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Who Will Notice When You Die?
Three weeks before Christmas 1993, Wolfgang Dircks died while watching
television. Neighbors in his Berlin apartment complex hardly noticed the
absence of the 43-year-old. His rent continued to be paid automatically out
of his bank account. Five years later, the money ran out, and the landlord
entered Dircks's apartment to inquire. He found Dircks's remains still in
front of the tube. The TV guide on his lap was open to December 3, the
presumed day of his death. Although the television set had burnt out, the
lights on Dircks's Christmas tree were still twinkling away.
It's a bizarre story, but it shouldn't surprise us. Every year thousands of
people are found accidentally days or weeks after their solitary deaths in
the affluent cities and suburbs of the Western world. If a person can die in
such isolation that his neighbours never notice, how lonely was he when
alive?
Forget about the Information Age: we live in the age of loneliness. In a
world where marriage rates are dwindling, children are cautiously planned
for (or avoided by contraception and abortion), middle age is synonymous
with divorce, and old age means a nursing home, people are bound to be very
lonely. How many of our neighbors or colleagues do we really know as
friends? How often do we turn on the television because we lack
companionship?
Yet in spite of their aloneness, many people hunger for community--though
instead of the real thing, they often settle for the silly spectacles of
commercialized pop culture. Marketers have long appealed to the powerful and
unfulfilled need to "belong," and play on it constantly in order to sell
fake versions of togetherness. What else feeds the craze for raves, where
hundreds of strangers dance together for hours? More disturbing than the
health risks of Ecstasy is the isolation that drives so many youth to drug
themselves weekend after weekend and flee their parents' homes in search of
a place where everybody is their friend, if only for the duration of a
party.
Surely there must be more to our cravings than can be answered by the simple
presence of others around us--who hasn't felt lonely in the middle of a
crowd? Kierkegaard, by way of example, writes in his Journal that though he
was often the life and soul of a party, he was desperate underneath: "Wit
poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me. But I went away...and
wanted to shoot myself."
Such desperation is a common result of alienation from our true selves. If
it seems an exaggeration, recall your own adolescence. How often were you
insecure or lonely, unable to measure up to all those people who seemed to
have everything - people who were smart, fit, and popular? And even if you
were well-liked, what about your hypocrisy, your deceit, your guilt? Who
hasn't known the weight of these things? Multiply self-contempt a million
times, and you have the widespread alienation that marks society today. What
else is it that stops strangers from acknowledging each other in the street,
that breeds gossip, that keeps co-workers aloof? What else is it that
destroys the deepest friendships, that divides the most closely knit
families and makes the happiest marriages grow cold?
We may justify the walls we throw up as safeguards against being used or
mistreated. But do they really protect us? If anything, they destroy us by
keeping us separated from others. They result in the attitude summed up by
Jean Paul Sartre, who said that "hell is other people."
Dostoyevsky half-jokingly said that though he loved humanity, he couldn't
stand individuals. All too often, our actions unwittingly mirror exactly
that view. How many of us really love our neighbor, rather than merely
coexist? How often do we pass someone with a smile on our face, but a grudge
underneath--or at least a quiet prayer that if he stops to talk, he won't go
on too long? And doesn't this lack of love contribute to alienation on a
broader social level?
How far we have fallen from our real destiny! If only we were able to break
down a few of the barriers that separate us, we might not resign ourselves
so quickly to the idea that they are an unavoidable fact of life, but open
our hearts to the richness that human experience affords-both in the sheer
miracle of our individual existence, and in the joy of meaningful
interaction with others.
Copyright © Johann Christoph Arnold. An outspoken social critic and award-winning author, Johann Christoph Arnold's books have sold over 300,000 copies in English and have
been translated into 18 foreign languages. Excerpted from the book "Escape Routes" by J.C. Arnold. Read it free by email. Reprinted with permission.
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