Kurzgesagt - Loneliness

Thanks for taking the time. I'm short on time but I'll try to address what I can given what I've got.

Considering that's how evolution works, I'm curious as to why you have a problem with this.

In the context of what I wrote you'll find that I'm not criticizing the theory of evolution. Rather I'm bringing out the way in which Kurzgesagt will frame an argument. So in this sense, loneliness constitutes a linear evolution and a direct link from a to b, ancient to modern. It's not that they employ the theory of evolution that I'm criticizing, but that they define slippery concepts like loneliness with lines that are no more complicated than "it's old."

That's the point in drawing attention to how our ancestors lived. Our social conditions have changed, but our bodies evolved long before they did. We're still adapted to how it was before. So just like we feel hunger even though food isn't generally scarce, we feel loneliness even though perhaps we needn't anymore. By "social needs," he means both the ones our ancestors had explicitly and the ones our bodies are adapted to despite our changed society.

Of course here we're already agreeing that the topic is loneliness, that what we feel is loneliness, and that we can take this figure "loneliness" and define it as a biological imperative. I'm not denying the existence of loneliness, I'm denying that Kurzgesagt have been talking about loneliness as such. In this sense, though, I'm not clear that "need" is why or how we should be talking about loneliness. It's clear you mean "need" as a biological need, the drive that impels us back toward the social (need), but when you say "we feel loneliness even though perhaps we needn't anymore," the point is that if loneliness is the drive that leads us back toward the need, the drive would be otherwise than the feeling of the drive. Let me put this a different way because maybe that's not clear. Kurzgesagt wants to argue that loneliness is whatever the feeling of loneliness is for those who feel it, as well as that drive that impels us back toward the social need. It's easy to see how this allows us to say that depression (etc) or some other feeling can be an expression, or symptom, of the drive called loneliness. But, speaking analogically, sometimes we feel hungry because we are thirsty. The drive to sustain the body, which is to say the need, is still there and doing its work, but the feeling is otherwise than the drive. It's in this sense that I would challenge that we have ever been talking about loneliness.

I don't see your point here. Certain societies even today have "hunger epidemics," which is just a less scary way of saying "famine and widespread starvation." You're right in that me being hungry says nothing of an epidemic, but we can tell there is a food scarcity when many people feel great hunger at the same time. In the same way, we can say we have a "loneliness epidemic" because many people feel great chronic loneliness. Taken individually it means nothing, but the widespread occurrence indicates a problem.

We might say, talking about the US, hundreds of millions of people feel hungry at the same time without an epidemic or a question of food scarcity. But okay, let's also say a hunger becomes an epidemic when there are both many people involved over a longer period of time without being able to resolve it. The reason I don't like this definition, even though I recognize that we sometimes call it a hunger epidemic, is because the feeling of hunger is distinct from famine or starvation. The feeling of hunger can disappear to someone who is starving, for example. We have other ways of knowing someone is starving even if they don't feel hungry, let's say. It gets more complicated, though, if we start talking about something like an eating disorder. The person might be starving themselves, and might not feel hungry, and might not necessarily show some kind of symptom of their starvation. Many people have eating disorders but not all of them are feeling hungry. Why do I keep stressing this distinction between the feeling of hunger and the drive impelling us toward the need? Because Kurzgesagt have put a lot of stress on the fact of loneliness being a vast array of individual feelings that are all rooted into the drive toward biological need. The problem is that we are relying, it seems to me, on a very fuzzy border to define the being of loneliness. We are calling many different things the product of or the being of loneliness. It is in this sense that I'm asking "what is the epidemic?" I grant that many people are impelled to say they are lonely, or feel more lonely. I'm asking how we know we are talking about loneliness?

Those seem like random questions aimed at a portion of the video that wasn't at all unclear. Loneliness is subjective, so if you feel lonely, you are. If you feel lonely for a long time, it's chronic. Many people currently feel this "chronic loneliness," so we can idiomatically call this an "epidemic." Exactly what is unclear?

The above, what I've said, is what's unclear. You've said "If you feel lonely for a long time, it's chronic." Fine, I agree that if we use biomedical language, and argue for biomedical intervention and study, that we, if we feel lonely, and report that we have been lonely for a long time, are chronically lonely. And, if many people report the same thing, we have a loneliness epidemic. It's not that this argument is unclear to me, it's that the thing called loneliness is unclear to me in this reportage. What is loneliness? For the video, loneliness is social isolation, sadness, depression, stand-offishness, social anxiety, paranoia, delusion, fright and fear, and the list could go on for a long time here. Loneliness "is" not those things, though, it is the drive that impels us toward the need. But in what sense can be sure those different things emerge from the drive (loneliness) toward the social (need)?

To this end,

No, loneliness is the feeling that may give rise to such behavior. It is not synonymous with the behavior itself.

Then how did you understand their definition of loneliness? Because even you have said loneliness is the "feeling that may give rise to x," that "loneliness is subjective," that "if you feel lonely, you are," and so on. If I were to say: hunger is subjective. If you feel hungry, you are hungry. Are you willing to say that my hunger is always indicative of the drive toward the need (food)? We know that the feeling of hunger sometimes is the need for something else, or not a need at all. But despite this we don't deny the need or the fact of hunger. Similarly I don't deny the need for sociality or relationality, or the fact of loneliness. I do deny, though, that we've been talking about it here. If we are claiming that loneliness is not synonymous with what one feels like is loneliness, despite the fact this allows us to say that we are lonely, even chronically lonely, even in an epidemic of loneliness, then what is loneliness?

If it is reported as loneliness, it becomes loneliness. Self-centredness, depression, isolation, fear, social anxiety, and so on, all become symptoms of loneliness, which is only the drive "like hunger." We are finding loneliness there as the root of what is not itself a root of anything except the biological coding of the social.

I wrote this in my response and you said that you didn't understand what I meant. I've essentially been spending time repeating this, so hopefully it comes out clearer. But to repeat one part of it, loneliness is not the root of these symptoms according to the video. Loneliness is the drive that, like hunger, impels us toward the need. In other words, the need is the root of our symptoms. We need the root (the need - food, relation, etc) and so we have drives that, when deprived of them, impels us back toward the need. But I'm saying the video is arguing that reporting something as loneliness, which includes a wide array of feelings and symptoms, gives us the root cause of those symptoms. We are depressed, we see things incorrectly, we are increasingly stuck in cycles of dislocation from one another, etc, not merely because of the world we inhabit but also because our loneliness is being disregarded. But loneliness is not a root to give regard to, it merely tells us about the need.

/r/videos Thread Parent Link - youtu.be