Feeling lonely?
You aren't the only one. It is an epidemic.
Loneliness has tripled between 2016 and 2022
Before the pandemic loneliness was experienced by between four and 10 percent of people in Finland. That increased to between 10 and 25 percent during the pandemic
The steepest increase has been among the under-30s. Students, unemployed people and single parents experience loneliness more than others
Were they expecting it to reduce after the pandemic??
We are more disconnected now than we have ever been in the past, with smaller and weaker social circles, work from home practices that restrict our interaction further and when we are out, we have our noses buried into a digital world of unimportance. We don't interact anywhere near as much as we did in the past and while people claim convenience, they are not looking at the massive costs to wellbeing, that are going to have impacts on us for generations.
How can people be lonely when they have so much social interaction on the internet!?
Sarcastic much?
It is a funny thing when I talk to various people about their sense of social wellbeing and how they "don't need" the random interactions with strangers, yet so many of their complaints are about their lack of wellbeing - without seeing the connection. It isn't that random interactions are valuable for being random, but they are one of the things that builds our sense of community and, piques our interests in others. It allows us to be part of conversations we wouldn't otherwise, at a personal level, not an intellectual level.
For instance at the office today, with most people heading on vacation in the next few weeks, the topic of discussion was often "what have you planned" with a range of answers, from travel to home renovation, weddings to fishing in the local lakes. With various people moving in and out of the conversations, it led to a lot of splinter discussions through clarifying questions to discover more. While this was in a work setting with semi-familiar people, there was a sense of community around the conversations and, people were visibly better off for participating.
These short step away from the desk moments to spend sharing human details with others meant stepping outside of the workplace and into a completely different arena. For a few minutes, whatever was making them frown at the desk, was washed away.
Yet, when we design our lives to never step outside of our own perspective, and not see the visible change in people, the impact we have on the world and our experience of it is altered. While we might feel that what we are doing is important, we aren't getting that human feedback that it is. Not only that, we aren't potentially seeing any impact on others at all, as everyone becomes faceless, or our experience of them is somewhere disconnected, with the screen being a proxy for the person - and screens aren't human.
Like it or not, we are human and we are hardwired to need each other for a range of purposes. While some people seem to want to idealize the version of themselves that would be happy living alone and completely disconnected off the grid, the only reason they do is because this isn't possible for them. If they actually experienced that for any length of time, they would start to miss the connection with other. - even if those interactions are at times inconvenient.
I think for a lot of people, they feel that social interaction is a burden, that the reward on effort is just too high, because they look at it from the each interaction perspective. However, social interactions don't live in a vacuum, they are part of the fabric of society itself, the building blocks of a community. Foregoing the daily interactions means not having the material needed to build the larger tapestry, the one where we have more than the goods and services we can buy, but also the support networks that make us feel safe, relevant and loved.
I feel that a lot of people want to live in a better world, but they don't want to participate in building that better world. The trouble is, that it isn't like a piece of tech that can be built by a small group and then purchased by the consumers, it is something that participants need to take an active role in developing, in innovating. A culture that isolates us from interacting with each other continually reduces our opportunities and abilities, making it more difficult to return to the creative role of active growth. And when we aren't part of building a community, we aren't part of a community at all and instead, we are going to feel lonely.
Loneliness is not just from not having a significant other, but this is a big factor also and, the more isolated we become, the more individualistic and the more we see social interaction as a convenience, the harder it will be to meet and build the relationships that we value, the ones that connect us to each other and make us feel part of something greater than ourselves Make us feel relevant in a world of irrelevance.
Everyone is so busy spending their time alone on what is important to them, they are missing the thing that is actually important to them feeling like their life is valuable - connection with others. Yet, even though their body is telling them that they are lonely, they see them as a symptom of society, not a side-effect of their behavior.
We keep making strangers of everyone, so loneliness will only increase. Perhaps we will learn to suppress how we feel and pretend that it is normal, but history should tell us, that our frustration will leak, spilling out into other areas of our lives, reducing our wellbeing across the board. Loneliness is a social disease and when this spreads across a community, it is an epidemic.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]