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• Loneliness (Score:3, Insightful)

  by Matts (1087)

  I can never quite put my finger on it, but big cities always make me feel incredibly lonely. London and New York both do that to me, yet nowhere else has really. I can stand in the middle of Oxford street, a thousand people passing by me in an instant, and feel the most agonising despair for someone to just be with me. [1]
  
  Yet I've never felt that way in the country. I could walk for miles on Strensall Common (across the road from where I grew up), or on the North York Moors, or even now, around the Cotswol
  • Re:Loneliness (Score:1)

    by FoolontheHill (2732) on 2002.03.04 11:44 (#5444) Journal

    I feel very similarly (sometimes). I rationalize my feeling thus:

    I think it is a case of "out of sight out of mind". By which I mean that in Oxford Street (London), there is a constant and never-ending flood of people and it is this that reminds me that I am just one of many millions of unique people and that they are all quite possibly feeling the same thing? Anywhere else it is much easier to pretend that you are the centre of your own universe because there are not lots of other people who are clearly the centre of their own universes bumping into you and quite happily existing without needing to even acknowledge you existence.

    Maybe this is just a little bit like the "total perspective vortex" from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Although I would say that it is not total. So that Oxford Street effects different people in different ways depending on the strength of that person perspective of their universe. Sometimes I can walk along it and feel like I am at the centre of everything and other times excluded from everything.

    Well thats how I feel sometimes.

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