Being alone has never been so simple. The running joke of wanting to quit everything and live alone in a cabin in the woods stopped feeling like a joke somewhere around 2020, and is now followed by more practical statements from your friends, like "Make sure it has good Wi-Fi", which is the only connection to the outside world that you really need.
The Wi-Fi is for work, which you generally still need to do. Feeling disconnected from our work is not a new phenomenon. As occupations grow more and more sectorised and abstract, many of us have a hard time answering questions like "what is your profession?" and easily lose track of the ultimate purpose of the reports and spreadsheets we compile.
However abstract, "work" used to mean a physical space where you go every day and socialise with the same people. Run into acquaintances on the bus, stop by the new supermarket on the way. Now, many jobs can be done without leaving your house or socialising with anyone outside of Microsoft Teams' chats and calls.
But no, this is not a piece advocating for you to go back to your 2-hour commute to work. Home office has great perks for your well-being, one of them being having more time to yourself. The point is: when was the last time you made a new friend?
Making friends as an adult is hard. You graduated college, and now there is no place to effortlessly meet similar-aged people with somewhat similar interests. You convince yourself you have enough friends as it is, but you only know that your friend started learning to play the bass because she posted about it on her Instagram stories. Many people used to befriend their colleagues at work, but you have barely met your co-workers (and you don't even feel that you really want to).
If you are feeling alone, you are not the only one: a study found that 12% of Americans do not have any friends, and 48% only have 1-4 friends. In 1990, 33% of Americans said that they had 10 or more close friends. Today, that number has gone down to 13%. A similar poll in Brazil found that 28% of Brazilians have one friend at most.
Nowadays, having only a few friends may feel like enough, since we do not rely on them as much. My parents always talked about the lawyer friend that they called for (questionable) on-the-spot legal advice, or the friend with a car that kindly drove them to the airport. The friend who owned a small convenience store and would save them a pack of the gum they always bought on the way to work.
For many young people, the lawyer is a fashionable lady on TikTok, the car is an Uber, and they can't remember the last time they went in-person shopping. However, unlike these services, my parents' friends weren't being used or only kept around for chores. A big part of friendship was doing favours for each other and generally sharing some of the burdens of life. Nowadays, it can feel like our lives are sharply separated from other people's. Our burdens are for us to carry, and friends are there to lend an ear at most.
In this scenario, reaching out can feel difficult. How would that friend react if I asked them to buy me medicine and take care of me when I am ill? Surely, they have their own routine, and I am not really a part of it. Would it be silly to ask to go shopping together? Would they like to help me choose a new dress? Or is this friendship, like many, one that barely exists outside of a loud pub?
It is tough to navigate the "terms & conditions" of friendships outside of their original, well-designated space (like a classroom), when everything that you can do together could technically be done alone. No one "needs" each other anymore, so how can we have friendship turn into more than "hanging out" in nice places with well-planned activities? And if we end up doing everything alone, how can we tell if we are lonely? I have friends that live in the same neighbourhood as I do and friends that live across the world. Every now and then, they all feel equally far away. We can find ourselves feeling close to our friends through social media, when, actually, we are no t living with them, but living vicariously through them. I feel close to my friend because I am aware that she is learning to play bass, but I have never heard her play. Does she know I would love to go to her concert, no matter how bad a musician she currently is?
A recent survey run in 142 countries discovered that 1 in every 4 adults reports feeling very or fairly lonely, with the loneliest demographic being exactly those between 19 and 29 years old. Loneliness appears to be so widespread that the World Health Organisation has recently labelled it a global health priority – because it does impact our health, in manifold ways. The lack of meaningful interpersonal connections can hinder cognitive ability, compromising functions like memory and concentration. Moreover, there are observable physical effects: t he National Institute on Aging in the United States found that prolonged loneliness might present health risks equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Time is a funny thing: it is all about how you spend it. Instead of shortening our lives through isolation, we can make time fly by enjoying it with our loved ones.
So then, why are we stopping ourselves from asking others to be a part of our lives? Well, as it often is the case, we get better at socialising with practice – and, likewise, we get worse when we don't. Many of us spent as long as two core formative years without quality time with people that we were used to seeing often. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Prime Minister Boris Johnson advised Brits to "avoid unnecessary social contact". If what he meant was somewhat clear back in 2020, perhaps we are still trying to figure out what "necessary" social contact looks like now that life is supposed to carry on "as normal" . Nonetheless, one thing that the data seems to show is that we desire meaningful socialisation more than we are letting on.
Maybe this article can be a conversation-starter. It can be a nice way to tell someone you appreciate that you would love to hear them play. That you would drop everything to take care of them when they are ill. That it would make your day to have them come over and play Mario Kart for a whole afternoon . No fancy dates, no expectations except friendship and understanding.
And if it is my friends who are reading this, know that I would love to help you choose a new coat for the coming winter. I will help you paint your bedroom walls because you got sick of baby blue. I will hold you when you cry, but I would also love to simply go to a bookstore and hear about your favourite stories.
Because, in the end, we spent so much time taking socialisation for granted that we became incapable of reaching out when it is not a given. Isolating ourselves can be therapeutic, but it cannot be a long-term mechanism to avoid tricky, often unspoken, social dynamics. We can survive alone in a cabin in the woods, but we can live a longer, more fulfilling life when we take a chance and reach out to a friend who might be just as lonely as we are. A great deal of life is individual, but we can find joint meaning by allowing ourselves to truly intertwine our experiences.
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