The Loneliness Epidemic Isn’t About Being Alone.

The "loneliness epidemic" gets diagnosed the same way every time: too much screen time, not enough face-to-face interaction, people hiding in their rooms instead of touching grass. The prescription is always some variation of just go outside more, just talk to people, just be present. As if proximity alone could cure what ails us.

You join the groups, attend some meetups, start hitting the local events and mingling across all manner of affair, but— you still find yourself silencing your phone when you get down, instead of feeling there’s someone truly safe you can call to sit with.

Proximity has never guaranteed connection.
We've sat in classrooms, offices, and family dinners feeling profoundly alone; physically together and still completely unseen. The problem was never the room we were in, but was what we had to give up to stay in it.

What's shifting now isn't that people stopped wanting connection. It's that many of us stopped betraying ourselves to get it.~

The Individualism We Kinda Needed

There's been this major cultural move toward individualism, and it gets painted as the villain in every loneliness think-piece. Self-actualization, identity labels, boundaries— these are treated like symptoms of a sickness, evidence that we've all become too selfish, too picky, too fragile to handle real human contact. (Trust, I once held thoughts that it was wholly toxic.)

But individualism didn't make us cold. It gave us a language for honesty we didn't have before.

Those identity labels people love to mock? They're maps. They're how we learned to name ourselves after spending years disappearing into what other people needed us to be! We figured out our values, our limits, our non-negotiables. We learned who feels safe and who doesn't. We built filters not because we're shallow, but because we got tired of relationships that required us to shrink, to smooth our edges, to make ourselves smaller and more digestible.

Yes, that means fewer people get close now. The bar is higher, and for good reason! But here's the tension we're sitting in: knowing who to avoid is not the same as knowing how to build depth.
Discernment isn't intimacy. We've gotten very good at protecting ourselves, at recognizing what we won't tolerate anymore. We haven't quite figured out what comes after, but I have a feeling it’s going to be leveling up our emotional bandwidth to start integrating different viewpoints more closely into our lives. (I’m not talking Frida prefers salsa, either.)

When Standards Are Just... Standards

Here's where it gets even more pointed: neurodivergent people have been living this tension forever.

We get accused of having "unreasonably high standards" for connection— too picky, too rigid, too much need for specificity, predictability, honesty that doesn't bend. But those aren't higher standards, they're just standards we actually enforce.
Neurotypical people have needs too; they've just been socialized to override them more readily, to smooth over the dissonance, to keep the peace at the cost of their own clarity.

Neurodivergent folks tend to stand by our own morals, our own boundaries, our own truth, not because we're inflexible, but because the alternative is destabilizing. We know what it costs to mask, to perform neurotypicality, to betray our own operating system just to make others comfortable. (So we don't, or we try not to, or we're learning not to!)

The irony is brutal: we romanticize neurodivergent traits in film and television. Wednesday, Good Doctor. The brilliant misfit, the socially awkward genius, the person who sees the world differently and that's what makes them special. We love that character! We root for them. We admire their refusal to compromise their vision!
…But extend that same grace to actual neurodivergent people— the ones who need direct communication, who can't do small talk, who have sensory limits, who need time to process, who don't perform warmth the expected way?

Maybe what we're seeing isn't a loneliness epidemic so much as more people— neurodivergent and otherwise— refusing to play a game that was rigged against authenticity from the start. Maybe it's what happens when enough people stop accepting "you're too much" or "you're not enough" as valid reasons to go invisible.
It can take a lot of energy, after all, to just be yourself. Freedom is a muscle you have to keep moving and exercising, otherwise you atrophy. Confidence is a personal freedom. You have to discover what flexes that, for yourself. Use this to enforce the standard effortlessly while radiating your vibe like a beacon.

The Honesty of Loneliness

In her essay "Maybe we aren't Lonely. Maybe we're just done Betraying ourselves for Connection," Amy Hale cuts through the noise and points to a truth most loneliness discourse refuses to sit with: stepping back from hollow connection isn't avoidance, it's coherence returning, it's refusing to override yourself just to stay attached.

Maybe loneliness isn't always a failure, or a lack. Maybe sometimes it's integrity showing up, the space between I will not disappear anymore and I don't yet know how to be fully myself AND fully connected. That in-between place is uncomfortable, but it's also real in a way that forced togetherness never was.
Like boredom, loneliness is an invitation to explore ourselves, attend to deeper needs that typically get swept away with our dailies, and discover bits of ourselves along the way. When we know ourselves, we can better represent ourselves, and protect ourselves.

We keep trying to solve this loneliness with data, numbers in an attempt to represent feelings, connections. Studies count hours online, number of friends, frequency of in-person interaction. They track metrics and build graphs and generate headlines about Gen Z or millennials or whoever's turn it is to be blamed for the state of human connection.

But this is what data cannot measure….

But you can't spreadsheet the things that actually matter— being comforted, being seen, being loved in a way that doesn't cost you your dignity. Feeling needed without being used. Feeling helpful without being drained. Feeling chosen, not just convenient.

The research can tell us what is happening, can draw us maps of declining social connection and rising isolation rates. What it can't do is speak to the ache underneath, the gnawing knowledge that we want to matter— not as a performance, not as a transaction, but as ourselves. Sans performance.

Between Worlds

The answer isn't "log off" or "get out of the house" or any other oversimplified directive that treats complex human yearning like a problem of poor time/energy management. It's not about going back to some imagined past where people were less isolated because they were forced into proximity, into churches and civic organizations and neighborhood potlucks where you had to show up whether you wanted to or not.
We're in a liminal space, and maybe we need to sit with that for a moment. The old models for connection are broken— they required too much self-betrayal, too much compromise without reciprocity, too much mistaking proximity for care. But the new models aren't fully formed yet. We know what we won't accept anymore. We're still learning what we can build instead, what it looks like to be both boundaried and open, both discerning and vulnerable!

That transition feels a lil lonely. And maybe that's okay, or at least maybe it's honest. Maybe loneliness isn't always something to fix. Maybe sometimes it's the acknowledgment that we're between worlds, no longer willing to betray ourselves, not yet fluent in intimacy that honors who we've become.

We're not failing at connection. We're refusing to accept connection that fails us.

If that means sitting with loneliness for a while, then maybe that's the price of not disappearing. Maybe that's what it costs to wait for something that doesn't require us to shrink, to perform, to override our own knowing just to keep someone else comfortable.

We want to be comforted, seen, loved, needed, helpful. We want to matter in ways that feel true, in ways that don't leave us hollowed out and performing a version of ourselves we can barely recognize. The work now is learning how to let that happen, how to build the kind of intimacy that doesn't require betrayal as the price of admission.

We're figuring it out. Slowly, imperfectly, with plenty of loneliness along the way. But at least we're doing it as ourselves!

You are seen and treasured.~