Good evening, New York City

Feeling Only in The City (All Lonely Humans)
Originally uploaded by lorenzodom.

Feeling Only in The City (All Lonely Humans)
Feeling Only in The City

when you're lonely in the city, you think you're the only one in the city that feels lonely, when in fact feeling lonely is such a universal feeling.

why do we get lonely? even when we are surrounded by family and friends that love us, why do we still feel this sense of emptiness and being at a loss for place, as if we don't belong where we are, as if we need something else, something different to attach to, to make life more meaningful and seemingly less lonely?

albeit, feeling lonely is certainly universal, being lonely in the city might actually feel lonelier, if only because the lonely in the city cannot get attached to anyone or anything as easily as those outside the city because everything and everyone in the city is moving so fast.

friends dart in and out of our lives so fast that sometimes an occasional sunday brunch or drink after work just doesn't cut it - there's no consistency, no reliability, not enough attention given to one another to feel loved, to feed the ego which constantly must be fed because it is so infantile.

is maturity therefore the ability to fare well and well enough on our own? when we have grown enough on our own does that mean we can be alone without being lonely? or are we all simply fated to always want contact and meaningful interaction with others simply because we are only all lonely humans?

*

at the same time, we city folk bring it all upon ourselves in the city. for we are notoriously wary of strangers—on our journeys to and fro as we go we keep our heads down and buried in our books, in our papers, in our journals and in our headphones; so alone we are interred so deeply that we are unaware, so that no one knows we exist; we resist contact with others, with the unknown, even if each traversal across the city is another opportunity to make life much more intriguing, if only by being curious, by striking up conversations with interesting-arresting strangers, by overlooking the unforeseeable, the dangers, so that another heretofore foe might become a friend.

nonetheless and allthemore, we resist such intimate temptation, feeding our vexations, insisting that we keep quiet and to ourselves. and so we are lonely, and so we bring it upon ourselves.

*

this foto and musing are featured as today's daily chronicle at the lost man chronicles,
http://www.thelostman.com/
Tuesday, December 6, 2005.

- Flickr friend lorenzdom