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It seems to be an epidemic.  Vast amounts of psychologists talk about the perils of loneliness.  Depression, hallucinations, and addiction are all byproducts of loneliness.  Even the body’s ability to heal itself, fight off disease, and your chances of recovery from cancer are impacted if you feel lonely.

Being lonely is as much of a risk factor as smoking – Dr. Shimi Kang

So what can we do?  Why do so many people feel lonely in the age of communication?  I will contend there are two main reasons for it.

We have lost our ability to connect.

Sure, we can pick up our phones and send a text message instantly, and get a cute emoji back for our efforts, but that isn’t truly connecting with someone.  Even if the text is deep and meaningful, most communication isn’t written.  A text misses out on the quiver in our voice, or the pauses we make while trying to explain our feelings. But a phone call can’t replace an in-person conversation.

We mainly communicate through body language: Facial expressions, hand gestures, the way we sit and engage in the conversation, all play a role in our communication, and they’re all lost in SMS.  True connection comes from a physical presence, from touch, from eye contact.  An emoji simply isn’t going to cut it when it comes to true emotional expression.

If we were completely ignored by everyone we came across, it would feel worse than being tortured. – William James

We are afraid of being vulnerable.

Every day, we see the cute things our friends’ kids have done on Facebook.  Instagram shows us the new car someone bought.  We see headings, “So-n-so is in a relationship.”  We see all the good things that happen to people, because people generally don’t want to acknowledge the bad things that happen. They don’t want to talk about the report card that barely passed.  They don’t want to mention the bills that aren’t getting paid.  And they certainly don’t want to admit they settled for their new partner because their self esteem is so low, they didn’t want to be alone any longer.

Thirty years ago, our friends and our neighbors knew so much more about our lives.  They saw the good, but also some of the bad.  Today it’s so easy to control the message we publish, that we get to leave out the things that make us appear ordinary, damaged… Human.

It would be a bad idea to talk about all your fears and shortcomings on Facebook.  Those topics are best discussed with close friends, in person.  But that can only happen if we connect with people.

Loneliness is a crisis. It affects our health, our well being, our sense of fulfillment, our joy, our longevity.  It even affects our ability to be compassionate and caring towards other human beings.  It is one of the worst conditions a human can find themselves in, and sadly its more and more common every day.

Stop reading this blog, and go meet people.  Make those connections, be vulnerable, not just in your sorrows and fears, but in your joys and ambitions too.  Humans thirst for connection.

It would seem that I have a lot of friends.  However you want to measure it – the number of people I enjoy spending time with, in various clubs and groups in which I am active.  Maybe it’s the number of Facebook “friends” I have.  Or the regulars I see at various establishments that I recognize, and that recognize me, and look forward to a thirty second chat when we make eye contact.

But what about true friends?  I feel blessed, because I’ve been able to find a few of those along my journey.  They are rare, and some people never are able to find them.

These are the friends that tell us when we’re making bad decisions.  They tell us when we’re behaving badly.  When we’re hurting ourselves, and hurting those we proclaim to love.  They tell us when we’re not living up to the potential that they see we’re capable of.  It takes a mature person to actually have true friends, because no one likes to hear those things about themselves, and we can feel attacked when a true friend voices their concern.  Hopefully our maturity can help us step back from what feels like an attack and listen with a humble heart.

Like so many things, this comes back to love.  Love is service.  It’s, “what can we do for someone?”  A true friend is serving us, by helping us grow.

“We must become the change we want to see” – Ghandi

I ran across an interesting comparison of relationships vs an amusement park, and the speaker made an excellent point: If you go to the amusement park and ride the rides, but the entire time you’re thinking about how expensive the ride is, and how upset you are that you spent that money, you’re going to miss the enjoyment of the ride.

But if instead you think, “The park costs x amount. And I get to do this, and this thing over there, and that over there.. And OH! (pointing) that thing over there too!” you’ll enjoy it.

We humans so easily focus on the negative. It’s almost like we’re programmed to complain. In its good form, complaints fuel innovation, change, and improvement. But in its negative form, we dwell on it, and we don’t use that energy to improve, we simply fester.

There are no perfect relationships, because there are no perfect people. Everyone has a price of admission. There will be something about a person you won’t like. Probably lots of things. And if we focus on those, we’ll fester. But instead, if we think about all the joys and experiences we get to share, maybe we can stop dwelling on the price of admission, and simply enjoy the ride.

It makes sense, but I haven’t heard it explained this way before – the anger (due to infidelity) is there because they care. It takes a higher level of thinking to not throw away the entire relationship over an affair, but to look at it as a whole, and realize that the person you’re with is still a good person, even if they messed up in this one instance.

When she explains it that way, it really makes you look at how easily people throw away relationships these days (with our swipe-right, something-else-is-better-around-the-corner attitude) and you can’t help but think real love is dead. People throw away relationships for so many absurd reasons. It takes love to look at your partner after a breach of trust like an affair and be willing to say, “You’re a good person. You messed up. Now lets figure out how to move past this.” Sadly, it seems people throw away relationships because they don’t like the way their partner folds the towels.

In programming, the simple “Hello World!” application was often the first program you’d write, when learning to write code.  As this site is really about learning about yourself, I found it fitting to not change the included sample, and instead leave it here.  We are, after all, learning how to rewrite ourselves to be better versions of who we are.