Despite having an extraordinary wife and two children whom I love very much I still sometimes struggle with crippling loneliness. There are times when I feel like there isn’t another being on the planet with whom I can share some corner of who I am. And there are moments when I gaze into face of the person I love most in this world, my wife, and feel we both have an unknowable inner existence which neither of us will ever be able to reach in the other.
If you want to see a depressing chart of relative search volumes for people asking Google how to find love, make friends and to not be alone, it’s here. And then there are myriad quotes one can find on loneliness. The saddest being this one from Albert Einstein.
It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely.
We all experience loneliness at some point in our lives. But we never talk about it. Feeling lonely is seen as a symptom of a bigger character problem. We believe it means we’re unlikable, that people don’t want to be friends with us. But that is an unhelpful diagnosis. A lazy heuristic that amplifies our disconnectedness.
I prefer to think of loneliness as a deficiency. That feeling of being alone that hollows you out is a sign that something is missing from your life. It’s not a reflection on you or your character.
You’re lonely because you need connection
Evolution has moulded us into a very social species. Five million years ago humans survived because they were able to cooperate. We thrived in communities with around 200 members. This is because the combination of skills and the number of individuals in the group allowed us to hunt and forage effectively. The worst thing that could happen to a person was for them to be ejected from their community. An individual fending for themselves was unlikely to live for very long.
In this environment, loneliness is an incredibly effective trigger to help individuals understand that they may not sufficiently integrated with their community. And that they should work harder at connecting with others in the tribe. Loneliness is also an emotional prompt to not jeopardise one’s place in the tribe.
Today, most of us live in cities with thousands if not millions of people but we’re deeply lonely. That is because we no longer share our lives with a community. In fact, our communities have shrunk down to be no bigger than a nuclear family, and the assortment of connections we as humans enjoyed thousand of years ago no longer exists. What civilisation has done is drastically reduce our need for cooperation. Food is freely available and a person just needs a singular set of skills to make enough money to feed and house their family. There is no longer a reason for us to be together and look out for one another.
Between our family, our work colleagues and our friends, modern society hasn’t been able to replicate the experience of being part of a tribal community. In a tribe we saw the same people each day, we knew one another intimately, and had different sources for advice depending on our problem. And, in most cases, the tribe were likely to have known us since we were children. Which allowed us to be comfortable being ourselves with a wide group of people who accepted you.
Loneliness is pain
I said earlier that the feeling of being lonely is a sign of a deficiency; that we are lacking in the connection we need with other humans to feel safe. However, the body also reacts to loneliness at a cellular level. In this meta analytic review researchers found that people who experience loneliness increase their risk of dying by 26%.
Being lonely triggers our body’s inflammation response. This is an effective response to injury, but if this response endures we open ourselves to suffering from cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. The body experiences loneliness as pain, as an injury. We aren’t designed to feel loneliness for extended periods of time. However, loneliness appears to be growing in our cities. And this is reflected in the number of people who suffer from heart diseases, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
How do we combat loneliness and the reason we don’t
We combat loneliness through connection. By reaching out to other people an by allowing them and ourselves to be who we truly are. It is when someone is willing to listen to our insecurities, the things that we’re ashamed of or that confuse us while still accepting us as friends, that our loneliness goes away. But our society wrung out the opportunities we had to share with others that we fear death, or that we’re bad at sex, that we loath our parents, or the shame we feel when we sometimes look in the mirror.
Instead we follow time established conversations behind which we hide our deepest fears and who we are. And we hide these things because we don’t know our friends or colleagues well enough to entrust them with our deepest feelings, our shameful fetishes or our deepest insecurities. We don’t feel safe sharing who we are for fear that we’ll be judged, shamed or rejected. And that is how so many of us can find ourselves amongst crowds of people whom we call friends, and still be utterly lonely or lost.
Its like we live in an episode of Friends. Our social interactions are bleached and sterile. What we share are updates on the things we’ve been doing or our opinions on the latest TV show. We hide our strangeness and cover the unsightly edges of our psyche. And in doing so we never connect with one another. We don’t truly meet another soul or have the opportunity to experience the joy of being ourselves in someone else’s presence.
The rush of connection
I really enjoy a show on Netflix called Sex Education. In it one of the main characters, Otis, is a natural at counseling, who finds real joy in helping others. In one of the episodes his mother talks to him about the joy of helping others and experiencing the ‘rush of connection’. I discussed this idea with my wife. She’s a talented coach, and she shared that she experiences that ‘rush of connection’ in her work daily. There’s something powerful and moving when someone is completely open and themselves with you. And being open and having nothing but unconditional positive regard in return for the that person, she tells me, is a privilege and one of the great joys in life.
And that is what our feelings of loneliness are trying to tell us. We have a connection deficiency. One of the greatest experiences we can and need to have as humans is lacking. And we need to do something about it.
What do we need to do to not be lonely?
And there is nowhere else we can experience that rush. Social media, TV, alcohol, reading, nothing can replace a moment of connection with another person. And, deep down inside, we all know this. But, what we don’t know is where or how to find that connection, that friendship.
In the link I shared above about Google searches, you’ll note that there are almost twice the number of searches for ‘how to make friends’ than there is for ‘how to find love’. Many of us do want to find someone to love, but even more of us just want to have someone in our lives we can call a friend. And we are so lost that millions of us ask the internet each year to teach us how to make friends. I believe we have forgotten what to do when we feel lonely.
There are a few things I have learnt that I found helpful to deal with my own loneliness.
- One person isn’t enough. When I said I still sometimes feel lonely when I’m with my wife, or my kids, it’s not because I don’t have a genuine human connection with them. It has more to do with the fact that the bonds we share with others differ depending on the person. There are emotions and thoughts I have that if I were to share with my wife wouldn’t illicit the response or connection I know I need in that moment. I have another good friend with whom I can share that part of myself, and he gets me. Having a connection with only one other person isn’t healthy.
- It’s okay to pay for connection. Speaking to a psychotherapist, a coach or a counsellor can be an incredibly helpful way to deal with loneliness. Having a person in your life to help you understand your loneliness will help you understand yourself better. I see a psychotherapist every so often and it has helped me realise what I’m missing in my life and, more importantly, why.
- Put yourself out there (part 1). If you are lonely, the only way to dissolve that feeling is by connecting with another person. And to do that, you have to put yourself out there. The most obvious way is to approach someone whom you believe could be a friend and to be vulnerable with them. To take a chance. Sometimes this approach doesn’t work, and things get awkward. And you’ll need to accept that. But it is worth doing. So, choose an appropriate moment, and don’t unload everything in one go. The rush of connecting with you shouldn’t feel like being hit in the face with a fire hose.
- Put yourself out there (part 2). Share and be vulnerable in other places. By sharing my thoughts on this site I have had several people reach out to me, and I have grown close to a couple of them. If you’re open and vulnerable, you’ll be surprised by who comes into your life.
- Being lonely is part of growing. There a parts of us that others will never be able to reach. Corners of our minds where there are dragons and darkness. Feelings of such joy, fear and sorrow that words can’t explain those parts of us. It is these parts that we have to carry alone. However, it is worth exploring these corners of our psyche, because we tend to overestimate the size of this burden we can’t share with others. We ignore those corners in us because to go in there is painful or terrifying. But we must be brave and examine and understand as much of ourselves as we can bear. Because the more of ourselves we know and are able to share with our friends, the lighter the burden of our life will be on us.
- We are all weird. Everyone, literally every human on the planet has issues. There isn’t a single person who doesn’t think there is some part of them that is strange, weird or shameful. You are not alone. And if somebody shares their weirdness with you, treat them with compassion and be gentle. It’s a privilege to be entrusted with part of another person’s inner life.
Loneliness is a call to action. It lets us know that we are connection deficient. If you feel lonely, don’t ignore it by watching TV, eating or going onto social media. See it as a craving for genuine human connection. Understand what part of you needs to be shared with someone you love, and then go out and find the person who can and will accept you for who you really are.
And if you can’t find that person, call me.
What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
Kurt Vonnegut