(gentle soothing music) (waves splashing)
- Hey there, guys, and welcome back to Unjaded Jade.
Welcome to episode two
of Summer of Self. (light upbeat music)
There are only two rules for this series.
One is you need (gentle music)
a cute drink of some kind.
Today I've got camomile tea.
And the second is that there will be some journal prompts
at the end of this video, which you can go away and do
if you would like to explore the topic
in more depth with yourself.
Something which I talk a lot about
is feeling happy in your own company.
I made videos like "Taking Myself on a Date"
or "Solo Traveling" or embracing time alone
and being happy in your own company.
Which is why I think it's so important to talk
about something that I don't really talk about.
Loneliness.
Loneliness is such a weird one
because the times I felt lonely,
I think I can split them in two.
One is where I've been physically alone
and therefore felt this sense of there's no one around me,
no one to hear my musings about this film,
just craving human attention in some way.
And then the second is where I'm around people
but for whatever reason,
I don't feel like I'm connecting with them.
Or there's this lack of depth,
which is really hard to describe
if you've never felt that.
It's like you're there with people, but you're not really.
You feel like they don't understand you
or you don't understand them
and therefore that makes you feel isolated.
Today I'm gonna talk about times
I have felt most lonely in my life.
But more than anything,
I'm making this video to make you feel valid
if you feel lonely.
Because loneliness sucks and it also has
this weird embarrassment around it when you feel lonely.
Like, you feel like if people knew you were lonely,
that people would not wanna hang out with you even more,
or that you're just really desperate for attention
so therefore you hide your loneliness,
but then that kind of just makes you more lonely
because you're being even more inauthentic
to how you actually feel.
It's been your experience.
Okay, so one of the first times
I ever felt most lonely in my life
was in my gap year.
I moved to London for a month-ish.
It was my first time moving out of my family home.
I was living completely alone, not with housemates.
It was student accommodation,
but the kind of student accommodation
where you don't really talk to other people,
like everyone has their own solo apartment.
And essentially my one purpose for these five weeks
was to be a YouTuber and to allow myself
creative time to experiment.
But in reality, I just felt cripplingly lonely.
I had so many days where I sat in that room,
in that little apartment, also kind of beating myself up
for not having friends and not exploring this amazing city
that I was lucky enough to live in.
And spending the other half of the time
beating myself up for not making
more creative, incredible content,
because I had literally given myself the time in my gap year
to spend on my YouTube channel.
And there I was hardly putting any time into it
because I was just lonely.
The sadder I got, the less I wanted to talk online.
Something I find about YouTube as a job,
as a hobby, is it's a very lonely job. (chuckles)
Don't get me wrong. I love it.
I think it's amazing
that you can connect with people online
and I think the creative process is so fun.
There's so many benefits.
But as a process, it's very individual.
It would be me and my laptop planning a video,
then me and my camera talking
and then me and my phone uploading stuff
and talking to people through a screen.
And at a time where numerically my life seemed
like it was so full of connection,
I felt so isolated and so deprived of good relationships.
Anyone I did meet just felt
like conversations lacked depth.
And I obviously was not being honest
about how I actually felt at that time
because it just felt desperate and needy (chuckles)
even though being honest
is probably what I should have done.
And one of the worst things about feeling lonely
is you make it worse for yourself.
You like spiral into this place
where once you've given yourself this label of lonely
and no one wants to spend time with me,
you literally perpetuate it
or at least I did.
If close friends asked me to FaceTime,
I would say, "I'm too busy,
I don't have enough time"
Or "I'm busy doing YouTuber things."
In reality, I was just feeling sad in a room.
And I would decline invitations
until the invitations would stop.
This is symptomatic of a lot of things.
Mental health is a very complex place.
This borders on things like depression and anxiety
and a whole multitude of not fun things to experience.
But at its root was this feeling
of isolation and loneliness.
And I felt so angry at myself too,
because it just felt like I was
in such a privileged position to be able to afford
this one month where I lived in London,
in one of the best cities in the whole world,
and I was just wasting it.
I didn't feel like I could tell my family
because it, again, it felt too embarrassing to admit.
But I just really wanted people.
I just really craved connections
and I didn't feel like I had any. (chuckles)
A second time I felt very lonely
was actually when I went to France
on my French exchange.
I don't know if you saw my blog.
In general, I had the most incredible experience.
I loved it. I wouldn't trade it for the world.
But there were moments where I felt,
again, like I had no one.
Because when I didn't speak the language fluently,
all my interactions lacked depth.
There was small talk niceties
'cause that's all I could really say in French.
I don't regret the experiences there.
I made amazing friends.
If I could relive the experience again,
I would in a heartbeat,
but there were just moments which made it really tough.
I think nowadays I've really worked
on what a support network means to me
and what deep connections mean.
I've made such an effort to nurture friendships
when I'm in a better place
and to get friends to understand my needs as a friend
that I don't experience loneliness nearly as often
as I have done in the past. (gentle music)
But I just know what a crippling feeling it is.
Something I wanna talk about is social media
and its impacts in how we feel lonely.
Social media is effectively a parody
of everything that we crave
and that we need evolutionarily to survive
in a social way.
We all want to feel like we're part of a tribe
of people who get us, who are like-minded.
We want friends, we want family.
We naturally, as humans, want to ascend in social status,
in hierarchy in some way.
And then it comes along social media
which gives you friends, followers,
like-minded people who follow you.
You can ascend in status through followers and likes.
So it gives us what we want at this surface level,
that it's interesting and that it draws us in,
but it doesn't actually satisfy any of those needs
that we come to it for.
If anything, it makes us more aware
of our lack of those things.
We see friends enjoying time with other friends
when we're sitting inside alone,
which just perpetuates our feeling of being alone.
We think that projecting
a more desirable version of ourselves
is a way to combat loneliness
because surely if we're more desirable online,
then more people in real life will reach out to us
or be friends with us or think think that we're cool.
Everyone's scared to look embarrassed or desperate
or sad or lonely online even if we are feeling those things.
So it creates this really shallow culture
where everyone's feeling similar things,
but no one sees anyone feeling them.
So then you just think you're alone.
But then every single person is also feeling those things
so every single person is feeling alone.
Even though the projection that we're giving others
is causing their loneliness
just like their projections are causing ours.
I just think so much about this.
How is society like this?
It's crazy. Like it's set up for our failure, you know.
Every single one of us wants to feel love,
we wanna feel part of something, we want a community.
We wanna feel cool because being cool
is being part of people who accept you.
One thing which was really powerful from the book,
the "Lost Connection"
is understanding that loneliness
is very normal and actually has
amazing evolutionary benefits to it.
Humans adopted this feeling of loneliness
because back in the day, back in cavemen times,
the biggest thing that could kill you
was not a giant animal attacking you.
It was your tribe rejecting you from the group.
Because if you were alone, you were more likely to die,
and if you're a part of the community,
you're more likely to survive.
So when we're alone or when we lack that depth of feeling
like we're part of a community,
that feeling rises in us because it's telling us
you need people for survival.
And nowadays when survival is less of an issue,
the loneliness just sits there and we don't use it.
We don't use it as a propeller
to then go get better social connections.
We just sit in it and feel more lonely
and lie about it.
I think the fact that we don't talk about loneliness
is linked to the fact we hardly talk
about mental health,
the idea of what is considered strong
and what is considered weak.
And I think it's really tied to in the West especially
how individualistic we all are.
We like to think that we can sweat out our lives on our own,
that we can live alone, we can do everything alone.
And in so many other parts of the world, that's normal.
You lean on your community,
you lean on your family to help you.
But it's not something that's naturally pushed
in our culture here.
But every single paper that you read
about how humans evolved suggests we need people.
We need love, we need connection.
We need to feel part of something.
You are not weak if you feel lonely.
Honestly, I think it is a symptom of our culture
and our priorities.
You can be super macro and be like,
blame it on capitalism, blame on individualism.
I don't know what the answer is
but I know that it goes
beyond just us (gentle music)
in our social situations.
Some things that help me personally
are firstly journaling.
If you can't voice your thoughts to others
and you feel lonely, write it somewhere,
like put it in a book.
Have your train of thought,
make it feel validated by getting it out.
Secondly is meditation and spirituality.
I'm still very much on my spiritual journey
and I do find myself a natural skeptic,
but I know for a fact that working on things deeper
than your appearance, you know,
working on whatever you wanna call it,
energy, your sense of self,
meditating just to stop that overthinking
and all the voices in your head
and come back to being present right now
and enjoying your own company, whatever that means to you.
That is so helpful to me.
And it's the reason that I often love being alone
is because I don't feel lonely.
I feel like rooted in who I am and where I am right now.
So especially if you all physically alone
that you don't have a lot of people around,
I think focusing on, yeah,
your inner self is very important.
If you've never tried meditation before
I promise it's not that scary.
It's basically just you focusing on your breathing.
Like get an app.
I'll leave some in the description
or get some on YouTube, try yoga.
I promise it's not that scary.
And thirdly, and this is something I wanna talk about
in another Summer of Self episode
is how to cultivate depth in conversations.
Small talk is unsatisfying.
I'm sorry. It just is.
It doesn't make you feel humanly validated. (laughing)
Me, I think fostering those relationships
and also being honest with others
about how you feel is great.
Like if you feel lonely,
even though you're surrounded by people,
then maybe you should say something
and maybe you can like, I don't know,
express your needs or something that would help you
feel less lonely.
Here are some journal prompts that you can explore
on your own if you have ever felt lonely,
if you're lonely right now,
realizing also what might cause it beyond just you.
I also just really wanna say, you are not alone.
I know it can feel that way sometimes.
I've felt that way.
But even I can guarantee you
that this comment section,
there's gonna be at least one person
who relates and who shares their experience of loneliness.
I find that even scrolling through them
and just witnessing how many people
have had similar feelings to you,
is quite, it just feels validated,
makes you feel part of something bigger,
a community of people,
even if it's just a community of people,
individually feeling alone.
I don't have the answers. I'm not a professional.
I'm just a 21-year-old who has felt lonely
at points in my life.
Yeah, I hope you (upbeat music)
found this useful.
I'm sending you so much love
and stay tuned for another Summer of Self episode next week,
Saturday at 12:00 PM.
Let me know what you'd like me to discuss.
Have a beautiful day.
Bye. - [Man] Beautiful.
(light upbeat music)