I didn’t learn to swim until I was 14 years old. Throughout my childhood, I had a recurring nightmare of drowning. I saw the movie Jaws when I was too young, and it left me with a lifelong fear of sharks.
These two factors explain why I seldom venture into the sea. And that’s why loneliness is so terrifying. I can avoid water and the creatures that live in it. But loneliness can strike at any time. It’s waiting in your house; it can lurk among crowds ; and you can’t outrun it.
That’s why loneliness is my greatest fear.
It is easy to dismiss this as mere pre-Christmas melancholy or a bit of a low mood. But the reality is far more brutal. We are looking at a killer that sits on par with smoking or obesity. Research suggests it ramps up your mortality risk by 27%. It is linked to heart disease, stroke, and biological markers for Alzheimer’s. Yet, this isn’t a virus, a toxin, or something you catch from human contact. It is born from the precise opposite; a lack of human touch, a starvation of connection. And loneliness is, quite simply, an epidemic.
We are living in a strange time. We have never been more ‘connected’ in the technological sense. We are globally wired, plugged into a 24-hour cycle of digital noise. Yet, the warmth of actual human contact is receding. We are automating the humanity out of our lives. We shop online, we work remotely, and we substitute real conversation for the sanitised distance of a text message.
Our social fabric is fraying.
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