500 Words a Week - Loneliness
In a world when we have never been as connected, we have never been as lonely and isolated. Social media fills us with false interactions, we get some form of checking up and seeing what those close to us are up to without any communication to them. While online, and checking in with friends, what do we see? We see the best version, the out with friend’s version, the doing fun stuff with those close to us version. Further causing feelings of loneliness as we continue to scroll. We scroll so much, we associate it as a passive activity, not one as a genuine means of connecting with other people. We see someone close to us do something cool, achieve something they’ve wanted to achieve or have a significant moment in their life, and what do we do? We like the post, might comment at a push. Do we message that person saying how amazing that news is? Better yet do we talk to them.
“Loneliness is a growing health epidemic. We live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization, yet the rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s.” Prolonged periods of social isolation has the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. As per the World Health Organization “The effect of social isolation and loneliness on mortality is comparable to that of other well-established risk factors such as smoking, obesity, and physical inactivity.”
The following things are aspects I’m trying to get better at:
Better communication. When something reminds you of a friend, or a good memory with a friend, tell them. Even if it’s a short message.
When seeing good news online from someone close to you, message them. By all means like the post but put some more effort than a 0.5 second click to show some support to those close to you. We need to bring back an element of what social media was created for, connecting with people, staying in touch with those we don’t see regularly.
Go on dates with your friends. If you are in a relationship, or in the early stages, you will regularly go on dates to keep the relationship alive. How often do you do things with your friends? How often do you intentionally plan seeing your friends? We are coming to an age when I think it’s both harder and easier to make new friends. Harder in terms of how regularly do we expose ourselves to new situations where we speak to people we don’t know? Easier is some regard, because many people are open to making new friendships. I think it’s in times, when we do start talking to new people, we mustn’t be afraid of trying to make new social connections. The movie “I love you, man” comes to mind, go on some man dates.
From “I Love You, Man”
An important point on social isolation is that it’s not just centred around seeing people, it’s about the level of support you feel from people close to you, it’s about having people around you that you can open up with and have meaningful conversations. This number doesn’t need to be high. You can live alone and not feel isolated or lonely, equally you can be surrounded by people and feel lonely.
