Tag: Love

Are We Alone?

by James Wallace Harris, 2/19/26

There are two ways we can examine the question: Are We Alone? The first is personal. As individuals, are we by ourselves? I’ve often heard people say they feel alone even in a crowded room. The other way is to wonder if humanity is alone in the universe. Lately, I’ve been meditating on both.

With all the mysteries that the James Webb Space Telescope is discovering, and all the speculation about our universe being part of a multiverse, it’s easy to assume reality is infinite. Which would make people infinitely small. Does it matter if we’re alone in the universe when we’re so insignificant?

Of course, if we assume reality is infinite, it also means there are infinite possibilities for other beings to exist. But is this similar to that person at a big party still feeling alone? If we’re not talking, then we still feel alone.

Even though I have always had lots of friends and can be social, I’m a loner. I’ve always been a bookworm who prefers being social 20% of the time, and by myself 80%. I think I was at my most social when I was young, but after retiring, I became more social again.

However, I’m noticing something lately. As my friends move into their middle seventies, they are withdrawing into themselves. I’m trying to resist that trend, but it’s getting harder because my aging friends want to stay home. I have to admit, I want to stay home but get my friends to come over.

I felt like I had regular conversations with 40-50 people when I worked. But now that’s down to about a dozen. And two of them have been ghosting me. I think when we get old, the stress of everything makes us withdraw into ourselves. I’m both fighting that and embracing it.

Part of the problem is energy. As we age, we run out of energy, and thus it gets harder and harder to make any effort – for friends, for hobbies, for staying healthy, for keeping the house clean, etc. The other obvious problem is health. We’re just slowly breaking down.

But I wonder if there’s another factor. Are we just getting tired of explaining ourselves? Let’s face it, words fail us. Could we ever adequately express what we wanted, what we felt, what we meant? Since the advent of the Internet, people have certainly tried. But what a mess. Just imagine how well we’d do communicating with beings living on other planets orbiting distant stars?

I haven’t given up. But I think we need to explore new ways of communicating.

Yes, we’re alone, living in our heads, while existing in a fantastic reality. I’ve decided we have many problems to conquer. Two of the biggest obstacles we need to overcome are the narrative fallacy and the confirmation bias.

They work together. Basically, we embrace beliefs that have no relation to reality, and second, we only see what will confirm those fantasies. We tune out people who undermine our beliefs and embrace those who do. But other beliefs will splinter those bonds.

That shell of delusion keeps us from communicating with other people. In the long run, we’re either forced to be alone or choose to.

Maybe reality never cared about evolving beings that communicate. Maybe intelligence, self-awareness, and language are failed evolutionary experiments. Or maybe we need to try harder.

JWH

Why Was Last Night’s Dream So Damn Intense?

by James Wallace Harris, 10/14/25

Last night’s dream was epic. It was one of those dreams that was so intense that when I woke up, I was immensely thankful to be back in reality. The dream started out pleasant. Susan and I were with our friends Mike and Betsy. Maybe we were on vacation together. We kept seeing marvelous sights. I wish I could remember them. All I can remember is that the four of us went from scene to scene together. And then at some point, I realized I was in a “Can’t Find My Way Home Dream,” which I’ve written about before.

In recent years, my dreams have tended to be dark and murky, sometimes even black and white. But last night’s dream was in vivid technicolor. At times, the four of us found ourselves in dark places, outdoors, but mostly we strolled through touristy areas in broad daylight. However, some scenes were even more vivid. They were psychedelic, bright, and looked like something from Cirque du Soleil. We were having a good time. Then something changed.

I remembered we were in a dream and I tried to tell Susan, Mike, and Betsy, but they wouldn’t believe me. I knew it was a can’t find my way home dream. I’ve always been by myself in those dreams. They are very frustrating because I get lost and can no longer find my way home.

I tell Susan, Mike, and Betsy to stick close. I try to get us to all hold hands. I figure as long as we’re all together, I’d be okay. At one point, we’re in a store and Betsy wants to shop. I try to stop her, but she steps away. We lose sight of her. Then we think we see her, but we realize it’s not her, but someone who only looks like Betsy.

Then we lose Susan. I plead with Mike that we must stay together. He isn’t worried. My anxiety grows. I feel like I’m Kevin McCarthy in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I know Mike will disappear, too. And he does.

Now the dream shifts to the standard routine of the can’t find my way home dream. I run down streets hoping to find one I know. Things shift, and I’m in a mall again. I can’t find the exit. I enter a store and go to the back wall, hoping to find a door that leads outside. I find a door, but it’s into a back room. I look for another door. I find one, but it takes me to a smaller room. I discover there are no doors or windows. There are workmen in the room.

I tell them I need to tear a hole in the wall. They try to stop me. I start ripping away sheetrock and then wooden panels. Finally, I find the outside. I run out and see a vast, strange world. It’s bright and colorful, but nothing like this one.

That’s when I wake up. That’s when I always wake up.

My friend Mike has been having health issues, and that worries me. I lost my oldest friend Connell this year. I’ve known Mike and Betsy for forty-five years. I’ve known Susan for forty-eight years. So many people I’ve known have died. And nearly all my peers have been in and out of hospitals.

I assume the dream was generated from my anxiety over losing people. But it was so damn intense, so damn vivid, so damn emotionally overwhelming. It’s like my brain has a copy of Sora 2 built into it. Why did it put me in all those scenes? Who wrote the prompt?

I can’t remember the details now. They are just a blur in my memory. But in the dream, I felt like I was somewhere else. I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but that dream made me wonder.

However, if that dream was anything like an afterlife, it would be overwhelming. Buddhists believe that when we die, our personality disappears, and our soul returns to an ocean of souls. I don’t think a human mind could handle that dreamworld for long.

The dream felt like I was in a giant pool of possibilities. That our brains are like ChatGPT and Sora 2 and can generate anything. That’s only words to you.

Whenever I wake up from these dreams, reality feels solid and real. I like that. It’s comforting. Aging is making me worry. Reality is starting to feel less solid. Like an acid trip, all we can do is ride it out.

JWH

How Many People Listen to You

by James Wallace Harris, 10/2/25

It wasn’t until I couldn’t talk to my old friend that I became truly puzzled about a recent piece of advice. I lost Connell, someone I’ve known for 58 years, last April. I keep wanting to talk to him, but he’s no longer there to hear me.

My social media algorithms keep sending me various kinds of warnings about dealing with life in my seventies. A recent video told me people would stop listening to me. And, if I were a parent, I shouldn’t be shocked if my children stopped listening to me, too. What did that mean?

At first, I didn’t think that advice applied to me because I don’t have children, and I have lots of friends. I wasn’t even sure what they were talking about. I wondered if it was similar to how some of my older female friends talk about how men no longer look at them. Does becoming old make what we have to say unworthy of hearing?

I’ve always assumed I would be ignored when I got old. I remember when we were young, we’d say, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Now I don’t trust anyone under sixty. Was the advice about that kind of age prejudice? Actually, moving into my seventies makes me distrust everyone of all ages.

The video said people would stop listening to you once you got into your seventies. What do I have to say that people would no longer care to hear? And why was it a warning? Were they talking about loneliness? And who wouldn’t be listening? And does that include me? Will I stop wanting to listen to other people?

Many of my family and friends became quiet as they got older. Did they say less because they no longer cared what other people had to say and stopped listening, too?

I often want to talk to people who have died. They can’t listen anymore. Is my desire to communicate with them revealing why I want people to listen to me? And what do I have to say that will make me feel bad if it’s not heard?

Mostly, we chit-chat in life. We find damn few people to converse with on a deep level. Was that what the warning was about? Was the warning suggesting that meaningful conversations will disappear?

As I get older, I feel I’m withdrawing from the world. Maybe the warning is suggesting that as everyone withdraws, we’ll stop talking to each other?

I remember an acid trip I had back in the sixties. I took a hit that I didn’t know was a four-way hit, and got rather high. I lost my sense of self. I felt every person dwelt in their own island universe. And that real communication wasn’t possible, and the best we could do was like tossing a message in a bottle onto the ocean, hoping someone would find and read it. I sometimes feel that getting older will be like that. Was that the warning?

Do we have a need to be heard that goes unfulfilled as we age?

Maybe someone older can clarify what that warning meant. Leave a comment.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure how many people do listen to me. Oh sure, I converse with friends all the time. But that’s chit-chat. I have a few friends with whom I believe we resonate on the same wavelength. Was the warning telling me that those people will disappear in my seventies? That is a depressing thought.

I have one last theory. The older I get, the less energy I have to express myself. So I don’t make the effort. Maybe, if we don’t make the effort to send, we stop making the effort to receive.

JWH

How We Lose People as We Get Older

by James Wallace Harris, 7/6/25

I never knew my grandfathers. My father died in 1969. My grandmothers died in the 1970s. My mother died in 2007. All my twelve aunts and uncles have passed on. My sister, born in 1953, is still alive, but both her husbands and one son have died. Only seven of our twenty-four cousins are still alive. My wife, Susan, and I have known each other for forty-eight years, but we have no children.

Susan and I bought her parents’ house after they died. We hosted Christmas and Thanksgiving like her parents had for many years. As our nephews and nieces got married, they wanted to create their own holiday traditions. We stopped hosting holiday dinners. Since then, I seldom see people under sixty. I told one friend, who is 59, that she’s the youngest person I know.

Of the hundreds of people I knew in school, I kept in touch with only one person. He was my oldest friend whom I first met in 1967. I lost contact with him in April. I fear he is dead.

Before I retired, I had a large circle of friends at work. There were at least forty people I kept up with regularly. Twelve years later, I speak with one person every week on the phone, see another person about once a month, and text with a third person several times a year. All my other work friends have faded away. Several have died.

Outside of work, I’ve made many friends. Quite a few have died, but I’m still in contact with several of them, although that group is slowly shrinking. Of a group of six guys I hung out with in the 1970s, only two are still alive. I was born in 1951; only 72.8% of Americans born that year are still alive.

At seventy-three, I’m still quite social, but I realize that is changing. When I was younger, I assumed friends would only disappear when they died. But I’ve learned that many people have just drifted away. They got jobs in other cities, or they moved to a retirement community, or they quit driving, or withdrew from social life due to illness, or they moved away to be near their kids, or we just didn’t stay in touch.

Maintaining friendships requires effort. I thought being retired would give me all the time in the world to do everything I wanted. It hasn’t worked out that way. I have more time, but less energy and vitality. Aging means triaging friendships.

In recent years, I’ve often dreamed about the places I worked and all the people I knew in each job. I’d wake up from these dreams and lie in the dark and try to recall the names of all the people I knew in the job I just dreamed about. In the 1980s, I worked in a library for six years and got to know around twenty people. I’ve kept in touch with just one. But I really liked most of those people. Why didn’t I keep up with them? I know some have died, but what happened to the rest?

Over my life, I’ve had a couple of dozen good friends and hundreds of rewarding acquaintances. My sister once observed that we start out life in a room by ourselves with someone coming in to change our diapers, and we end up in a room by ourselves with someone coming in to change our diapers. She didn’t point out that we get to know hundreds of people in between.

Now that I’m on the downhill side of things, I’m experiencing a dwindling population of people I see regularly. I’m still making friends, but I fear they will only be acquaintances.

I’ve stopped driving at night, which caused me to see people less often, and for some folks, I’ve stopped seeing at all. Covid put a dent in my social circle. So did politics. Several people I once liked became unlikable after politics got so nasty.

People disappear for many reasons besides dying. Some for their reasons, some for mine. I need to make a greater effort to maintain my remaining friendships.

JWH