Quotes on Loneliness & Friendship
Yes, there is a rise of loneliness. How are people thinking about this?
First, quotes that reflect on the problem:
Brad East, theologian and professor, says:
Our society is awash in loneliness, apathy, despair, and even sexlessness. The youngest generations (“Gen Z” and Millennials) are marrying later or not at all, and (thus) having fewer children or none at all. Divorce is rampant. Kin networks are declining in both quantity and quality, and what remains is fraying at the seams. Regular attendance of church (or synagogue, or mosque) reached historically low numbers before Covid; the pandemic has supercharged these trends beyond recognition. Even friendship, the last dependable and universal form of love, has seen drastic reductions, especially for men. I heard one sociologist, a middle-aged woman, remark recently that our young men are beset by “the three P’s: pot, porn, and PlayStation.” You can’t open an internet browser without stumbling upon the latest news report, study finding, or op-ed column on opioids, deaths of despair, hollowed-out factory towns, fatherless children, lethargic boys, screen-addled kids, housebound teens, risk-averse young adults, social awkwardness, and all the other symptoms of a sad, isolated, and unloved generation. They are like a car alarm ringing through the night. Eventually you get used to it and go back to sleep.
Anne Snyder, editor-in-chief of Comment says:
It would be too simple and socially myopic for me to narrate these [loneliness] trends with the usual declinist explanations, even if they apply to a whole bunch of us — the weakening of institutions and the decline of associational life, geographic transience and the digital displacement of in-person engagement…
Still, there does seem to be a cocktail of forces battering the societal substrate that makes friendship possible, yielding a mass anxiety and inwardness that are keeping too many of us from entering - let alone encountering - models of relational joy.
Stephen Marche in The Atlantic says:
Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill.
Jonathan Tjarks, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, says:
The lie that society tells us is that our friends can be our family. That’s the premise of TV shows like Friends, Seinfeld, and How I Met Your Mother. We can all leave our hometowns behind and have exciting adventures in the big city with people that we meet. And those people will love us and take care of us and be there for us.
But life is more like what happened to the actual actors on Friends. Their TV reunion was the first time all six had been together in years. They still cared about each other to a degree, but they had grown apart. They were living in different cities and working different jobs and had a million different things happen to them that they didn’t share as a group. It couldn’t be the same as it was when they were all single and working on the same TV set.
Quotes on the core of the problem:
In Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own he says:
Whom we belong to makes all the difference in the world. If we belong to ourselves, we are radically free—with all the accompanying glory and terror.
Similarly, Taylor Swift says:
I know it can be really overwhelming figuring out who to be, and when. Who you are now and how to act in order to get where you want to go. I have some good news: it’s totally up to you. I also have some terrifying news: it’s totally up to you.
Steve Wilens, in the book Hidden Worldviews, says:
Individualism is the belief that the individual is the primary reality and that our understanding of the universe and lifestyle should be centered in oneself.
Quotes on the solution:
Timothy Keller, in an epic sermon on friendship, says:
“Let us admit that one of the reasons we do not have the friends that are hearts need is not because of our terrible mobile society but because we aren’t the friends we should be. The reason why we don’t have enough great friends is because we are not great friends!”
In Jennie Allen’s book Find Your People she describes five qualities of good friendships:
Safe (transparency): True belonging requires being fully known and fully loved
Deep (shared purpose): If we can focus on Christ and others instead of our own needs and desires, we can truly love and serve each other.
Protected (accountability): Friends need to be willing to submit to and serve each other.
Committed (consistency): To develop deep friendships, we need to make regular time for one another and protect relationships in our schedules.
Close (proximity): Allen suggests we should prioritize friends who live within a walk or short drive from us.
And some more of that Jonathan Tjarks article I quoted above:
I was nervous the first time I went to a life group… I remember walking up to the door and not knowing what to expect on the other side. There were about a dozen people in the living room talking to each other. I didn’t know any of them besides the pastor—and I barely knew him. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what most people would do: I headed over to the table with snacks.
That was seven years ago. Some of those strangers from the house that first night are now some of my closest friends. It didn’t happen overnight. It took me a long time to feel comfortable. I usually came after the life group had already started and left as soon as it was over.
But I was seeing the same people every week and I was telling them about my problems and they were telling me about theirs. Do that for long enough and you become friends. You get to know enough people that way and life group goes from being an obligation to something you look forward to.
And finally, C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves:
[Friendship] is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…”
In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares twopence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
In friendship...we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another...the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting--any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends, "Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.