Lonely lives

Friendship used to be a staple of human lives.
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Increasingly professionals are filling this need.
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This gap in our time short lives.
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Time pressured, money paying lives.
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Paying money for everything.
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Friendship or ersatz friendship.
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While it is a truism that money cannot buy friends.
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It can buy many of the functions that friendship once served.
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One of the most insidious transformations of our social capital is the commercialization, in the form of celebrity news, 
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TV dramas and the like. 
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Of societies increasingly intimate involvement in other people's lives and stories.
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These replace the caring relationships and intimate knowledge of people around us with voyeuristic glimpses into the lives of distant or fictitious personages, temporarily assuaging the hunger for intimacy and community.
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Of course, this feeling of involvement is an illusion.
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It is a one-way involvement that can therefore never be truly nourishing.
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It leaves the real need unmet.
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And ultimately creates even stronger unmet needs.
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A perfect recipe for addiction.
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A further example of the professionalisation of friendship is to be found in the proliferating professions of life coach
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Grief counsellor.
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Psychologist.
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Spiritual adviser.
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And all the others.
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Wise advice and a steadying hand, a person to turn to and a shoulder to cry on.
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These too are now for sale.
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The rapid growth of these "services" can mean only one thing: again.
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That something people once did for themselves and each other has been taken away from them and sold back.
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Cut off from community and alienated from our own intuitive wisdom.
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We find ourselves increasingly dependent on professional advice.
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Tragedy is that so many of these experts and gurus are themselves dysfunctional people.
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What price do we pay?
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Ever more lonely lives.