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Imaginary friends can’t solve real problems

We live at a time of constant hyper-connectivity. Regardless of where you live, you can always connect with friends across town or across the world using your cell phone, email, text messages, or social networking web sites. However, according to a recent publication, we feel lonely and desperate as never before.

According to an article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers at the University of Miami and at the University of Buffalo discovered we feel so lonely that for many people the only friends they have are TV characters, with whom the lonely people develops imaginary interpersonal relationships.

In their article, psychologists Jaye Derrick, Shira Gabriel and Kurt Hugenberg explain what they call the “Social Surrogacy Hypothesis,” that is, the substitution of real relations where people interact with real people for relationships with movie or TV characters. For many people, those characters are the only “close friends” they have, to the point people adopt their idiosyncrasy and lifestyle.

These para-social or pseudo-relationships are the result, according to these three researchers, of many people no longer having the ability to develop relationships with real people, developing as a consequence relations with imaginary people, as a way to overcome their loneliness and low self-esteem.

Relationships with real people are unpredictable and bi-directional. However, relationships with TV characters are totally predictable (you meet them every day at the same at the same channel) and unidirectional.

Those relations are so “real” for those involved in them that they experience real pain and anguish when the TV series where they “friends” appear ends or is canceled. For the person affected, the pain is as real as losing a blood and flesh friend.

According to the three psychologists, every day on average Americans spend more time with TV characters than with real people. The cycle then feeds itself, because pseudo-relationships have a negative effect in the development of true relationships.

It is interesting to know that this story also appeared the same week when the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality announced it will begin the distribution of information in Spanish about depression (specifically, anti-depressants), because of the growing impact of depression among Latino immigrants. These two stories are clearly connected.

We live in a post-modern society where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fantasy, between truth and illusion. In fact, this distinction, that was so important to Plato in ancient Greek, has become now so irrelevant that the usual answer is, “It is real to me.”

I wonder if we will be able to solve real problems if we never leave the little boat and we go around and around singing, “It's a small, small world.”  I don’t think so.

We have become so used to live inside our own fantasies, that we have created a phantasmagoric maze so convoluted we never go “outside,”  not even when we feel alone and depressed.

Perhaps it is time to boldly face reality and develop risky but rewarding relationships with real people.

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