Always busy.

It makes me sad that people are so busy all of the time.

I made the above its own paragraph because it is such an enormous understatement, it really needs to stand out a bit. Maybe I should put it in all caps, bold, italics, and underline, maybe in a variety of different colors, maybe repeating 100 times, and that could be the entire content of the blog. Is anyone else lonely? Does anyone else feel alienated by the fast, breakneck pace of our daily lives? Does anyone else feel like human companionship is more important than getting ahead, making more money, always advancing forward to some imagined destination called "success"?

I admit that I'm different from most people. Although I have worked a normal job for many years, I have more often been unemployed. A combination of fear and passivity have kept me largely home-bound and socially isolated. But even when I've been involved in a job, school, and various social activities, I've found that I still haven't been happy. Why? Because it seemed like I could never make a real connection with people. They didn't want to hang out outside the job, outside the classroom, outside the theatre. And I couldn't understand why.

However friendships are formed, it must not be the way that I tend to try and form them. And among those people who I call friends, most of them I seldom see because they are constantly busy. They literally have no free time. Of course, that's not really true, but it's easy to say to someone if you want to put them off. Or if it is true, isn't there something wrong with that picture? It seems like nobody only works 40 hours a week anymore. Got to keep going above and beyond the call if you want to keep your job. People are pressured to give more and more of themselves to the company or the class assignment, they lose sleep, their health suffers, they lose touch with their family and friends, they no longer have time for the things they really enjoy, it's all just work, work, work, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go............

Now I admit that if I had a little work and a little "go, go, go" obligations myself, I wouldn't have as much time to feel lonely and isolated, but because everyone is in that Ultra-Ambition mode, I feel like they don't have time to get to know someone new, or even someone old, like me. Someone who just wants to feel a connection with people.