52: a guide to loneliness
by Isaac Javier
For over decades now, scientists have been looking for the whale who sings at a sonic frequency of 52 hertz, just above the lowest note on a tuba and higher than any other whale of its kind. Spending the rest of its life roaming the oceans in search of a mate, calling out but never getting an answer. It’s an animal that resonates with countless millennials, transposing their own melancholy on to it, insisting they understand it. Alone in their bedrooms, scrolling through Tumblr, believing they understand the creature to be lonely like them. To many lonely people, they see “52” as their totem. They identify with this whale, who doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, can’t make friends, alone, and different from everybody.
In 2016, I tried counselling for the first time as an attempt to formulate answers to why I feel the way I did. Months before, I’ve just finished sixth form and set to start university in a few months. And much unlike my peers, social anxiety and the prospect of such drastic change made me inexplicably miserable. Along with broken, or rather non-existent, relationships at home already a baggage I carry in the back of my mind, I felt like I was losing “it” – whatever kept me sane and non-melancholic. In the short amount of time that was that summer, I grew out of relationships, cut people off, stopped writing, and put myself in a prolonged state of deep uncertainty. It felt like the things that have always kept me tied down to my youth, innocence, and stableness – friends, sobriety, my teenage years - were disconnecting their carabiners and pushing me outwards into space.
An important realisation I made during all this is that once you start losing a few things it gets easier to lose the rest and have some time alone to think. I left my chaotic home in Leeds and shared a student flat with four girls - and their pre’s and whatever basically makes female freshers female freshers – trying my best to see this as a change of scenery that I might like. A few months in and with the adrenaline of false positivity finally wearing out, I found myself regularly sleeping at 5am, waking up in the afternoon and missing most of my lectures, having cigarettes for breakfast, ready-salted Lidl crisps for dinner, and living out of my luggage in a permanent state of transience. I got too tired to try and make friends with a social battery lasting approximately 2 minutes. I reduced my daily human interaction, little by little to the point of virtual non-existence.
I followed no schedule. How I managed to make it to my second year is beyond me. I used to always go to the cinema during peculiar times of the day when there’s no one except occasionally some old man. I usually go high, and I watch the credits until it finishes because there’s no one putting their jackets on to suggest I should go (like me, the old man has nowhere to be). When I leave, it’s brisk and the streets are empty. At nights, wherever they are, I know my friends are living the supposed best three years of their lives like they should – partying, clubbing, trying to get laid, whilst yours truly is part of the population of people who have jetlagged themselves over one’s own thoughts and are adrift from their own time zone and friends. We send each other snapchats of the joints I’m smoking or things I find funny in my daily ventures from the smoking area back to my room –flares into the sky. I’ve managed to engineer a life in which I exist in a rare Cardiff with no one in it except the problematic, the drunk and high, and the lonely.
It requires a unique type of mental strength to be alone even if that’s what you wish, a belief that you’re not going to vanish or that people would notice if you ever did. It takes physical strength to not text the girl you’ve slept with once to ask her to come over, the one who says when she arrives at 1am: “Which one are you again? Are you the one who does journalism?” and you say yes, you were that one, would you like a drink.
In a 2014 research by the Office of National Statistics, Britain was voted as the loneliness capital of Europe. And now we’re just a lonely island filled with lonely people getting lonelier, or so 48% of us think. Only 11% of lonely people make an effort to remedy their loneliness, whether it’s in the form of finding God, laughter yoga, scouring the internet for cures and cat memes.
The term “loneliness epidemic” is always commonly coined when describing these statistics. Much alike any other epidemic, this one comes with the search for a cure, but loneliness is so much bigger than a simple cure. You can feel lonely in a crowd, a bed can feel the emptiest with the wrong person in it, and going on a bender will definitely not fix you. Loneliness can be both internal and fundamentally external. In The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker, he wrote that the one thing keeping us humans functioning on a daily basis is our fear of death, that if we were to confront our own oblivion we would be frozen on the spot. I think this is why loneliness is much darker than just being alone. It’s an eerie stillness that gives you a preview of death – seeing the world carry on just fine without you in it.
You can express yourself for countless hours in counselling about your fear of death, your loneliness, and still get nowhere. Counselling is usually reflecting inwards where all there is is yourself, and when you’ve already got endless amounts of reserved hours to search your soul, it can feel pointless inviting someone to talk about it with. That’s why I never came back. Some of the deepest conversations I’ve had were with random people I paired with on Omegle chat rooms, the one’s I know that I’ll never see in person. The element of essential anonymity makes it natural to not have the walls I’ve built around me and say anything off my chest. It’s like having a drink at an airport bar with strangers you’ll never see again.
Scientists think that the lonely whale is a blue whale, one of the strongest animals in the world due to the amount of energy and muscle it needs to carry on moving and living. There would always be this one person on one of these chat rooms for unhealthy amounts of hours a day. As each person he meets, he hopes it’s a good enough soul to tell all to. You can tell how long he or she has been looking at his laptop with his posture and distance from the screen. He spends those hours, locked in, hoping for just one. Sometimes we talk, but it doesn’t make a difference. Loneliness is all in your head, but muscle keeps you moving.