"It is true that we have never actually experienced, as Adam did, what it is like to be the only person on earth. And yet many of us live most of our lives as if this were indeed our situation, and that is why there is a kind of suffering known as "loneliness", a kind of suffering known as "alienation'. People can be surrounded by other people and still be lonely and alienated, because they do not care, or do not know, how to get in touch anymore with the reality of others. After all, how tiring and intrusive other people can be! They heap us with expectations, demands, responsibilities, and any sense of siginificance in our own lives run the risk of being swallowed up among the sheer numbers, the impossible teeming bllions of others in the world. We are expendable, it seems, so quickly replaced. Once we are gone, the rest of humanity will close over us the way water closes over a sinking stone. Is it any wonder if we seek some refuge from this terror of insignificance, from the crushing pressure of relationships, from the armies of other beings who would trek like locusts through the verdant pastures of our innermost soul? The need for such a refuge is met by the deliberate yet sublimal fantasy that we are all alone in the universe. And so we walk around with our heads in the clouds, pass people on the street as if they were telephone poles, look them straight in the eyes and hardly see them, and engage in conversations that are really only conversations with ourselves. Too often others are but the punctuation marks in the dry and windy monologues of our own self-centered existence."

- Mike Mason,

"The Mystery Of Marriage"