‘Home Alone’ during the lockdown is painful when you are ‘twenty’ something

He was nine when he first saw “Home Alone.” On that day a brown-eyed brown boy watcheda blue-eyed blonde boy say “I made my family disappear” with a smirk and proceeded to jump on top of his bed. The brown boy thought it looked like fun. He too decided to jump on his bed as well. He dropped back to earth following a stinging rebuke. No, films weren’t quite real, he learnt.

Now millions of people everywhere are experiencing what it means to be ‘Home Alone’. The Brown Boy has grown. It’s been over a decade since he lost faith in films. For four months now, he has walked only in the modest apartment he resides in. Four months feel like a million years.

He looked out often but there was no drama on the streets, no man furtively trying to urinate in the corner, no elder citizen waving his umbrella at impudent bikers, not a soul in sight. His cousin has contracted the Coronavirus and is in the hospital. The Brown Boy feels strangely envious. It would have been nice to stay in a new place, see new faces and speak to new people in the hospital, he muses.

He has learned that he’s in fact not an introvert that he thought he was. His yearning to prove otherwise is becoming overwhelming. He is not really a loner.

He has plenty of friends with whom he engages in chats on the internet. Even before the pandemic his and his friends’ online presence was substantial. But now despite having hundreds of friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter, there is no one to talk to.

He now knows the number of corners a decent apartment has. He has looked up videos on YouTube to see if they ask this question on the money-making quiz shows. He doesn’t kill mosquitoes anymore. Malaria to him is now nothing but a warm hug. He has developed an unhealthy obsession with reaction videos.

Reaction videos are videos on the internet where someone films themselves watching a video someone else made. He has grown to love many reactors. It does the job. It’s much easier to like a stranger who loves your favourite film than to introduce it to a friend who may or may not like it So many people have learnt to cook. The Brown Boy has made attempts as well. But baking a cake till it becomes a dishevelled biscuit is not cooking. He wished he had a pet. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But no work makes all play seem very dull. Work is supposed to be dull, play being dull is just sad.

An article in ‘Psychology Today’ discusses the effect of loneliness in quarantine. The article says that loneliness by operating through physical pathways increases the risk of death and leaves people susceptible to coronary heart disease and stroke. This public health crisis has left many people living alone. Their social rhythm and their daily life patterns have been disrupted heavily. The longer this feeling of isolation continues their cardiovascular system might respond to stress differently.

Lonely people, the Brown Boy learns, don’t respond to stress well. Sleep patterns have also been dis-lockdown. The article further argues that the way to help lonely people isn’t by introducing them to new people and encouraging social interactions but by teaching them how to think about their inter- actions differently. It is called social cognitive training interventions.

While homo sapiens were smarter than most species, sapiens weren’t the only species in the genus Homo. Out of the many human species were the Homo Neanderthals, said to be stronger than sapiens and with a bigger brain. But what is unique to homo sapiens is language, the only species on the planet that can have conversations on a wide range of topics including things like money, government or nations, something we created and didn’t exist in the first place.

Our complex language allowed us to form battle strategies and maintain unity amongst our peers. We have always been a tribe that excelled collectively. It’s tattooed in our brains.

But because of the Coronavirus, we are forced to stay apart, work alone and interact while maintaining distance. This way of survival goes against our nature. We are aliens and hopelessly lonely. We have a lot left to learn and there are plenty of uncharted territories.

Let’s tread wisely.