​Loneliness

In the USA, roughly one in three people older than 65 live alone, and half of those older than 85 live alone. But what does it really mean to be alone? And how is that different from being lonely?

Being alone means simply being by ourselves or apart from others. Being lonely, on the other hand, is feeling unhappy about being alone. Deep in our hearts, loneliness is an emptiness — a feeling of disconnection from people, or being ignored or overlooked. It involves a desire to be connected and to belong.

An article in Atlantic magazine titled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” states:

We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time and space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less actual society.

The article continues:

Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing appetite for independence. The price of self-determination and self-reliance has often been loneliness. But Americans have always been willing to pay that price.

It also points out:

The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. The greater proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are. The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are. New technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy.

The book Beyond Loneliness identifies four sources of loneliness: leadership responsibility, superficial relationships, depression, and grief or loss. But it reminds us that each of us has three parts: body, soul, and spirit. Our spirit can only be truly connected to God. We are created for divine friendship.

Each of us has a “God-shaped hole” within our lives — a part made to have a divine connection or relationship with God. Often, we try to fill this hole with other things because we don’t have a relationship with God. We may put people, sports, TV, cars, alcohol, drugs, or work in that space.

Yet, none of these can ever fill our God-shaped hole. We are bound to feel emptiness and loneliness because this part of us, meant for divine friendship, gets filled with so many other things.

Thus, part of the loneliness we experience comes from not having God within our God-shaped hole. In other words, we hide from God as we pursue things other than God — and then we feel loneliness.

While loneliness can have many causes, one thing we can be sure of is that God is with us. We can build on this divine friendship. God’s intimate relationship with us is a powerful antidote to feelings of loneliness.