alone

It is commonly said of New York City that you could easily go through everyday life here, in this city of 8 million people, and still feel like the loneliness person in the world. We live alone in this culture, most often in our solitary apartments, on top of other solitary apartments, forming no real connections to the masses that surround us and only interact with them in the shallowest of manners. We push through each other in the crowded subways and streets everyday, fight for reservations at restaurants and tickets to shows, and lay awake at night unable to sleep while a zillion car horns blare and pedestrians chatter excitedly on the sidewalk outside our windows. There is life all around us, and somehow we are so removed. I can put on my Ipod and tune it all out.

Mark Twain called it “a splendid desert—a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.”

New York Magazine's cover story this week is about this so-called "Urban Loneliness," and how recent sociological studies are proving this to be more of a myth than we feel. How so? Humans are social animals with a hypothesized biological need to interact, ultimately ensuring the survival of the species (i.e. sex). Really, that's all it comes down to? Everyone needs someone to love them. Woop!

That's the ultra-simplified analysis. Read more here.