Loneliness in the Age of Eight Billion

There is a quiet that does not belong to peace.

It lingers in the air even when the street is alive with footsteps,

even when music spills from a café door,

even when the train is so crowded you have to lean into strangers just to stay upright.

It’s the quiet that hums when no one meets your eyes.

I have met that quiet in rooms full of people who knew my name,

at tables where laughter rose around me,

in celebrations where glasses clinked and confetti rained.

It doesn’t arrive with warning.

It slips in softly, settles,

and before you know it, it has taken up residence in your chest.

Eight billion of us now.

More every day.

Our cities spilling over,

our devices able to reach across oceans in seconds.

And still,

the ache of being unseen may be sharper now than it has ever been.

The World Health Organization calls it a crisis.

Loneliness now measured like blood pressure,

compared to smoking, to obesity, to heart disease.

But numbers can’t hold the way it moves through a body.

How it can make the air feel thinner.

How it can dull the eyes.

How it can slow the beat of your own heart until you forget what joy feels like.

We have spoken before about social media as MSG for the soul.

It mimics the taste of connection without the nourishment.

A like, a comment,

a flicker of attention —and for a moment, you think you’ve been met.

But like instant noodles, it leaves you emptier than before.

You scroll again, still hungry,

forgetting the feast was never on offer.

But the ache runs deeper than the blue glow of a screen.

We’ve let our “third places” fade —

the park bench where you’d meet a neighbour,

the porch where someone would wave you over,

the café where the barista knew your name and asked about your day.

We’ve been taught to stand on our own,

as if that were the point of living.

And somewhere along the way,

we forgot that being human was always a communal act.

It hasn’t always been this way.

There were times when solitude was sacred —

a place to meet yourself,

to listen,

to breathe —

because it was held inside the arms of community.

You could wander into the quiet knowing there was a circle to return to.

What so many of us live with now is not sacred solitude,

but a spiritual drought.

And so I want you to remember, love:

your loneliness is not proof that something is wrong with you.

It is proof that you are still human in a culture that has forgotten how to gather.

Circles can be remade.

Not by filling stadiums,

but in the small, almost invisible ways we have always called each other back —

a knock on the door,

a shared meal,

a walk where the phone stays in your pocket,

a story told without rushing to the end.

And maybe,

if we follow those threads long enough,

one day you will pass that park bench,

and find someone sitting there.

Perhaps you will sit down beside them.

Petals falling between your feet.

And in the simplest of ways,

you will answer the call.