Loneliness

While this may sound outrageous at first, but study shows that loneliness really does spread like a virus. When you’re lonely, you’re not only lonely yourself, people around you will feel lonely too.


And if that keeps up, it’s not a good thing because loneliness, instead of making more friends to care about you, makes friends leave you.


Find out why.

I first read about this on Whichlaneareyou.com, which Marcell discusses “Is It Loneliness Is Contagious“. And yes, after reading it and this study by University of Chicago, I am convinced that loneliness is really, contagious.


Let’s take a real world example. One day a friend comes to you and tells you that he is lonely. He will start explaining why he is lonely, and he will start giving you real world examples of how others make him lonely. He will start to count every fault that people make, every little detail that people do that makes him feel lonely, every single glare, single grin, or even a single hand wave is enough as a “hint” for people is trying to isolate him and make him lonely.


It’s so natural that when you’re lonely, everything is against you. He is rationalizing everything to be against him, even if they are not.


And you listen so intently to his speculations and you actually start to believe that it is true, perhaps out of sympathy. You begin to let your rationale down. Then part of you will start to think, maybe what he said is really true. And maybe all those glares, those grins, those gestures do mean that they are isolating him.


Then you start to get away from those “friends” of him because you think that they are bastards to make your friend a loner. You’re left with your loner friend. He continues to be a loner, and eventually you’re getting lonely too because you have lesser and lesser friends.


And eventually you get sick with your loner friend, you’re left with yourself.


Loneliness is a very scary bug, isn’t it?