A gaggle of legit researchers over at the University of Buffalo, presumably not buffaloes themselves as natural selection is a thing of the past, have reached the startling conclusion that social withdrawal is actually good. If slinging a hammer were a team-effort it would never be slung. A prick lost in a haystack of digits.
Surveying almost 300 self-purporting loners, which I’m not certain how many true loners would be quite so eager to seek out and participate in university studies but alright, the non-buffalo researchers noted how the general lack of social support and opportunities for developing social skills has been unnecessarily stigmatized, ironically by society itself.
And that the benefits of being alone, such as enhanced creativity and decreased risk of poor health, would actually appear to outweigh the negative aspects, such as the perfectly normal compulsion for masturbating in confessionals or voting booths, either one.
All of which casts a stunning new light on the practice of solitary confinement.
CAPTIVE CREATIVES
While periods of solitary confinement extending more than 24 hours are banned by international law for use on, say, enemy combatant prisoners of war, the US government quite regularly confines its felon citizens for periods lasting decades uninterrupted.
Under the light of this new research, however, it would now seem that the UN apparently seeks to suppress creativity by shunning solitary confinement, whereas the US government proactively churns out new authors and artists and other visionaries by the millions.
Thank you, Uncle Sam.
We never knew you cared, or cared so much.
Contrarily, as Dimo wa Moraswi Sekele wrote earlier last year concerning how the human mind is the greatest prison ever built:
“The truth is fear is the reason many are in hospitals depressed, in jails, trapped in unfulfilling self-drowning careers and relationships that don’t make them happy. Fear and happiness can’t coexist, fear will make you second guess every happy moment you have. It whispers in the back of your mind and incites ideas of doubt that start as just ideas but given a platform to grow they soon become mental prisons.
Fear or more accurately anxiety is a multisystem response to a perceived threat or danger. It reflects a combination of biochemical changes in the body, the patient’s personal history and memory, and the social situation. As far as we know, anxiety is a uniquely human experience. Other animals clearly know fear, but human anxiety involves an ability, to use memory and imagination to move backward and forward in time, that animals do not appear to have. The anxiety that occurs in post-traumatic syndromes indicates that human memory is a much more complicated mental function than animal memory. Moreover, a large portion of human anxiety is produced by anticipation of future events.”
FUTURE BLOGGING
Fortunately, having allotted myself some alone-time to think about it and brood on through it, I believe we can all safely conclude that there simply is no future. At least nothing which hasn’t already happened in one form or another. The creator, she thinks she moves in mysterious ways, but everything here is predictable. A lifetime free of surprise is a miserable affair. Frightfully so in fact.
We can join the lemmings in hurling ourselves over the cliff at the edge of the world, any of the five corners will do, or we can pull back and away from the party and blog pretty (and pretty disturbing) thoughts online for the aliens who shall be cruising through the inevitable rubble of our world to ponder over and feel inspired by. The singularity of man.
Inspired enough to visit yet another world to make the simian locals feel the lightning strikes of the gods as their genetic code gets amped enough to eventually hunger after chocolate bars and shaved legs, and the many more chocolate bars and shaved legs denied them in due course whether by circumstance or poor choice.
And so the amped simians can hurl themselves from the cliffs of their own world or go about blogging pretty (and pretty disturbing) thoughts online for yet other aliens to invariably cruise past the rubble of the inherently doomed though replaceable simian world to later discover and feel inspired over. Because my flat is a circle of time. Yours, too. But interpersonal intersections only truly happen among conjoined twins.