Hispanic antibodies to the global loneliness epidemic

By Gonzalo López Martí  – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• It’s a global crisis.
• Loneliness.
• Not to be confused with solitude.
• The latter, whether voluntary or not, is usually transient and can be a pleasurable state.
• The former inflicts serious emotional pain on the sufferer.
• Usually with negative physical consequences and symptoms.
• Mental health specialists and governments, particularly in so-called industrialized nations, are sounding the alarm.
• Despite the illusion of connectedness that technology and social media injects into modern life our collective sanity seems to be seriously threatened.
• In China, for example, the notorious and now defunct “one child policy” created, on one hand, a generation of spoiled, entitled only children* and, on the other, a massive amount of miserable empty nesters.
• The problem seems to manifest itself very gravely in countries of Anglo Saxon, Nordic and Germanic Protestant culture where, for instance, parents have the habit of kicking their kids out the house when they reach 18 years of age.
• Go to college, find a job, clear your room.
• Be productive, be self-reliant.
• Sure, but at what price?
• In so-called developed countries an awful lot of people live alone.
• You’ve probably heard about the new Ministry of Loneliness that the UK government has put in place to attend to the massive number of miserable elderly folks living alone, some of which allegedly go for stretches of weeks without interacting with another human being.
• Gives the aphorism “misery loves company” a totally new meaning, huh?
• See, dwelling in a bachelor or bachelorette pad in one’s 20s & 30s can be fun.
• In one’s 40s & 50s it becomes a bit neurotic.
• Come your 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond it is gloom & doom.
• Then again, the big lonely scare might as well be a massive campaign of PR & astroturfing orchestrated by Big Pharma to keep stuffing our bloodstreams with happy pills and assorted meds.
• You never know.
• Conspiracy theories aside, I foresee a lot of attention on us Latinos.
• It is a known fact that we are considerably less vulnerable to this nasty malady of the soul.
• We are gregarious.
• Overly so.
• We somehow manage to dodge despair.
• Are we afraid of the thing, impervious or just immune?
• Who knows.
• Due a number of reasons (mainly the fact that we rarely are too hard on ourselves), we Latinos tend to be less prone to, for instance, suicide.
• Despite the fact that we live in or hail from alarmingly dysfunctional societies and borderline failed nations.
• How can we use this to our advantage?
• Firsts thing that comes to mind: tourism.
• Latin countries could become happiness resorts of sorts.
• Rehab for lonely souls.
• Another industry: music and dance.
• It’s happening.
• Maluma and his monotone odes to sexual promiscuity are proving to be mighty profitable to record companies.
• Another one: entertainment, streamed, live or otherwise.
• Luis Miguel La serie, essentially the life and redemption of a very lonely precocious kid, is making a killing and, with a little luck, should cross borders.
• Anyhoo.
• Where was I?
• Ah, yes: how will we handle loneliness in the future, when people live well into their 90s or even 100s?
• The pension/healthcare/social security systems of developed countries are already running on fumes.
• The tax-paying workforce will not be robust enough to support it.
• Soon.
• Governments will not have the funds to support millions of elderly folks living in retirement facilities, let alone single family homes.
• The solution might be a very Hispanic one: multigenerational households.
• Just sayin’.

*Mostly male because Chinese couples, confronted with the mandate of having only one offspring, opted for abortion when the sonogram indicated it was a babygirl. The logic being that a baby boy offered a more “productive” outlook down the road of life, retirement in the harsh life of ultra competitive post Communism.