Isolation and Loneliness
For my writing piece, this modernist essay will be about the topic of loneliness and how it feels to be isolated and lonely. This will mostly revolve around loneliness and isolation from a teenagers’s point of view and how the Great Depression contributed to loneliness in the 1930’s. Also, I will talk about how teens can become isolated or lonely in a normal life and how “being lonely” and “feeling lonely” are two different things.
Teenagers can experience the feeling of loneliness for many different reasons. One reason could be that when a teen tries to speak to someone or tries make friends , they are ignored by others. Another reason could be that when trying to spend time with family, no one else is home and their parents work all day or trying to find work or just too busy to do anything. The Great Depression is a very good example of an event that basically promoted loneliness and isolation. I think this because during the Depression, many people, including adults and teens alike, were trying to find some sort of work if they were lucky.
If a person would happen to find a job, they would most likely have to travel and have to leave their family and friends behind making the person isolated and feeling lonely. If a teen were to find a job in these times, the teen would probably have to quit school in order to work. I think it’s agreeable that life would be impossible to live out if one was isolated from others. If this really was the problem, extreme feelings of loneliness and sadness would take over because there is no one around to talk to or care for or care for them. Perhaps insanity would soon take over from being alone for so long.
Also, the society around a person can have a big role in the isolation and the feeling of loneliness of that person. A society of people usually determines whether a person is acccepted because they relate to the society or ignored for being different physically, mentaly, emotionally or because of the person’s beliefs and actions. For example, imagine a high school in which many kinds of students are enrolled. There are enough students to create many kinds of cliques, or a specific group of people such as “jocks” or “preps” and many other groups. A perticular student does not fit the certain characteristics of these groups and is ignored or isolated.
An example of this would be a student who doesn’t play sports is shunned or picked on by students who are on the football team. The student would feel abandoned and hurt because now he/she feels they don’t fit in their society which could lead to the student’s tragic fate like suicide. I know this has happened before. I personally believe that there is a slight difference between “feeling alone” and actually being alone. I think a person can be or feel one or the other or together at the same time. A person could be surrounded by a large group of people but feels loneliness because he/she does not relate or does not belong with the people around them.
Also, lets say that a teenager is left at home while his/her parents go to the store. The teen would technically be alone, but the teen would’t feel lonely because the parents will return. I think that loneliness felt during the Great Depression in the 1930’s and loneliness felt today are somewhat similar, yet different. As a teenager today and with my experience with loneliness, I think now that it is not so easy to be or feel lonely as it was during the Great Depression. Also, the teenager and young adult of the 1930’s went with not having a job and in most cases a family to becoming very successful and having a family of their own because of what they learned from the Depression.
