There are more of us than ever, so why do many of us feel so alone?

By David McElroy · September 10, 2017

Loneliness is the most deadly disease a human soul can suffer.

It wounds a heart. It numbs a mind. It breaks a soul. Worst of all, it’s invisible to the others in the crowd.

Nobody spots the lonely man or woman going about his or her business — working, talking, laughing, caring for others, pretending all is well. The lonely soul wears a mask — and nobody sees what lies underneath until something inside breaks.

Around 1960, there were 3 billion souls on this planet. Less than 60 years later, there are around 7.5 billion of us. Those of us in the West — and particularly in the U.S. — are wealthy enough to be around as many or as few others as we want.

We’re more connected than ever. At least theoretically. A couple of centuries ago, a man might never know more than a few hundred people. He would marry from among a limited number of women. He would have few opportunities to make a living. He had no hope of making something better of himself.

With the Internet and modern transportation, I can get to know the right woman — wherever she is — and marry her. (Theoretically, at least.) I am surrounded by people with money and resources and ideas. I can travel to whatever opportunity I want. I have every hope and expectation of making something better of myself.

So why do so many of us feel most alone in crowds? Why do so many of us walk silently around in a bubble — in a lonely fog — reaching out from wounded hearts and whispering, “Are you the one who will know me? Will you be the one who will love me and never leave?”

We face a crisis today of hidden depression. I’d never heard of “high-functioning depression” until a year or so ago, but it’s rampant. And I’ve experienced it.

We think of the depressed person as someone who can’t function. The stereotype is that he or she stays in bed all day or collapses on a couch in front of a television, refusing to work or do much of anything. But someone with high-functioning depression is different.

There are some people — including me at times — who can look perfectly normal to others. They can get their work done. They can act professionally. They can laugh easily with others and follow every expected social script. But inside, those people are falling apart — shriveling as the lonely soul dies without the one thing it most desperately needs.

When people typically interacted with only a few hundred people over the course of their lives, they had nowhere to hide. They walked with each other to the same water sources. They hunted or planted together. They spent intimate time in religious communities together.

Today, we hide in our homes. We hide in our cars as we zip from one place to another. We dart into offices where we put on masks and become someone else. And then we leave those people behind and return to homes where we put on yet another mask. Not only does almost no one know us, but people who know us in different parts of our lives see us wearing different masks.

And some people wear their masks so well that they become comfortable with them — and they forget who they really are and what their souls need.

But no matter how comfortable the masks become, the soul inside is lonely. The heart hurts. The heart slowly breaks. The mind numbs itself with pleasure or work or drugs or sex or success. The mind does anything to stay busy and avoid thinking about the soul which is dying all alone.

And we consider this hell on earth to be normal life.

The only thing worse than being alone is being with people with whom we don’t fit. It might be a spouse who’s a terrible fit. It might be a boss or co-workers who don’t understand us. It might be family members who are dysfunctional and bring pain. For some of us, it can be even broader than that — those of us who fit in society so poorly that it’s always a struggle to find people who are anything like us.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I know this is going on all around me. On the rare occasions when I bring it up, a few tortured souls have a flicker of recognition in their eyes and murmer, “Really? You, too? I thought it was just me!”

For some of us, life is difficult — for many reasons. It’s a struggle to find a place to fit. It’s a struggle to find genuine love — not the counterfeit kind which is so commonly offered by selfish people. It’s a struggle to find work that gives purpose to our productive days. It’s a struggle to find hope that life has meaning and that it’s worth continuing the fight — that life isn’t worth giving up on.

Mostly, though, it’s a struggle not to feel numb. It’s a struggle not to let the hurt of loneliness destroy the soul.

The loneliness inside is killing us — and genuine love is the only cure for this most deadly disease.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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