Unrelatability
Can one be truly independent, staying in isolation, and not requiring the company of any fellow human, a la Walden? There is a bunch of ideas that go around people being ultra-independent and failing at it. We’re all social animals, apparently, and as a certain John Donne says, no man is an island.
So it seems that the broad public consensus (or at least what seems so) is on the idea that we all need company, whether professional, social, or intimate - and most societies are modelled on those lines (whether by accident or as a result of evolution). At some point a few years ago, I came across this interesting concept of Dunbar’s number, which is essentially a theoretical limit on the number of significant social relationships one could have - and most societies in history seem to have followed a pattern conforming to this idea. Fascinating.
But at the same time, it is extremely difficult to really, really, find relatability in company - by relatability, I mean a sense of understanding from an external entity to an extent that one really feels like they’ve been read thoroughly and can be really open about what’s on their mind. We’d like to think of ourselves as belonging to the tribe that defines us, whether through lifestyle, profession, politics, or whatever, but we never truly are part of it. The collective sum of all experiences we’ve ever had defines us so specifically that no matter how close we feel to people we’ll never feel fully relatable. What influences us, what keeps us ticking, what thoughts slither in our minds - they’re all us. National borders, intellectual boundaries, professional categories - they’re all approximations.
What we have going in our minds will never be fully expressed. But perhaps that’s all right.
