A Popular Handbook of the Emotions by Robert Hauptman;

Author:Robert Hauptman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Emotions in diverse cultures

In humankind’s early history, when people lived in groups, tribes, and other small enclaves, loneliness would not have been an issue. The people were intimately connected at all times and were far too busy protecting themselves from the weather, wild animals, and alien groups, as well as foraging and hunting for food. This situation still obtains for contemporary Stone Age groups, the Tasaday and the Jivaro, for example, who continue to live in similar ways. As the outside world encroaches, these primitive tribes will assimilate into the wider world but this will take longer than one might imagine. Consider the isolated tribe on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean, which is off limits to all trespassers, according to the Indian government. In late 2018, an American foolishly went there and was murdered by a bow hunter. These people are insulated from external society but presumably not from their peers.

Wood, citing R. S. Weiss, informs readers that Americans perceive those who are lonely as failing to be self-reliant; in Europe, they are thought of as dangerous, since they exist outside of a communal environment (200). But I am fairly certain that many Americans as well as Europeans, despite their ostensibly differing attitudes toward individuality and community, consider the lonely (an emotion that they too may have experienced) with compassion and sympathy. It is true that Europeans have very different beliefs when it comes to privacy, for example, and so the European Union has made it easier to protect its people in member countries than it is in America, but nevertheless, beliefs, religious commitment, mores, and the general ethos are all moving closer together in both environments, because Europeans (not to mention everyone else), emulate Americans in almost every materialistic, cultural, industrial, financial, technological, medical and military way. Evidence, if it is needed, can be seen in the basketball players in Greece and Turkey, the rappers in Israel, Morocco, and Albania!, the factories in Korea and Cambodia, the mobile phones in the hands of everyone, everywhere, and the extreme gridlock in India as well as China, where I encountered horrendous traffic and pollution when I visited more than a quarter of a century ago. Loneliness is a ubiquitous human emotion and probably increasing in all Americanized, Westernized environments. We fight against loneliness by seeking consolation through dating sites (Match, eharmony), not just in the US but in any country one might consider; there even exist international dating sites. We are so lonely, we no longer can meet dates at work, school, or at a bar. Indeed, my own brother met his ex-wife through a newspaper advertisement, because the Internet did not exist in the 17th century!

The choice to live alone depends on finances, age, culture, and personality. Surprisingly, national trends vary dramatically. Only a limited number of people live alone in Brazil (ten percent of the population). But in Russia 25% live alone; in the US, 28%; in Japan, 31%; and Sweden comes in first with 47% [or more] of its population residing alone (Brannan).

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