A Society of One

People are the problem, and the cure.

Photo by Patrik László on Unsplash

“Everyone I know is Lonely, and God’s so Far Away.”

That's one of my favorite lyrics I've ever heard. I'm not going to tell you where it’s from. You can find it easily enough. It's from a song that never gets played on the radio and wasn't even a single released from the album over 40 years ago.

But it sums up the human condition in a magnificent way. It hit me when I first heard it when I wasn’t even a teenager, and it hits me the same way now.

Everyone is lonely in their own way. We are social animals, and to not be accepted, not loved, or not valued is the worst thing that can happen to us.

Well, that's what I thought, until I started reading about and understanding the environmental devastation that awaits us.

Ironically, the solution to the loneliness problem is also the solution to the environmental devastation problem. Funny how that works.

Some stats for the math inclined.

As I write this, 52 percent of Americans report feeling lonely while 47 percent report their relationships with others are not meaningful. Being chronically lonely is like the mortality impact of smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Chronic loneliness is also associated with a weakened immune system, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes. More than 80 percent of people under the age of 18 in America report feeling lonely. Forty-three percent of people between the ages of 18 to 25 report feeling unloved. Seventy-three percent of Millennials say they are lonely.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

Go through your day, how much of it are you alone? Alone in your headphones, alone in your car, alone on the train, alone in your office or your cubicle, alone at your work, alone at lunch, alone as you walk home, how long is your bike home? Alone in your head. Alone staring at your phone, your tablet, your computer. Alone reading this.

Many of us, with each passing year, are becoming more and more a Society of one.

Social media and the virtual worlds that await us have played a pretty amazing trick. They’ve convinced us that the isolation they engender is community.

It is not.

You're not really connecting with someone if you're only using one of your senses to do so.

I have hundreds of followers on Substack and thousands of other social media platforms, but I know very few of them, and consider very few of them my friends. And they would say the same of me.

Social media isn't evil, it's just a tool. I connect with smart people on LinkedIn, I come across interesting stories on Instagram, and I even learned things on Facebook.

But none of that leads to me being any less lonely until I reach out to that person on LinkedIn or they reach out to me, and we talk over Zoom, or meet for coffee, and connect on a human level.

It’s not that complicated.

The cure for loneliness and our environmental challenges is the same thing - each other.

But we have to do the work. You don't want to save the world for @brownsfan3000 just because you're both from Cleveland. You want to save the world for him when you meet him, and see he's a decent guy, what kids he loves, and a future he wants for them.  

I think the golden age of community is ahead of us. But we have a choice about what that is. Is that a place where environmental devastation has wiped most of us out, and we have to cooperate and work together to survive and rebuild things? Or is that golden age starting now as we step away from an economic and cultural model that has convinced us to destroy ourselves so we can consume more things that don't make us happy, that make us lonelier?

If we invest less in trying to grow our economies, and invest more and trying to grow our communities, doesn’t that lead to a better place?

Community is where people keep showing up.

You can't show up for your community, and they can't show up for you when they insist on being alone, or you insist on being alone.

So yes, we need to get off our phones, and less obsessed about work, and consume less, and all those things. But most of all, we need to tell our leaders that that's the world we want. We want less time on our phones, we want to work less, and we want to consume less, because not only will we not be lonely then, but we will have saved ourselves too.

We want to construct our lives, our routines, and our public places to have more of each other in them. It’s easy to believe that climate change is a conspiracy, (or that anything is a conspiracy) if we only connect to people through a screen.

If we interact with more of each other each day, and we hear matter-of-fact conversations about climate change the become less mysterious. If the realities of climate change become just mundane facts that we know, we will tend to accept them and be more inclined to act.

This is true with any topic. If it's something we're unsure about, and we only come across information that tells us to stay on shore, we're going to stay that way – unsure. But if we're out in the world, at the library, at the community garden, at our kid’s basketball game, we're just hanging out talking to people, we're less likely to believe things that are quite easy to disprove -like climate change is a hoax.

This is also the case with the other environmental challenges we face, the other planetary boundaries we have crossed or will soon cross. Have that conversation about ocean acidification with a friend or loved one. Same thing with plastics polluting the biosphere, the loss of biodiversity, the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. These huge natural systems that we have broken need fixing, but I would venture a guess that many of us never have these conversations. We should.

It takes more community, and less striving for that last percentage point of growth, to talk about these things, to learn about these things, to fix these things.

There is a way out of this fog. It isn’t magic and it isn’t smiling on your brother. It is doing the hard work of working with people you don’t know and don’t love to get something done so that you can survive.

There is a word for it.

Solidarity.

We need to let the frames of class melt away and all subject ourselves to the same restrictions, because we have the same goal – survival. We are all equally responsible for our collective rescue. Solidarity isn’t the billionaire bestowing a gift of charity on someone less fortunate. Solidarity is the billionaire and the poor man marching shoulder to shoulder in the street demanding a just outcome for all. The former is a one-time gift from the upper class to the lower class. The latter is an acknowledgment of, and desire for equality.

Such solidarity isn’t the natural state of things. Think about when you have seen it and when you have heard that word used. It is a word used when different groups share a common struggle that can best be addressed if they work together.

Solidarity is what is needed to attack the problem of climate change. (Here is the upcoming book by the authors, that goes into more detail than that article). Solidarity is not some socialist ideal assuming that everyone is equal or the same. Solidarity can arise when there is a threat daunting enough for disparate groups to unite to fight for a common cause, despite their differences. In the end, if we are to achieve the solidarity we need to save ourselves, we need to realize that we are all in this together and act accordingly.

Solidarity requires the powerful not to give their power to the less powerful, but to throw that power away because they see it isn’t useful for the society they want to help create.

Solidarity in the context of climate change can only work if enough of us acknowledge that climate change isn’t just coming for you, it is coming for us. You can’t solve climate change. But we can. It is only when we join the larger group with the attitude of “we are not leaving this room until this is solved,” that we can get where we need to be.

Solidarity doesn’t demand that you leave your tribe and join the solidarity tribe. It only demands that you acknowledge that the problem – climate change – takes precedence over your tribe because the threat isn’t to your tribe or your enemy's tribe. The threat is to everyone.

A society of one is a narcissistic fantasy. Throw it away.

A society based on solidarity can fix this. We just must get out there – in person – and make that happen. So go out there in the world, meet people, talk to them. Tell them what scares you, ask them what scares them. Ask them how you can help them, and that you need your help.

It may be a bit uncomfortable, but there are billions of people out there who want your help and want to help you.

Here, I’ll start.

“Hi, I’m Matt. I’m concerned about our future. I need your help. How can I help you?”

(That last part wasn’t a rhetorical flourish. Feel free to reach out if you want to, and if not to me, to someone else you want to talk to about saving the future).