Why You Can’t Find People Like You
A guide to escaping chronic loneliness.
If I had to describe my life from 18–23 in just one word, that word would probably be “lonely”.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have any friends — although, there was definitely a period like that — but it was more so that I didn’t feel connected to anyone I interacted with.
I was interacting with people every day at school, Jiu-Jitsu, and the different little jobs I did, but I had a profound sense of loneliness because I felt disconnected from everyone.
This, paired with the already constant social anxiety that I’ve had for as long as I can remember left me feeling miserable all the time.
Anxiety paired with loneliness is a hell that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.
But luckily for me, there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
This is how I found my way out of chronic loneliness.
Working your way to a lonelier life.
After I graduated high school, I did what most high seniors did. I went to college.
However, when I was in college, I didn’t live the way most people did.
I didn’t do the whole “go to class, study with classmates, and then blow off steam on the weekend at parties and bars” thing. I didn’t interact with people at school because I didn’t feel like we had similar interests. I decided this, and therefore, it was true.
I was only 18, but I swore my mind was older.
I swore I was destined for bigger things than a bachelor’s degree.
Instead of enjoying my youth, I was obsessed with achieving outside goals that I had set for myself. The thought of social interaction was so uncomfortable (thanks, Anxiety) that I decided to throw myself into goal-oriented pursuits instead of doing anything else in my life.
I became obsessed with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Every day, 2–3 times per day, I was in the gym either training Jiu-Jitsu, lifting weights, or working on wrestling. I was obsessed.
Once I started competing, I had to find a way to make some money so that I could pay to go to competitions, so I became obsessed with finding ways to make money on the internet.
All I did was train martial arts, go to my college classes, and obsess over entrepreneurship on the internet.
This might surprise you, but this made me very lonely.
I was lonely because I thought that there was no one like me.
There’s only no one like you because you are not looking for people like you.
When you read that little story, you might think something like “well, your loneliness was your own fault. You didn’t do anything.”
If you’re older, you probably think that I’m a spoiled brat who should have just been more grateful for the opportunity to do cool things like chase goals and do Jiu-Jitsu.
You’re probably right, but that doesn’t really matter. I was still depressed.
I had this delusion in my mind that there were no people who could understand what I was trying to do. I didn’t think that anyone my age would understand what it was like to want to be a world-class Jiu-Jitsu athlete, so I just didn’t talk to anyone about trying to be a world-class Jiu-Jitsu athlete.
My beliefs about friendship were self-fulfilling.
I went to school, trained, and sat at home being sad whenever I wasn’t chasing my goals. I lived my life on social autopilot. I was married to my routine because I thought that deviating from my routine would make me fail at my goals.
I thought I was too ambitious to have friends. I thought I couldn’t date anyone because dating would kill my dreams.
I created a reality that was based on my beliefs about goalsetting and success which I had learned from watching YouTube videos and scrolling through Instagram.
My naivety to believe everything I saw online helped create a very depressing, and isolating reality.
Your phone is not your friend.
I made my first social media account when I was 14.
I made a Facebook account because I wanted to play the “ESPN U Collegetown” game with my friends.
Soon after that, I made a Twitter account. After that, I made a Snapchat. Then, I joined Instagram. A year or so after that, I was graduating high school, so I created a LinkedIn profile.
I’ve grown up with digital communication and I’ve used a smartphone since I was a teenager. I’ve communicated through iMessage since it came out in 2011. My last 2 romantic breakups have started over things that were posted on social media.
For years, I thought that my phone was my friend because it was connecting me with my friends and the world.
The reality is more complicated.
Your phone doesn’t make your social connections stronger. Your phone does help you maintain bonds, but the best way to build bonds that help enhance your sense of connection and happiness is through face-to-face communication.
Call me old-fashioned, but after years of feeling alone and addicted to social media, I prioritize in-person communication over digital communication every single time.
I think a lot of people feel this way, but I also think that our world is being engineered to force us to prioritize the digital over the physical.
We feel that there’s no one like us because we’re not around each other as much.
I used to feel lonely all the time, but I don’t feel that way anymore.
I feel lonely sometimes, but I know how to handle it now.
One of the most common and heartbreaking messages that I get from people who read my writing is something like “I wish there were more people like you”.
This is weird to me because I’m really not super unique.
I mean, I have an anxiety disorder and not everyone has an anxiety disorder, but still, 20% of people in America have anxiety.
You could walk outside and scream “I have anxiety!”, and the odds that a person who has anxiety will hear you are incredibly high.
What makes us lonely today is not that we are different from each other. What makes us lonely is that we do not talk to each other. Given the statistic above, I’d reckon that we probably aren’t talking to each other very much because we are all too nervous to talk to each other.
We think that there’s “no one like us” because we’ve been taught to focus on our individuality from the time we are children, but the reality is that we’re all quite similar. We’re individuals, but we’re also part of a group.
Perhaps instead of constantly celebrating our differences, we could take a few moments to celebrate all the things that make us the same.
There are millions of people like you. You just have to be bold enough to go out and find them.
Closing Thoughts
Modern society has a loneliness problem.
While our mental health problems are incredibly valid, I think that our society’s mental health problems could be greatly alleviated by working together to fix our collective loneliness problem.
This starts with a mindset shift: don’t focus on all the things that make you different, focus on all the things that make you similar to the people around you. Make a deliberate effort to not be unique, at least, sometimes.
That doesn’t mean you’re going to become best pals with everyone, but I promise that if there are people like me, there are people like you.
There are people like all of us, we just haven’t found them yet.
Have the audacity to seek connection in a world that preaches about the importance of solitude and “focus”. Have the courage to be vulnerably human.
“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”― Elbert Hubbard
Got home from Europe late last night, so I decided to use an old article for the newsletter. I hope you guys liked this one.
Back to regular programming next week 😊
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