BY SOFO ARCHON
Why do so many people feel lonely?
Although we have access to advanced technology that allows us to instantly communicate with each other, hundreds of millions of us feel isolated.
In the United Kingdom, for example, 60% of 18-34-year olds report that they often feel lonely. And in the United States, 46% of the entire population say they’re lonely on a regular basis.
Loneliness, as you might know, sucks. To live in a world where you don’t have anyone to genuinely connect with can be soul-crashing. It can make you feel insecure, anxious, unimportant and undeserving of love. And since the soul and the body are not separate but intrinsically connected, what is hurting us psychologically is also hurting us physically.
Research has revealed the detrimental effects of loneliness on our health. For example, a study found that suffering from chronic loneliness can be twice as deadly as obesity and as dangerous as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Another study found that lonely people were three times more likely to catch the common cold than people who had plenty of healthy relationships. And yet another study found that isolated people were two to three times more likely to die during a nine-year period of time than highly connected people.
One of the main reasons why loneliness is so harmful is that it tends to go hand-in-hand with high levels of stress, which has been shown to significantly weaken the immune system, and thus to accelerate aging as well as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and all sorts of other diseases. Loneliness, therefore, is a serious public health issue. Yet we rarely hear or talk about it, which itself is a crystal-clear sign of social disconnection — a reflection of our modern world, wherein loneliness has become an epidemic in recent years.
So, why do so many of us feel lonely nowadays?
There are plenty of reasons, but at the root of the loneliness epidemic lies the cultural belief that we don’t depend on each other. This belief is mainly the result of our economic system, which is largely based on the conversion of relationships into paid services. You see, in this system, most of us are conditioned to think that we can buy everything we need, without having to form ties to other people.
Do you want to eat a delicious meal? Pay your local restaurant and it will be prepared for you. Do you feel the urge to have sex? Pay a prostitute and an attractive person will sleep with you. Do you want someone to look after your kids? Pay a nanny and she’ll help you out.
Everything we desire is within our reach, we believe, provided that we have the money to pay for it. Therefore, as long as we work enough and earn enough, we’ll be able to satisfy our needs. In other words, we’ll be “independent” — a word that implies personal success in our culture. Other cultures, however, considered this kind of independence as a sign of failure.
In earlier times, people used to feel dependent on one another. They saw themselves as part of a community, which they served and was serving them. If, let’s say, someone wanted to move a very heavy object out of her house but didn’t live with someone who could offer a helping hand, she’d ask her neighbors for help, rather than paying a company. Or, if someone wanted to have fun, he’d likely meet with his friends and chat, sing, dance, play sports or maybe create something together, instead of paying for entertainment.
Being embedded in their communities, people felt much safer and happier. Not only did they have the support of their neighbors, but they also formed intimate relationships with them.
Nowadays, most of us think that we don’t need anyone. We pay strangers — who can be easily replaced by other strangers — for pretty much anything we need. Not surprisingly, the sense of community has almost completely disappeared. Each one of us feels like a tiny island in a vast ocean, separated from each other by the wild currents of a cold and indifferent existence. And the cost of this sense of separation is affecting everyone — some of us more, others less — but we all experience a certain degree of alienation, and the insecurity, fear and anxiety resulting from that.
Our loneliness is further intensified by society’s fixation on competition. You see, we’re living in a scarcity-based economic system where money isn’t enough to go around. In this system, more for one person means less for another, and one’s success means another’s failure. Hence, nearly everyone is trying to outdo others in order to maximize their personal gain – something we learned to do from a very young age at school, competing with our peers for grades and external validation.
Is it any wonder, then, that so many of us feel lonely? When we feel that our wellbeing is threatened by the success of others, how can we trust those around us? When we’re hurt again and again by other people, how can we dare to open up our hearts, embrace others and offer them a place in our lives? Quite the contrary, we prefer to insulate ourselves from the world in order to find protection from it. But the problem is, the more we seek security away from others, the more we lose it, because true security can only come from friendship and community.
Whether we like to admit it or not, we all depend on each other — and there’s nothing wrong with that. Just like we depend on the sun, the soil and the air, we also depend on other people. In addition, we are all social beings with an inherent need to connect and share, not hoard and compete. And, contrary to what our culture has programmed us to believe, money can only buy us superficial, short-lasting substitutes of what we actually need. Yes, we can pay someone to prepare a meal for us, but would that be the same as a meal prepared by a person who sincerely cares for us? Yes, we can pay a band to play music for us, but would that be the same as a lover serenading us? And yes, we can pay a stranger to sleep with us, but would that be the same as sleeping with someone who knows us inside and out?
I’m sure that everyone deep down knows the answer to those questions: Money can’t buy us love and connection. Yet our belief that we don’t need each other has made us stray from that truth. Once we wake up to it, we’ll want to reach out to other people and start co-creating new social systems that will bring us together, instead of bringing as apart.