Different Creatures

Entertainment media depicts no real aloneness. Nobody in popular fiction is ever actually alone, as there's a tribe for everyone in a fantasy world. In the real world, permanent outcasts exist. Some people are judged ineligible for acceptance in any tribe.

It can't be that everyone you encounter occupies the center of your attention all the time. Think about what makes someone forgettable. What traits could someone have that would make you, consciously or otherwise, put them on the margins of your consideration?  I'm talking about benign inattention here. We decide how to direct our care based on identifiable factors. We don't try to attend to everyone. That would take more brain power than anybody has. We have to triage, so we only attend to those people who meet a set of criteria.

Within communities, criteria for inclusion usually overlap. Most groups share similar criteria for whom they will keep in their attention. If an individual doesn't meet any of the criteria imposed by any group, there is a risk that their entire community will marginalize them and that they will effectively disappear. This is sometimes described as falling through the cracks. Equitable inclusivity is a romantic myth dependent on the idea that criteria for inclusion are themselves inclusive, encompassing every possible iteration of a person, and that no one can ever fail completely to fit in. The reality is that total social failure is possible. It happens all the time, and the people it happens to may be so outside anyone's consideration that they are essentially invisible even to scientists who study society and psychology.

For these exiles, existence is pain. Everything they need is in the communities that they can't access. On the margins of concern, exiles have no recourse to petition their peers for support. In-groups resent outside demands on their attention because they only have so much attention to spare and it's all spoken for. In-group bias is useful for conserving attention. Energy spent on outsiders is energy that isn't spent on the in-group, and this puts the in-group at risk. Furthermore, from a purely animal perspective, an outsider may be weak, sick, or malicious, so engaging with them could be dangerous. Now, prejudice becomes a factor. Exiles become enemies when they complain.

There's a moral incentive to deny that any of this is going on. Most communities want to see themselves as welcoming. Inclusivity is considered good because we want to be included, so in-groups blame outsiders for deserving to be put on the outside. This makes group members feel like they're in the right and it makes non-members feel like good people who've been wronged. Tension is the inevitable result: us versus them. The outsiders suffer even more.  Now, they're not only desperately lonely, they're also not allowed to talk about it.  Denied the care of their peers, they're supposed to either find care somewhere else or just cease to exist.

Some exiles are able to find acceptance. Others remain on the outside their whole lives. A person may fail to meet any community's criteria for inclusion. Even cross-culturally, most communities prefer confidence, fitness, and success. An individual who appears to lack these traits, no matter where that person comes from or how they conduct their lives, may be overlooked by everyone. Many, if not all, in-groups are largely defined by who they oppose. An individual with no power to oppose anyone is unlikely to be considered for inclusion in any group.  I live in this obscurity. I feel unseen and unheard. I want to draw attention to the profound suffering of the clanless, but I'm without any hope now that we can ever become visible because of the way in which humans must curate their attention. It isn't in any human's nature to walk the social wastelands collecting castaways to nurture. Such an individual would make a castaway of themselves and, as such, would have no way to help anybody. Value judgments notwithstanding, this is the only way humans can structure their societies. Any more inclusive society would be a society of different creatures altogether.