Listerine on a Sunday

Well, it is Sunday back in the States and Monday morning here in Australia. Sometimes you come across something random on the Internet that strikes your fancy. It has nothing to do with money, well, not directly.

You may have seen this study last week about how Americans are getting lonelier. The study concluded that Americans have a third fewer close friends and confidantes than twenty years ago. And the number of people who have no one to lean on has nearly doubled.

It seems to me like it's hard to measure a thing like loneliness. But that aside, there are plenty of other economic and sociological and technological trends that might lead to people being more lonely.

First, you have suburbs and exurbs. Fewer people live in traditional neighborhoods these days, the kinds of places where you know your grocer, your Chinese takeout lady, your dry cleaner, or your service station owner. The tradeoff for having suburban privacy and your own kingdom is a kind of isolation from personal interaction with people you see everyday.

Granted, it doesn't HAVE to be this way and isn't always this way. But it's easy to see how you can wake up, go to work, come home, and go to bed and very little meaningful interaction with other people. Incidentally, this is one reason why I like living in cities. Despite my initial impression that cities were vast, anonymous, soul-grinding machines, it turns out that a some big cities (that have not been blighted by poor urban planning or physically deformed with neighborhood separating super-highways) are collections of little neighborhoods where you DO know people. It was true for me in London and in Paris and Baltimore.

In Paris, I saw Claude, the blues-loving wine salesman nearly every day. He knew that in the fall I drank Rasteau, a cotes du Rhone vintage, and in the summer, usually a chilled Rose. In London, Louis, the South African bar-tender at the Cambridge Arms on Goodge street always had my Guinness going before I'd completely taken my coat off. And in Baltimore, if I walked in today, Ms. Kim at the Kozy Korner would still remember my breakfast order (two eggs, over-easy, bacon, white toast, coffee cream and sugar.)

The only disappointing thing about cities, really, is the posture of pedestrians. Ever notice that hunch many people walk with in a city? You develop by literally trying to keep a low profile and avoid eye contact. It's disappointing, but understandable. No one wants to get involved in anyone else's life. No one is looking for trouble. No one wants to be responsible for doing something when they see something that goes wrong. Suffering remains visible, but anonymous.

Which brings me to Listerine on a Sunday. My friend Greg googled the term a few weeks ago and found a link to this paper by a graduate student named Floyd Berry at the University of Texas at Austin. Like I said, it doesn't have anything to do with money directly. But I found it a pretty fascinating read for a lot of reasons.

One of the reasons is that some people simply retreat from the world when they sense they don't understand it or don't belong in it. The above article on loneliness suggests to me this kind of retreat is a lot more prevalent than you might imagine. Maybe another way of describing it is that people choose to consume their time with trivia or other people's lives (reality TV) than live their own. Who knows? Anyway, here's one quote from Listerine on a Sunday. The emphasis added is mine:

• The history of tramps or hobos as a subculture began after the Civil War in the
  United States (Harper 1982). Workers appeared at new job sites on the American frontier, but the work was seasonal in nature, and the workers had no intention of living a sedentary lifestyle. Thus they were mobile, moving from place to place. Features of this lifestyle included strong feelings of independence and drinking bouts. (Anderson 1923; Harper 1982). In 1922, the Committee on Homeless Men was organized in Chicago to study "the problem of the migratory casual worker" (Anderson 1923:xi). Anderson engaged in a year of fieldwork with this population and even constructed a typology of homeless men, including seasonal worker, hobo (migratory worker), tramp (migratory non-worker), home guard (non-migratory casual worker), and bum. He described the bum as "the most repulsive of the down-and-outs," a category which included alcoholics and drug addicts. Anderson seemed to hold the tramp in higher esteem than the otherwise described the tramp as "an easy-going individual who lives from hand to mouth for the mere joy of living." Such a person had the romantic passion to explore the country and experience life without working (Anderson 1923:93). By 1938, Merton had constructed his typology of deviance and had located tramps, drunkards, and drug addicts under the rubric Retreatists or Aliens. Such people feel defeated and are resigned to accept their fate in life. They have renounced both cultural goals and the institutional means to attain them, and, in a sense, they have escaped from society and public scrutiny (1938:677-78).

P.S. Has technology isolated people instead of connecting them? On the surface, we're more connected than ever with e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging and cheap telecommunications. But this doesn't mean the quality if communication between people has increased, only the quantity. In fact, maybe communication works a little like information, the more you have the less it's worth. That is, more points of contact don't make communication any more meaningful if you don't have anything to say, or don't risk saying something meaningful.

That raises the question of what words actually mean and gives me the chance to quote on other chunk from the paper by Floyd Berry. He's asking Dan (the alcoholic and homeless subject of his study) why he never comments on his (Floyd's) interpretations of his (Dan's) life.

Floyd says: "And so, I wondered why you always comment on what is actually said between us, but you never comment on my interpretations of what is said."

Dan looked me straight in the eye and said, with emphasis:

"That's because that's what's important. What we say is what's important. The other--well, you gotta do that for college. But what is important is in the words, and you gotta find it." And with that, Dan put out his cigarette, grinned, and stroked Tia, who opened one eye and huffed once. And I felt a shudder pervade my body, as if Dan has provided me with some truth. And I remembered Underwood's ethnography, The Bridge People, and remembered how the best parts, the parts that provided me with the most meaning, were in the dialogues. And
I thought how strange it was that interpretation was somehow embedded in words exchanged between people who embraced two different worldviews.