Recovering Hope in a Lonely World

Thank you for having me. So I want to start today by telling you about Luke. Luke was a patient of mine a few years back. He came from a normal enough family—such a thing does exist. Mom was a nurse, typically worked the overnight shift. Dad was a teacher. He had an older brother. They got along most of the time.

A Shift at Home Leads to Being Lonely

When his older brother transitioned into high school, he fell into the wrong crowd—started skipping class, smoking marijuana, and generally getting in trouble. Appropriately, Mom and Dad’s attention shifted. They needed to meet the needs of the older brother. In the background, Luke started participating less in class.

At first, it wasn’t super obvious, but his teacher started to notice that homework, which he always brought in on time, was no longer showing up. When he’d leave for the day, she’d look at his desk and notice that there were etchings—just little patterns, things that were never there before.

Luke ended up in my office, though, after the school nurse sent him home one day because he sat at his desk and not just picked at his nails—he picked at his nails to the point that he removed one of them.

When I asked Luke what was going on, he struggled to describe it at first. But he said, “Well, my stomach hurts in class now. It’s really hard to answer the teacher’s questions. Sometimes I don’t even know what she’s asking or what I think. I’m worried the kids around me will want to talk to me and I won’t know what to say. My hands are always sweaty. Sometimes I get shaky. Not hungry very often. And I feel like I could throw up all the time.”

What Luke was describing were the physiologic and cognitive symptoms of anxiety. As a result of original sin, all of us at various points in our life will experience periods just like Luke—periods of anxiety. We might experience periods of low mood. It might even rise to the level of a depressive disorder.

As I continued to talk to Luke about his experience—thinking, okay, anxiety in a kiddo, lots going on at home, this is perhaps part of the normal human experience during a difficult time—but I wanted to continue to give him the platform to describe what his experience was.

And as we continued to talk through it, I said, “Luke, how can I help?”

He said, “I—I don’t know. I don’t know if you can. Because I just—I don’t want to hurt. And I don’t want to be a bother to my mom and my dad. Maybe it would be better if I wasn’t alive.”

Pain at the Root of Loneliness

What I haven’t told you about Luke is he shared this story with me as we sat crisscross-applesauce on the clinic floor playing Hot Wheels. Because Luke was 9 years old. Just barely old enough to grasp the finality of death. You could argue maybe he even wasn’t old enough. But he knew that he was suffering, and he didn’t know where to go from there. He didn’t have a way to make sense of that suffering. And he felt that he was a burden on those around him.

As I’m sure you can imagine—alarm bells were going off, red flags flying in the air. Luke was at incredible risk of becoming a statistic—becoming a death by suicide that makes suicide the number two cause of death for American kids age 10 to 14. One of the 50,000 suicides we have each year in America.

More broadly speaking, Luke was at risk for becoming one of the statistics for our deaths of despair. You’ve probably heard of them—they’re deaths in the short term due to suicide, or over a slightly longer period of time due to drugs of abuse and alcohol.

In 2022, we had over 200,000 deaths of despair. A recent article in The Economist equated this to the equivalency of a Boeing 747 falling out of the air every single day.

Understanding the Roots of being Lonely – Despair

How did we get here?

Now, typically if someone’s going to take their life in the shorter term via suicide, or over a longer period of time via drugs of abuse or alcohol, they’re likely experiencing some symptoms of anxiety, depression—maybe more serious and persistent mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar. Some of these symptoms might reach the level of a clinically diagnosed disorder. Some might go undiagnosed altogether.

But the reality is: depression or anxiety, schizophrenia or bipolar alone do not drive someone to contemplate taking their life. These are conditions that confer large—large—amounts of suffering. The type of suffering that causes you to withdraw from the environment around you.

No other medical condition plays out this way. Think about it. If you had throat cancer—God forbid—chances are your throat’s going to be really sore. You’re going to be losing weight. You might be coughing up blood. You’re going to be very tired. What’s your next move? You go to the doctor.

If you have an uptick in your symptoms of depression or anxiety and you feel that no one cares and that there’s no point, what’s the last thing you’re going to do? Reach out to a stranger to talk about it.

Mental illness is one of the only types of illness where the illness itself prevents you from seeking treatment.

The Role of Suffering Without Meaning

From an evolutionary perspective, depression can be understood as the body’s response to a toxic environment. Anxiety—the body’s response to a dangerous stimuli.

Again, these symptoms in and of themselves oftentimes do not lead individuals to contemplate harming themselves further or taking their own life. It’s when there is incredible, prolonged suffering in the absence of meaning and hope—when you think it’s never going to get better, and you don’t know where to go from there—that’s when you start to contemplate something as dire as suicide.

The deaths of despair have increased astronomically over the last couple decades at a rate that can’t be explained by genetic shift or genetic drift. That means we’re not being born sicker. But we’ve had an uptick in the deaths of despair because once we’re born—something is making us sicker.

A Cultural Shift

In order to talk about how we can find hope in a lonely world, we have to take just a moment to sit with this very uncomfortable topic.

Who’s a little bit uncomfortable right now? Right? That’s honest. This is hard.

And while it’s not a one-to-one equivalent, those feelings that you have—that desire of “man, couldn’t we have Matt back up here, that had more energy, that was more fun, that was easier in some regards”—I understand that tendency to want to pull away.

Take this moment. Recognize it for what it is. This is a moment of empathy. Just a little glimmer into what it’s like to live with these unbearable feelings. Unbearable feelings that sometimes when you share with other people, they pull away because they’re uncomfortable and they don’t know what to do.

In order to shepherd to the communities around us, to those who need us most, we have to be willing to sit in the uncomfortable. And I promise you—the talk will get more positive.

So we know that something has shifted in our environment that’s making us sicker than it ever has.

We could have five different breakout sessions lasting three hours apiece trying to dissect what all of that is, but I’ll provide a very rough and simple framework.

The Collapse of Social Capital

I’ll give a nod to Robert Putnam’s work. He identified that in his book Bowling Alone. Between roughly 1950 and 2000, there were significant changes in how we were navigating society—how we were interacting with one another—that were having serious implications.

In total, these can be summarized as social capital: the ties to your neighbor, to your family, to your friends. They don’t necessarily give you more money at the end of the day, but they give life meaning. They give you hope and support when times get challenging. They give you sugar when you run out.

What we saw is a decrease in civic engagement, changes—fundamental changes—in our family life and our church life.

The Erosion of Embodied Community

Jonathan Haidt more recently has conceptualized these real-world interactions as having the four following characteristics:

• They’re embodied—happening physically

• They’re synchronous—happening at the same time

• They’re typically one-to-one or one-to-many interactions

Think of a dinner table. There’s many people at the dinner table. No one’s talking at the same time, hopefully. So even if it is one-to-many, there’s only one direction of information flow at any point in time.

• And then fourth—there’s a really high bar for entry and exit. If you disagree with your neighbor, odds are you’re not going to sell your house.

We saw these changes. The way and how often we were engaging in the quote-unquote “real-world” interactions we just described shifted.

Enter the 2000s—and especially right around 2010—when personal devices became commonplace.

Most of these interactions that we had previously were replaced with very superficial and truncated interactions that Jonathan Haidt described as exactly the opposite. They’re disembodied, asynchronous, one-to-several—oftentimes with those several communications happening at the same time. Think of the email chain, that by the time you get around to finishing your response, four other people have already responded and there’s no point in you even contributing.

Yeah, I see the shared frustration and the nodding. And then there’s a very low bar for entry and exit. I don’t like what you had to say, I’m going to unfollow, and I’m going to walk away thinking potentially you’re a bad person. I don’t like you. I don’t like this group.

It’s very easy to cultivate an us-versus-them mentality when the majority of our interactions are defined by these four virtual characteristics. We have more shallow, more superficial interactions. We’re still searching for meaning and belonging, and we’re doing that via bandwagon activism that, as we’ve explored over the last couple days, are resulting in some really bad and dangerous ideas.

Self-Reliance as a Virtue and the Limits of Perception

We’ve also elevated self-reliance to the level of a virtue. Matt did a beautiful job earlier talking about Step Blake. He had the desire to lift himself up and to contribute and to find meaning by giving to those around him.

If we just looked at him on a flat piece of paper amidst an array of virtual interactions, we would say, “Oh—homeless, probably doesn’t want to work, it’s probably his fault.” We didn’t have the context, or we increasingly have fewer opportunities to recognize what Matt recognized—and that it’s not a personal failing most of the time. It’s that the environment is no longer healthy and conducive to supporting us thriving and living in a healthy community.

Loneliness and Avoidant Coping

One in three Americans, depending on what study you look at—you look at—it’s actually reported as more—but at minimum, one in three Americans report being lonely most of the time. That number is significantly higher for individuals under the age of 34. That’s a tough place to be.

But I want to draw your attention to a lesser-discussed statistic related to this. What do people do when they feel lonely? 133% of the time they’re turning to drugs of abuse and alcohol. It’s actually 21% of the time for people under the age of 34. And 50% of the time they’re turning to their devices when they feel lonely—podcasts, social media, TV.

So I’m going to pause here, and I’m going to give you a little crash course in psychology. Think back to when you were in fourth or fifth grade and you had to give your very first presentation in front of the whole class. Nerve-wracking, right? Odds are, you probably had a lot of symptoms similar to what Luke was experiencing—butterflies in your belly, shaky, sweaty, “Gosh, I don’t want to do this.” You might have contemplated going to the nurse. You might have even gone to the nurse.

Let’s say you go to the nurse and you go home. How do you feel when you get home that day? Relieved, right? You have successfully avoided that stimuli your body was saying might be dangerous. But you have to go back to school the next day, and your teacher says, “You’re up.” Those physiologic symptoms and response that you had yesterday—you just now reinforced to your body were something worth avoiding. So chances are, you’re going to have more upset stomach, more shaking, more trembling, and more concern about doing this.

So while going home gave you short-term relief, it actually reinforced, on a physiologic level, your body’s response—the anxiety response to this stimuli.

I share that because my jaw hit the floor when I was reviewing the study that in response to symptoms of loneliness, 50% of the time people are turning to devices and 133% of the time they’re turning to substances. We’re avoiding—which provides relief in the short term—but only makes the problem worse in the long term.

Loneliness, Anxiety, and the Loss of Meaning

With this in mind, and then when we consider that teenagers who are experiencing unprecedented rates of anxiety spend six to eight and a half hours a day on average on their devices, 36% of them say that they have no perceived meaning or purpose in their life.

That’s a dangerous place to be, because if we go back to the preconditions for suicide, it’s not just suffering—but it’s suffering without purpose or belief that it can get better.

This talk is titled Finding Hope in a Lonely World. I promise we’re getting to the hope. Thank you for bearing with me through that. I know it’s hard, but it’s incredibly important.

Take that difficult—any difficult feelings or thoughts you had during that moment—and store them, because that is the lived experience of empathy.

So let’s talk about where we go from here. We have a whole bunch of broken pieces in front of us. We can sit here, and we can keep saying, “Well, this is broken because…” and, “It’s probably their fault.” That’s not going to get us anywhere.

Making, when done intentionally, can be a spiritual practice. Repairing, when done intentionally, can be a spiritual practice.

Isn’t that what Jesus did with us? Took us in our brokenness and brought us closer to God? Isn’t that the calling of the Church? To meet people in their brokenness—the brokenness we just described—and to accompany?

The good news is that when we repair, we have the opportunity to build something even better than it was before.

Examples of Restoration and Growth

Think of the Japanese art of kintsugi—when pottery breaks, they take precious metals to actually bring the pieces back together. So not only is the pottery stronger, but it’s more valuable than it was in the first place.

A scientific example would be muscle breakdown. You know when you go to the gym and then you’re really sore the next day? That’s the proteins within your muscle cells physically breaking down to get the pieces they need to build back a bigger muscle cell.

A really commonplace example I like to think of is a couple years ago when I sent my husband to the garage with my son and said, “Can you help him fix his Big Wheels?” He was pretty upset—his new Big Wheels truck broke down. I heard some clinking and some clanking and a fair amount of cursing—sorry, Mike. And about three hours later, the garage door flies open and my son’s hair is blowing in the wind. He’s going 12 miles an hour because they took the battery out of the lawn mower and dropped it in the Big Wheels.

Human Flourishing and Cultivating the Good

We have an opportunity right now to put a lawn mower battery in our Big Wheels. So let’s look at the pieces and cultivate the good.

What we know is that we have lots of superficial, truncated interactions that are not good for the soul. But we’re doing it anyway. We’re doing it anyway because we love living in community. We need to live in community with one another.

Bravo is not the best way to understand the shared human experience, but by the hours and hours of Bravo that people are consuming, we know they care about having a shared understanding of the human experience.

Through this bandwagon activism of half-baked ideas, we know that people are searching for meaning and a way to understand how they fit into the broader picture. Those are broken pieces we can work with. We want connection, and we want meaning.

How do we do that? I’m sure many people in this room are familiar with Tyler VanderWeele. He’s a Harvard professor that studies human flourishing all over the globe. And one of, I think, the most under-publicized findings of his work is that—regardless of baseline well-being or location—the most predictive element of either an individual or a group’s future well-being is how strongly they can rate the following:

“I (or we) seek to promote the good in all circumstances, even when they’re difficult or challenging.”

I seek to promote the good in all circumstances—even when it’s difficult or challenging.

How do we do that? I think we can understand the good on a philosophical, on a theological level. The practical application can be very challenging.

So to guide us here, I want to turn to positive psychology, which is, I think, a wonderful form of natural moral theology.

Similar to Tyler VanderWeele’s work, positive psychology has taken up the task of studying humans who live well and how they do it. And what is unique—and what they found—is there is a correlation to an individual or group’s well-being based on how strongly they can affirm the following:

“I have family whom I love and who love me in return.”
“I have friends I can trust and confide in.”
“I have work that matters—a calling that benefits my neighbors.”
“And I have a worldview that can help me make sense of suffering and death.”

Loneliness and Our Sense of Identity

I’m going to pause for just a moment here and ask you all to think back to whoever you had dinner with last night, breakfast this morning. What’d you guys talk about when you sat down with someone you’d never met?

Odds are: “Hey, I’m Francy, I’m from California originally. Now I live in Minnesota. I’m a psychiatrist. I have three kids.”

These are ways that we understand ourselves and introduce ourselves so that we can make sense of where we fit in relation to the world around us. These four tenets I just described are often the things we offer first when we’re navigating community.

Ben Sasse wrote a book several years ago called Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal, and he suggested that we consider these four questions as the legs of a chair. If you can answer all four of them, those legs are on and you’re sitting sturdy. No problem.

You lose one of those legs, you’re pretty wobbly. You lose two, and you’re probably no longer sitting in the chair.

So the actual application of where we go from here and how we mend these broken pieces is going to look really different for every single one of us—based off our family life, our community life, etc. But if we can keep these four questions in mind as guardrails—if we can answer them a little bit better at the end of the day than we could in the morning—we’re going to be moving in the right direction.

So let’s talk about the practical application. In order to do so, I want to highlight that human flourishing also requires a certain level of consonance between the internal environment and the external environment.

It’s not just enough to say, “I’m doing right, I’m good, my faith life’s in check, I have good family—that’s all I need.” If the world around you is in disrepair, you will not be able to achieve a state of flourishing that you would otherwise.

So I’m going to propose a couple solutions and next steps focusing on both the internal environment and the external environment.

Faith and the Inner Life

On the individual level—hear me loud and clear when I say—there is absolutely no replacement for prayer life, for the sacraments. We know, and we’ve already covered, that as a result of original sin, we will experience suffering.

Without your faith, you run the risk of suffering alone or suffering without purpose. And that’s a very dangerous place to be.

We have to prepare ourselves both cognitively and spiritually to move forward in this.

Why do you say cognitively?

Bishop Conley got an award for courage yesterday. He wrote a beautiful pastoral letter outlining his experiences struggling with anxiety and the associated symptoms that came from there.

He courageously discussed how when he got more anxious, he stopped sleeping. And then his mind started to play tricks on him—started to convince him that things were either all good or all bad, things were all his fault, things were never going to get better.

There’s a lot of fancy psychological terms I could use here to describe this. But essentially, when you start experiencing anxiety or depression, your mind will start to distort the way it perceives the world around you.

We have to prepare ourselves for this so that when it happens, we can 1) acknowledge that it’s happening, but 2) have some tools in our tool belts.

The Power of Gratitude

Positive psychology has decades of empirical evidence supporting what the Bible has been telling us for thousands of years: gratitude is essential.

Because when things get difficult, your mind will automatically focus on the challenges or the barriers in front of you. If you have not honed your gratitude muscle—your ability to see the world in its balanced state, that there is good that will always coexist alongside the difficult—it’s going to be very difficult for you to navigate.

So don’t wait until things get hard. Start now.

There’s robust evidence supporting that gratitude practices, such as going around the dinner table with your kids talking about what you’re grateful for, a gratitude journal in the morning, can increase your baseline level of gratefulness significantly.

The Challenge of Technology

What about the external environment? We need this consonance. Remember, talk about the elephant in the room—and that’s technology.

That’s not to say all of this is due to technology. It’s not. But we took a little bit of time earlier to talk about Jonathan Haidt’s framework for the real world versus the virtual world. And I’m going to propose that the ratio is off. We’re spending way too much time in the virtual world and not enough time in the real world.

I’m also going to propose we cannot be Luddites. And we cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater. We’re called to accompany and minister to those who are struggling—and this is where we’re asked to meet them.

So what does that look like? How do we use the virtual worlds as a way to complement and enhance the real world—not replace?

I had the opportunity to meet a wonderful woman last night—she’s actually sitting in the back over there—who saw this need within her family and within her community and answered the call. She founded an organization called Is This for Kids? and she puts out a podcast very regularly.

I was impressed, actually, with how many episodes there were when I looked at it last night—reviewing content to help guide parents: is this appropriate, is this not?

Above and beyond that, it gives some really nice real-life practical examples of how you can integrate this into your home.

Something that I’m going to carry with me for a very long time is the recommendation that anything that’s consumed in the home is consumed on one big shared screen so that it’s by nature a shared experience. And by the way, if you have an inclination to watch something you shouldn’t be, you’re going to think twice before you put it up in the middle of the family room.

Grassroots Responses to Digital Overload

We’re seeing movements like this sweeping the country—individuals recognizing the need and answering the call.

Wait Till 8 is another group I’d recommend you look into. Around fourth or fifth grade, many kids start pressuring their parents to get them an iPhone, get them some type of a device to stay more connected.

Many parents cite the fact that their kids need to “fit in” as the reason why they provide these devices. Wait Till 8 is a grassroots movement saying that this is a collective of parents who are going to sign and say, “We will not give our child a smartphone or equivalent device until at least eighth grade.”

And so when your kid says, “But mom, everyone else has it,” you can say, “No they don’t.”

They go further to provide empirical evidence supporting that, really, social media shouldn’t be provided to the child until they’re at least 16—ideally older.

So how do we meet those who are struggling in this imbalanced world where they’re at, and do it from a place of kindness and compassion?

I think armoring ourselves with these types of tools and answering the call in the way that we’re starting to is a really great start.

We also talked earlier about the need for dignity and work. We need common-sense policies that support marriage, that support work—work that supports the family in our local communities.

Every single person here is called to model.

My hunch is we have many leaders of their organizations in this room. We need to walk the walk and talk the talk.

Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk

What does that mean? I’m going to break it down.

Okay, talk the talk. I’m sure many of us have heard the story of the custodian at NASA that was interviewed by JFK. He was walking down the hallway and he said, “Sir, what’s your job here?”

The gentleman didn’t say, “I sweep the floors. I clean the toilets. I fold the linens.” He said, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

He had an incredible ability to sense and derive meaning from the work that he was doing.

I’ve worked with thousands and thousands of patients over the years and can tell you that that is an atypical find.

If you are in a leadership position—which all of us are within our homes and likely many of us within our work settings—we need to state the obvious. Don’t let too much time—I would argue even a day—go by without recognizing the why in the work that you’re doing. How something even potentially as small as cleaning the hallway could help put a man on the moon.

We have to help draw these connections for individuals so that they can start to see it. Much like the gratitude practices, the more we do it and the more we model it, the more other people will be able to, too.

We talk the talk. We have to walk the walk. That’s hard too.

I will encourage every single one of us to take a regular examination of our work settings and ask: What are we doing out of convenience that’s perpetually or potentially contributing to the disproportionate nature of the real and virtual that we discussed earlier?

If everyone’s in the building, have the meeting in person. If most people are in the building, have the meeting in person with only those who are out of the building joining virtually.

If we’re going to say it’s really important that we have strong home, faith, and family lives, don’t send an email at 8:00 p.m.

If it’s imperative for you that you send it that night for whatever reason, put it on delayed send. Because if you as a leader send that in the middle of the evening—that which should otherwise be protected family time—you’re sending a subtle message of: I expect you to maybe be devoting some of this time to work as well.

There’s countless other examples I could provide, but it’s so tough because all of our environments look a little bit different, which is why I don’t want to be too prescriptive in any way, shape, or form. But I just want to provide a framework.

One Person at a Time

When we leave here, it is our job to promote the good in all circumstances—even when it’s difficult and challenging. And it is difficult and challenging right now.

How we measure our success is: if at the end of any given day, week, or month, if for even just one person they’re able to say more resoundingly:

• I have family who love me and whom I love in return.

• I have friends who I trust and confide in.

• I have work that matters—a benefit or a calling that benefits my neighbors.

• And I have a way to make sense of suffering if and when it happens, knowing that I’m not alone.

If anyone—anyone in your life—can more resoundingly answer yes to at least just one of those questions, you’re meeting the call.

Thank you.