This person is delighted to encounter each part of you and is thrilled that you, individually, have entered the room. For this one moment, you are experiencing a touch of “narcissism.” This is not such a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with wishing, for an instant, that we somehow stand out from the crowd – that someone thinks we are special. We can always melt back into the group and assume our appropriate role as just one member of the group that has been greeted at the door. Yet, just for a moment, we are unique and noteworthy. We have been appreciated.
This final word is critical. With appreciation comes our ability to find and savor our personal identity. It is also with appreciation for its efforts that a group of which we are a member will feel like home and a setting in which we choose to spend time and talent. We are less likely to feel uncomfortably alone when our work individually and collectively is being acknowledged and honored by other people. It is when our life and work is filled with meaning (as acknowledged by our organization or community) that we are most likely to feel comfortable within our own skin and in a crowd.
With all of this opportunity for choice, we must always keep in mind that we, as human beings, are wired to be with other people. As “social animals” it is certainly easy for each of us to slide into a feeling of loneliness when we are alone—especially if this state of being alone is not something we have chosen for ourselves. We are inclined to feel profoundly alone and alienated when we are being excluded, isolated or left powerless. Anomie is a state that is rarely of our own chosen and is rarely something we savor. This may mean that choices regarding the feeling of loneliness are reserved for those of us who are fortunate to be living with some socio-economic privilege. The state of loneliness is likely to attend a dominant feeling of powerlessness and the grim reality of hopelessness.
At the very least, we know that the state of loneliness is produced at several different levels and is best addressed through multiple initiatives taken at the personal, organizational, community, national and even global level. As we are about to see in our next essay on interpersonal relationships, the matter of loneliness and, more broadly, interpersonal relationships are understood and confronted in large part through our construction of the social reality in which we live and work.
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