While walking the dog this morning, I observed a long series of bicycle riders travelling towards downtown along Bond Street. These were all folks of an age to have uncommitted time on a Monday morning -- that is, they may all be retired. In addition, they all appeared to believe that it is not possible to ride a bicycle without first changing into funny clothes. On the other hand, they clearly felt that obeying traffic laws is optional for bike riders.
I tend to get a little peeved about such false presumptions whenever they contradict presumptions of my own. Such ideas have been the impetus for other commentaries in the past and likely will incite still more in the future. (You may have noticed how I unfairly cast these folks' odd preference for "biking" clothes as a false belief in the necessity of such clothing.) So it should be no surprise for me to say that I felt a tad alienated from this stream of bike riders.
What is interesting to me is how easily this minor point of alienation could be expressed in the full gamut of emotion. By the time I returned home, I discovered that I was feeling isolated, angry, and depressed. Only just a little bit angry and a bit depressed, but why feel this way at all? I took me several minutes to realize that these were the emotional expression of that minor sense of alienation from old bikers.
I'm sure that had anything interesting distracted me during the rest of my walk I would not have noticed this linkage. The distraction would not have had to be very large to make me forget the entire stream of people on Bond Street. But as no distraction arose, I was able to observe my own emotional state.
It should be noted that the original sense of alienation is reasonable on its own terms. These are people close to my own age who are engaged in an activity which is close to -- in fact, superficially identical to -- an activity in which I engage regularly. The distinct difference in attitude toward this activity between myself and all of these other people gives rise to cognitive dissonance. That leads to a heightened awareness of separation where no distinction is visible. This is all a very normal human response.
What surprised me was the observation that there seems to be no threshhold for the secondary emotional aspects of this cognitive reaction to differences. I would have expected that anger and depression would not come into play until the alienation had reached some preset level of significance. A truly trivial alienation such as this would, I thought, stop with the simple fact of feeling different. A stronger sense of being separated, separation in some more fundamental way or separation which factually threatened my well-being would, I thought, be necessary to invoke the complex emotional dynamic.
The fact that even a little bit of alienation can arouse the full panoply of emotional response sets the question in a different light. How does a pre-teen deal with being just a little different at school? How does an uncertain stranger react to walking into a church gathering? How does a citizen deal with neighbors of differing opinion? The whole fabric of actual reality seems a little bit more complicated now, and the playing of the actual reality game just a little bit harder.