This is the newsletter version of Sara by the Season, where I explore what is piquing my curiosity as I try to lean into nature’s wisdom and rhythms. You can listen to me read you the newsletter by hitting play above - or you can click the little link above and to the right to play in your favorite podcast player. If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it.
I keep finding myself sucked into reporting on the “loneliness epidemic.” This epidemic started before Covid; a 2018 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 22 percent of all adults — almost 60 million Americans — said they often or always felt lonely or socially isolated. But the Covid pandemic seems to have exacerbated the problem, so much so that Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, put out a warning in May 2023 equating our lack of connection with smoking 15 cigarettes a day, among other dire health outcomes.
The Surgeon General’s report on Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation is 82 pages long (!) with a solid twenty of those pages devoted to a national strategy informing us what we and other stakeholders can do to foster connection - plus a very fancy website with interactive videos and printables. In other words, this is a big deal to our national health and well-being according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It isn’t just the US though - rates of perceived loneliness seem to be rising around the world.
Over the last few years, probably because I’m interested in this whole conversation so it’s likely that I bring it up often, I find myself talking to friends around my age about friendship. Most of my friends say that they wish they had more friends and stronger connections. We wish we had more time for our relationships, and we feel like there are people “out there” somewhere enjoying more and better connections than we do.
I have a few theories about the causes of this loneliness epidemic that I haven’t heard much about that I’d like to delve into here.
Maybe it’s an expectations problem.
Years ago, Grant’s therapist assigned him some Brené Brown CDs to listen to. This was before Brené’s TED Talk when no one we knew had ever heard of her, and we loved her Texas twang and how she cussed just the right amount. While I don’t remember a ton of practical take-aways from the hours of talks we listened to together, I know that it sunk into our psyches in ways we’ll probably never know. There is one bit of wisdom that she shared that I have since referenced too many times to count:
Our stories are not meant for everyone. Hearing them is a privilege, and we should always ask ourselves this before we share: ‘Who has earned the right to hear my story?’ If we have one or two people in our lives who can sit with us and hold space for our shame stories, and love us for our strengths and struggles, we are incredibly lucky. If we have a friend, or small group of friends, or family who embraces our imperfections, vulnerabilities, and power, and fills us with a sense of belonging, we are incredibly lucky.
Brené, who remember, gets paid to study shame and connection, says that we’re lucky if we have one or two people in our lives who we trust with our deepest stuff. When I share this tidbit with our friends in these conversations we’ve been having, they all express so much relief. If Brené Brown says we’re lucky if we have one or two of those types of connections - and most of us would say that there are at least one or two people in our lives that embrace our whole selves - it felt like we were ok. We didn’t have to worry so much about our relationships. Instead, maybe we could put that worrying time and energy into deepening our existing relationships.
Maybe it’s a social media problem (but not in the way you’re thinking).
Much of this reporting I’ve been reading and listening to has tied the loneliness epidemic to social media, in the sense that people are spending too much time on social media and don’t have time for real, in person connection, which is making them lonely. Or that social media engenders FOMO, which leads to loneliness. You weren’t lonely until you saw ten of your friends hanging out together without you. I think both of these characteristics of social media certainly contribute to the problem.
But I wonder if it’s not so much social media itself, as it is that social media puts people’s highlight reels in front of our faces all day long, so that it appears that everyone is having more and deeper connections than it feels like I’m having. The source of our dis-ease is shoulding ourselves into thinking that we need to have more and better friends instead of having gratitude for the connections we already have. It is the comparison baked into social media that then creates a sense of lack in ourselves instead of us noticing a lack on our own and maybe deciding to join a book club or a hiking group to find more connection.
Obviously personality and age comes into play here. I had more friends when I was in school and just out of college because I had less responsibilities, but also because the way my life was structured during those years fostered more ease in connecting. I spent so much of the day with my friends when I was in school and college. In college and after college, I lived with or very near my closest friends, eliminating so many of the barriers to hanging out that I face these days: work schedule, kids’ schedules, childcare depending on the kids’ ages, distance, exhaustion. In fact, I don’t ever “hang out” with friends anymore - time with friends has to be scheduled, oftentimes weeks in advance. We might hang out once we get to our destination, but it isn’t really anything like the random, fun and sometimes boring, hanging out that I used to do in a friend’s dorm room.
We tend to compare ourselves to past versions of ourselves, so if we have a couple of close friends now, but had a handful of close friends 20 years ago, we judge ourselves for it instead of acknowledging that our lives are completely different than they were 20 years ago. Or we judge ourselves instead of getting honest with ourselves about whether or not our connections are actually lacking or if we’re holding ourselves to some ideal we see on the internet or that we experienced during a previous season of our lives.
Maybe it’s a social media problem (but not in that way either).
To keep piling on social media (everybody is doing it), I also wonder if there is a component of the “right” kind of social activities that make for good social media posts. To go back to hanging out in my dorm room, even if I had social media back then, not much of our hanging out would have made compelling social media content. These days, my favorite activity is hanging out with Grant on our porch - sometimes with the kids, sometimes with friends who we invited over. It’s fun, relaxing, basically free, and easy - but I’m not posting it on social media because it really is only fun and exciting to me.1
In this great conversation with Ezra Klein and Sheila Liming, author of the new book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, Liming defines hanging out as, “daring to do not much and daring to do it in the company of other people.” That is completely contrary to what social media rewards. When it comes to your social life, social media rewards the epic couples’ vacations or the “it” concert with 40 of your closest friends or a flawlessly orchestrated dinner party. Unless you already have a huge social media following, no one gets tons of likes for the video of you and a few friends “not doing much” in whatever today’s equivalent is of my boring college dorm room.
Liming goes on to say:
Another way to think of this is spending time with others without trying to put too many expectations upon what that time has to do, or what it has to result in, or what it has to produce. Yet, I would say that hanging out itself is not necessarily a skill. You don’t necessarily excel at hanging out. You either do it, or you don’t do it. But I think there are certain skills that are built into the work of hanging out itself. So I’m thinking of it in the book as a kind of social musculature that we have to expose ourselves to these sort of repeated scenarios with relative frequency, just like exercise, in order to keep those muscles active and in order to prevent them from effectively atrophying.
Because most of our lives are quite busy, we have to plan out our social activities far in advance, and if we don’t get to see our friends as much as we’d like, then it feels like when we do see each other, it needs to be something exciting and something that typically requires meticulous planning and/or money. Because we don’t “dare to do not much in the company of other people,” we lose the “social musculature” for hanging out that Liming warns us about.
Maybe it’s a our solitude muscles have atrophied problem.
Speaking of musculature, I’m wondering too if some of this is because we have lost the muscle for boredom and solitude. We carry around these super computers in our pockets everywhere and never have to be bored. But we never really have to be alone either - we can text our entire social circle at any given time or eavesdrop on their lives via social media or just consume entertainment that makes us feel less alone for a time. Solitude, like boredom, is a muscle that will atrophy without use, and all of our great wisdom traditions point to solitude as an essential spiritual practice:
The Buddha said: “Apply yourself to solitude. One who does so will see things as they are.”
In Jewish scripture, Moses and Elijah experienced spiritual awakenings of sort only after 40 days alone in the desert.
The Tao Te Ching says, “Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe.”
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna advises, "Those who aspire to the state of yoga should seek the Self in inner solitude through meditation. With body and mind controlled they should constantly practice one-pointedness, free from expectations and attachment to material possessions.”
Most Christian traditions consider solitude a spiritual discipline, modeled after Jesus’ own solitude practices related throughout the Gospels.
Despite their diversity, we see practices of solitude in nature as vital to most indigenous cultures around the world.
Perhaps we confuse loneliness with solitude. Solitude feels uncomfortable for many of us, especially when we don’t practice it and experience its benefits. As we’ve increasingly disconnected from our spiritual and religious traditions (often for good reason, let’s be clear), I am wondering if some of our collective loneliness comes from an inability to sit still with ourselves. We think what we’re feeling is loneliness when really it’s just that we feel uncomfortable being alone with ourselves because we don’t have to as much anymore, so the difference between loneliness and solitude gets murkier.
Maybe it’s a we’re only “counting” human social connection problem.
Another thing worth thinking about is how our disconnection from the natural world plays into the loneliness epidemic. I have a solid five minute snuggle session with my dog before I get out of bed every morning that I guarantee you does something good for my mental health and serotonin levels. My best cooling off place is the garden or a walk in the woods - I can go in completely pissed about something and calm down considerably in less than ten minutes.
We all have experiences like this where we might not be connecting with another human, but we’re definitely connecting with the more-than-human-world. But the data is clear that we’re collectively spending far less time in the natural world than ever before in human history. Is it a coincidence that we are also reporting feeling far lonelier?
It’s complicated.
I think it is great that we’re collectively talking about loneliness, but, as we tend to do, we act like there is a practical five step solution that we can follow to resolve the problem. Instead, we should be talking about the complexities of the problem, acknowledging how we all might be impacted differently, and, most of all, offering ourselves self-compassion and curiosity instead of judgment and critique.
Scattering Seeds
I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s wisdom, as well as other things related to this newsletter’s topic that maybe didn’t fit into the actual newsletter, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.
So many great podcasts and articles on this topic if you’re interested in digging in:
There is a whole structural element to this conversation in the sense that we’ve setup our society so we could all be by ourselves most of the time and then we wonder why we’re lonely, which had me thinking about this piece on Sabbath.
Live Closer to Your Friends and The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake via The Atlantic. Also this follow up from AHP on why we don’t just live closer to our friends if it makes us happier was excellent (always read AHP’s comments).
Derek Thompson hosted some great conversations on his podcast Plain English that helped me to come to some of my conclusions above, specifically this one on lessons from that 80+ year Harvard study and this one on why our teens are so unhappy. Similarly, Ezra Klein has been digging into the teen mental health crisis, which makes me curious about what overlap there is with the loneliness epidemic.
Vivek Murphy (current US Surgeon General) was great on the Ezra Klein podcast and on On Being.
Every year, we curate a pretty killer (if I do say so myself) playlist for hanging out. Here’s 2023’s if you want to listen and hang out wherever you are.
Here’s to finding some time to just hang out!
Sara
Have you noticed too that when you’re really present and having fun with your people that you rarely reach for your phone to take a picture of it?
the loneliness epidemic