SOCIAL ISSUES
Navigating the Maze of Modern Loneliness with Observations and Interactions
Loneliness is an epidemic that only one person can cure at a time.
Being alone, if you’re not lonely, is a luxury. The whole world ignores you, and in return, you don’t need to give a rat’s tail about it. Loneliness can be a paradoxical beast until you need your tea, coffee, lunch, or dentistry. Though it is an individual feeling, it only manifests amidst the life surrounding you and dwells within you.
Loneliness is not escapism; it is a prison. The keys to your cell are in your pocket, but it feels as though your hands are tied. It is too much to ask someone else to reach into your pocket, unlock the door, untie your hands, and then hold them and comfort you because life after long imprisonment can be scary.
According to Gallup’s survey in February 2023, ‘loneliness is highest among young adults under 30 and those in lower-income households’. Amid all AI and social media, it is alarming that young people feel more isolated.
The wealthy seem to have more means to connect and break the vicious cycle of loneliness and being forgotten and lost. At least they can afford some therapy. It’s the marginalized and the poor who carry the heaviest burden of loneliness.
Another research from 2020 indicated that ‘61% (three in five) of US Americans reported feeling lonely’. It is safe to assume that these results reflect all high-tech societies and are not exclusive to being a US citizen.
Among those who are lonely, the wealthy with access to health insurance and mental health services find themselves again on the sunnier side of the lonely street.
This level of loneliness is expensive. Cigna estimates that “loneliness costs employers more than $154B a year in lost productivity due to absenteeism”.
They have a very alarming graph about this issue.
A macro lens to loneliness from my interactions with strangers
I was having a break from the world, enjoying my tea alone. At the table next to mine, a young man was left alone after his noisy family went to celebrate the sale in the knick-knack shop that surrounds the restaurant.
Our eyes met. I smiled. He looked confused. In a sudden quirk, I said to him, “Please join me.”
To my surprise, Tom came to sit opposite me, looking suspicious but curious. “Why didn’t you go with your family,” I asked as a clumsy starter.
“Well, they are not exactly fun to be with,” said Tom, “at least not for my taste.”
During the next 40 minutes or so, we exchanged views and our experiences about loneliness. When I think about the conversation, one of Tom’s sentences still lingers:
“I have always been different, and that’s hard for my family to deal with.”
I could relate to that.
When I was a small boy, my mother told me she could understand my siblings and know what was happening in their lives, but not me. I know that I was her favorite, but I was a stranger in the context of the rural village where we lived. She often looked at me like she was trying to guess what was going on in my head, but finally, a resigned smile reached her sad eyes, and she said, “I don’t know you, but I love you still”. And I knew I wasn’t lonely but alone.
While I was different — creative, curious, and mischievous — I belonged to my family. They accepted me — sometimes with high brows and eye-rolls, but still.
The young man I met didn’t have the same luxury of being accepted. Tom’s parents wanted him to enroll at a university, but instead, he started as an apprentice to become a bricklayer. “I don’t belong there,” he said, “they wanted me to have a life that they didn’t have, but I couldn’t care less”.
“I enjoy doing work with my hands, being outside and working alone,” told Tom, “it is great to see how the brick wall gets higher, and after a day’s work, I can see what I have done.”
Tom was animated, excited, and immersed in his explanation of bricklayer work. He wasn’t lonely or alone anymore, but he took me with his story to his life. I was grateful he had the guts to let my hand in his mental pocket and get the key out.
And to my great pleasure, the same key fit perfectly into my cell door’s lock. Tom turned it, and my stories started to come out.
Then the noisy family came back.
I shook hands with his parents and learned the names of his three siblings, which I forgot immediately. With a subtle accusation in her tone, Tom’s mother said, “Thank you for keeping company with Tom; he is such a hermit who doesn’t really care about our company”. She looked apologetic, embarrassed maybe, and said, “OK, thank you — and we better go now, Tom.”
I saw a woman who had lost contact with her son and a father who didn’t observe any of it — or didn’t care. I could see the disappointment in her eyes when she looked at Tom. Simultaneously, the memory of my mother looking at me came to my mind, and her eyes shone with love and acceptance. There is a vast difference.
Tom said nothing but rolled his eyes when the rest of the family didn’t see. I smiled and made a gesture like opening a door with a key. Tom laughed, and the rest of the family thought that, finally, their long-lost son was with them.
Sometimes, it is better to let others be wrong and at least pretend to belong.
“After you have escaped from prison, don’t hang around the prison gate.” — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec.
Back to the big and very distorted picture.
The short encounter with Tom triggered this article. Loneliness is an epidemic, but lonely people are not to blame. It is a symptom of broken systems, shredded values, and algorithms that feed greed, anger, and ignorance.
Uniformity breeds loneliness because we all are different in some way or another and have to hide something that is essentially us.
Also, fragmented communities and split societies are the soil that grows the weed of loneliness.
And thirdly, it is corporate greed that eats for breakfast our capabilities to connect, like Johan Hari so poignantly wrote:
“The internet arrived for most of us in the late 1990s, into a society where the middle class was starting to crumble and where financial insecurity was rising, and we were sleeping an hour less than people did in 1945. It would always have been hard to resist the sophisticated human-hacking of surveillance capitalism, but it appeared we were already getting weaker, and we were easier to hack than we would have been otherwise.”
We are hacked; algorithms tweak our human operating system. Everything goes so quickly; all is so instant and shallow that we cannot properly swim in the ocean of human connection.
We feel lonely because there is not enough water to dive into meaningful relationships.
We quickly tip our toes into this and that site and then forget the feeling while searching for the next dopamine hit. That’s our rite and ritual at the altar of shortening attention span.
But human touch is not synonymous with touch screen. The flow of bytes does not get you in a flow. The mouse click is the greatest disconnector (or connector) humans have ever installed. What you click does not indicate that you are clicking with someone.
And there is a grim prediction in loneliness. According to Gallup, “67% of those who were lonely the previous day also experienced a lot of anger on the same day”. Anger is often linked with loneliness. No wonder we have so many mass shootings in the USA and elsewhere. Being lonely, marginalised and rejected is a perfect breeding ground for violence on an individual level.
On a social level, loneliness makes it easier for those in power to keep the power and rule as they wish. Lonely people who don’t have any sense of belonging become easy cannon fodder and sheep ready for slaughter. Goebbels knew it; Putin is an expert today, and Netanyahu and other global leaders study the same playbook intensively. As Shoshana Zuboff put it, “It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.”
So, how do you ensure you have the key in your pocket?
Tom got the joke about the lonely prison cell and how to open it. He was curious and open-minded. He had a north star in his loneliness: to follow his dream.
Even if Tom’s family pushed him away — or he turned away from them — he was true to himself. And that gave him the courage to say yes to my invitation. He was aware of his purpose. He didn’t externalize but tried to find what was right for him to fulfill his dreams and become happy.
Conclusions and Takeaways
As a pattern freak, I tried to distill some essential learnings from our encounter after Tom left.
- You are lonely if you are not accepted or if you are rejected. We do this to each other almost unconsciously: fear of the unknown isolates us. Observing your mind, heart, and other people with curiosity is the remedy. Letting somebody put their hands in your pocket is scary, but that’s where the keys are. Courage is the first dose of medicine to break the shackles of loneliness.
- You are alone but not lonely if you open your eyes and ears to the world. Let the sunshine in. People need you, and the world needs you, but it is up to you when you let your guard down and who you choose to free from loneliness. The second dose to heal loneliness is wisdom: don’t be a martyr or people pleaser, but train your discerning muscles.
- Your loneliness is a valuable gem. It teaches you how much people mean to you and you to them — and what it is like to be without them. It teaches the value of human touch, vulnerability, and forgiveness. The third and last medicine against the epidemic of loneliness is to develop compassion. It is not just sympathizing or being empathetic but taking somebody’s sorrow and turning it into joy and understanding. Compassion is action. Keep your hands ready and your pockets open — compassion is a two-way street to make friends and gain freedom.
Gallup estimates that ‘over 300 million people globally don’t have a single friend, and one in five don’t have friends or family that they can count on when needed’.
If you can make just one friend a year using these three remedies, you can help make the alarming statistics less worrisome, one person at a time. And at the same time, you create lasting value for your own life.
Who will be your next Tom or Tina? Do you dare to let them take your key from your pocket and vice versa?
Thank you for reading my story. I wish you a joyful life. You can subscribe to my weekly newsletter, FreshWrite, here.
