The Opposite of Loneliness

So, the title of this post I stole from one of my favorite articles on the internet—one that everyone should read because it aptly discusses what I think all of us are looking for in life but seldom verbalize: the opposite of loneliness.

I left UVA a little early for thanksgiving break to attend a wedding in Abu Dhabi and it’s a BLAST. But something that I noticed through every step of this trip is that humans, while insanely social creatures who fear loneliness, pay to keep others away from them. We constantly pay to limit competition to things. In class, Professor Coppock mentioned the Battle of the Buzz article and after, I realized the concept that leads to alcohol companies bankrolling campaigns against legalizing marijuana isn't foreign to our everyday lives. But this concept comes to fruition in many different ways: companies can pay to limit competitor success and growth, political candidates pay to publish negative ads about their opposition, we pay to mitigate opposition and substitutes to the things that we and our friends use and enjoy. 

On the plane, I saw a benefit of first/business class is that you have a set of bathrooms that only the 15 or so people who paid for the upgrade get to use and personal flight attendants. Whereas the rest of us in economy wait our turn for the community restroom as the flight attendants wrangle the crowds. This same philosophy applies to the wedding I’m attending. Except now instead of mitigating opposition and competition to one person’s use of something, the hosts pay to make sure that everyone except a specific group of people, their guests, are not able to use the amenities they’re providing. For context, this is a true big, fat Indian wedding. By reserving 300 of the 325 rooms at the hotel, the hosts effectively made our hotel a private playground for those they invited.

We took over the driveway leading upto the hotel for the Bharat, which is basically a huge dance party for the grooms side to escort him to his new family. A lot of people plus the horse and carrige made getting into the hotel for other cars slightly problematic....

The hosts limited the number of external guests in the building and thus the competition between groups (wedding guests and non-wedding guests) to use the different benefits within the hotel. 

The back of the hotel turned into the wedding ceremony venue, attracting a few random spectators along the way. But thanks to the wedding guests, there wasn't too much room for others to use the area. 

If you think about it, we spend time and money on a daily basis to attain exclusivity—to make sure that we and those we care about get access to things and others don’t. We make reservations at restaurants to make sure our group gets a guaranteed space that another can’t take from us. We fly first class. Like Buchanan touched on in his economic theory of clubs, we pay for country clubs and join fraternities #brotherhood. We also pay millions to be the only person with access to an exclusive Wu Tang Clan album (well, one of us did). Sometimes its cool to step back and appreciate the irony that despite fearing loneliness, we pay for exclusivity in the pursuit of making sure we and our groups can be together, alone.