The modern solitary confinement | The Way Things Are

Other people are an inevitability. 

It is one of the few, reliable certainties in life. Any task, from the most grand to the most mundane scale, requires contact with other human beings. Every action we undertake, whether apparent to us or not, requires someone else to do their part. 

There are several evolutionary explanations for these inherent social interactions. Our chronology as a species is built upon a foundation of communal engagement, care and communication. Child-rearing, behavioral imprinting and collaborative processes are a few of the core evolutionary traits that help us survive and — once this simple life condition has been fulfilled — thrive. 

However, a purely evolutionary explanation precludes us from getting to the core of this argument. Indeed, the public sphere creates conditions which provide us a significant competitive advantage. Yet, there is an aspect of active determination that is lost by diluting the entire human experience down to what has helped improve survivability. 

Our sociability is a characteristic that does more than just ensure that we live, for it determines how much we have lived. At the end of the day, we choose to come in contact with other people. 

The collaboration involved in the jokes that we make, the stories we hear, the bonds we form, the communal progress we achieve and the collective awareness we develop are as essential to a good life as the work we do to simply get by. 

At least, this was the case until the advent of an invention that would come to destroy the very social architecture of our species: the fence. The choice to stop the intrusion of people in our lives. The culture of valuing our singularity above all else. 

The modern world is extremely concerned with optimizing the private sphere, ensuring that entire lives can rise and set within the narrow barriers of our own individuality. At a certain point in history, the inefficiencies of the public sphere became too costly, and the focus shifted from the riches of collective good to a private life calibrated for absolute control.

Government policies, emerging technologies and structural norms, in general, have allowed us to cut down on the distance it takes between a desire and its fulfillment. These days, the lifestyle of hyper-individualism permeates almost every aspect of our lives. It is a tragedy unfolding worldwide.

In America, cities once revered for their public transportation adopt car centric infrastructure for optimum urban efficiency. A tired office worker chooses to stream a movie on Netflix instead of going to the movie theater. Third spaces and communal public environments are fractured by the installment of paywalls and inaccessible institutions. 

It would not suffice to simply chalk up these phenomena to the will of external forces like zoning policies and the tapering urban sprawl. 

While these are the primary factors fueling our hyper-individuality, they were only allowed to proliferate because of the choices that we, as a collective, are comfortable making. There is a potent spirit of separation ingrained into many of the choices that we make on a daily basis, in the preferences that we actively embrace. 

Such is the complete diagnosis of the modern disease of individualism. A religion of choice, of being the final arbiter and having a say in even the most trivial choices in life has given rise to the hyper-individualism rampant in every modern lifestyle. 

This explanation is consistent with why the Western world and, more specifically, the United States are especially infectious to third spaces. For, after all, there is little room for public unity in societies which prefer to tweak each factor of the private sphere to the individual will. 

Being around other people involves compromise. It involves resigning personal choice to, at least, a point where a space satisfies more than a single set of preferences. Yet, there has been a historical effort to subtract, little by little, from the spaces in which all of us overlap until we are left with only a small box big enough to only fit one person: ourselves. 

In the eloquent words of Kurt Vonnegut, “We’re here on Earth to fart around. Of course, the computers will do us out of that. But what the computer people don’t realise is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore." 

Life is indeed made easier each time an amenity is placed closer to our reach. But what are we even left with in this box? When the day comes that we are able to centralize all required effort to our own private spheres, what will we even live for?