Why are we ashamed of being lonely? 🦄
​Upcoming community events:
​Building Belonging Community Conversation: July 28. Meet and share experience with other people who are connecting communities and building belonging. I would love to see you and introduce you to some amazing people.
​Other events:
​Commsor Community Career Fair
​Rise Up!: A National Conference for Queer & Trans Youth Organizers
​The Crisis of Social Care and the Promise of Social Coops
​The life changing magic of having someone to talk to
​It was my ninth birthday and I was mortified.
​Only two other kids showed up to my party. Petal Conklin, my best friend, was unfazed, but Amy Compton evinced a distinct discomfort, though it was unclear whether that was because she was shy or because it’s simply painful to witness a disaster.
​The picture I have from that day doesn’t reflect my memory at all. In it, I am smiling and blowing out the candles an elaborate cake in the shape of a unicorn and rainbow (so ahead of my time).
​But even now, as my birthday approaches, I still get that out-of-nowhere feeling like “oh, maybe I don’t have friends after all,” which leads me to avoid the whole thing or feel awkward when I invite people to do something and they already have plans.
​In retrospect, I know having a summer birthday means many people are traveling or have family stuff going on. I know there are a good number of people who I love and care about and trust. But it’s absurdly easy to feel alone and even more potently, ashamed, like I can’t let anyone know that I’m lonely.
​Even if I really had no one to celebrate with, I wouldn’t be alone. A recent study found that 30% of millennials say they have no close friends. Another finds that one in four Americans say they have no one to talk to about important matters. One in three older people are lonely.
​The health effects of social isolation and loneliness are well-documented and staggering. Years of life are lost. Even more years are filled with depression, anxiety, obesity, addiction, and greater risk of heart attacks and stroke.
​We're treating so many symptoms of this problem and coming up with technological solutions that really make no sense if you think about it for two seconds. Sharing content? Robots? Artificial intelligence?
​We don't have any shortage of people to talk to! Billions of us are out here. But we've come up with this crazy idea that we don't have time to invest in relationships and community, that we don't have ways of really connecting with people or finding the right ones.
​Some of that is by design. There are industries predicated on our loneliness and even more emerging- not to actually solve the problem, but to make money from the problem's existence. Look around at how many businesses depend on an ongoing supply of people desperately seeking connection AND who supply a simulation of connection or a brief hit of something comforting that leaves us wanting.
​We've definitely seen this in tech. Social media, dating apps, voice assistants, and so many other services offer this idea of connection or interaction in service of their own bottom lines. Even the services that promise to directly connect us to other people often lack any real sense of context, emotion, or what is really going on for someone in their daily life. They are more like ads of our lives or emotionless snippets of text, not conversations. But they are convenient!
​The thing is, we're moving culturally into a context where it's only going to be harder and harder to get the required amount of connection and belonging we are built to need. We've built systems to support individualism above all else. We are alone way more than we evolved to endure.
​I get it. I've always been one of those people who felt conflicted by any sort of tribalism. I have an idea of myself that is independent, self-sufficient, kind-of weird and outsidery. But the more I look into the systems around me, the more I wonder how much of that is my inherent personality and how much is me blindly responding to the cues around me.
​Even before Web 2.0 came along, we were seeing more isolation and a kind of breakdown of social structures that had collective or community aspects. The Information Age accelerated this by creating more jobs where people primarily work on their own, more gig work, more opportunities to move away from family, and more ways to find people with similar interests anywhere and create loose networks, as opposed to being forced into the messy work of building relationships with the people nearby.
​Here's the thing. We can't reverse time, and even if we could, there's lots of reasons we wouldn't want to. But we can think about what we want to move toward, and whether we want to do it together.
​To build strong, sustaining relationships, we have to spend the time (and get years back in return)! We have to learn how to be in connection. We have to heal. We have to have conflicts and we have to be honest. We have to be vulnerable and trust one another, even though we've been hurt.
​I'm not saying this is easy. It's so far from easy. But that's the point.
​We're hurtling towards a future where we implode from convenience.
​As a tech builder, I want to make it easier to facilitate community and stronger connection. And I am convinced that's possible. But I don't want convenience or ease to be the goal.
​People are complicated, confusing, awe-inspiring paradoxes. We are everything and nothing. We are tender and cruel. To successfully come together, we need to have some sense of owning our own experience and to avoid judging others. In groups where those norms are established, trust emerges. Sometimes trust is challenged or conflict happens. But just those two norms can help us to go through the river, to get wet but not to drown.
​I don't believe we can 'solve' our disconnection with technology, but we can make technology that fosters these norms, that doesn't actively work against connection. And we can serve the people who hold the spaces that allow us to find ourselves in community.
​Reads & Resources
​Don’t Call it a Community and don’t miss Rosie’s thread on advice for folks starting communities
​Video: The Art of Community & Belonging - Charles Vogl at Google
​If you're not a member of our collective yet, please join us to build the future of community.