Nobody called, nobody wanted me

I forgot to turn on my cell phone yesterday.
Then, when I remembered
I had forgotten to turn it on,
I still didn’t turn it on
Until this evening.
But, nobody had called for me
Anyway.

No voicemails, no text messages.
Not even a list of missed calls.

I guess I’ll survive.

Do I have a choice?
Well, it seems pretty stupid otherwise.

I never thought I would appreciate
The wireless link to the outside world.

But, sometimes it relieves a bit of loneliness;
Is there anything so bad about that?
After all, farmers a century ago led our nation in suicides
Before the wireless waves of radio
Relieved the mind-numbing, stupefying tedium
Of life after dark
In the not-so-idyllic rural heartland.

So, before we overl8y bemoan
The electricity-gobbling technology of modern life,
Let us remember that many would-be Luddites
Actually do not want to make too far a trip
Back into the oh-so-idyllicized past.

Talk of carbon taxes, or traded caps,
Can be a time for reflection
At just what price we paid for our modern era,
And just what we have been paying to escape.

(It still would be nice, though,
To escape the sense, the expectation,
Of on-demand availability
Others may have of us now.
Or that we have of ourselves.)

-- Dec. 31, 2008

Are you looonely tonight?

It may not just be a song, it may be you. Twin research on 8,000 pairs of identical and fraternal twins indicates a moderate- to fair-sized correlation for a hereditary tendency toward loneliness. As I’ve noted in posts and responses to commenters here, I do believe there is a valid discipline of evolutionary psychology, while I am at the same time far and away from believing every claim of its biggest boosters and their just-so stories.

So what’s the evolutionary advantage of loneliness, if this isn’t just a spandrel from genes coding for a tendency to something else?

The researchers suggest that loneliness may stem from prehistoric times, where hunter-gatherers may have deliberately shut themselves away from others so they did not have to share food.

That would have meant they were better nourished and therefore better able to survive and have children.

But loneliness would already then, and certainly today, does have its downside, the researchers caution. Then:

But they added that the strategy had a downside, in that it also developed dispositions towards anxiety, hostility, negativity and social avoidance.

And now:

Loneliness has been linked to heart disease as well as emotional problems, such as anxiety, self-esteem problems and sociability.

One naysayer psychologist offers a caution:

Dr Arthur Cassidy, a psychologist at the Belfast Institute, said people could learn behaviours from their families.

“They may have a very pessimistic outlook and interpret things in a very negative way, so people can learn to become pessimistic and therefore to become lonely.”

Actually, all Dr. Cassidy does it to show that he apparently doesn’t recognize how twin studies are controlled, through studies of adopted twins, etc., to control for environmental influences such as that as much as possible. Besides, it is likely that as much of a sociological influence toward loneliness would come from outside the family structure as from within.