Humans are social beings, say anthropologists. This fact refers to how our society functions: Everyone contributes to the social system we have built and everyone benefits from the system. This requires humans to interact with one another and depend on each other, in other words, the way our society works forces us to be social because we cannot meet our needs on our own.
Although the way society functions remains mostly the same, people’s lifestyles have changed drastically as technology developed and urbanization became more common. Prior to the advancement of technology and urbanization, people used to rely heavily on manpower and manual techniques in most industries. This established our social community system which impacted humans towards living and working with other humans just like seen in the tribal behaviors of humans who lived in the Stone Age. The same tribal behaviors were left unchanged even though many areas both in the areas of science and art developed and eventually tribes were forgotten and instead smaller groups of people and families were formed.
A crucial event that has inarguably changed the structure of society was Industrial Revolution. With the Industrial Revolution that began in the British Empire, every area of human life changed from agriculture to transportation. Along with the massive increase in the number of factories so did the dependency on machines. In contrast with the rise of reliance on machines which decreased the need of manpower, the need for labourers who maintain machines in factories or agricultural fields increased creating a huge migration wave from the countryside to the big cities. This led certain areas to have a dense population with more severed social ties compared to early communities.
The ties of people became even more severed as humans entered the new millennium and new technologies occurred with social media being one of the most impactful inventions of the new millennium. Social media enabled individuals to be a part of larger communities without directly interacting with other people creating a society with more involvement of networking with less amount of social intimacy. This led numerous individuals to develop the feeling of “crowded loneliness”.
“Crowded loneliness” is a feeling that occurs when an individual feels lonely amidst a group of people, mostly a crowd. It is how people express their longing for close friends or the warmth of family, the longing for even a glimpse of familiarity.
It is “crowded loneliness” that is behind eyes eagerly waiting for the reply of an acquaintance, lips that are forced to smile while not feeling even a little bit of belonging or minds that wander off to melancholic memories. Perhaps, “crowded loneliness” is a sign given to us for us to realize how much we should cherish the time we spend with our loved ones and to break from the cycle of unfamiliarity caused by the unspoken rules of our modern world by creating strong bonds with people, this is the way to open the path for a future where no one will feel the suffocating feeling of “crowded loneliness”.