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    loneliness

    Solitude by Giorgio de Chirico

    Capitalism And The Lexicon Of Loneliness: Your Wounds Demand You Speak Your Truth

    Do not pretend to be anything other than yourself attempting to gain the approval of heartless authority and petty tyrants of the everyday kind.

    Phil Rockstroh
    Mar 09, 2025

    "I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company."—Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

    Deep down, we struggle to come upon accurate words to describe the terrible beauty of our aloneness. In this plight, we are together. In this musing, I, listening to the music of my heart, will attempt to hobble through and send back dispatches conveying a lexicon of aloneness.

    A lesson I hope to learn by scribing a travelog of the dark: I've noticed, people who have survived the howling abyss of abandonment, and have been freed from its grip of grief, have been transfigured by the ordeal. Rarely, as a consequence, do such individuals act as errand boys, muscle, or apologists of oppressors.

    They have snatched this from the mouth of despair, it would be tragic to be false to the forces that formed them. Thus make a vow to self: Do not pretend to be anything other than yourself attempting to gain the approval of heartless authority and petty tyrants of the everyday kind. Your wounds demand you speak your truth.

    Leonardo Da Vinci, "Saint Jerome in the Wilderness" (1480, unfinished)

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    Opinion
    capitalism
    Trump rally

    Trump Gives Isolated Americans the Chance to Hate Alone Together

    What Donald Trump and other MAGA leaders have done is take emotions like loneliness and channel them into a social movement.

    Andrea Mazzarino
    May 18, 2024

    An acquaintance who hails from the same New Jersey town as I do spends his free weekends crawling through the woods on his stomach as part of a firearms training course, green camouflage paint on his face and a revolver in his hand. He considers this both a way to have fun in his free time and to prepare for the supposed threat from immigrants everywhere. (“You never know when something could happen,” he tells me.) He’s never gun-less. He brings his weapon to diners and dinners, to work meetings, and always on walks in his quiet neighborhood, where he grumbles, “This is America!” whenever he hears Spanish spoken by neighbors or passersby. The implication, of course, is that the United States has become both less American and, to him, by definition, less safe in these years.

    He spends his other weekends right-swiping on dating apps to try to find a new partner (he’s being divorced) and watching—yep, you guessed it!—Fox News. He can be counted among a growing population of white, rural Americans who are lonely, lack people to count on as confidants, and feel poorly understood, not to say excluded from this country (at least as they imagine it).

    Keep ReadingShow Less
    Opinion
    donald trump
    Yard signs including one depicting the QANON conspiracy theory and the other denying Trump's election loss in 2020.

    An Epidemic of Loneliness and the Dark World of Far-Right Conspiracy Theorists

    What I found in the deepest reaches of the Internet and the lost art—and political potency—of true human connection.

    Andy Kroll
    Dec 23, 2022

    We all do it. Make little snap judgments about everyday strangers as we go about our lives. Without giving it a second’s thought, we sketch minibiographies of the people we pass on the sidewalk, the guy seated across from us on the train, or the woman in line in front of us at the grocery store. We wonder: Who are they? Where are they from? How do they make a living? Lately, though, such passing encounters tend to leave me with a sense of suspicion, a wariness tinged with grim curiosity. I think to myself: Is he or she one of them?

    By them, I mean one of the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of “people” I encountered during my many forays into the darkest recesses of the Internet. Despite the staggering amount of time many of us spend online — more than six-and-a-half hours a day, according to recent research — we tend to haunt the same websites and social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, CNN, Reddit, Google) again and again. Not me, though. Over the past five years, I’ve spent more hours than I wish to count exploring the subterranean hideaways and uncensored gathering spaces for some of the most unhinged communities on the Internet.

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    Opinion
    conspiracy theory

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