Connections to other people

So the world is trying to tell me something I don't want to hear. The idea of life being less meaningful or less fun or less "insert positive thing here" without connections to other people. It's not that I disagree so much as it feels like a pointed statement to me right now. Yeah, I know the obvious downsides to choosing to exist as a oner instead of as part of a couple or larger family. And I accept them. But I am also recognizing lately that there are less obvious downsides that I haven't considered for a while. Even little things like thinking over movies I've seen or music I've listened to, I remember that I wouldn't have seen or listened to this or that particular thing were it not recommended to me by the people I was hanging out with at a certain time in my life. Somehow that seems more significant to me than the knowledge that I don't have anyone to freakin' cuddle with at night, which is what seems to drive a lot of people into relationships. How many cultural experiences do I miss from that lack of input?

Of course, there's the internet, which provides reference services all the time. But it's almost ephemeral, surface level; it's not the shared physical experience of watching a David Lynch film and discussing it for hours and feeling on fire with ideas, or going to a Brazilian Girls concert with a friend when you'd never even heard of them before and feeling that emotional specificity that music provides.

I have friends, and I see them fairly often, so it's not a dire situation, just something that has come up recently. A reminder to not let them fall by the wayside out of lethargy or hermitage.

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To my mind, Cloud Atlas was all about how our connections to other people are pretty much the only good thing in a world full of horrors, about how interacting with other people changes us, and how magical that can be. There's even one point where a character says the only way we truly know ourselves is through the eyes of the Other. Which struck me because I've spent my whole life attempting to reject definition from the outside. If that's a true statement, what does that say about my inherent abhorrence of the whole idea? I'm just not sure what to do with that. The right to self-definition is one that I consider to be of pretty primary importance. Why would we seek to have another define us?

But I get it. There is the nausea of looking into yourself and finding a lack of purchase. Maybe the eyes of the Other give you something to stand on, a reference point? I've always found the idea of myself in Others' eyes to be inevitably wrong. But maybe that's more about what I can and cannot accept about myself than it is about what is a truth about who I am.

I don't know. Through my life I've found that women especially, when they define themselves by the Other, it's almost always by the male Other, and that's problematic because historically men have viewed us as less human than men. Why would I want to be defined that way? That's not shelter from the storm; that's a lie that demeans us both. That's worse than existential pain and loss. That's the worst thing I can think of (relative to this discussion).

So is it possible for the Other's gaze to be helpful? To be less about objectification or broad generalization based on the Other's own understanding of the world rather than my specific self and more about telling me a truth that helps my self-understanding? Can I be made less abstract without being frozen in a shape of someone else's choosing?

I find it doubtful, but I can't help but be intrigued by the thought.