I’ve had this story hanging around my browser for a week now, waiting to be used. And seeing as the summer weather seems to have wipe my brain clean of any and all ideas about what to blog about today ^[1], I figure today’s the day to use it as a jumping off point for a blog entry.

I’d say today’s blog entry was going to be about the subject of that article, but we both know that I am unlikely to fulfill that kind of commitment.

Anyhow, the article is about our human need for physical content with other human beings. This includes but is by no means limited to sex. And while the article refers to this need by the extraordinarily ugly phrase “skin hunger”^[2], it makes some very salient points about this tragically under-recognized need.

This sort of thing is what leads people to hire sex workers to hold them and stroke their foreheads for an hour.

As the article notes, we have known for a very long that human beings, along with our closer primate cousins, need to be touched in order to thrive. This is most dramatically illustrated in the case of overcrowded orphanages where the babies all get their physical needs taken care of but there is little to no physical contact with the overworked nurses who barely have time to get everyone fed and clean.

These babies grow up into a group children with much, much higher rates of serious mental illness than the general population. They also tend to be undersized for their age and sometimes even show signs of malnutrition despite having been fed just as well as a baby with active, involved parents.

Some even die. They die from lack of love.

So yeah. This is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a real thing. And I think it has a very profound impact on modern life. I believe that a big part of the spiritual crisis of our age, which leaves even mentally healthy people feeling cold and isolated and empty sometimes, comes from a vastly underserved need for nurturing, and that need is most potently realized in our lack of touch.

It’s not hard to see where it comes from, however. One factor is the association that has formed between “cuddling” and early childhood. Somehow, the need to be touched came to be associated with the “childish things” we are meant to “put away” when we get older. As if the need vanishes along with our baby teeth and onesies.

A more important factor in the formation of this touch deficit is that the closer we naked beach apes live to one another, the more important personal boundaries become.

The epitome of this occurs in super high population density cities like Tokyo. We have all seen the images of people being pushed into a railway car and packed in tight as sardines in a can.

But if you watch carefully, none of those people actually touch one another. At least, not by the contact rules of their society. They might get jostled together, but without even thinking about it, they take great pains to make sure they never touch any of the other people with their hands.

That’s because we can only tolerate that kind of crowding if we feel safe from any kind of intimate contact with strangers. Modern society depends on these social barriers because they are an integral part of suppressing the usual response of a human being to being close to total strangers, which is to move into a state of alertness which may very well turn into aggression as we attempt to establish a more natural spacing.

In fact, it is said that in very high density societies like that of Tokyo, and Japan in general, the only two reasons people touch each other is to fuck, or to fight.

That’s obviously an exaggeration, but it gets the idea across.

And that’s true of less pop-dense societies like Canada as well. It’s true of city life everywhere, at least to some extent. A lot of things become clearer when you realize that living and coming into proximity with hundreds of total strangers is not natural for human beings and we have developed elaborate social structures to deal with that fact.

Where was I? Oh right, touch. Yay, I remembered the point!

It’s these rules that isolate us from healthy sources of human touch.  So much of modern social life is concentrating on preventing intimacy with strangers – there’s no way our human minds could handle that much intimacy – that we end up overcompensating and leaving people feeling unloved, unwanted, and unhappy.

The article talks about it in the context of the inhuman practice of solitary confinement. I’ve experienced a form of that myself due to my agoraphobia. And it definitely made me feel isolated and unloved, to the point of being suicidal.

And it’s led to something which seems counterintuitive at first : I hate being touched by strangers. I really don’t want people I don’t know to touch me. It doesn’t burn like fire to me like I was autistic or anything. I just don’t want people to touch me if I don’t know them,.

And it took me a long time to figure out why. It’s because a touch from a stranger is like a tiny tiny taste of something I want so bad that getting just that tiny taste of it with no hope for any more is downright maddening. It wakes the sleeping giant that is my terrible, terrible loneliness and leaves me worse off because now I am depressed.

All from a casual touch by a stranger who probably meant no harm.

So yeah. I know what skin hunger is all about.

And I wish I could dream up a solution to the problem, both for me and for society, but I can’t. There is no way to get people to touch each other more,. “cuddle parties” aside.

I guess I can’t solve all the world’s problems with my brilliant mind.

But I will never stop trying.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.