A toxic loneliness now plagues America. Several factors came together to create it, and all of them will need to be addressed in order for us to end it.
First, there’s economics. A ruthless form of capitalism has left so many millions living in survival mode, people often lack the time or bandwidth to be really be there for the people closest to them. Second, an addiction to our screens has made us blind at times to what’s going on with the people we care about most, even those sitting right in front of us. And third, common psychotherapeutic models now teach us more about how to build walls between ourself and others, than teach us how to dissolve them.
While all of those factors are different, they emerge from a common place in consciousness. Modernity has leached from us our sense of divine connection to the world around us. Fortunately, we are on the verge of a Great Remembering.
Our underlying dis-ease, at its most essential level, is that we think that we are random beings living in a random universe. And we are not. We are one with each other and with God. Our sense that we were separate from a Higher Power, separate from nature, and separate from each other, has created a profound and psychologically dangerous rupture within ourselves. It has left us living lives that seem purposeless and without meaning. Sigmund Freud defined neurosis of “separation from self,” and we are a deeply neurotic society.
None of this is a problem that can be fixed overnight. We are living through a whole systems breakdown and it requires a whole systems response.
Every prayer, every act of contrition, every moment of forgiveness, every act of mercy, every reaching out with kindness, every moment we show up even when it’s not convenient, every word of graciousness, every tender look, has a way of chipping away at the walls we have built up between us and among us. Most of us are good at monitoring the mistakes of others; too few of us are good enough at monitoring our own.
We’ve created personal habits, social attitudes, and economic systems that breed loneliness because they breed disconnection. They are like walls we built, but which we can choose to bring down.
When we experienced the turn of the new millennium, a friend told me about an interesting experience she had on a New York subway car that New Year’s Day. She had ridden the same train for years, and had never seen people on it talking too much or interacting with others. On that day however, the social contract simply changed. She said people were chatting, exchanging cookies, excitedly celebrating together the birth of something new. She told me how fun it was, and how much people were enjoying each other. Yet it occurred to her, she said, that nothing had really changed except our view of one another! People remembered, if even for just one day, that we are here with and for each other.
Each of us can choose to remember that. Everyone is carrying dreams, and longing, and the experience if not memories of suffering. One shift in perception, from “I’m here alone” to “I’m here to extend love wherever I go,” changes everything. No matter how lonely we are, there are those who are lonelier and could use our kindness. Who among us could not choose to reach out more?
Years ago, I founded an organization called Project Angel Food that delivered, and still delivers, food to homebound seriously ill patients. At the time we were in the middle of the AIDS crisis, and I couldn’t stand the idea of people suffering through that experience alone. Yet time and time again, volunteers told me that they got as much from delivering food and kindness and love, as the clients themselves could possibly be receiving. The world we are living in is changing now, from a civilization posited on fear and separation to one posited on unity and love. That is what people are longing for. One day, humanity will have remembered ourselves. And loneliness will be no more.
