The Hard Work of Combatting Loneliness

And what low & lofty views of love have got to do with it.

A solitary moment on the Dingle Peninsula, Ireland.

5 years ago this week, I wrote an essay that went on to be my most-read piece ever: “Little Women and the Truth We’re Too Scared to Say.” The article is less about Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film and more about my growing inclination that loneliness is something that many of us are more haunted by than we would care to admit.

Loneliness is something that I experienced periodically throughout my life, beginning in my childhood and teenage years. Even through college, where I had formed some great friendships, I still struggled with loneliness, comparing myself to peers who seemed to always have weekend plans or study buddies or an imaginary miles-long list of people who were begging for them to make time to get a meal together. Post-grad life introduced new kinds of loneliness as my friends got married and started to have kids and I transitioned to remote work, solo-living, and oh yeah, the pandemic.

5 years and one pandemic later, the issue of loneliness only continues to grow as a concern. Just this week, I saw a new article about the topic of loneliness published as the February cover story of The Atlantic titled “The Anti-Social Century,” which is a long, detailed, and sobering look at the factors behind the rise of “self-imposed solitude” in 21st-century America.

I have to tell you, much of The Atlantic article made me feel extremely bummed out. However, the author (Derek Thompson) does end his essay with some more hopeful content, which I have been ruminating on. Thompson suggests that the problem of loneliness is a “collective-action problem,” meaning that a possible solution could be the (re)cultivation of “deeply etched communal habits.” He writes, “Our smallest actions create norms. Our norms create values. Our values drive behavior. And our behaviors cascade.”

The chief example Thompson references is a social experiment spearheaded by Nick Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. From the article:

[Epley] asked commuter-train passengers to make a prediction: How would they feel if asked to spend the ride talking with a stranger? Most participants predicted that quiet solitude would make for a better commute than having a long chat with someone they didn’t know. Then Epley’s team created an experiment in which some people were asked to keep to themselves, while others were instructed to talk with a stranger […] Despite the broad assumption that the best commute is a silent one, the people instructed to talk with strangers actually reported feeling significantly more positive than those who’d kept to themselves. “A fundamental paradox at the core of human life is that we are highly social and made better in every way by being around people,” Epley said. “And yet over and over, we have opportunities to connect that we don’t take, or even actively reject, and it is a terrible mistake.”

I appreciate that Thompson highlights Epley’s social experiment because I think it hits on the core challenge of combatting loneliness: this work can be very hard. I definitely agree with Thompson and Epley’s conclusions: both personal habits and community rituals are deeply helpful for combatting loneliness. I have experienced the benefit of things like weekly group runs and church community group, and have even found it surprisingly impactful to realize how much I enjoy small talk at the gym or at the grocery store. And I must add this: I’ve found combatting loneliness to be a hard, humbling, and complicated problem that touches nearly every area of my life and health.

A lingering question that came to my mind at the end of the article is this: what happens when these gold-standard personal habits and community rituals fail us? In reality, the whole rest of the article is about how personal habits and community rituals have failed us, thereby propelling us into this “anti-social century,” so I have a hard time wondering how renewed personal habits or redeemed community rituals could be the solution. Is that too cynical? Perhaps. But my personal experience might provide some context as to why I think personal habit and even community rituals are an insufficient solution to combat loneliness…

For example:

What happens when you’ve spent years forming a public personality that is resiliently independent, cheerful, and seemingly-busy? What happens when healthy habits like getting 8 hours of sleep or not looking at your phone after 8 PM cause you to say no to watching that late NBA game with friends or make you miss the FaceTime call from your night owl pal? What happens when you leave a church, or when your friends have babies and admit that they want more mom friends to relate to, or when old friends’ new rituals and routines are rendered incompatible with yours and yours incompatible with theirs?

What happens when our “deeply etched communal habits” do not relieve your deeply etched loneliness?

Loneliness is such a complicated issue because within it, like Russian nesting dolls, are more issues stacking one within the other. The issue of loneliness is also an issue of identity and theology, faith and freedom. Loneliness involves the self and others. It also involves risk, even when there is (almost always) a reward. When it comes to interacting with others in both thick and thin social settings, people have the propensity to disappoint us in trivial and profound ways. So yeah, I can understand how and why the people that Derek Thompson writes about have settled for self-imposed solitude. It’s less risky.

So what are we to do? Is loneliness simply a problem that will haunt us forever with no solution to be found? Well, yes, sort of. But as strange as it sounds, that’s actually not bad news. Curious? Still willing to read? Great, because now I’m going to explain myself! First, I’ll discuss something to apply in our relationships with others, and finally, in our relationship with God.

Loneliness & Life with Others

On the complexity of loneliness as it interacts with our relationships with others, I look to David Zahl and his wonderful book Low Anthropology. ‘Low anthropology’ refers to the “accurate, humble view of humans that helps us avoid the temptation to divide the world into good and bad people, provides the foundation for real relationships rooted in vulnerability, and leads us to a more liberating view of human nature, sin, and grace.” Personally, I think that this view can provide some relief when our communities—places meant to assuage our loneliness—disappoint us.

Zahl writes:

“A low anthropology understands that we are all, to some extent, beholden to our histories and subject to relational patterns beyond our choosing. Our loved one's alienating behavior suddenly stands a chance of being received with generosity instead of accusation. No wonder Alain de Botton says, "This is what it means to truly love someone: to be generous in one's interpretation of another person."' This posture theoretically allows a low anthropologist to head into a relationship with eyes open, sparing themselves the shock and surprise when limitation, doubleness, and self-centeredness raise their heads, as they inevitably do.

A low anthropology does not expect other people to be any more virtuous, stable, or capable than we ourselves are. As a result, it fosters patience and understanding and, in many cases, keeps disappointment from choking the seeds of affection before they've had an opportunity to take root. Relationships bathed in disappointment seldom survive, especially if the disappointment morphs into superiority” (Low Anthropology, 168).

When it comes to combatting loneliness, I’ve found it very important to not let disappointment choke the seeds of affection. Instead of allowing bitterness for a friend’s lack of communication cause me to slap them with the silent treatment, I’ve been humbly reminded (maybe graciously reprimanded is a better way of saying it) to be generous, get curious, and reach out anyways. A few months ago, this happened with a friend and when we were able to schedule a call, she revealed a number of complex problems going on in her life that were occupying her time and relational capacity. I had no idea. Often, we’re all more lonely than we care to admit, and sometimes, we need to be humbled in our collective humanity and reoriented into love, compassion, and patient care.

Loneliness & Love with God

And lastly, the problem of loneliness is immensely complicated because it requires us to stand before others and God and admit that we are—to borrow a phrase from a friend of mine named Brad Montague—“Just humans who want to be loved.”

Maybe you’re more well-adjusted than I am, but admitting that I want to be loved is something I find very hard to do. It is exposing, humbling, at times, humiliating. To throw it back to a quote I referenced in my Little Women piece from author Kate Bowler, “I don’t know why, but it took me so long to admit that I have had my own struggles with loneliness. It felt a little bit like admitting to being unpopular… If we say we’re lonely, it means that we’re not likable, and God-forbid, that we’re not lovable.”

No matter what habits we cultivate, what thick communities we form, what problematic attachment styles we work to heal, what talk therapy we do or what meaningful text messages we exchange, we are all still human who want to be liked and loved. But here’s the problem: even if every human being gave an earnest and honest attempt to remedy our “collective-action problem,” through “deeply etched communal habits,” that helped everyone feel encouraged and included and admired, we would still be dissatisfied. Why? Because 1) as we discussed above: we will let each other down and 2) humans cannot be each other’s source of ultimate love.

For me, my hardest times of loneliness really come back to a misunderstanding and misattribution of my belovedness. This is the third time I’ve shared this Dallas Willard quote on my Substack, but I’ll share it again (again), because it is so, so important when it comes to softening our hearts as they grow calloused in our loneliness:

“We must understand that God does not ‘love’ us without liking us — through gritted teeth, as ‘Christian’ love is sometimes thought to do. Rather out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it. The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is the core — which we vainly try to capture with our tired but indispensable old word love.”

Over the last year—a year that I have felt both profoundly lonely and profoundly cared for by God and others—I’ve been relearning how God sees me holistically. God does not tolerate me. He likes me and he loves me. I think this theology matters when it comes to the disastrous problem of loneliness because when we are able to have a grace-filled view of God’s view of us, I think we are able to better give and receive love.

So yes, eliminating loneliness is and always will be a lofty goal. And so I look to lofty sources to steer me and soften me to be a person filled with the love of Christ—the only person who said he could defeat death through the power of love... and he did. Now that’s a pretty lofty, wouldn’t you say?

¹ You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
² You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
³ You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
⁴ Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
⁵ You hem me in behind and before,
and you lay your hand upon me.
⁶ Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.

—Psalm 139: 1-6

So let us raise a glass to unattainable human goals, let us exchange ‘cheers’ to our dissatisfied hearts and discontented spirits. Let us find hope in feeling like nothing will ever satisfy us, for it all proves the point: “We have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked” (2 Corinthians 5:1-3).