Lonely Man – The Weird Side of the Internet

Lonely Man – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Loneliness bits big. If you listen to dusty old memes, if you ride alone, you ride with Hitler. No one wants to be alone, not always, not forever, and we live the breadth of our lives in avoidance of loneliness. But I think we’ve all heard of feral children who were abandoned at birth, only to be found eighteen years later with the table manners of a moderately-sized jackal.

But these kids, when found, are cared for and reintegrated into society. Some of them, anyway. I guess it’s a crapshoot when it come to whether or not Wild Timmy will crap on the deviled eggs at the family barbeque.

So imagine a man, not abandoned as a child, but left the only member of his tribe after a massacre. That was this man in the Amazon rainforest, a man left so alone only he knew his name. Maybe not even.

So let’s call him Ishmael. So Ishmael spent 26 years in the rainforest, seen here and there but never encountered, a near perfect isolation.

Imagine getting convicted for murder and sentenced to twenty-five years to life, and you spend all twenty-five years in solitary confinement. They say that even a month can drive out out into the fields, but what about a whole life of nobody?

He was a study in human survival, though. He had a small home built out of palm trees, trapping pits for small animals, even a hammock. Sadly, that’s where they found his body in August 2022.

What I think is interesting here is that he wasn’t somw feral human. He was a legitimate tribesperson with the weight of his slaughtered tribe on his shoulders and no one to say it to. He knew what he was missing out on.

I wonder if he ever found a volleyball?

More from Liam Sweeny…