We Don’t Come In Or Go Out Alone
So why does everyone keep saying we do?
We literally come into the world tethered to another person. Usually, there are doctors, nurses, fathers, doulas, and other assorted bystanders there too.
And when we die, there are frequently people there as well, sometimes holding our hand as we pass.
Still, my mom used to repeatedly chant the mantra that “we come in alone and go out alone.” Throngs of other people say the same thing even though it’s extraordinarily untrue.
It’s a puzzling thing to proclaim, but my guess is that it must be some odd way of expressing of how lonely life feels.
As modern humans, we find ourselves in a strange situation to feel so alone that we’ll readily accept such nonsense. We evolved to live in close association with others. But we’ve displaced ourselves from the small tribal communities for which we are optimized, leaving us perpetually distanced, separated, and suspicious.
Feeling isolated and alone wasn’t a problem for most of human history. If you failed to connect to your tribemates, you weren't around long enough to suffer loneliness.
But once we developed agriculture and civilization, our populations began to grow. With that came a flood of strangers that diluted our natural ability to be seen, known, and needed.
Long before Bob Seger felt like a number, modern people were suffering from a chronic lack of connection and belonging. The close cooperation, upon which everything humans have is predicated, has become institutionalized. Isolated and alienated humans can now work together in almost total anonymity.
An anonymous, modular workforce has made for some highly efficient production, but some miserable producers. Our transient, industrial world goes against our deepest natural drive to bond together in small, permanent groups of interdependent individuals who hold each other’s welfare in their own personal interest.
The truth of today is that we come in, and quite often go out, together, but we spend far too much time alone in-between those two events. We’re not living the lives of close connection that we evolutionarily require to feel okay. And it hurts. A lot. It may well be the root of all of our problems.
Maybe this is what my mom was trying to say.
If you liked this, you might also like this comic essay about pretending to be okay, even when we’re not.
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All comics ©2021 by David Milgrim
Just trying to feel okay, one comic at a time