On loneliness: The option alternative/ counterfactual alternative conflation

Today, the 5th of January, marks the first day of the third lockdown in the UK. For many of us isolated in our rooms (and isolated for awhile now), it marks the continuation of loneliness. As an extrovert, the absence of not just people, but social opportunities, hit harder. This is not a phenomenon exclusive among extroverts, for the introverts have lesser access to the extroverts who have ‘adopted’ them (Haha!), but in all seriousness no man is an island, and at the risk of sounding redundant we need the company of another.

At the point of writing I am in the UK, about 10000 km from my home in Kuala Lumpur. As it is the holiday season, many people residing in the UK are in their respective homes, and several international students travelled back as well. That leaves a handful of us here in Cambridge. In light of the new lockdown, students are not permitted, except for exceptional reasons, to travel back to Cambridge until at least the end of March. Meanwhile, those of us here are prohibited from travelling back to our respective homes. This potentially make those who are here feel ‘stranded’, away from most of the community, and back to our daily slog in front of the screen. From this stems loneliness.

Every year during countdown, I have a tradition of attending watchnight service with my family at church, welcoming in the new year with God. This year was the first time I was unable to do so, and I learnt one lesson which may seem obvious to most of you, not to check social media on New Years’ Eve when you are spending it alone in performance of one’s duty as a good Tier 4 citizen. I did.

An illustration of loneliness from a sitcom

The episode prompted a TV episode in one of my favourite sitcom’s ‘How I Met Your Mother’. I often glean counsel from that show. I say glean as there is much in the show that should not be followed. A similar gleaning approach is present in one of the show’s episodes. It is a well-known scene associated with intense sadness due to its portrayal of loneliness and counterfactuals. While it is a powerful scene, I argue that its approach though well-intended, may provoke even more sadness in those watching it, and the lesson is better learnt through treating the event as a ‘what not to do’.

The episode I am speaking about is ‘Time Travellers’ - which had nothing to do with actual time travel. Here, the premise initially appeared simple with Ted contemplating whether to go to a show of ‘Robots versus Wrestlers’, a favourite past time of the gang. However, as he called each member of the gang, all of them were busy with what we know as ‘adulting’ – the chores associated with adult responsibility. Lily and Marshall were busy taking care of their son Marvin while Barney and Robin were busy deciding on a caterer for their wedding. But somehow, they were also present in the episode, with Lily and Marshall arguing about a drink and Barney discussing with Ted how he got a stain on his shirt. Without attentive observation, the average audience would not see how these two plotlines cannot co-exist.

Towards the end of the episode, it was revealed that the second set of events were a Red Herring. The events relating to the drink and the shirt stain took place 5 years ago, and Ted was simply thinking about these thoughts alone in the bar. This was ‘told’ to Ted by the imaginary Barney, representing Ted’s self-realisation of the chasm between past thought and present reality. What was happening in present reality?

“Right now, Marshall and Lily are upstairs, trying to get Marvin to go back to sleep. Robin and I are trying to decide on a caterer. And you've been sitting here all night, staring at a single ticket to Robots vs. Wrestlers because the rest of us couldn't come out."¹

An ‘imaginary’ Barney then utters to Ted what is perhaps one of the most painful lines from the series: ‘Look around, Ted. You’re all alone’.

‘Look around…You’re all alone.’

That moment would be more than enough to get every depressed person more depressed. I noted earlier than though it was a touching episode, it took a wrong turn. What I mean by this it that it glossed over its own advice, what as Barney eloquently put it, the “Right Now”.

Ted shares with the audience a list of alternatives which he could have chosen. Listing out the options, they were 1) returning to his old apartment to recapture the landmark memories there, 2) go to Lily and Marshall’s place to recapture a different set of meaningful memories and see the baby, 3) spend time with Barney and Robin watching them fight about their caterer. In all three of these alternatives one thing unites them, possibility. They were alternatives in the sense that they were options, which connotes a possible realisation within the bounds of knowledge.

Contrast this with Ted’s priority alternative, the thing he told to his kids that he would “do first”. This was to meet the woman that would eventually be his wife 45 days earlier that they had been predestined to meet. He demands in a tone of sorrowful longing, “I want those extra 45 days with you. I want each one of them.” Humorously, he then states he would “take the 45 seconds before [her] boyfriend (then) shows up and punches [Ted] in the face”. A sitcom is still a sitcom, and I caution myself not to take a pre-scripted allegory too seriously. But what I want to point out is the strangeness of this fourth option from the previous three, the engagement in a counterfactual alternative.

The option alternative versus the counterfactual alternative

A crucial difference must be made between both concepts. The option alternative considers what can be done with the knowledge possessed at the time while the counterfactual alternative requires the assignment of hindsight knowledge to the decision-making process at the time. The failed distinction of the two is where the episode’s thesis on loneliness risks doing more harm than good. Many of us, like the scriptwriters of How I Met Your Mother, tend to conflate the two which leads to an unanswered pain.

Let me illustrate. When we are lonely, we tend to consider a series of questions to the effect of “What could have been?”. Perhaps we would be having a New Year’s Eve dinner or travelling to some exotic European destination. Perhaps we would just be able to have someone we do not live with over for a card game. These were option alternatives made available to us then, and things we considered doing but were prevented from doing so due to Covid-19 related restrictions. Just to caveat, we had ‘options’ in not in the sense that they were legal options, but in the sense that they were possibilities we could include in our consideration of our decision on new year’s eve plans, and relatedly whether or not to follow the law!

Contrast this with the counterfactual alternative, where to use a popular sentiment expressed by many students, we do not wish to come back to the UK for further education during pandemic times, but were forced to. Here the counterfactual alternative must be carefully distinguished from the option alternative. The counterfactual alternative was not a possibility because we did not have the knowledge that cases would rise to the extent it did in September 2020 as the winter months grew near, and then a new variant would peak our cases up to 60,000 as of the time of writing. We could say we foresaw them, but we did not have enough knowledge to make a beyond absolute doubt claim. The option alternative was not made null because Cambridge forced its students to return to preserve ‘academic rigour’, we had the choice to ignore him and face the consequences. We had enough knowledge to do so then.

Purpose of the warning

Why go to all this trouble to distinguish these two types of alternatives? Mainly, it is to prevent the process of an unanswerable regret and self-reflection process. We do not have access to the knowledge needed to make the counterfactual alternative. Presupposing that we do would only render us lost. We are forced to make a decision bound by time, put with more nuance our cognitive ‘what if’ enquiry is itself bound by time. In a sense, we have no cognitive free will, we are bound from the start by time, and the moment we try to assign hindsight to re-evaluate a decision, we realise that ‘hindsight’ is a creature of time –‘hind’ comes from behind and none can employ the word ‘behind’ without viewing it in a temporal line.

If you dislike the idea that free will is absent (as some readers might), do not let that put you off from applying the distinction between alternatives. You can always see free will as something operating within a bounded set, and hug free will tightly. The main point of this blog piece is to write an encouraging note to the lonely, not to beat themselves up over the temporally-bound lack of self-ability, but to surrender to the sovereign factor in decision-making and to wonder what He thinks about loneliness.

[1] https://transcripts.foreverdreaming.org/viewtopic.php?f=177&t=11612