Loneliness, Yoga and Isolation

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

Kurt Vonnegut said this in 1982, decades before humanity would become steeped in a world of social media, cellphones, pandemics and artificial intelligence. I think he would be horrified at just how un-lonely the world was in the early 80s compared to today. I’ve read more and more headlines about today’s loneliness epidemic, and have observed firsthand the decline of clubs, sports leagues, religion and spontaneous gatherings, along with the rise of privacy fences, ear buds and cellphones, all of which are built to quash potential conversations. My daughter, while attending orientation at the University of Louisville eight years ago, lamented the fact that in an earlier era when students waited for the festivities to begin, they would have struck up conversations rather than leaning on the comfort of scrolling through their phones.

By contrast, I can still remember the first person I spoke to at my graduate school orientation in 1992. Today, that conversation would likely never occur.

But hell, when it comes to disengaging, I’m exhibit A, or at least B or C. After being a late holdout on the purchase of a flip-phone, and eventually a smartphone, I’ve become adept at passing time via a screen versus speaking with a fellow human being, and after years of heavy involvement at my synagogue and other volunteer activities, I’ve pulled away. And, for the moment, this disengagement feels…good. Comfortable. Cocoon-like. But as Roger Waters concluded in Pink Floyd’s magnum opus The Wall, isolation decays the mind. It places us too much inside our own heads and our own echo chambers, and the inevitable result is loneliness and perhaps even a descension into fear and paranoia.

All of this brought to mind something I read in Benjamin Lorr’s book about groceries that I blogged about a few months ago. In it, he references a previous book of investigative journalism that he authored called Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga.

Lorr writes about his immersion into the world of yoga, where people “would enter a studio and bend for eight hours a day, busy doctors, lawyers, bankers who would sneak off to fit in an hour and a half on their lunch break. In yoga it was self-betterment, self-improvement, or becoming a stronger, more radiant version of yourself.  And in it, I found a whole community based on this ethos: people reveling in the very real ways they had transformed from couch potatoes and addicts, remarking after every class about just how much more capable they felt now. But wat was the end? What did you do once you became a better version of yourself? Where did all this self-improvement lead? The answer was always back to more yoga. Never volunteer at a clinic or a food kitchen, never for a studio owner to open more classes to the poor or injured. Never to take our radiant yoga bodies and put them to use in the service for others. And so those lawyers or doctors would go on to use that extra energy to bend for longer house, and when they had a vacation they went off in search of themselves, spiraling deeper and deeper into the practice, becoming ever more capable humans, who could push their bodies into ever more drastic positions.”

It’s similar to the philosopher who devotes a life to the study of ethics while never lifting a finger to help another person, or the theologian who reads the scripture in one hand and turns away the beggar in the other.

And how lovely it is to judge others and think, “Well, that’s not me.” But most of us practice our version of self-immersion, perhaps in worlds other than yoga. For me, it’s writing and composing, record-shopping, listening to music, watching baseball, organizing photos, etc.

And when was the last time I volunteered? It’s been a year, a full five months past the deadline I’d set for myself to get started again.

Time to make a change, I know. Studies show time after time that one of the best ways to cure loneliness is to volunteer to help others, to engage with our fellow human beings. So why are we working so hard as a society to do anything but?

Life's Meaning and Selfish Pursuits

Speaking with my mother on the phone a few weeks ago, she lamented the aches and pains that she and her older friends have been experiencing lately, concluding that today’s elderly are dealing with issues that their parents never encountered because they’re “living too darn long.” While my mother is certainly still active and enjoying various activities, she feels like she’s no longer living a “purpose-driven life,” borrowing a phrase from Rick Warren’s best-selling book. Aside from doing some tutoring and volunteering at a hospital, she doesn’t feel like she’s truly contributing to society or the greater good.

I don’t know that one has to actively contribute to society to live a meaningful life, but I’ve been ruminating about this ever since our conversation. I too am wrestling with what a meaningful existence entails. Back in 2017, I wrote a few blogs that tackled this subject, and I seemed more assured of the answer than ever before. I wrote:

Learn. Explore. Volunteer. Start a hobby. Help others. Learn an instrument. Love, and experience joy with the ones you love. Learn a craft. Grow something. Learn a language. Have fun with friends. And perhaps most importantly, enjoy the little miracles around you every day. 

But for me, 2022 has been a year of saying “no” to things. I resigned from my two biggest volunteering activities: picking up food for a local food pantry and serving on my synagogue’s board. At the end of the summer I am leaving one of my bands, and I’ve also given up baseball this year, having watched not one game this season in person or on TV, an act of defiance which provoked the following response from an old friend of mine: “Oh shit, this is getting real.” It is kind of! I’m used to watching over a hundred games a year. This year I’ve probably freed up somewhere around 300 hours to pursue other things.

But what things, exactly? As a friend of mine once said of retirement: you can’t just retire from something, you have to retire to something. And if 2022 is the year for me to say no to some things, I’m also going to have to say yes to other things. 

So far, it’s a little unresolved, and I echo my mother’s thoughts that perhaps I’m not living a purpose-driven life. But the thing is, I’m happy to have walked away from a few of my volunteer activities. It was time. I’m at peace with leaving one of my bands. It was time. I don’t miss baseball in the least, something I couldn’t fathom saying a few years ago. But what will I walk towards?

I have friends whose purpose in life seems to be to enjoy life itself. Is that enough? It’s a self-centered pursuit for sure, but damn, they seem pretty happy, and after spending years and years doing what I thought I should do, I’m kind of enjoying just doing what I want to. I’m recording a new album that few people will ever hear. I’m playing in a few bands. I’m reading books more proactively. I’m tackling home maintenance projects. I’m reaching out to friends and family, attending concerts, enjoying food and taking walks with my wife and dog.

Is that enough? It isn’t noble. It’s perhaps not the life I can sustain for long before I tell myself to get back in the game and – as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. described in his novel Dead-Eye Dick – stop living life as epilogue and get back to adding to one’s story. It’s tricky. My mom probably feels like her life is epilogue – that her life story is over now. I’m 29 years younger than my mom, and in some ways I’m living a life that’s “short on story and overburdened with epilogue.” But I’m enjoying it except for the part of me that feels guilty for enjoying it! 

For now, I’m going to try to give myself permission to pat myself on my back for twenty years of parenting and volunteering and say it’s okay to have a reprieve. To reset. To just breathe for a while and let my whims take me where they may. Eventually I’ll find something to say yes to, that excites me.

This meaning of life stuff is tricky, whether you’re 83 or 54. It really never gets any easier.

How Good Do We Have to Be?

Several years ago a friend of mine said to me: “I don’t believe in heaven, but if there is one, I think I’m going.”  I loved how self-assured he was despite his obvious flaws, and wish I could go through life with as much confidence, not because I’m worried about an after-life, but because I want to believe that I’m doing “enough” for my fellow man (and environment) while still being able to enjoy my indulgences. 

For me, I’m constantly wrestling with the question: how good do I have to be?  I don’t mean “how good” of the self-help variety, a la Stuart Smalley’s daily affirmations on SNL as depicted by Al Franken.   I really mean, “Okay, so how good do I have to be so that I can spend time doing things I really want to do, and do them with a clear conscience?”  If this question seems rather seedy, I’ll conceded that point, but ask that you hear me out (and bear with me as I lean on religious teachings).

The very fact that I’m asking this question probably deflates some of the good I do.  In Judaism, there are eight levels of charitable giving according to Maimonides, and the worst is giving grudgingly.  So now, on the days when I dread going to a nearby homeless shelter because I’d rather stay at home and watch football, not only do I walk away feeling like I haven’t done enough, I feel like what I’ve done isn’t even worthy.  Say it with me: oy!

Monetarily, Judaism offers straightforward guidelines, as there’s both a minimum (10 percent of one’s net income) and a maximum:

One who wishes to donate (generously) should not give more than a fifth of his income, lest he himself come to be in need of charity. (-Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 50a)

Of course, there’s really nothing easy about donating 10 percent of one’s income, so the maximum is probably irrelevant for most people, but one could just as easily apply this “upper limit” logic to volunteering and perhaps give credence to the idea that there’s a point at which someone’s done enough to help others.

Without delving into specifics, I volunteer and donate here and there, and sometimes I feel pathetically proud: “Well, wasn’t that nice of me?”  It feels good to mentally check the box “volunteer one’s time” so that I can enjoy the rest of my day (week? month?) without the nagging feeling that I’m not contributing enough to the care of others.  But of course, the reality is that I could always do more.  Much more.

So how much is enough?

Well, if the story of the Good Samaritan from the New Testament is any indication, probably a lot more than what I’m currently doing.  (I get a double dose of religion many weekends by attending synagogue on Friday and then hearing a Sunday morning sermon at the Presbyterian Church where I play piano.  This allows me to feel doubly inadequate.)  In this story, a lawyer asks Jesus what he needs to do to receive eternal life, and when Jesus asks the man what the law says, he answers in part, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”  Jesus tells him, “You are right.  Do this and you will live.”  But then the lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor?”

Ah ha!  Well, this gets more complicated.  I suggest you read Luke 10:25-37 for the whole story, but the short answer to the question is: everyone is your neighbor!

Oh goodness.  This is where the anxiety starts creeping in.  In this day and age of unlimited information about every ailment and calamity facing people all around the world, one could hardly blame a well-intentioned person from becoming so overwhelmed with charitable possibilities that he’s not even able to buy a coffee or a beer without sinking into a hole of self-hatred, like Steven Spielberg’s Oscar Schindler on steroids: “This coffee!  Instead of buying this coffee, I could have fed a family an entire meal!  Instead of watching this baseball game, I could have volunteered at a homeless shelter!”

So how good do we have to be?  Harold Kushner wrote a book with this exact question as its title, but he doesn’t really talk about what’s required of each of us when it comes to helping others.  He discusses familial relationships and acceptance for one’s failings.  That’s all well and good.  But the reality is that as I write this blog that maybe fifty people will read, I could be delivering food or mentoring a child.  I might already be doing those things, but shouldn’t I do more?  If yes, how much more?  Can I spend a day writing without thinking that I could have done something nobler with my time?  If yes, can I spend two days?  Three days?  Four?  Can and buy myself a $400 bass amp (as I did last week) without thinking that my money could have (should have?) gone to a nobler purpose?  How about a $1000 guitar?  A $2000 keyboard?  I already own two keyboards, you say?  So why would I need another?  Wow, have you got a lot to learn about musicians.

Look, for me, these are not easy questions, and there are no easy answers.  I suspect I’ll never be as content as my friend who believes he’s a shoo-in for the ultimate reward, and maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe by questioning what I’m doing I make better choices here and there that lead to the betterment of others. 

I sometimes play piano at funerals for people who – by the accounts of their loved ones – have done remarkable things:  formed foundations, served on every society known to man, volunteered for every cause, and I leave these funerals feeling partly depressed and partly inspired: depressed because I haven’t done enough and inspired because I see what people are capable of.

So maybe that’s the answer.  How good do we have to be?  Better than we are, but less than perfect.