It's December 2023 and although the heights of the pandemic lockdowns are becoming a distant memory, loneliness seems to be sticking around. The condition of course is not correlated solely with the past couple years of world history, but it definitely garnered more attention then. Now, daily life shows hardly any traces of that time: holiday gatherings are in full swing, and public places are bustling with people coming in and out, mostly without masks and long-forgotten vaccination receipts tucked away in their physical and phone wallets.
So why am I writing about this now? Why is loneliness still a problem if people are free to gather again?
A few weeks ago, I was giving a friend a ride home from church on a Friday night. I had been attending this church for a little over a year and plugging into the community was slower going than I expected. As we were talking, he surprised me when he revealed that he felt lonely at this church. To my knowledge, he'd been at this church at least a year longer than me, and although he was also introverted, he was not as quiet or shy as I was. He had served in several capacities, and he seemed to know the people fairly well. Suffice to say, if he hadn't told me that he was, I would have never guessed it.
Around the same time, I was catching up with a friend who had also joined a new church with her husband, just at the start of this year. Like the friend at my church, she was regularly attending services and small groups, and serving as an usher and a kids' Sunday school teacher. Yet she too told me that she was struggling to connect with her community there.
I also have my own relationship with loneliness. Long before these conversations, before I even knew that this is what I was feeling, I have been struggling with it. You might say, we've got history.
Naturally, facing loneliness often means you feel you are the only one going through it. It can also illicit feelings of low self-esteem (is there something wrong with me, that people don't want to spend time with me?), and can lead to depressive states where we resign to that as reality and turn in on ourselves, seeing no point in trying to reach out if no one will bite anyway.
Hearing these two friends share about their own loneliness, plus countless other accounts by strangers on various internet forums these days, struck a chord inside me. While it was some small solace that I was not alone in feeling lonely, the bigger impact they had on me was that I was pulled out of my self-pity enough to have compassion for other people. It didn't fix my loneliness, but for the first time in a good while, I wasn't thinking about my own loneliness anymore, I was thinking about others. Which then reminded me why my thesis project was so important to me in the first place. Recently I felt very disconnected from it. I had forgotten the small fire that kept me going through that tough final year of university. It had started feeling like a wasted year, wasted effort. But now, all of a sudden, the pieces are starting to click back into place.
Loneliness is the internal experience of someone who longs to feel known by the people around them. - Me
As a condition that is felt inside the person, interventions must be varied, individualized and long-term. No one-time, one-size-fits-all solution. The things I do in my own life to combat loneliness ought to follow this framework, and the solution I designed back in 2020 also fits within this understanding. No one thing will cure all, but we need as many accessible options as possible.
I realize I haven't yet answered the question I posed at the beginning. Why is this a problem? I can't say that I have an answer from an academic, anthropological point of view. But I do know that it's still a real problem that people are experiencing, including myself, and I'd like to continue writing about it here.
Comments