The Lonely Death of George Bell
nytimes.com
The Lonely Death of George Bell
1–10 of 72 posts
Re: The Lonely Death of George Bell
#2A wonderful piece, almost read like a novel.
At the end, I couldn't help but try to derive some overall take-away. The best I could come up with was to cherish your friendships and always try to keep in touch. One concern I would have is whether or not today's internet-based culture could hinder this?
Re: The Lonely Death of George Bell
#3A wonderful piece, almost read like a novel. At the end, I couldn't help but try to derive some overall take-away. The best I could come up with was to cherish your friendships and always try to keep in touch. One concern I would have is whether or not today's internet-based culture could hinder this?
I'd say it cuts both ways. I don't get out much myself, but I keep pretty well in touch with friends from all walks of life via social media. In another era many of those relationships would have atrophied with both time and distance.
Re: The Lonely Death of George Bell
#4A wonderful piece, almost read like a novel. At the end, I couldn't help but try to derive some overall take-away. The best I could come up with was to cherish your friendships and always try to keep in touch. One concern I would have is whether or not today's internet-based culture could hinder this?
I'd say it cuts both ways. I don't get out much myself, but I keep pretty well in touch with friends from all walks of life via social media. In another era many of those relationships would have atrophied with both time and distance.
Good point. However, I can’t help to think that this makes it harder to make new friends, e.g. when moving to a new city.
Re: The Lonely Death of George Bell
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say it cuts both ways. I don't get out much myself, but I keep pretty well in touch with friends from all walks of life via social media. In another era many of those relationships would have atrophied with both time and distance.
Good point. However, I can’t help to think that this makes it harder to make new friends, e.g. when moving to a new city.
I think that would depend on a lot of factors. Some people have more bandwidth for social stuff and can cope with keeping in touch with old friends and also seeking out new ones. Others can't.
But, also, if you are online, you can already know people in the new city. I am somewhat prone to having my friendships start online and then become IRL instead of the other way around. While I am probably not the norm, I am not some bizarre statistical outlier these days either. Plenty of people meet people via Internet and move the relationship to meatspace.
Re: The Lonely Death of George Bell
#6https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi is the Japanese name for this phenomena. There were several articles about it a few months back, like:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2015/0...
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/in-japan-lone...
http://qz.com/380685/photos-cleaning-up-after-japans-lonely-...
They say you mentally breakup with your spouse/partner some time before before actually do so. From what little I can glean here, the same can (not always, just can) hold true for dying alone.
Re: The Lonely Death of George Bell
#7Contrary to the implications of the beginning of the piece, Mr. Bell had connections, he had the potential for relationships, he even had friends who tried.
I'm an introvert, who recently moved to another city for graduate school. I don't get out very often unless it's to a solitary place (my own spot in a coffee shop, for instance), so I can relate to Bell's desire to be solitary most of the time. However, if anyone reading this thinks his death was a wrong, know that he had ample opportunity to at least have one or two people to "be around his death bed" so to speak. The end of the piece talks about "the Dude", not to mention the possible wife who it seems loved him even towards the end.
If there is any take away, it is to cherish our relationships with others. There are extreme cases in which people really are alone, but for those of us who can at least count on our hands the ones we love, or at least like, (even if it takes us a few minutes to enumerate them), we should continue to develop those friendships and not force people out who could otherwise enrich us. As the "investigators" put it, we don't live forever. We need to use the time we have to enrich others, because only the rest of society will out-survive us as individuals.
Re: The Lonely Death of George Bell
#8I never understood this stigma about hermits/social isolation in western societies. In the east, it's much more accepted.
Reading this piece I got the impression that the writer and persons interviewed were HORRIFIED by what they discovered. It seemed to me as if "having friends" was pretty fucking high in their list-of-important-things-in-life.
I was very amused by this, almost started laughing in fact. Human relationships are not for everyone I'd say, in fact there are many healthy people that view them as pointless waste of time at best.
Technology will solve this little problem once and for all, in this century. I won't go as far as AGI but when house keeping robots become ubiquitous which is surely less than 20 years down the road, society at large will have to evolve and primitive points of view as described in this nytimes piece will basically disappear.
Re: The Lonely Death of George Bell
#9I'm sorry but this is garbage in my view.
We need to use the time we have in order to do the things that are important to us, not to enrich "others" whoever they may be. This obsession about society and socializing and following norms and "fitting in" is one of the things that are seriously fucked up in the western world.
We need more people who have gone sideways, more recluses, more geniuses, more people who do not fit in and do things their own way. Otherwise what's the point?
I understand that this may sound alien or maybe crazy to people who have grown up in western societies and therefore been indoctrinated to an extreme degree to seek the approval of others and so on, but that's all there is to it really, social conditioning. Nobody will remember you 200 years after you die, you better use the time you have to do something meaningful with your life and to me that does not include idle socializing so that some sacks of blood, meat and bone will "feel" sad when you're gone.
Re: The Lonely Death of George Bell
#10We need a society where every person is needed and wanted. We need it more than any dumb technical advance that lessens the need for people, like robots delivering pizza or whatever. That will take some heavy thinking, though, and I feel that we haven't even started.