The loneliest place on Earth

You share the world with six billion other people. As crowded as that sounds, there are any number of places where you can feel as alone as though you just landed on the moon. Antarctica is as large as the United States but except for a few locations at the south pole and the coast, you could spend a lifetime if you had supplies and not see a trace of humanity.

There are vast areas of desert, mountain, boreal and tropical forests around the globe where if you choose, you can be totally alone. You will not see, hear, or smell anything that vaguely reminds you of civilization.

These are places to be alone. But if you want lonely, there is no better place than Midtown Manhattan. From Monday through Friday, you can join the sea of humanity that is there for one reason only: to do what has to be done to earn a paycheck and leave. Anything else is incidental. Millions of people whose only reason for walking the streets is to get from point A to point B, with as little spontaneous human interaction as possible.

Like them, when you get to point B you'll join up with others who are working with you to collect paychecks. If you want that check every other week, you'd better join in the make-believe teamwork and comraderie. You do this every day, pretending with everybody else that you live for it. Like everybody else, you do this knowing that if you come to an untimely end, the biggest concern within a week will be filling your empty cubicle with another warm body.

As you sit through meetings and go to required training, you also know that if profits decline, you'll be booted out the door and and forgotten before they unplug your desktop computer which after all, can be used by the next warm body.

If you take a walk at lunch, you might see some streets where people actually live. Mothers are walking with kids, old men sit on stoops watching whoever comes their way. They know each other, know the storeowner on the corner. You though, are nothing more than a shadow. You're a passerby without any ties. At the end of your hour, you go back into your office and perform for your paycheck, waiting for the end of the day so you can resume your life as a human being.

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