This ‘guide’ offers twelve honest (maybe too honest) ponderings to help you bridge the gap between isolation and meaningful connection.
I was reading the transcript of an ABC podcast episode on loneliness the other day, and feeling both curious and lazy, I wondered what would an AI, a non-sentient being, have to say about this deeply human feeling? So I asked one to extract key lessons from the podcast. The lessons it generated were surprisingly insightful and at first I was going to just reproduce that, but if I am honest, I’ve been feeling a little reliant on AI recently.
So instead, I sat with each of its recommendations and used them as prompts for my own self-reflective writing. What follows are my various ponderings on the experience and management of loneliness. I should say upfront, I don’t have any magical suggestions to address loneliness or for that matter, much success in addressing it in my own life. But I will say that half the battle in tackling loneliness is getting one’s head/mindset into a place where you can take some action, any kind of action or make some kind of peace with the situation. Hopefully one or more of these helps you tune your inner world in such a way as to feel a little more ready to take on loneliness in your own life, should it be present.
1. You have to name it, even if it is just a whisper. The first hurdle is admitting it. This might just be to yourself, a quiet acknowledgment that something is off. But more powerfully, it’s about signaling it in some way to others. I know how vulnerable that feels and how culturally taboo it can be. But it doesn’t have to be a dramatic declaration with accompanying ‘I’m lonely’ t-shirt. It can be as simple as, “Hey, I feel like I need some company, want to get coffee?” You don’t actually need the word ‘lonely’; you can more simply express a desire for connection and a suggestion on how it might be achieved. If you give a peer, colleague or friend sufficient notice (“It would nice to get a coffee with you Thursday”) that makes it more manageable for them.
2. Figure out what kind of connection is missing. I’ve come to realise that loneliness isn’t a single, monolithic feeling. It’s a gap between the social connection you want and what you’re actually getting. The real question is: do you know what aspects of social connection you’re missing? Is it emotional depth, intellectual sparring, physical intimacy or something else? You might not really know what you are missing, only that you are missing something. Or you might not want to admit to what you are missing. For example, I like to think of myself as some mysterious lone wolf 🐺, but that is mostly bullshit. I’m as in need of connection at the next person.
Here’s a disclaimer though: knowing what you are missing and being able to get it are two different things. There will be times when you need to accept what connection is available, even if it’s not the specific one you crave. But have some faith that connections create possibilities, so opening yourself up to something that isn’t ‘perfect’ may very well change your life in ways you could never predict. And I’ve learned the hard way (repeatedly) that you can be so focused on one unmet need that you fail to see the opportunities that are right in front of you.
3. Start with what you love. Walking up to a stranger and saying ‘hey, let’s be friends’ is both confronting (for both of you) and maybe not the best starting point. Values and interests however are excellent starting points. If there’s something important to you, a topic you are interested in, a hobby that you have, there’s a good chance a community already exists around that thing. At Flinders, clubs and associations are a perfect example of this. Shared purpose is a fantastic, low-pressure foundation for getting to know people, and a lot less threatening than trying to make conversation with a stranger from a cold start. ‘Join a club’ is probably one of the most commonly suggested loneliness busters, but the strategy is more sophisticated than simply putting you in contact with new people. Common interests/projects are so often the starting point for new friendships.
4. Calibrate the frequency and form. How much connection do you need? I can’t really answer that for you because it depends on a bunch of things like personality, lifestyle, and responsibilities. I hear people talk about how they only catch up with some friends once a year and that is plenty. I hear others say that some kind of daily connection is important to stay close to someone. I do think it is worth noting that not every interaction needs to be a two-hour deep-and-meaningful. Some of the most vital connections can be maintained with a simple text message, a shared meme, or a quick email. But ultimately, you’ll have to use the feeling of loneliness either increasing or decreasing as a guide to whether the changes you are making in your social connections are having the desired effect. In this case, it is the subjective assessment (how does this feel to me?) that is important.
5. Prepare for the long, hard road. I can speak to this from personal experience. Making friends as an adult is hard, and full disclosure, I’ve had mostly failures on that front for a while now. As such I know that the impulse to abandon the effort altogether is strong. Retreating to heal after a rejection or failed attempt is okay and often necessary. But that can quickly become retreating to disappear or prevent future rejections. And while disappearing might sound attractive when you’ve been hurt, it’s an escape, not a strategy. It’s unlikely to benefit you long-term, unless you become some kind of bad-ass monk. So really, the only option is to dust yourself off after a failure and have another crack. Repeat until success. I wish I had better news on this front but the unpredictability of it means it can be difficult at times. It also means that you can strike it rich when you least expect it.
6. Notice how you feel afterwards. So let’s say you’ve been crushing it and developing a range of new connections. Are they what you need? Pay attention to your energy after a social interaction. I come out of some social interactions feeling refreshed or energised, and others feeling worse than when I started. While I haven’t fully cracked the code, I know it often comes down to authenticity. Did I feel like I was myself, or was I playing a role? If I feel I was performing, I’ll likely leave the interaction feeling drained because it was more of a performance than a connection. That being said, sometimes you do need to play a role, not for your needs but for the other person. For example, if you catch up with a friend who is going through something difficult, it is good if you can put aside your needs for a little while to attend to theirs. It might leave you feeling a bit heavy, but that’s okay, because you were able to be there for them when it mattered.
7. Beware the trap of unhealthy coping. When you feel lonely, the instinct to self-soothe is strong. My go-to is chocolate, which isn’t the worst (my cardiologist isn’t super keen on it tbh) but some people end up with some unfunky addictions to drugs, alcohol, gaming, gambling, shopping etc. The danger is that you can become so reliant on these coping mechanisms that you start to convince yourself you don’t actually need the social connection you once coveted. I’m sure there are some people that thrive with limited social interaction, but for most of us, the ‘I’m fine on my own’ is possibly a story we tell ourselves when the alternative feels too painful or difficult to pursue.
8. Remember your role in other people’s lives. I find loneliness to be a very self-centred experience. The inner story revolves entirely around your lack, your need. It’s easy to forget that you play a part in other people’s lives. When you neglect those already around you, you are removing your support from their lives. They might not complain or say anything – it’s a vulnerable thing to tell someone you need them – so you might take their silence as evidence that they’re fine without you. That is a dangerous assumption to make, for both of you. If your own loneliness leads you to create disconnection in other people’s lives, the problem ripples throughout the network.
9. Try the paradoxical antidote: Help someone else. If you’re struggling with feeling disconnected, find a context in which you can help others. This needs to be titrated; you don’t want to provide help from a place of deep personal distress. But what small thing could you do for someone else? It shifts the focus from your own lack to another’s need and, in doing so, can create the very sense of purpose and connection you’ve been missing. Volunteering would be a common example of an activity that involves you helping others, but in turn likely helps yourself.
10. Loneliness is a signal, not a failing. This is perhaps the most critical point. Loneliness isn’t a sign that you are broken; it’s a normal, human experience. Yet so many of us use it as a weapon for self-shaming: “I’m lonely, therefore I am a loser/unlovable/weird.” That shame only makes us withdraw further, which entrenches the loneliness and deepens the shame. It is easy to think you are the only person feeling this way, but you might be surprised how many people feel disconnected. The problem is so widespread that loneliness and social isolation are viewed by many as a genuine human emergency.
11. But I do have something to say about “weird”. We know that if you put someone in solitary confinement for an extended period of time, it really does a number on their psychology. A much lesser version of this is when see when someone hasn’t had much social contact for a while. They can be little ‘quirky’ or ‘weird’, like they’ve lost some of their social conditioning (like you lose muscle mass if you stop going to the gym). That makes some of their social interactions a little awkward and impacts on the formation of new connections. It is one of the cruelties of loneliness is that it starts to degrade the exact skills (social) that would help us pull out of that state. That is where professional therapeutic settings (e.g. counselling) can provide a safe space to warm up one’s connection skills before you have to play it out in everyday life. It is also a space to process the impact loneliness has had on your life and strategise a way to address it.
12. Broaden your definition of “connection.” One of the key ideas I have taken from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander philosophy is that connection is about much more than just people. Yes, our friends, family, colleagues, peers and random person on bus are important, but we can also form connections with places, culture, history, spirituality, our bodies, and our minds. One of my most common mistakes when lonely is to assume the solution lies only in “finding the right person.” In fact, the solution might lie in pursuing connections of different kinds: with pets, plants, projects, objects, places, books, and stories. These are not just healthy coping mechanisms; they are legitimate and nourishing connections in their own right.
Pondering these points hasn’t “solved” loneliness for me, but it has made the feeling less of a terrifying abyss and more of a manageable, human challenge. It’s a gap, and a gap is something you can build a bridge across—sometimes to a person, and sometimes to a place, a pet, or a part of yourself you’d forgotten was there.
A Final Thought for the Flinders Community
If you are reading this at Flinders and feeling the weight of loneliness, please know that you are not alone in that feeling, and that there are people and services here to support you. Places like OASIS and the team at Health, Counselling and Disability Services exist for this very reason. Talking to someone is a powerful first step. It’s a way of turning that first, quiet whisper into a conversation.
I’ve added this to the Loneliness & Making Friends collection.