Be the connection you seek
Or, how your breakfast choices can help you understand your loneliness
We are lonely in the United States.
Former United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has argued that many Americans—almost half—are experiencing considerable levels of loneliness, which can affect physical, mental, and societal health. That was back in 2023. Murthy has even called loneliness the new smoking.
Earlier this year, The Atlantic explored this phenomenon in a rather presumptuous title: The Anti-Social Century. TED Talks has a collection of talks along this theme as well, entitled The Paradox of Loneliness. I have not read this piece (it’s paywalled) or listened to many of the TED Talks. I link to them here to support the notion that our increasing loneliness is not merely a pet project of the former Surgeon General’s but rather a real social phenomenon worth exploring by some of our most respected institutions.
But I’ve known about this problem for some time.
A claim from Johan Hari’s 2018 book Lost Connections has always stuck with me: as the size of our domiciles has increased, the number of people we count as close friends has decreased. It’s quite an indictment of how we live in this wealthy country. Here we are, ensconced in houses and apartments, like big children who built a fort—not out of cardboard boxes and pillows, but 75-inch televisions, ring cameras, and air fryers. And there we are in our forts, with our only connection to the outside world being our high-speed internet connections, which we use to binge-watch Netflix series alone with a few pets and a Roomba.
There are many ways to think about our problem of loneliness and isolation. I will present one grounded in sociological analysis. But first, I need to talk about breakfast.
My breakfast of…choice?
Some mornings, I wake up so hungry that my main task is to get food in my belly right away.
I get up, shuffle into the kitchen, pour about a cup of ground corn into a pot, cover it with water, and boil it for around 20–30 minutes. I’ve developed a special liking for yellow corn and corn that is not ground too finely—what is called “coarse ground.” After some time, the ground corn turns into a thick soup. Sometimes, I boil an egg or two, chop them up into the mixture for protein. I also add butter, cheese, and salt because everything tastes better when you add butter, cheese, and salt.
I am describing grits, a common breakfast food in the Southeastern United States. I have been eating variations of this simple, hearty dish all my life
Two points of note here.
First, I chose of my own free will to get up and make this dish. No one told me or forced me to make this corn porridge conconction.
I could have chosen grilled fish with rice and miso soup. Or, I could have chosen yam and eggs. Maybe the hungry people from Japan and Nigeria, respectively, would wake up craving fish or yams, respectively. And like me, they’s say they chose those dishes.
But what kind of choice was it?
It’s not as if Nigerians are given a list of all the possible breakfast dishes human beings have devised and then they check the box for 'yam and eggs' and placed a big fat X in the 'grits' or 'miso soup' boxes. It’s not really choice. There is no thinking involved, really. The choices were, for all practical purposes, predetermined by society—our parents, associates, and media. Grits doesn’t pop into their mind at all.
So, it’s really a learned expectation. I learned to expect grits in the morning. Sure, I’ve modified that expectation a bit—choosing coarse ground, choosing yellow. But the core expectation—a good breakfast in the morning—still includes grits.
Second, if for some reason I were not able to have my grits for breakfast, I might feel some type of way. Suppose I was told by my doctor that the high starch content in grits is bad for me, and that all the butter, cheese, and salt I use to add flavor are adding inches to my waistline and clogs to my arteries. Then I’d feel a sense of loss. No more grits? Ever? Or suppose some lawmaker decided that grits needed to be heavily taxed or, God forbid, banned for some reason. Then I’d be filled with indignation—how dare they? In other words, my emotions have become fused with those expectations. I feel some type of way if I have expectations and they are not met.
To make the above clearer, the main point here is that I have a biological need to eat, but how I meet that need is predetermined by social influences. The interesting part for me—the sociological part of all this—is how we learn those ways of meeting our biological needs, act as if we chose them out of thin air, and then infuse emotions into them to the point of passing judgement on ourselves and others.
Now, what does this have to do with loneliness?
Many others of many significances
Like my need to fill my belly in the morning, we all have a need for social connection and intimacy. Consider these social arrangements, and as you read them think about how they make you feel.
Two heterosexual men in their mid-50s deciding to buy a home together. They are friends from college, maybe, and share similar leisure activities. The home is big enough so that if and when they desire intimacy with someone, they have their space and privacy.
Several single mothers deciding to pool their resources and live together. They share the rent or mortgage and share the parenting responsibilities. They create a village to raise their children.
A child who moved away to the big city to get their fancy degree decides to take a job close enough to live with their parents. The arrangement is not meant to be temporary, though. They create some approximation of a “mother-in-law” suite and build their new college-educated life alongside that of their parents.
These arrangements describe many others of significant meaning. They deviate from the standard models of social relationships we’ve been taught. As such, like me not wanting miso soup for breakfast, we never consider them, and when presented with them, we reject them. We feel these are “wrong.”
Here is the socially approved model—my grits in the morning, as it were:
We must build a two-person unit legally recognized by the state, with the one person we have decided we should forever and always have sex with and be our best friend. They are our significant other. The rest of the human beings in our lives are relatively insignificant, or at any rate less significant than this one other human being you’ve promoted over all others.
Sure, we can have parents and friends come in and out of our orbit—maybe crash on the couch or use the guest room from time to time. You might reach out for advice and on occasion offer or receive economic or social support from them. But extended family and friends are temporary visitors to the island you have created with this one other special person you should forever and always have sex with and be your best friend.
This is the socially approved model. As such, we infuse feelings into how close we approximate this model.
A “single” parent feels less than. Even if the other parent is involved in the child’s life, they will still feel some type of way about not meeting that model. I put “single” parent in quotes because the label itself is infused with a strange meaning. Single parents, it seems, are to be condemned for their bad choices, pitied for being one person raising a child, and considered heroic for trudging on even if they are “single.” But the person in a legally bound two-parent arrangement likely feels superior to the “single” parent.
A couple feels bad if their marriage ends in a divorce. I can see how a marriage that ends after a few years would be seen as a negative. Usually, a person invests a considerable amount emotionally and economically in starting a life with their significant other. But we have the somewhat insane expectation that you should sign a contract in your twenties, giving away much of your economic autonomy before you have even built up enough experience to generate your biggest paychecks, and forbidding you from seeking intimacy elsewhere, despite what and how your significant other comports themself. This is for life. And apparently, a “successful” couple must stay in this binding contract and feel the same way about that significant other until the day they die. Is this an indicator of success, or a lack of imagination and options? It’s hard to say.
Our isolation comes from the fact that many of us can no longer meet the socially approved model, reject many others of significant meaning, and find ourselves binge-watching television with our pets while a Roomba whirs in the background. We have a biological need for connection, but the socially approved way of meeting that need no longer works for many people.
We need new models.
Be the connection you seek
If the solution were grounded purely in psychology, I could have titled this ending section the more common “be the change you seek.” I can do that with my solo breakfasts. In fact, this morning I had what my favorite coffee shop calls a Polish Breakfast. I did not grow up eating cabbage for breakfast, and I tend to translate runny eggs into raw eggs and reject them. But here I am. In this instance, I can be the change I seek.
Now, what if I were cooking Thanksgiving breakfast for my family—most of them born and raised in contexts where grits are a socially approved way of addressing early morning hunger? For that to be a successful breakfast, they’d all have to agree that this odd raw egg and cabbage mixture was a worthy breakfast.
They won’t.
And so, there might be people out there reading this who can pick up what I am putting down. They get it, as it were. They are able to recognize that the ways we are expected to live are not eternal or set in stone, that the emotions infused into them are also not set in stone, and they can imagine other ways of meeting our needs and desires.
But an individual person can’t solve their loneliness problem alone. They need to connect with people who also believe these arrangements are possible—who can also see their feelings are connected to socially constructed models that they are not bound to. That is exceptionally hard.
But there are examples out there. Way back in 2022, I had a conversation with a Charlotte, The Feminine House Bunny. Yeah, that’s quite a name. Certainly more interesting than the Neighborhood Sociologist! She was a great guest, though, and I did not get the sense she had embraced this persona for the attention it might bring.
The purpose of the conversation for me was to understand the Trad Wife (traditional wife) cultural movement and lifestyle. Charlotte and other folks who wanted that lifestyle—a model of being a woman that is seen as 'less than' by many in society—found each other online.
I suspect many people like Charlotte presented themselves in ways online that attracted likeminded individuals—both other erstwhile trad wives and the men who wanted to marry them.
I think the same can happen with other alternative social arrangements, including the scenarios I mentioned above. It just requires being the connection you seek and then finding others who want the same connection.