What’s the point of human connection? Is it true that happiness is only real when it’s shared?

I thought for a long time after finishing my complete emulsification in the riveting, dooming words of Jaqueline Harpman’s 1995 book, “I Who Have Never Known Men.” I was horrified, relieved and beginning some sort of existential crisis all at once.

In the novel, the largely unnamed narrator spends her life trapped in a post-apocalyptic prison with 39 other women, escaping said prison, wandering around an unknown planet and discovering other prisons full of dead people, learning how to be a human and eventually dying alone by merciful suicide in an unknown bunker.

For the last several decades of her life, the narrator is completely and utterly alone. She spends her days walking, unsure of what she’s searching for, and becomes overjoyed at discovering a new mound of dead people, because their belongings might be able to teach her something new about the world from which she came, but never knew. 

Toward the end of the book, she admits she was never happy. She never felt the love of a man, the joy of a career or any of the ordinary things we tend to take for granted. 

In one instance, the narrator discovers a dead man, who she says must have been handsome because, amid his decaying flesh and skeletal state, she saw what appeared to be a beard and an attractive face. 

That is the closest she ever gets to knowing a man, and it is quite a poignant scene. She vows to remember him, like we in the real world vow to cherish our existing lovers. 

Relationships, a quintessential part of being human, exist for the narrator somewhere between life and death — three feet down into a six-foot grave.

So, she could have achieved happiness, but it simply wasn’t accessible. 

It is important to acknowledge this, but it is not the part of the book’s teachings from which I base my findings. 

I’m talking about addiction, but not in the usual context of substances like nicotine, alcohol and hard drugs. I’m talking about our addiction to people, stimulation and noise. 

How is it that the narrator was able to find such pleasure, which is different from general happiness, in something as simple as counting letters on a cover of a book or in the rotten eyes of a corpse, while I’m on Earth, anxiously waiting for my phone to light up again and my music to shuffle to a better song? 

Then it hit me: I may not be addicted to the typical array of choices, but I am grossly addicted to company. To conversation. To some sort of stimulation. To avoiding the feeling of being alone.

Ironically, I don’t think, for a second, that I’m the only one. In a world where going a few hours without a response from someone feels like active withdrawal, should we be focusing more on being comfortable in our natural, one-man show?

I really thought about this, like, really. Are humans supposed to be addicted to these things, human connection and some sort of stimulation? Why else would most of us desire a happy, exciting marriage or life partner, a vibrant career and a healthy mind?

Even our poor narrator, who has only known what we would consider hell, had an addiction to discovering the unknown. 

Though her addiction was a silly, watered-down version of what we modern-day humans grapple with every day, desires cannot be completely shut out. 

All within the hour or so after I finished this incredible book, I was thinking about this made-up jigsaw puzzle and, admittedly, beating myself up about the concept of needing certain aspects in my life to thrive. 

I wondered if the key to achieving actual, tangible peace was straying as far away as possible from raw humanity — what keeps us so miserably high, and so euphorically low.

I started to think that I needed a complete life detox, so I could become comfortable with the thought of being alone on a different planet for sixty years. 

But the thought of stripping my life of all the features that make it so thrilling made me nauseous. I don’t want to detox from loving, learning or anything that makes me feel anything at all. 

So what if in the absence of these things I feel like I might evaporate into the never-ending sky? 

So what if I really am addicted to having a lust for life, seizing every little thing that enhances my light and letting it explode like a bomb?

I think we’re all too scared of feeling pain, of withdrawal. What is life if not sprinkled with some heartache, anyway?

I think I’ll let myself continue on in my various addictions, and in between my triumphs, feel sorry for whatever possessed Harpman to write such a comically unhuman book.