God, Drugs, and Loneliness

Hungarian-Canadian addiction specialist Gabor Maté, describing one of his patients, wrote one of the saddest sentences I’ve ever read. Referring to an HIV-infected sex worker under his care, he quoted her saying: “The first time I did heroin… it felt like a warm, soft hug.” This sentence has haunted me for years after reading Dr. Maté’s book. Imagine feeling so alone, so bereft of contact with something satisfying, that you find solace by driving a spike in your vein.

Dr. Maté writes about addicts suffering the lingering traumas of childhood abuse, while researcher Bruce Alexander, another expatriate living in Canada, describes addicts facing the consequences of loneliness. Both share one underlying realization, that people consume drugs because they lack something. Their souls feel so desolate, they’re desperate for some connection. For diverse reasons, they believe they’ll only get it by stuffing their bodies with foreign substances.

As humans, we’re acutely conscious of our innate solitude. Even surrounded by people, we feel alone, bounded by our material finitude. Wild animals and plants don’t need to ask what role they ought to pursue, what choices they should make; they fit into their ecosystem and pursue their instincts. Humans can’t do that. We make choices daily, and often spend years reckoning with consequences for our bad or poorly-considered decisions.

Yet we want something more. We’re aware the world exists, and we’re somehow part of it, but we don’t know what that means in any particular way. In times past, humans found meaning through two chief means: religion and war. Both give us roles and responsibilities, defined by something greater than ourselves, something into which we can immerse our beings. We can stop being finite, and become part of something vast, something meaningful.

Religion offers people deeper unity. The mystical impulse promises us the ability to know God innately, or become one with the Brahma, or understand and embrace our place in society. Religions offer humans the ability to not be alone. Despite the well-intentioned promises of secular scholars who claim all religions are paths to salvation (which is an innately Christian concept), all religions aren’t identical. They do, however, offer a matching promise:

Dr. Gabor Maté

You don’t have to be alone.

Except that, in a religiously plural age, we no longer experience religion as oneness. Answers aren’t clear-cut. We have to make decisions, knowing the high likelihood that our decisions are wrong, which possibly explains why religious people seem constantly at war with one another. To embrace religion today doesn’t assuage our loneliness, as our ancestors experienced; if anything, it makes us more acutely conscious of natural human solitude.

So we turn outside ourselves seeking unity. People define their identities through volunteer activities or political parties, through immersive hobbies or evangelizing secular values. We seek unity with something greater which, without religion, must be something within the world. That something is always outside ourselves, it can never be us. To seek meaning internally inevitably reminds us how alienated and alone we necessarily are.

Some people feel this pain, this isolation, so acutely that they just want the pain to go away. For them, the issue lacks nuance or complexity; the pain is so overwhelming that it has to stop. Whether through substances or the ecstasy of religious transport, they need the pain to stop now. Faith or drugs numb them to trauma and suffering long enough to feel normal, but not long enough to actually heal.

Not all religious people behave thus, of course, just as not all recreational drug users are addicts. People’s unique circumstances reflect the way they seek the union of souls. If they didn’t, we’d never feel lonely. We’d be finite and alone, sure, but we’d be finite and alone in the same way, and nobody would suffer distinctly. To be human is, on some core level, to remain constantly lonely.

The human desire to bandage our loneliness manifests in ways that people behave. We seek company, even to our own detriment; we embrace people we don’t necessarily like. How many “friends” do we have, whom we need to consume alcohol or drugs to stand being around? We numb ourselves to others because we need them, their company, their continuity. Sometimes we numb ourselves with substances, other times with liturgy.

Such maudlin meanderings seem superficially hopeless. Nobody likes to think that loneliness is tied to human nature. Yet thinking about it, I gain great comfort: everyone else is as estranged and isolated as me. I’m not alone in my loneliness. And that’s profoundly consoling.