The Power of Loneliness
The human species is the loneliest of all the living creatures on earth. Why? Because we, as humans, are endowed with almost more intelligence than we can handle. Many other species instinctively need to maintain daily physical closeness.
We are evolutionarily programmed to need closeness to our own kind. Our problem is that we are so intelligent that we can create far more closeness activities than other species, and we can experience those relationships far more intensely than other species can, but we are not instinctively programmed to accomplish these connections as other species are programmed.
Rather, we must actually be “trained” to fulfill our intimacy needs. We are so intellectually and emotionally complex that, without guidance, we easily get lost in our quest for human connectedness. The skills training that we need to build emotional and physical intimacy with others is in extremely short supply in our modern society. Thus, an enormous number of people of all ages are struggling to establish meaningful, enduring relationships.
We may be lucky enough to be born into families where some member of the family has been trained in intimacy skills, but nowadays, that is becoming increasingly unlikely. For several generations, our lifestyles have been shifting in ways that greatly diminish our chances of learning intimacy. By way of example, one person shares her life. This person was my partner in The Center for Human Development, a center geared toward helping women with the many issues, including loneliness. Here name is Alberta Anderson and this is her story.
“In the late 1930’s, I was adopted by a family that lived in a small rural village of 200 people in northern Illinois. My adoptive parents owned a country general store that was the commercial hub of the community. By the time I was 8 years old, I knew almost every person living within a forty-mile radius because the local farm families all gravitated to our store to procure their food, household, and farm supplies.
Not only that, many of our customers came to our store on Tuesday and Saturday nights because our store stayed open late on those nights—sometimes till ten at night. This was done ostensibly to enable farm families to work in their fields till dark and then come in to do their weekly shopping. However, these late hours actually served as an opportunity for farm families to socialize. During the summer, the kids played in the park nearby while their parents visited in a circle under the store’s ceiling fans. In the long winters, everyone gathered around the large potbelly stove at the center of the store.
Our store also served as the focal point for community activities and to deal with the personal tragedies that occasionally befell our citizens. Food, clothing, household items, and money were collected at our store whenever a local family experienced losses due to sickness, accidents, or storms. People knew pretty well what size clothing or financial contribution to give because they were usually well acquainted with their neighbors. In these ways and many others, the people in our community were intimately connected with everyone else in the surrounding area.” In this type of social environment, kids easily learned empathy and trust for other people as well as appropriate boundaries for their own behavior. After all, everyone’s actions, behaviors, and misbehaviors were usually common knowledge shared by the whole community.
The downside of all of this connectedness was that everyone knew your “business” and thought they had the right to comment on it. The upside of this environment was that you were never lonely. You pretty much knew where you fit in, where to ask for help, and where to find someone who needed you. With this kind of knowledge of one’s community, a person could connect with others meaningfully whenever the pangs of loneliness occurred.
In my own life, our “neighborhood” consisted of seven houses, each situated on an acre of property. Having moved away in my early twenties, I still visit the “old neighborhood” when I return for class reunions. The last time I visited I was shocked.
Six of the seven houses were built in the early 1950’s. They all look pretty much as they did when I lived there. The seventh house, which was next to us, was a farmhouse. It is where Grandma and Grandpa lived, the original owners of all the land on which these houses were built. When Grandma and Grandpa died the property was sold, and to my amazement, several homes were built there. The twenty-five acres behind that house and the house where I lived were sold and it was now populated with several new homes.
There was a time when nearly everyone in the neighborhood would be in our yard, well the ladies and kids. The men were working. There were never any real problems in our neighborhood, but the ladies discussed news that may have been going on in the township, or nearby city.
Even when the ladies didn’t meet, the neighborhood kids always seemed to congregate in our yard. We had a barn to hang out in, trees to climb, a swing set, a porch swing, and heavy-duty wooden lawn chairs sit around in. We had five apple trees, six plum trees, three apricot trees, a pear tree, and a sassafras tree, so fruit was always available in spring and summer.
The era of close-knit, neighborhood families gathering to socialize and collaborate around community issues is nearly gone. Oh, there are community groups that briefly coalesce to promote specific activities such as Little League or parent/teacher associations, etc., but their scope is narrowly focused and only a small segment of the community members is involved.
Nowadays, so many parents work outside the home that even the parent(s) and kids in the same home spend little time together. The kids don’t really know much about what their parents do at work, unlike the kids of earlier generations who worked alongside their parents on a daily basis.
Kids of my generation worked hard doing chores, and by the time they reached their teen years they had acquired many adult work skills. They often took over the family business when their parents retired.
I was 13 when I began babysitting on Wednesday evenings and sometimes both Friday and Saturday nights, 14 when I began cleaning houses after school one or two days a week and during the day on weekends, and 16 when I worked on an apple farm for the summer sorting apples. The other jobs didn’t end, apple sorting was just added.
Not only do kids today not work, but homework, video games, social media, and TV take up so much of the evening hours in most families there is not a time for closeness or relaxation either. In fact, home can be yet another source of isolation or chaos, depending on how many family members are not getting their needs met there.
There are other reasons that so many people experience chronic loneliness. One is the high divorce rate and the dislocations caused when families break up. The kids are then reconstituted into new stepfamilies. Another reason is the high mobility of modern families. This causes kids to be separated from their grandparents, extended family members, and former friends. Still, another reason is the sheer size and complexity of our society. It reduces everyone’s personal sense of belonging.
Social trends are made much worse by the pervasive influence of the mass media—TV, movies, social media, and various reading materials. Never in human history have so many people of all ages been so acculturated with such vivid portrayals of human destructiveness—often in the name of “entertainment.” The mass communication media rarely express the enrichment of human compassion, intimacy, and dignity. Instead, they foster mindless competition, exploitation, and elitism in our society as they slavishly give praise to the selfishness and greed of prominent sports, business, and entertainment figures.
Social MediaWhen I was growing up, as dysfunctional of a household as it was, everyone sat down at the dinner table at the same time and had dinner. Now, if family members are sitting at the table for dinner, one, two, maybe all are on their cell phones.
Recently, I was sitting at the table of someone I was visiting. I was at one end of the table and the man of the family was at the other end. Everyone at the table had cellphones but me. I watched, appalled at what I was seeing. It was apparent that, rather than talking, two were texting each other. But all of them were texting throughout the meal.
Social media is a huge reasons why the number of lonely individuals has increased in the last few years. A recent survey showed that 97% of teens are now online daily. Another smaller percentage of teenagers (58%) said they frequently use TikTok. About 50% of teenagers are on Instagram, while 51% are on Snapchat every day, and another 19% reportedly visit Facebook daily. Those are statics of teenagers.
Social media isolates. Even though a teen may have thousands of followers, how many of the followers has this teen ever had a person-to-person conversation. That statistic is less than 1%. Isolation causes loneliness. The net result of all these influences is that many people of all ages are not able to accomplish the three primary forms of connectedness.
1) They don’t learn how they can fit into our society; 2) They don’t know who to ask for help with problems; and 3) They are not sure whether anyone in our society really needs them.
These three types of interpersonal connections are essential to the well-being and fulfillment of humans. Our modern culture does not currently guide people to achieve these important connections, however, the situation is not hopeless. We can build this skill training into the fabric of our society if we want to, and if we understand what this technology looks like. See a Therapist Research suggests that loneliness and symptoms of depression can perpetuate each other, meaning the more lonely you are, the more depressed you feel, and vice versa. Sometimes just “getting out there” and meeting other people isn’t enough. It's possible to still feel lonely when you’re around them, which could actually be a sign of depression or social anxiety. If this is the case for you, it may be a good idea to seek psychologist or counselor to help with feelings of loneliness, especially if you also feel other symptoms of depression. Some forms of therapy, especially cognitive behavioral therapy, can help you to change your thoughts as well as your actions to help you not only experience less loneliness but have more tools to prevent it. Whatever you do to combat loneliness, know that you are truly not alone, and there are many things you can do to feel more connected.
We are evolutionarily programmed to need closeness to our own kind. Our problem is that we are so intelligent that we can create far more closeness activities than other species, and we can experience those relationships far more intensely than other species can, but we are not instinctively programmed to accomplish these connections as other species are programmed.
Rather, we must actually be “trained” to fulfill our intimacy needs. We are so intellectually and emotionally complex that, without guidance, we easily get lost in our quest for human connectedness. The skills training that we need to build emotional and physical intimacy with others is in extremely short supply in our modern society. Thus, an enormous number of people of all ages are struggling to establish meaningful, enduring relationships.
We may be lucky enough to be born into families where some member of the family has been trained in intimacy skills, but nowadays, that is becoming increasingly unlikely. For several generations, our lifestyles have been shifting in ways that greatly diminish our chances of learning intimacy. By way of example, one person shares her life. This person was my partner in The Center for Human Development, a center geared toward helping women with the many issues, including loneliness. Here name is Alberta Anderson and this is her story.
“In the late 1930’s, I was adopted by a family that lived in a small rural village of 200 people in northern Illinois. My adoptive parents owned a country general store that was the commercial hub of the community. By the time I was 8 years old, I knew almost every person living within a forty-mile radius because the local farm families all gravitated to our store to procure their food, household, and farm supplies.
Not only that, many of our customers came to our store on Tuesday and Saturday nights because our store stayed open late on those nights—sometimes till ten at night. This was done ostensibly to enable farm families to work in their fields till dark and then come in to do their weekly shopping. However, these late hours actually served as an opportunity for farm families to socialize. During the summer, the kids played in the park nearby while their parents visited in a circle under the store’s ceiling fans. In the long winters, everyone gathered around the large potbelly stove at the center of the store.
Our store also served as the focal point for community activities and to deal with the personal tragedies that occasionally befell our citizens. Food, clothing, household items, and money were collected at our store whenever a local family experienced losses due to sickness, accidents, or storms. People knew pretty well what size clothing or financial contribution to give because they were usually well acquainted with their neighbors. In these ways and many others, the people in our community were intimately connected with everyone else in the surrounding area.” In this type of social environment, kids easily learned empathy and trust for other people as well as appropriate boundaries for their own behavior. After all, everyone’s actions, behaviors, and misbehaviors were usually common knowledge shared by the whole community.
The downside of all of this connectedness was that everyone knew your “business” and thought they had the right to comment on it. The upside of this environment was that you were never lonely. You pretty much knew where you fit in, where to ask for help, and where to find someone who needed you. With this kind of knowledge of one’s community, a person could connect with others meaningfully whenever the pangs of loneliness occurred.
In my own life, our “neighborhood” consisted of seven houses, each situated on an acre of property. Having moved away in my early twenties, I still visit the “old neighborhood” when I return for class reunions. The last time I visited I was shocked.
Six of the seven houses were built in the early 1950’s. They all look pretty much as they did when I lived there. The seventh house, which was next to us, was a farmhouse. It is where Grandma and Grandpa lived, the original owners of all the land on which these houses were built. When Grandma and Grandpa died the property was sold, and to my amazement, several homes were built there. The twenty-five acres behind that house and the house where I lived were sold and it was now populated with several new homes.
There was a time when nearly everyone in the neighborhood would be in our yard, well the ladies and kids. The men were working. There were never any real problems in our neighborhood, but the ladies discussed news that may have been going on in the township, or nearby city.
Even when the ladies didn’t meet, the neighborhood kids always seemed to congregate in our yard. We had a barn to hang out in, trees to climb, a swing set, a porch swing, and heavy-duty wooden lawn chairs sit around in. We had five apple trees, six plum trees, three apricot trees, a pear tree, and a sassafras tree, so fruit was always available in spring and summer.
The era of close-knit, neighborhood families gathering to socialize and collaborate around community issues is nearly gone. Oh, there are community groups that briefly coalesce to promote specific activities such as Little League or parent/teacher associations, etc., but their scope is narrowly focused and only a small segment of the community members is involved.
Nowadays, so many parents work outside the home that even the parent(s) and kids in the same home spend little time together. The kids don’t really know much about what their parents do at work, unlike the kids of earlier generations who worked alongside their parents on a daily basis.
Kids of my generation worked hard doing chores, and by the time they reached their teen years they had acquired many adult work skills. They often took over the family business when their parents retired.
I was 13 when I began babysitting on Wednesday evenings and sometimes both Friday and Saturday nights, 14 when I began cleaning houses after school one or two days a week and during the day on weekends, and 16 when I worked on an apple farm for the summer sorting apples. The other jobs didn’t end, apple sorting was just added.
Not only do kids today not work, but homework, video games, social media, and TV take up so much of the evening hours in most families there is not a time for closeness or relaxation either. In fact, home can be yet another source of isolation or chaos, depending on how many family members are not getting their needs met there.
There are other reasons that so many people experience chronic loneliness. One is the high divorce rate and the dislocations caused when families break up. The kids are then reconstituted into new stepfamilies. Another reason is the high mobility of modern families. This causes kids to be separated from their grandparents, extended family members, and former friends. Still, another reason is the sheer size and complexity of our society. It reduces everyone’s personal sense of belonging.
Social trends are made much worse by the pervasive influence of the mass media—TV, movies, social media, and various reading materials. Never in human history have so many people of all ages been so acculturated with such vivid portrayals of human destructiveness—often in the name of “entertainment.” The mass communication media rarely express the enrichment of human compassion, intimacy, and dignity. Instead, they foster mindless competition, exploitation, and elitism in our society as they slavishly give praise to the selfishness and greed of prominent sports, business, and entertainment figures.
Social MediaWhen I was growing up, as dysfunctional of a household as it was, everyone sat down at the dinner table at the same time and had dinner. Now, if family members are sitting at the table for dinner, one, two, maybe all are on their cell phones.
Recently, I was sitting at the table of someone I was visiting. I was at one end of the table and the man of the family was at the other end. Everyone at the table had cellphones but me. I watched, appalled at what I was seeing. It was apparent that, rather than talking, two were texting each other. But all of them were texting throughout the meal.
Social media is a huge reasons why the number of lonely individuals has increased in the last few years. A recent survey showed that 97% of teens are now online daily. Another smaller percentage of teenagers (58%) said they frequently use TikTok. About 50% of teenagers are on Instagram, while 51% are on Snapchat every day, and another 19% reportedly visit Facebook daily. Those are statics of teenagers.
Social media isolates. Even though a teen may have thousands of followers, how many of the followers has this teen ever had a person-to-person conversation. That statistic is less than 1%. Isolation causes loneliness. The net result of all these influences is that many people of all ages are not able to accomplish the three primary forms of connectedness.
1) They don’t learn how they can fit into our society; 2) They don’t know who to ask for help with problems; and 3) They are not sure whether anyone in our society really needs them.
These three types of interpersonal connections are essential to the well-being and fulfillment of humans. Our modern culture does not currently guide people to achieve these important connections, however, the situation is not hopeless. We can build this skill training into the fabric of our society if we want to, and if we understand what this technology looks like. See a Therapist Research suggests that loneliness and symptoms of depression can perpetuate each other, meaning the more lonely you are, the more depressed you feel, and vice versa. Sometimes just “getting out there” and meeting other people isn’t enough. It's possible to still feel lonely when you’re around them, which could actually be a sign of depression or social anxiety. If this is the case for you, it may be a good idea to seek psychologist or counselor to help with feelings of loneliness, especially if you also feel other symptoms of depression. Some forms of therapy, especially cognitive behavioral therapy, can help you to change your thoughts as well as your actions to help you not only experience less loneliness but have more tools to prevent it. Whatever you do to combat loneliness, know that you are truly not alone, and there are many things you can do to feel more connected.