Issue 07: Loneliness Sucks
We’re extra vulnerable to loneliness at the moment, and we’re not talking about it enough. We might not be able to identify loneliness until we don’t feel it anymore. Like when you’re super pissed off and you don’t know why, until you eat a burger and realise you were just hungry, you might feel shit until you catch up with a real friend and feel the warmth of connection.
The bloody stupid thing about loneliness is that many of us feel it but don’t talk about it, which can make us feel more lonely.
I knew a few of my friends had started getting high on their own. Sometimes it was just to chill and listen to the birds, and it seemed okay. Other times I wondered if it was a coping mechanism for something more sinister. They were listening to lo-fi sad songs on repeat.
Over the weekend I’d gone to a BYO with some people I was kind of friends with, but not the sort of friends where you’d get a coffee. Communication was in the form of dropping coins in glasses and yelling at people to drink up. By Sunday afternoon I had a full case of hangxiety and started to wonder if I’d said something I shouldn’t have.
On Monday I sat eating my lunch in a weird university hallway. I kept refreshing my messages to see if anyone had sent a meme or something. I felt conscious that I was alone, and that if people were walking passed they might think I had no friends.
These are moments where you find yourself looking for connection, but end up running into a blank. Or when you feel like you’re watching someone else retreat into themselves and you don’t know how to communicate with them.
“Loneliness is an emotional state that arises from not having the desired sufficient meaningful connections with others – those people you could rely on in time of need. Loneliness is not related to how many friends or relationships you have, or whether you are alone or amongst people” (loneliness.org.nz).
Loneliness is highest in people aged 15-24, although it is experienced across the population. It is “most prevalent in many vulnerable groups in society”, including people with disabilities, unemployed people, and those with a low income. Loneliness is associated with a whole bunch of things like trouble studying, poor mental health, poor sleep, being less active, and shorter life span.
There is a biological reason for loneliness. Just like we feel thirsty when we need water or pain when we are injured, we feel loneliness when we lack real connection. Because we’re a bunch of social animals, not being social can trigger responses. It could be drinking, smoking, withdrawing from your social life, doom scrolling, hitting people up online more often, looking for people to talk to, saying really rash things in conversations, or trouble sleeping.
Being in a transitionitional period—whether that’s a new flat, new job, new classes, new city—opens us up to more loneliness than we might know how to handle.
There are resources (see loneliness.org.nz) to help us make sense of it. It might start as small as being able to identify your feelings so you can start to process them. It might help you seek out meaningful connections instead of surface level interactions. And, it might help you to look out for your friends.
Anyway, because it’s 04/20 we’ve written about the best weed sneakers and chatted to Chlöe Swarbrick about the potential for drug law reform now.
This week’s cover depicts a voting scenario where the new option for drug law reform is decriminalisation, based on post-referendum NZ. Look at the stress on the face of the nug. *Should drug law reform ever have been put to a referendum? Email your thoughts to editor@salient.org.nz.*
Sally Ward (she/her) and Matthew Casey (he/him)