There is the faintest hint of crispness in the dawn these
days, just a little teaser that alludes to autumn's approach.
The seasons are shifting. A previously quick early-morning
grocery run took 45 minutes transit time one way yesterday.
Back-to-school traffic is a real thing, friends.
September is a season of gathering. Everywhere we go, it
seems we are gathering in groups: in classrooms, on
sidelines, in newly formed committees, on crowded planes and
subway cars, on Braddock Road at 7:40 a.m. We are always
together. And we are increasingly alone.
Last night, I read the text from a sweet teenaged girl barely
into her first week of school: I just feel left out and
lonely. My daughter - several years older than the message
sender - got up, grabbed her keys and told me she was off to
deliver a milkshake. On her way out, she paused a moment and
glanced back at me over her shoulder.
"I don't know why we all think we are the only ones who are
lonely," she said. "Actually, I think we're all lonely."
She's right. We are.
The go-to cure for loneliness in 2015 is to log-on. Flip open
a laptop. Click open a smartphone app. There you go; you're
now surrounded by oh-so-many people. And many, many times
they will make you lonelier still. As we scroll through
everyone's edited versions of themselves, it seems like all
those faces are close to other faces. They have to be. They
huddle together to fit in the frame and freeze the moment for
publication, thereby ensuring a perfectly preserved testimony
to togetherness.
Social media can make it seem like everyone has lots of
friends and they are all doing spectacularly fabulous things
together all the time. The illusion is achingly close to
being real, and then it's not real at all. Those events are
happening and there are connections in those moments, but all
is not as it seems.
Away from the moment - away from the filters and the framing
- people are lonely. Even in the midst of the crowds of
people drinking lattes on stadium seats on Saturday
afternoons and gathering on bus stop corners on Monday
mornings, we are each in our own bubbles, yearning for
connection. Increasingly, studies show that the more time we
spend online, the more likely we are to use social media to
displace sleep, exercise and face-to-face exchanges, leaving
us vulnerable to loneliness, a sense of isolation and true
depression.
If we are going to cure the loneliness epidemic, we have to
reach into the personal spaces of the people we care about
and offer something better that what the screen holds.
Together, we have to engage in authentic opportunities for
relationship. Together, we have to commit to face-to-face (or
at least voiced and heard) conversations.
Relationships require risk. They ask us to put down the mask
and to step out, unfiltered, into the presence of another
person. More than hashtags, we are a people who yearn for
authentic, honest conversation.
To move beyond loneliness, we need to be the person who sees
the need for the real, genuine presence of warmth in the
lives of people around us and decides to be that friend. We
need to be the girl who shows up with a milkshake in real
life at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night and says, "You feel that
way? Me, too."
Foss, whose website is elizabethfoss.com, is a freelance
writer from Northern Virginia.