Don't Miss out on the "Feast of Life"

A warning as we all struggle for connection in a more isolated age.

A couple years ago I traveled to Dublin for work. I had never been to Ireland and while I was there I had picked up Dubliners, a book of James Joyce’s short stories.

I was reading this book on the bus or train — I can’t remember — and one of the stories just gutted me. It’s called “A Painful Case” and it struck me as very Irish.

The main character in the book is a banker named Mr. Duffy, who lives in an isolated suburb alone and really prizes order. During the course of the story he unexpectedly falls in love with a married woman, who returns his affection. One night she attempts to engage him romantically, and he rejects her — out of propriety — and stops seeing her.

Mr. Duffy is very pleased with himself initially. Not getting involved with this married woman maintains his orderly isolated little life. He also views it as a very noble moral decision.

Later in the story however, he reads in the newspaper that the woman has been killed, struck by a train. He learns that her death was related to alcoholism. Her husband is quoted as saying she declined about two years prior, which Mr. Duffy becomes convinced was caused by his rejection.

The incident causes him to question all of his life decisions. He is walking around Dublin one night in grief and he sees couples out hand-in-hand, people laughing and singing, and he is all alone.

“No one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast,” Joyce writes. And he is filled with regret and realizes he has wasted his life and contributed to the death of the person who he loved the most.

That decision Mr. Duffy made when he chose isolation over connection, I think that’s very relatable. Who among us doesn’t struggle with that? Maybe people who are more extraverted than me (and I don’t consider myself SUPER introverted, either).

Right now we are experiencing this sea change in the way people behave and relate to each other. It’s very profound with respect to children especially, where interaction with screens replaces face to face interaction on which human relationships have been built for centuries. But adults are guilty of this as well, of course.

In Derek Thompson’s touchstone Atlantic article “The Anti Social Century” he discusses all this. It’s really a very sad and compelling article. Anyway, he talks about how people of all ages are basically retreating from public life, and spending more time alone. And that they are satisfying their innate need for human connection in parasocial ways, with Youtube and multiplayer video games for eg.

I notice this kind of thing all the time in my own personal life, which is — I think by comparison to most people now — pretty full of activity and people. I’m not trying to brag about my own circumstances. Part of it is just the phase of life I’m in. It’s easier to be surrounded by people a lot when you’re married and have young kids, just by nature of the fact that I’m living in a household of four, and where the kids are engaging socially and bringing new people into our orbit quite a bit.

Regardless though, it’s still fundamentally different than when I was a kid in some ways. I have worked pretty hard to cultivate sort of a local network — other nearby families. And in some ways, I’m just lucky to have been able to do that.

Still, sometimes I plan a beach day for the kids, and they tell me they don’t want to come. They respond — this is not an exaggeration, I swear — like I’m trying to take them to the dentist for filling or something — it’s that level of resistance… about going somewhere like the beach or ice cream. The indoors has a pull it just didn’t when I was younger. Every time you try to do something in a public space, it’s that much harder to overcome that pull. It wears me down sometimes.

I’ve always been pretty active and kind of adventurous by nature so maybe I was always straining against this impulse in the people I was around. But it’s more noticeable since the pandemic. The resistance to meeting up, going somewhere. Part of it sure, is just how over scheduled people are. I admire people I know who seem to be negotiating all this so deftly, like this one family I know where they have five children. The parents are social geniuses. They have a way of making everyone feel comfortable and laugh.

Sometimes I feel really awkward compared to them, even though I’ve never been the type of person who I would say really struggled a lot socially. I would say my struggles in this are about normal, maybe a tiny bit better than normal. Still, I’m not like the type that was Homecoming Queen of my high school.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. And I was thinking about this stuff. I was thinking, like in the Joyce short story, often times when we choose isolation, we come up with a sort of flattering explanation for it, like Mr. Duffy did.

Maybe there was some of that going on even long after covid vaccines became available where people were choosing isolation and dressing it up as some kind of brave moral stand. That’s just the most convenient example I can think of. I also think tech companies understand this dynamic very well and promote messages that normalize “doom scrolling” and “binge watching” etc. out of self interest. And they are better at manipulating us than I think we’re mostly willing to admit.

Thompson connects increased isolation with the decline of the “village” and with rising feelings of hopelessness and despair.

“A night alone away from a crying baby is one thing,” he writes. “A decade or more of chronic social disconnection is something else entirely. And people who spend more time alone, year after year, become meaningfully less happy.

Thompson quotes this one University of Chicago psychologist, who says something that reminds me so much of the Joyce story and Mr. Duffy:

“A fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around people,” Nick Epley said. “And yet over and over, we have opportunities to connect that we don’t take, or even actively reject, and it is a terrible mistake.”

Barbara Kingsolver gave a graduation speech in 2008 that touched on all this. And in that speech, she singled out Ireland as one of the happiest places on earth (along with Mexico and Puerto Rico) “the kinds of places we identify with extended family, noisy villages, a lot of dancing.”

She said the way college students live during college “in close and continuous contact” is what the students should hold on to.

“This is an ancient human social construct that once was common in this land. We called it a community. We lived among our villagers, depending on them for what we needed. If we had a problem, we did not discuss it over the phone with someone in Bubaneshwar. We went to a neighbor. We acquired food from farmers. We listened to music in groups, in churches or on front porches. We danced. We participated. Even when there was no money in it. Community is our native state. You play hardest for a hometown crowd. You become your best self. You know joy.”