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Introduction

“Life is nothing without friendship.”

— Cicero

When I first began thinking and talking about writing this book, I was surprised at the reaction of the people I had mention it to. It didn’t seem to matter who they were, when I said the word “loneliness,” their own tales of being and feeling isolated would pour out. Almost everyone, it would seem, is lonely.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the loneliness that seems to run rampant in our world. Never in history have people been more connected than we are now. We’re all walking around with easy access to almost every person we’ve ever met. A scroll through the directories on our phones nearly always turns up someone to talk or chat with. Silence and time to ourselves are now completely optional. Our phones come with us everywhere (if you have kids or a dog, you don’t even pee alone anymore!). Which has many of us wondering: If I’m never by myself, why do I feel so lonely?

We’re not meant to be solitary creatures. Way back in the beginning, God looked at Adam and declared that it wasn’t good for man to be alone. It wasn’t long before God created Eve. They had a couple of kids, and then a few more. Those first people could have spread out and gone anywhere, but history shows us that they mostly stayed together. They congregated in tribes and then towns, not just for safety but also for companionship. Fast-forward thousands of years and we’re still congregating, not just in person, but in virtual villages and communities. Still, we’re left wondering, How can a society that centers on constantly being connected have so many people feeling as if they are all alone?

I started my research where I usually do, with a call to my grandmother. Ninety-six years old and still sharp as a tack, she’s a treasure-trove of common sense and wisdom. “I’ll tell you why y’all are all so lonely these days,” she drawled. “It’s on account of three things — air conditioning, television, and women drivers.”

I waited for her to explain what she meant, and with a sigh she said: “Back before air conditioning, it used to be just too darn hot to sit inside on a summer afternoon and evening, so we didn’t. We sat outside on our front porches with a big pitcher of sweet tea and visited with our neighbors. We knew the names of everyone living up and down our street, and there was always someone there if you needed them. It’s not that way anymore. It’s cool and comfortable in your homes, so you go inside and sit in the cold air. You’re bored or lonely because the people in your television talk to you and keep you company, so you never actually have to spend time with any real people at all.”

She thought for a moment and then said: “But what really did you in was women drivers. Once women started driving and folks got a second car, people started driving their kids all over the place. Used to be that kids played in the neighborhood or did sports at the school. Now y’all are driving them an hour each way for ballet or soccer or goodness knows what else, and patting yourselves on the back for being good mothers. It seems to me that you’ve traded having a life of your own for your kids’ being busy. That doesn’t seem like a very good trade to me.”

She was right, of course. She’s always right. It goes so much further than air conditioning, television, or women drivers (none of which are bad things, of course, and, actually, they’re all pretty good). Almost everything in modern life seems designed to keep us alone and lonely. How did it get this way?

After talking to Grandma, I started Googling. I kept running across the terms “Dunbar Number” and “Dunbar Theory” as explanations for what’s going on in our modern relationships. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has spent years studying human social interactions and has come to the conclusion that we all have a finite number of people we can fit into our social circles. For most people, that magic number is around 150. That’s everyone from your spouse and children, to your relatives, to that guy from high school that you keep up with on Facebook. It doesn’t matter how long your list of “Friends” is, you can’t maintain relationships with more than a total of 150-ish.

A hundred fifty people is a lot of people to keep up with, but it used to be much simpler. Most people lived in the same place for the whole of their lives. If they did happen to set off for somewhere new, they left their social network completely behind and constructed a new one for themselves wherever they happened to be. They became completely enmeshed in the fabric of their new community. The people they knew mostly knew one another, and friendships overlapped and wove around one another, creating a densely woven society. We don’t do that any longer.

These days, we are a much more mobile society, but we don’t really leave anyone behind. Instead, we maintain our social and emotional ties to people through social media and technology. Relationships that would have died natural deaths in the past now don’t ever have to end. We grow up and leave for college, taking with us all of the people we knew and loved throughout our childhoods. We gather a few more in college and elsewhere along the way. We keep adding people to our circle, but the number of relationships we can actually maintain never changes. Eventually, we end up somewhere and settle down with room for just a few spots left in our circle.

Even worse, our people don’t know one another. They may not even know of the others. Our relationships no longer interweave; they’re more like the random pattern of a shotgun blast. The kind of community that people were designed to live in no longer exists for most of us. There are all kinds of gaps between our relationships — and those are the cracks that we end up falling through.

That’s when we begin to notice how quiet our social lives have become, and how much we really want and need to have friends and people near us. We spend more time on the phone or on social media trying to connect or reconnect with the people we miss, and we bemoan the fact that we can’t find people “here.” All the while, we avoid getting to know our neighbors, calling back that guy from work, or joining any clubs or church groups. The thought of meeting all those new people is a lot to deal with, and we start saying things like, “I don’t have the time or energy for meeting people right now.” And we’re right. Our social abilities are strung out and filled by the people we have clung to for no reason other than that we knew them back in the day. Hanging on to those people we’ve known forever is a big part of the reason we all feel so alienated and alone today. Let them go, and set yourself free.

Then, once you’ve purged your friend list and cleared your social calendar, the search for your tribe can begin. But where? It has to start with knowing ourselves and who we are when all the layers are stripped away; not the person we pretend to be when we’re with other people, but the authentic self. A friend of mine once told me, “A good friend will let you into their life; a great friend will let you into your own.” Isn’t it time you found people like that?