A Life Truly Lived Must Inherit Enduring Loneliness

There is a certain loneliness inherent to living a rich life. To the one living it, it goes off with a quiet whimper. Against the baseline of a risk-averse life—one optimized for stability, repetition, and the avoidance of loss—what feels unfathomable there can be unremarkable in ours. This mathematical delta in the richness of the memories of our lives is where value is truly measured.

Everyone deeply wealthy knows this, or has a mind like Dory in Finding Nemo and cannot observe it, or—through cognitive dissonance—denies it but still feels it; and everyone without money often neglects it. Sometimes the wealthy envy the richness of love only found among those struggling at the bottom, where experiences swing rapidly from peak to trough, from hardship to joy. Those swings form tighter bonds and compress more experience into smaller amounts of time. They live a richer life, truly.

Herein lies the infinite problem of rich lives. If there is no loneliness, then there is no richness to our experience of being alive. Only when there is real tempo to our lives can we live a memory-rich life. Such loneliness is certain to arrive in the hearts of those who live rich lives, from peak to trough, from sadness and loss to joy and passion.

The reason is in our face. The more we experience, the more we leave behind, since time is scarce and so is attention; and we cannot contain all of it in our static, or even our moving-average, frame. Those people and those un-lived lives, in the infinite other frames we did not inhabit but touched, even briefly, create an abstract grief, a deeply intellectual one, if you will. It is one where simulations of what could have been widen our frame of awareness, and in that moment we collapse into sadness because all we see is what was left behind and abandoned, forgotten, as the cost of being present through so many transformations and journeys, a rich life truly lived.