Why is everyone so lonely?

Standing in a crowd . . . all alone

We have so many connections, so why are we all so lonely?

Maybe you're like me - I realized, a few months ago, standing awkwardly in a room of strangers at a PTA meeting, that I had forgotten the skill of small talk. After having two children and then living in the pandemic, I let my "knows how to exist in person" muscle atrophy.

Photo by Emre on Unsplash

Lately, I've been making a specific point to meet up with friends in person more than I have in years.

Extroverts weren't designed to live in a Zoom-powered world. Zoom calls feel like Caffeine-free Diet Coke when what you want is the "Real Thing." There are a few bubbles, but that's about it, and that gross aftertaste is a killer. Subtle interactions like body language, eye contact, handshakes, and hugs all get lost in translation over a screen.

I didn't realize how much I've missed the coffees, lunches, and drinks with people to whom I have neither married nor given birth, until I made a specific point to get back out. There's something about meeting in person that just hits different.

Yet, I am lucky to have thousands of online "friends." If I added up the connections from my various social media networks and met up with one person a day, every day, it would take up more than the rest of my life. Without the internet, my social world would contract dramatically.

In most ways, it's an incredible blessing for a weird goat Mom like me to have access to that many people. I get to build relationships I could never have otherwise. Before the internet and social media, the ability of an average person to build a large social circle was constrained by time, money, and geography. Now we can all build our groups however large we're able, if we so choose (by the way, thank you for being in mine - I'm glad you're here).

It is, however, a paradox - now that so much of our socialization happens online with volume that would be physically impossible in person, why are we lonelier than before? It should be the opposite - right?

Mounting evidence shows that more time spent on social media and online has detrimental effects on our mental health. Anxiety is on the rise. Even our children - who have access to relationship-building technology that was science fiction a generation ago - are suffering increased rates of suicide and depression. What is going on?

A principle of economics, diminishing marginal utility - could play a role. Diminishing marginal utility is the idea that every time we get an additional unit of a good thing - even a great thing, like a friend - although it makes us happy, it makes us marginally less so than the one before it.

Photo by Edson Saldaña on Unsplash

Take a delicious steak, for example. I love steak, and getting that first plate with a nice rare ribeye is one of life's great delights. However, if I already have a steak on a plate in front of me and someone hands me a second - although I will happily still take it - the second steak makes me less happy than the first did. If they keep coming, by the sixth or seventh steak, although I still like and appreciate a good cut of meat, each additional unit brings a little less joy than the one before. (By the way, if I die by drowning in steaks, know I went out doing what I love.)

Chickens in the barnyard are the Lays potato chips of animals. You can’t get just one. The first chickens I got all had names and got unique attention. Even when I was naming them each things like “dumpling,” “a la king,” and “noodle soup” to prepare myself for the emotional eventuality of consumption, the difference between three chickens and four is big. However, once I started selling eggs and got my flock to over 20, each chicken still mattered, but not in the same way.

Don’t get me wrong; we still have some individuals - Rocky (my husband’s chicken), Gertrude, the one-eyed chicken who lost an eye protecting her sisters, and some of our originals.

If you have no human friends, that first one can make all the difference in your life. But, if you have 4,999 friends, the 5,000th is still lovely but won't necessarily have the same impact as the first did when you have none.

In the 90s, a British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, posited that the average human could only maintain about 150 relationships. Although his number is debated in a world of online relationships, there still seems to be natural limiting factors to those interactions.

So, how do we combat these loneliness trends?

The first is to recognize and acknowledge it. I realized when I walked into a room full of people I didn't know (a thing I used to love to do) that I had lost part of my social skills over time. So now I am working deliberately to recapture them by meeting up and getting out.

Secondly, especially online, I'm working on remembering that each connection is an actual person. We are not chickens. Whenever I get an email that someone has signed up for this newsletter, I try to let my etch-a-sketch goldfish brain celebrate it like the first. Because there is no real difference between the 3rd subscriber and the 5,000th - each is an individual as special as the one before.

Third - and I know that basically, every post of this newsletter is some derivation of "go outside, everything is amazing." BUT go outside; everything is amazing. Reconnect to authentic relationships in whatever way works for you.

This newsletter is part of that process for me. This is me taking my "outside" and distilling it (albeit ironically) into my online space.

I get to share about the beauty of seeds, gardens, goats, and chickens - and also my joys and struggles. So, if I, an often overly extroverted person, can walk into a room and still feel that awkward pang of loneliness, then maybe you do, too.

If I accomplish nothing else, I hope to give you a reprieve from the daily doomscroll. A break. A breath.

And if you're feeling lonely, it's totally normal; and by the way, you're not alone.