Is There Happiness In Isolating Yourself?

Can isolating yourself lead to a happier life? Zoning everyone out and their problems can be a source of peace for some but do you end up backing yourself in a corner with nothing but a wall behind you where there used to be friends and family? Along the way of living my single life I have noticed that I have a handful of friends that I can call on. Even saying a handful can be an exaggeration. I have been away from home for more than 10 years and the friends that I once knew so well are not as close as they used to be. Even a phone call seems so out of the way for me now. So I often wonder if my comfort in being single has driven me to be truly alone and for how long?

Where I live there is absolutely nothing to do for common socialization. It’s a small town and slowly but surely over the 3 years that I have lived here, more and more, I have managed to find comfort in the solitude of my home along with my dog. Day after day I come home to the same TV and the same comfortable pillowtop mattress with the same laptop. I have found contentment in pecking away at my keyboard while my TV plays something on Netflix in the background for noise replacing a familiar voice from a friend. Forget the days of trying to figure out what’s going on in town, forget trying to hang out in search of for what seems now empty laughs and conversation. My quiet home has become my closest friend now. It doesn’t tell me of the woes of its life. It doesn’t chock my mind full of negative thoughts because someone hurt its feelings or is sleeping with its spouse. All the negative speak that comes with getting to know someone better. These days, my life is empty enough but I don’t need it filled with keeping up with someone’s life and helping them cope with their situations.

But on the other end of that are the joys in someone’s life that my comfort in being antisocial has caused me to miss out on. The laughs that I think are empty could positively intertwine its way into my thoughts and bring a smile to my face when I am feeling down but I choose not to even give it a chance. Am I missing out on human contact and all that is needed to keep my own self human? Human contact is crucial in life to keep you sane, to keep you in the loop of civilization. Gaining insight of human nature from television only is unnatural. And only receiving human contact from work isn’t natural either. Depending on who you have to associate with, human contact through work can cause forced interactions but it’s still a form of socialization I suppose. One, that at this stage in my life, I want to do without as well.

There are many times in our lives we do have to deal with things that cause us a wide range of negative emotions that if we were to cut ourselves off from the world we wouldn’t have to deal with them. From stress on the job dealing with a co-worker’s issue to someone crying to you about someone they know being afflicted with a crippling disease, we can just give a shrug, disconnect and crawl back into ourselves and not give a flip. But is it right to shelter our own selves from these types of emotions? Can we prevent the amount of negatives in our life? But at what cost? Situations of tragedy and situations of elation often go hand in hand. I would love to live in a world where only uplifting things happened but that will not always be the case in life. So by me cutting my emotions off towards others because I only want to hear good things in order to not take on the stress or the downtrodden feelings of another, doesn’t make me much of a human being. I’m no longer sure if it’s my environment, my only-child syndrome ways, my comfort in being anti-social or what that keeps me with a desire of wanting to be left alone. All I know is that as I get older in my life I find myself distancing myself away from those that I know and even those that I love. In a sense, I feel that this cuts down on any stress that can present itself in my life. But by distancing myself could I be missing out on possible joys that could make my life less stressed as well?