Independence and Isolation Are Two Sides of the Same Coin – Jamiatul Ulama KZN
Independence and isolation are two sides of the same coin.
Recently, I had an interesting conversation with my dad that got me thinking about this.
When my dad first moved from Egypt to the United States twenty-some years ago, he found some things very odd in his new surroundings. He gave me three examples of the things that initially puzzled him about Americans:
1. Driving around town, he noticed how many cars were small, 2-door cars instead of what he had always considered “regular” 4-door sedans. The sheer number of 2-door cars on the roads actually stood out to him.
Why? Because in Egypt, even if you were a bachelor buying your very first car, almost nobody would voluntarily choose to get a small 2-door car. Because, as my dad put it, even if you didn’t have a spouse or kids yet, what if your siblings or cousins or uncles or aunts wanted to catch a ride with you? You didn’t ever buy a car that was just enough for your own individual needs–you always bought things for yourself with your family and relatives in mind, informing your purchasing decisions. My dad laughingly recounted to me last week that when he first moved here, he wondered whether Americans didn’t have cousins or relatives or family, or if they just didn’t like them.
2. It caught his attention how much Americans seemed to love pets. My dad would watch in amazement, as he hurried to work in the darkness of dawn in New Jersey winter, as people would bundle up in huge coats and trudge through knee-high snow and brave patches of black ice in order to walk their dogs. He was utterly stupified. What would drive any normal person from their warm, toasty bed out into the dark coldness at dawn, other than the necessity of working for your family? Apparently, for Americans, the answer was their dog.
Of course, there are many cultural factors at play here. But it took him a while to realize that people were extremely attached to their pets because pets have become substitutes for people. Instead of having kids, some people got pets in order to show love to a living thing. Otherwise, they would be utterly alone.
3. It struck him as strange that at the grocery store, many people would buy tiny amounts of food. They would bag two tomatoes. One cucumber. Three apples. This struck my dad as odd, as he bought enough food to sustain a small army for his five kids and wife. Did they go grocery shopping daily? It didn’t occur to him then that many Americans lived alone.
In traditionally Muslim countries like Egypt, life revolves around the family. Not just the nuclear family, but also the extended family. In non-Muslim Western countries, life revolves around the single individual.
The difference between these two outlooks is what my dad immediately noticed when he moved from the former society to the latter.
In the modern Western world, there is almost nothing that people value more than their “independence.” Most today are obsessed with being their own boss, having nobody (not man, and definitely not God) tell them what to do, how to act, how to dress, or whom to love.
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They want to break away from the shackles of tradition, free themselves from the constraints of family, and throw off the burden of societal expectations.
Many guys and girls today in the empowered West prefer to drift along on their own, having casual hookups or short-term relationships, in order to avoid the offputting duty and commitment that come with marriage. Why legally commit yourself to another person and be forced to compromise, when you can just…not?
Do I even need to spell out why people today are generally having fewer kids? Raising kids represents the epitome of having to take care of other people and putting your own needs and preferences aside. Where’s the fun or independence in that?
If we don’t have a family, whether it’s one we were born into (since we became estranged from them as we moved out and away) or one we created (since we avoided marriage and kids like the plague), what is left? Work.
So, many people spend most of their waking hours at work, making money they will spend mostly on entertainment they desperately need in order to take their minds off their loneliness. They busy themselves after work with a lengthy series of casual social gatherings, so they are occupied. The “work hard, play hard” philosophy.
So, many people just drift along alone through life, congratulating themselves on being winners, reveling in their unfettered freedom and intense independence.
Until being free stops being fun.
They hit their 30s or 40s and realize for the first time that they are very lonely and their lives are very empty.
Human beings are social creatures. We need human company, human interaction, human touch. When we cut ourselves off from these things, we deny ourselves a large part of what it means to be human.
Then we wonder why we feel isolated and adrift and lonely. Depression sets in. We experience pangs of crippling existential angst as we realize that we live alone and will maybe die alone. We pop a steady stream of anti-anxiety and anti-depressant pills just to be able to function.
When we emphasize independence at the expense of all else, this is the result.
When we buy into the modern hedonistic individualism of today at the expense of communal or family values, this is the result.
When we encourage our young sons to be become hyper-focused on making money for its own sake, and push careerism, and imply that marriage and family are an afterthought, this is the result.
When we go out of our way to teach our young daughters to aspire to become “strong, empowered, independent” CEO’s, and we applaud “changemakers” and devalue homemakers, this is the result.
A society of lonely individuals steeped in material things, living lives devoid of purpose. The heady independence sours into crippling isolation.
