Society craves isolation; it requires it. Man is not proficient enough if man is always aching for another. Companies preach all they want about team building, yet they pluck out each one of us and plant us in cubicles dusted in ashy gray, tasting of regret and longing, and hope that by 5 PM sharp, one fades away into that wall. They commend individualism when one is creating a project, not when one’s project is themselves. Governments hold their breath for the fiftieth person to walk into a room before they smack a request for a permit on your front and tell you to disperse. Yes, man wants to be a social animal. No, man may not be one. Late-stage capitalism decrees as much.
Truth is, loneliness sells. You get an employee, you breed into them fear of authority and respect for the soul-stripping madness that is a 9-to-5, you teach them work culture, you make sure that work haunts their breaks, haunts their commutes back home, haunts their holidays, haunts their PTO. Thus, they do your work for you. They shame one another for leaving early, clocking in a minute before work and not hours before, for not building their calendars upon work rather than the other way around, and you tell them that teamwork makes the dream work.
Humanity still prevails, even in this Orwellian context, where we must wear overalls and bleat until we forget what we’d hoped to say and return to our desks. We still resist; it is human nature, it is physics. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Mayhaps we don’t pull the pitchforks from underneath our beds or walk out of McDonald’s and shoot our CEOs, but we still fight. We dream, we hope, we write, we sing, all things abhorred by a system that craves workers with hands of steel, minds of straw; through it all, we remain genteel.
Claiming that the antithesis of this loneliness epidemic is love would be outrageous– indeed, I know it is; but this is not the world’s first cycle. We have been wheeling through despair, then joy, for centuries. Countries warred, people died, then back at it again. But the focus had always been upon which king killed whom, rarely about the minute survivors, those peasants that we so often thought of as miserable, overworked, underfed, riddled with disease, almost like us, but worse. We forget, however, that serfs turned into free labourers, who tended their fields and watered their crops, who feasted often, enjoyed merrymaking, lavished acrobats and playwrights with coin and pleasantries. We forget that humanity still made it, that it didn’t dwindle under the suffocating regimes. For every Sisyphus, there is a Prometheus.
If love and hate– or indifference- are two sides of the same coin, then hope and love are the two edges of the same sword; one cannot exist without the other. One cannot hope to live if one cannot hope to love.
Corny as it is, love is the precursor of all things, be it with one hanging up a tree to bring some magic into a dreary season, pulling colors from the alabaster white, creating a lie that persevered through eons. Or throwing teeth to the unanswering sun. We create little rituals to celebrate every aspect of life: a six-month anniversary, a half-birthday, the airing of the final episode of our favourite show. Then we make a party out of it. As the Moroccan saying goes, where one hand lies, ten more could lie. One could simply watch a movie on their own, in the comfort of their own home and blankets, yet it remains irresistible to experience it with “the other”, to share a laugh over a moment with the one sitting next to you, or perhaps a tear.
Wherever capitalism enters, the urge for anarchy slips right behind. When the A-list artist makes their concert tickets cost an arm and a leg, the people gather outside the arena and dance and sing their fill. When one cannot afford to fly through continents for a football match, one sits in a fully crowded amphitheater and screams with joy when one’s team perseveres. When the fan zone costs more than the tickets to the match itself, the people crowd outside a coffee shop and watch through the blinds.
Even before the Industrial Revolution, people still sought out companionship through means we are most familiar with, though fire and instability ranged near; England plunged into succession wars, with the rise of Protestantism through Edward VI, its fall alongside its king, and the rise of Queen Mary and the reinstatement of the Catholic Church, followed by another plunge toward religious war with the crowning of Elizabeth. In the meantime, the Ottomans created the concept of coffee and a sweet treat. While a country burned at the hands of a sickly child and a scorned woman, another introduced coffee shops and created baristas.
And if capitalism tries to sell you the illusion of the supremacy of romantic love, platonic love seeps through to shatter it. Yes indeed, finding one’s soul in another person must be deserving of all that hype, though souls are fickle things; they may land within a friend, or a sibling, or the boss who tells you that cocoa is the secret ingredient to their special chili recipe. Romance might be more profitable, therefore most encouraged, especially if isolating, but it is only one kindling, one minute ember, to the bonfire needed to sustain a life in such times.
The world feels like it’s ending, true, perhaps that is how it felt before the volcano erupted in Pompeii or the meteor wiped out life from the surface of the Earth, though both could not erase proof of life, proof of love, proof of hope; proof that in one’s last moments, crawling to find comfort within ‘the other’ is an act of biology. Life ends, love does not; thus none could erase the Triassic cuddle, nor the Two Maidens, they stand to remind us that someone “was here”, and that is the whole point: to be here.
Texte: Lamyae Laaroui
Illustration: Chaimae Hidar
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