Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our time is all the lonely people out there. Our society is dominated by work and business, where people just have no time or very little time to address the virtues which do or should matter most to them.

What people are really going after is love, friendship, family and a healthy, caring, society. But they are pushed and shoved into various institutions and moulded into what ‘the system’ wants with its rote and deadening routine.

Thousands are ending up on dating sites and are there for years, with poor social skills or none at all. Many say they are “missing something in their lives” but do not know what that is, even though it is as plain as the nose on their faces.

Dates are dominated by work and endless circumstantial issues. Hours and hours of jaw-boning about their hectic lives. Some go so far that they are actually in breach of their confidentially agreements with their employers. The only thing they can connect to is their work and toil. They know absolutely nothing else.

Dating has become a disease for many who live in their own fantasy land, who go through hundreds of strangers looking for inspiration when what they really need is a psychiatrist to sort out the entanglement in their heads. They are lonely, depressed, on the brink, complaining about work and their lives, but cannot see any life outside of work which has become their life.

These lonely people are in a desperate condition psychologically and will eventually burn out. They have human needs which cannot be satisfied by money or a promotion. Of course many of them have been caught up in the rat-race greed culture. Ongoing dating seems to be a substitute for a real relationship.

Serial daters are as common as lampposts. However, these getting-around people cannot cure their loneliness. They just want a distraction from their jobs which they love to hate. Governments might consider State-run dating agencies that actively seek to pair off people, instead of the tens of thousands of window shoppers who are online with zero social skills, turning over millions of web pages and dreaming.

It is a great tragedy indeed that many people will leave this life never having known love, friendship or happiness. So many have great regrets when they are close to the end and suddenly realise the loss of friendships and intimacy.

Work is now the new religion and if you are not in work you are an atheist — even though you must suffer the alienation and loneliness of what can be years of dubious toil, while no better off down the line than at the beginning of your ‘working’ life.

Why should work come first? If people want to be truly happy, society needs to end the robotic movement and let people be human because that is what they are most good at which will bring about the most good.

Maurice Fitzgerald
Shanbally, Co Cork