Issue 01 - Loneliness

awkward moments as a society, but the
truth is that any attempt at connection
runs the risk of awkwardness.
The Hopelab project I was hearing
about, Nod, is actively attempting
to shift these beliefs and disrupt the
cycle of disconnection. While I’m still
a tad bitter that this information wasn’t
available to me when I was starting
out in school, I still managed to find a
way to overcome intense feelings of
loneliness on my own, with time and my
own strategies, not surprisingly similar
to the ones presented in the share out.
“Everyone is lonely. So why is no one
talking about it? ”
Drake raps about it on his newest
album in the song Emotionless. We
explore it on television shows like
13 Reasons Why. We hear about
tragedies like suicides without any prior
knowledge of mental health issues or
depression. Thirty percent of college
students reported feeling very lonely in
the recent past; 2 even though I didn’t
realize it in college, my peers were
struggling with their own loneliness
battles. But still, no one was making an
active effort to change the narrative of
what it means to be lonely.
on campus. We can meet people 6,000
miles away through a direct message
on Instagram. Connecting isn’t the
problem. It’s the depth of connection
that is lacking. The challenge is being
able to talk about that loneliness
and express it in a way that makes
ourselves feel heard.
What Hopelab is trying to do is
change the way we think about social
interactions, and the social norms
surrounding them. Friendships aren’t
as easy to build as people say they are,
the best years of your life don’t just end
in college, and even the most social
of butterflies are sometimes secretly
hiding in their cocoons. Loneliness
will always have a bit of a hold over us
because it’s our individual perception.
But learning strategies to overcome our
own perceptions and ideations of self is
how we can conquer it.
We have the tools to connect to
each other. Facebook (or, back in the
day, “The Facebook”) was originally
created to connect college freshman
1.
Peplau & Perlman, 1982
2.
ACHA National College Health Assessment, 2019
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