, and just essentially give up and stick to what they know and complain about the rest of the world's issues. This is what leads to the current issues on the internet, for instance. People go around insulting each other simply because they have plateaued in their own life in some way, and want to point out other people's issues rather than deal with their own which they have given up on. Even the best people you can witness this as they coast to retirement, yet retirement isn't about stopping learning, stopping fixing your current problems, etc. It always an adjustment of what your problems are.

Every single person will always have problems in this world. The sign of a true successful person is one who can solve their current problems and move on to the next ones, and continuously do this. Personally I am so focused on the future that I don't even keep track of the photos I take. If you are a photographer (professional or amateur), then great that's a part of your hobby or career. Culturally, though, it's become this point of contention. It's so easy to keep track of all of your photos in the cloud or otherwise that people find it a sign of weakness if you don't, yet I personally find it a sign of weakness that you rely on memories in the past and not on building new quality memories in the future. I have no idea anymore how many times I've been asked if I still had a picture or text message that they remember me taking or sending from six months ago, and my answer is always "No". I always get insulted after I say this, people saying how irresponsible I am for not keeping track of those things.

So how does all of this tie back to loneliness or aloneness? Well, my point is that for me, and for others, being alone isn't the current issue people are facing. Increasingly people are working on their careers before figuring out who they want to be with in life. We are no longer in a society where who you date in high school is who you are going to be with for the rest of your life. We also are no longer in a society where who you date in college is who you are going to be with for the rest of your life. Yet more and more, we are pointing out people's aloneness as an issue that needs to be solved immediately.

A long time ago our civilization had to find ways to deal with many physical differences in human biology adapting to our current culture. For instance, the fight or flight response deals with if a tiger were to sneak up on you and try to eat your throat. Your body physically gears up for combat or running, depending on your snap decision on which it is. Your blood actually starts to clump and clot to deal with the expected outcome. Today, we aren't dealing with tiger, we are dealing with stress. So it's not really an acceptable answer to bolt out of your workplace or to beat up your coworkers. The solution is exercise in conjunction with other stress relief activities, and that is why exercise is so important for you.

But now we need to start thinking of aloneness as the same type of civilizational issue. We need to accept that people aren't going to immediately need to figure out the issue of who or even if they are going to have a mate. That's a problem for a later date in some people's lives, and people need to start accepting that.

What it feels like to be a single person in this culture right now is analagous to having a goal to build a garage, and have your neighbor walk over to your yard and constantly laugh at you while you are paving the foundation for it. "OH MY GOD YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE THE GARAGE DONE YET, HAHAHAHAHAH, I HAVE HAD A GARAGE FOR TEN YEARS!", and then have him never leave. He's just sitting there laughing at you all day while you work on it. Well, now you have an additional problem, you can't pave that foundation with a jackass bothering you all day. So now I have to kick you in the nuts, and deal with police reports for your tresspassing and my physical transgression against you. Now we are fighting legal battles in court, and guess what? I still haven't paved the foundation, and the garage has been delayed considerably.

How does pointing it out to me delay my singleness? Well for one it significantly distracts me from the task at hand with my life at the moment, and adds this extra need to find a way to isolate myself from the rest of you. The more I go out, the more people point it out it seems, and the further it requires more isolation to get the current life tasks that I am trying to accomplish done. It also means that the more isolated I am by the time I get to wanting a mate, the bigger the problem will be with temporary reintegration for mate discovery, which is on my current plan. But the more I hear things like "I want grandchildren", or "everyone else is married in this family!", or even just friends not understanding why anyone would actively not want a Facebook account, the more I realize that I have to further isolate myself just to have time to fix the things in my life that need fixing first.

Also, the more this happens, the less I give a shit about the rest of the human race and the less I feel I will ever have the likelihood of finding someone in the future.

So back to my original point. My aloneness is not an issue with me, it is an issue with everyone else. Most people have plans for their lives, and people see single people as having no plan. Finding someone is just step 10 in my current plan, and not an earlier step in a previous plan like it was for you. So leave me to my plan, rather than assuming I'm some sort of invalid for being single. I'm not focused on that at the moment, it's as simple as that.

So my point is this. As technology and society progresses to this point of forever remembering our own live's pasts and being constantly reminded of it, we are going to increasingly see more and more depression, more conflict, more hatred, and more anger. The more you hold onto the past, the more likely you are to stop progressing in life and hate where you landed, which leads you to have a victim mentality that life treated you unfairly, yet you are the one that got stuck in that rut and won't move on. So leave me alone about my problems, which I am addressing with a sequence of plans, not an urgent sense of need.