No, Man is an Island
Accepting you’re alone is the first step to building real relationships
Descartes’ said: “I think, therefore I am”. And several hundred years later Jean-Paul Sartre said: “I am, therefore I think”. What about We, though?
You think everyday. Every moment you are awake, and alive, your brain is thinking. Not about anything particular, at any given moment mind you. But your brain is processing emotional, sensory and memory information almost non stop. If you think too hard enough about your existence, you might worry, if you exist at all. Then you might get stuck in failing to prove your own existence. Descartes did. He had to introduce God to get out of the quandary he created. But that’s got it’s own problems; ask any basic brewhouse philosopher about “the problem of evil” and you’ll have your head spinning faster than nickel-shot-night.
What do you do with all this thinking?
It kinda goes like this:
1. Learning information
2. Processing information
3. Identity formation
4. Belief formation
5. Value formation
6. Word & Action formation
What you make your identity then informs your beliefs about the world. With your beliefs, you then choose your values. Your values chosen, you use words and actions to qualify and manifest those values.
That’s happening for everyone, all the time. We’re always changing our beliefs, shifting values saying new things and doing new things. The best of us go real deep, and form a new identity and wholly reshape the paradigm of who we are and how we act.
Solipsism is this concept — wherein only the mind can be for sure known to exist. Read Caspar Hare. Solipsism balances alongside skepticism; true philosophical Skepticism, not you being wary of your weed dealer asking you to wait in the car while he “goes and gets the stash”. But the short, how can you prove even anything exists outside of your own mind? How is it not all some massive construct and your brain isn’t simulating everything?
I don’t have that answer, but take a second and think about something. No, I mean a literal something. Anything you can think of, think about it.
Here — a giant, floating, bubblegum pink elephant.
And now you’re thinking about it.
Now step back and think about the process of your thinking. Then how someone else is thinking about the pink elephant. Except it will be different than yours. Completely different.
Even if somehow you could PERFECTLY render your elephant in 3D, someone else seeing it would still interpret it different than you imagined it.
We are all locked in our own minds, with no way to connect them
Yes, we use language to codify our thoughts, and bring meaning to our existence. But the fun part about language is: it’s fluid, dynamic and rooted in culture. There is no universal context for any one word or phrase. Language is an extension of culture, and changes as cultures evolve and interact. The not-so-fun part is, it’s unreliable as sole means of communication. It’s why tone, context, intent, and physical cues, also shape spoken language.
The hurdle you have to jump is using a changing, cultural informed, experience based system to convey your thoughts and hope the other party will get your meaning.
You’ve heard someone say “there’s no one like you!”, or some variation on it, right? It’s cute, and said by men when they want to impress a girl they’re attracted to. Take away that context and see the statement objectively.
You can’t, because your own experience and understanding (your thinking process) is unique to you.
So the best you can do is look at the phrase from your subjective point of view. In fact, that’s all you can do with everything in life. Who you were born to, where you lived, what you learned, what you experienced, how you experienced it, are all magnificent details in a spectacularly complex algorithm that no supercomputer in existence could begin to calculate.
No one who has ever existed, or ever will exist, will ever be exactly like you.
Like there’s no two snowflakes, or two rocks or any two anything, all the infinite details of your existence have culminated in the person you are at this very moment. And because of that, when someone says: “oh, man, I know exactly what you’re feeling!”
They don’t.
They have their own understanding of them, informed by their experience, and the general relative concepts they have accepted as language.
Your sadness, happiness, anger, joy, grief, pain, is, and will always be unique to you because no matter how advanced language may become, we cannot:
- Step out of our own subjective reality and perceive without our mind/body
- Step into someone else’s subjective reality and understand it as they are.
Remember the Wizard of OZ? In Frank L. Baum’s novel, before Dorothy and the gang could go into OZ, they had to put on special green glasses. The guard spouted off some nonsense that OZ was too brilliant and it would blind them, or some other hogwash. Everyone who entered into, and lived in OZ wore the glasses. In fact they were locked in place so the wearer could not remove them. But then remember later on, when y’know, Oz kinda reveals he’s a giant fraud?
Was Oz actually Emerald, or was it only Emerald because the glasses made the wearer see it so?
Use that metaphor for your own experience in life. Your mind is locked away inside your brain and body and cannot ever experience the world outside of it. Kant (another philosopher I can’t shut up about) talked about a concept called Noumena & Phenomena. Apropos, phenomena is OZ through the glasses, and Noumena is OZ as it actually existed.
There are lots of things in our experience that exist, and that exist as we can perceive them.
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Sure, the vibrations in the air caused from the tree falling make “sound”, but if you didn’t have an ability to perceive sound, it wouldn’t matter to you, right? Try this one. UV light, is outside of the spectrum of human vision. Before we had the technology to measure it, it “didn’t exist” to us as a species. But it’s still there, despite our inability to measure it with our bodies.
So what does this all mean?
The phrase no man is an island, has always bothered me. It used in the context of striking down toxic thoughts of “I don’t need anyone!” and generally, it itself is used as rhetoric for toxic positivity. Along the same lines of “have you tried just cheering up?”, “it could have been much worse”, “it’s not so bad in the grand scheme of things”.
We are a social species, lots of science shows how miserable and quick-to-die we become when we isolate ourselves. Loneliness is deadly. The thing is, we are alone. You cannot ever be me, and I cannot ever be you. I have no idea what its like to have been what you have been through. I cannot fathom your pain, your trauma, your triggers, your fears. I only have a vague idea of what that is like in my own life, and only then if I’ve had first hand experience. Most of the time it’s assuming from watching others, or reading fictionalized accounts in stories and media.
You are an island.And there’s nothing you can do to change that. What you can do, is to build bridges. Cultivate relationships through open, honest, vulnerable communication. Learn more about yourself to better express, and articulate your experiences. Express not only through language but art. Draw, paint, sculpt, sing, dance — CREATE. Creation is the most powerful tool we have for breaking past the barrier of language to build higher levels of connection with others. You have to work to meet people halfway, to understand them, and understand you. In the end you may find that while only you populate your island, it’s something amazing to step off it into the unknown with someone else.
I am.
You Are.
We Can.
