I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me. It’s not like I don’t know what that feels like: being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there – and no one on the pillow next to you. F*ck! How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that? When I was a child, there’s one thing I said: I never want to be alone. That’s what I would say. I don’t want to be alone. (Elon Musk, talking in the 2017 Rolling Stone interview)

Yep, these are the words of the current richest person in the world… How’s that?! You don’t need to be a psychologist so as to grasp the idea that the man is lonely and he’s fighting against this… well… emotion of emptiness… although I would call it straight by its name: fear. From his own words we can infer that he is familiar with this fear since his childhood and we can also suspect that there wasn’t too much of a connection with his parents… since that young Elon came to the conclusion that he will do whatever he can during his lifetime so as to avoid being fearful. The year 2017 is not so far away from us, Mr. Musk was already a grown-up at the time of the interview, so that emotion doesn’t seem to be gone; he speaks about “empty big houses” and “empty beds”, something that is poignant and distressing at the same time. In the end, we know how he ended up: he has built big houses (so that he can still be small by comparison with the buildings, perhaps replaying a childhood scene) and had several relationships (and children), always careful to avoid that empty bed (and constantly craving that connection which, annoyingly, keeps remaining elusive).

Well… this is the man who wants to put us on Mars… And I cannot decide whether he wants to push us to a greater disconnectedness – living there, far away on that distant planet, in the “perfect place for loneliness” – or he is pushing himself (and ourselves) towards an almost impossible goal, so as to keep busy and avoid thinking about the loneliness at home…

If we are to explore the outer space, we need scientists, we need engineers, we need doctors, we need leadership and, obviously, we need to invest money. But we need to make all these work together. Namely, we need to be able to connect: connect professions together, connect ideas together, but also, connect people together. So yes, we need psychologists. Why?

Right now, instead of building the next rocket to Mars – regardless of Elon’s emotional reasons – we’re losing our time with wars. We cannot make people give up ideologies and stop killing other people. We simply can’t. Everyone comes up with countless justifications and excuses for not collaborating and not making peace RIGHT NOW. And this happens because those leaders have the emotional intelligence of toddlers, often with cognitive performances almost as low. Again, we need psychologists to “raise” them appropriately (read: to do reparenting) and to help them get their act together, emotionally (read: to pull their sh*t together). This is a daunting task and it takes years. And, judging by how insane the world has become, we’re not going to Mars any time soon…

I am often wondering about these things in the lonely moments of my own life. What should be done? What could be done now? And what I could do myself?

Remember: we risk nuclear apocalypse before even setting foot on the Moon if we continue behaving like turbulent children and interacting at a dysfunctional emotional level. The psychologists are doing psychometric testing and statistics during their training years (no emotional training experience) and the artificial intelligence is dumb even with simple, logical things, so thinking in symbols and emotions is far… far… far away in the future… if there is a future left after all…

My personal answer to this situation would sound like this: instead of focusing on data and rational knowledge – which, by the way, is useless if people are deciding and acting from the emotional stance of a toddler – we should better focus on healing the emotional side (so that Elon wouldn’t feel lonely) and learn to affectively connect with others (so that we don’t nuke each other). There are many ways and styles of doing therapy, but I think that what the world needs now – before going into space – is a relational-emotional psychotherapy.

Therefore, I would like to focus my following articles exactly on this.