All questions are variations on the same question, “How do I stop being lonely?” (Joan Tollifson)

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Many years ago, on my first visit to a fellowship of meditators whom I would come to know and love, we were invited to ask questions of the leader in an open forum. My turn came. “I’ve always been lonely,” I said. “But that’s not the problem. The problem is that I’m ashamed of it.”

Those of us who somehow maintain our day-in-day-out act of of being whole and sane, functioning according to the norms of our society—our loneliness usually only makes itself known in the wee hours, lying alone or with a partner. (Anyone who thinks partnership makes you immune to loneliness has never tried it.) And to admit publicly to loneliness, as I did, is to confess to failure.

The answer to Ms. Tollifson’s question above is, of course, we don’t stop. Ever. Loneliness is built in: we’re born alone, we die alone, we live with all our secret hopes, regrets, fantasies, each of us in our “private world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! …A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone…” per the late, great philosopher Julian Jaynes.

But that’s normal, existential loneliness to which, I believe, we all are prone. Most of us manage passably well: we live, eat, work, socialize, stay on this side of the law. Life, we tell ourselves, is basically good, a gift, to be relished so long as we’re able to participate in it. Then there’s loneliness as a disease, “social loneliness,” which, according to a recent study at Brigham Young University, is an epidemic that’s silently killing more of us than obesity or smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Here’s a headline from 2018: Loneliness at Epidemic Levels in America. The results of a survey of over 20,000 adults revealed that nearly half of us sometimes or always feel alone, while over a quarter of us “never feel as though there are people who really understand us” and 43% of us “are isolated from others.” On the loneliness scale, living with someone barely improves the odds: 44% vs. 46% for those living alone. The loneliest generation? Gen Z, 18-22 at the time of the poll. Do social media help or hinder? No difference: heavy users have a loneliness score of 44%, compared to 42% of those who don’t use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like.

The BYU researchers claim that loneliness produces stress hormones, leading to inflammation and other problems. Also, people living alone are less likely to exercise, eat healthily and see a doctor or dentist on a regular basis. On the other hand, “greater social connection is associated with a 50% reduced risk of early death.”

Baroness Diana Barran, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Civil Society and Loneliness (UK Parliament, Creative Commons)

What to do? The UK’s answer was to appoint a “Minister for Loneliness.” No kidding. She’s Baroness Barran, who is behind Britain’s “Let’s Talk Loneliness” campaign. As well as initiating conversations, the campaign “gives small grants to local gardening clubs, bird-watching groups and others so that they can spread the word and invite more people to join in…It is supporting ‘friendly benches’…public benches where people are encouraged to go and chat with one another,” says an op-ed in the New York Times.

We’re a gregarious species. We evolved in tribes of a couple of hundred souls, mostly our kinfolk. We lived and died alongside people we’d known from childhood. Loneliness was not on our ancestors’ list of anxieties—they had more pressing concerns, like starvation, toothache and fatal sepsis from cuts. That was then. Now loneliness is our very own first-world problem. And I don’t even like gardening or bird-watching.