Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. Here's a sunset from North Carolina.
I'm exhausted and exhilarated from the Project for Awesome,
which this year has raised over $1.3 million dollars for charity.
The fundraiser will be up for another couple days; you can learn more at projectforawesome.com/donate.
So this video is about loneliness, and if you are feeling lonely or concerned about your mental health,
there is help and there is hope.
Okay, when I was in my mid-20s, I experienced a bout of intense loneliness and isolation
that was correlated with serious depression. I was living in an apartment building with very thin walls,
and so I could hear people all the time. And I had a job, so I saw people every day,
including people who cared about me. And thanks to the emerging tools of the Internet,
I could Instant Message with anyone I knew anywhere in the world any time.
I wasn’t short on connective opportunities; I was just short on connection.
And the more isolated I felt, the less capable I felt of escaping isolation.
When I did talk to people, I often couldn’t listen to them well or engage deeply with them,
because I was so overwhelmed by my own sadness and worry.
But that’s just one of the many vicious cycles of loneliness.
Feeling isolated made me feel unworthy of love, which made me feel more isolated.
The thought of calling people I’d long failed to call flooded me with dread,
which made me less likely to call them.
And feeling despair made me feel useless, which made me feel more despair.
One of the biggest challenges of isolation for me is that I start to feel as if the whole thing is meaningless.
Human consciousness is an absolute wonder.
I mean, how wild is it that our minds can conceive of the infinite from within a finite universe?
But when I’m really lonely, I start to feel like my consciousness isn’t for anything,
like it isn’t serving any shared or greater purpose.
I sometimes feel as if my life is just circling its own misery like a vulture over a carcass.
And that pain makes me want to withdraw further from the stupid world
with its stupid people who believe in stupid b.s., which in turn worsens the pain of meaninglessness,
and furthers my isolation, and so on.
I’m situating this video in the deep past of twenty years ago,
but the truth is that a similar feeling of isolation began to pull me under much more recently.
I again started to feel separate from the world, and like everything was a sick joke.
And even though I had friends and family members who loved me,
I still felt as if I was floating away from all of them.
In both cases, these cycles were broken in the end by treating my chronic health problem
like a chronic health problem—which for me means taking medication and going to therapy regularly,
but it also means understanding that loneliness is a problem I need to address actively,
by being intentional about finding or refinding community.
This is hard at first—breaking cycles always is— but it gets easier, and it’s always worth the trouble.
Some of those communities I’ve become more involved in are built around a shared enthusiasm—
Liverpool Football Club, for instance; others are built around activism, or around my physical neighborhood.
Quitting the social internet has also helped me to address my loneliness,
because I used those platforms so unhealthily,
by engaging in superficial connection that left me feeling deeply alone.
But it is not only IRL communities that can run deep, as I was reminded this weekend.
Although I am a very introverted person, for me feelings of meaning and purpose
flow from the experience of deep connectedness,
of being part of communities that are bigger than me but nonetheless value and include me.
I hope some of you felt that way during the Project for Awesome this year.
I know that for me, the P4A showed up when I really needed to be reminded
that what we can accomplish together is truly cause for hope.
Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.