For several posts now we have been exploring common contributing factors to our loneliness crisis. We’ve explored both the emphasis on productivity and the obsession with technology as key contributors to the increase in loneliness. These are features ultimately of the ways we live and work. Changes to work and lifestyle in modern culture have led to a dramatic rise in loneliness.
Where You Live and Who You Belong To
One key element in our sense of belonging is our rootedness to a place. Justin Whitmel Earley has articulated well the relationship between geography and friendship. Our connection to a place does impact our ability to connect with others. He writes:
Place and relationship are far more intertwined than we may think. When you don’t know where you belong, it is hard to know who you belong to. (Made for People, 141)
You exist in a place and time and to the degree that you connect yourself to that place it allows you to connect yourself to the people of that place. Despite our assumptions, limitations lead to deeper connections, says Earley. Committing yourself to one locale forces you to work at connections, to resolve conflicts, to plant roots, and make commitments. Place grounds our relationships in important ways (these are also arguments that Wendell Berry has made).
It’s not, of course, that people who move or leave a place can’t have friends. Friendships can span distances. But there is something about geography that fuels a certain type of commitment. Being rooted helps me to stick it out with people when I feel frustrated, angry, hurt, etc. It allows for integration of individuals into my daily life in ways that matter. Such rootedness increases the face-to-face moments and physical contact that enhances meaningful relationships. I can be friends, and indeed have friends, who are in other states. I love them. But we would all agree that distance has had an adverse impact on our relationship. It makes it harder to stay connected and up-to-date with one another. And it leaves us often missing out on the tangible moments of connection that we get when we live in the same community. Geography and relationship matter; there are “habits of porximity” (Earley, 149) that promote healthy connection.
Mobility and Loneliness
Our culture, however, has prized mobility above rootedness. We live in a highly mobile age, where people leave jobs, churches, communities, and even uproot and move across the country. There are, of course, lots of reasons to do this. Good reasons even. But we live in a time where this type of mobility is such a given that we never stop to evaluate if such a decision is good and necessary. We just assume it is and move on. These moves often leave us less connected and cultivate higher levels of loneliness.
Connected to our mobility as a society is our prioritizing of work. Work has become the chief marker of personal identity. My job is my identity. Earley points to several studies that reveal people’s general conviction that finding the right career will make the the most happy. In fact, he states, “Finding a job that makes them happy is more important to many people than getting married or helping others.” So, we move for work. We leave communities and friendships and connections because we believe that this will make us happier in the long run. In reality, Earley points out, “There is also general agreement that this has made us miserable” (143).
Changes in the Way We Work
In addition to our mobility, however, changes in the way we work and live have dramatically increased the likelihood of loneliness. For example, more and more people work from home. In an attempt to cut costs and limit overhead, many employers have gone remote. This means that the even limited social interactions that people had passing one another in the hall, or visiting one another’s work stations, or eating lunch together has vanished. Many workers can no longer stick their head in someone’s office for a quick chat, and so many people have lost all connection to their co-workers. In years past, work became a place for many adults to build friendships. They would connect in the office and then go to “happy hour” after work together. We spend more waking hours working during the week than we do anything else, and yet we have nearly completely lost this point of connection.
For those who do still work in and around people the connection may not be any better. After all, connection isn’t about the frequency of interaction but the quality of it. The emphasis on productivity in the workplace has led many employers to put harsh limits of socializing. So you may work with many people, and you may have to interact with them regularly, and yet there is little conversation or connection beyond the demand of the job. Work has become an exceedingly lonely place for many.
Changes in the Way We Live
But what about the rest of our lives? Do we have any better connection in other pockets of our daily living? Not really. Sociologist Marc Dunkelman has written about the disappearance of “middle-ring” connections in American life. Dunkelman envisions our social lives like a series of concentric circles. The inner ring represents our most intimate relationships and these, he says, are as important to modern Americans as they were in past generations. The outer most ring represents casual relationships, those whom we interact with in small non-meaningful ways (the barista at your local coffee shop, a random co-worker you chat with for a few minutes each work day, a neighbor from a few houses down, etc.). We all still have lots of these connections in our modern world. But it is that middle-ring that has vanished (friends, church members, close neighbors, etc.). “Dunkelman suggests this shift reflects the larger problem of vanishing American community” (Jeremy Linneman, Why Do We Feel Lonely at Church?, 8).
We no longer live within community and connection. Even with our families, we often live alone together. Our work, mobility, and lifestyle have dramatically changed such that we cultivate loneliness in nearly every corner of our lives.
We need to think about the Bible’s teaching on relationships and remind ourselves of what the right way to live is. We will do that shortly, but before we turn there we need to look at one last dynamic related to loneliness: the family. In my next post we will consider how the family and loneliness coexist.
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