when you’re stressed. It will come as a relief to believe that others are truly available to you.
This increase in overall happiness and reduction of harmful stress among people with close relationships leads them to live longer. In 2010 psychology professors Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Timothy B. Smith found that the quality of one’s relationships is a primary factor in longevity: “[Our] findings indicate that the influence of social relationships on the risk of death are comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality such as smoking and alcohol consumption and exceed the influence of other risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity.”
You have likely done a good job of living well and having successes, despite bouts of loneliness. You’ve likely learned to shelve feelings of being misunderstood or neglected by others. But your life would be substantially better — mentally and physically — if you didn’t have to. Luckily, with the skills you will learn in this book, you don’t have to.
Questions for Reflection
• Think of a time when you believed another person really “got” you. How did you feel toward her? How did she make you feel about yourself?
• Whom would you say you care about most in this world? Do you believe he knows that you care?
• In what ways has feeling distant from others affected your life?
Get organized about how the people in your life measure up in terms of closeness. Jot down four lists:
1. Those whom you know well
2. Those whom you feel know you well
3. Those whom you care about
4. Those whom you feel care about you
Keep these lists handy for later when we discuss picking closeness partners.
Chapter Summary
• Closeness is the experience of having direct access to another person’s inner world. It is the foundation of all stable and functional relationships — romantic, familial, platonic, and business. Since loneliness is essentially sadness caused by distance, closeness works as the antidote to loneliness by nullifying distance and the sadness that comes with it.
• Knowing and caring are the two activities that generate closeness. Knowing is the act of understanding another person from that person’s own perspective. Caring means being able to feel and show that the other person’s well-being matters to you. Taken together, these two actions demonstrate a desire to know someone else’s deepest self and to keep that self well.
• There are at least three measurable, practical benefits to having strong ties to other people: improved mental health, improved physical health, and longer life. These practical benefits, coupled with the deep satisfaction that comes with feeling truly known and truly cared about, make closeness essential for a long, happy life.
Before we dive into the specifics of how to cultivate closeness, we need to understand what’s causing this new type of loneliness. Understanding the problem helps us to invent better solutions.
We are not experiencing this new type of loneliness because we are somehow worse people than our ancestors were. We are not intrinsically more distant from one another; we are not inherently more reserved. In fact, we probably yearn for closeness more than past generations did.
We are experiencing this loneliness — more and more every year — because our social environment is changing rapidly in ways that hinder the natural generation of closeness. Our social world is very different from what it was in the past. Most young people leave their hometowns for better opportunities, living with family past a certain age is considered a failure, and big commitments such as marriage and having children are being delayed longer than they ever have before. These interruptions in our childhood relationships, coupled with a delay in forming adult relationships, profoundly affect how much closeness we feel is available to us.
While these social changes certainly matter, the single biggest environmental change to affect our levels of loneliness is the proliferation of personal technology. I believe this is the biggest factor — by far. Technology has never been so much a part of our lives as it is now. It has never been so integrated into our routines, our reasoning, and our relationships. The products of personal technology — specifically the internet, mobile phones, and social networks — are always in our homes and in our hands. They are always on our minds.
Personal technology has undoubtedly provided us with advances too numerous to list here. You can probably think of a dozen ways your phone and the internet have made your life better. But I propose that personal technology has also built obstacles into our social lives that prevent the natural generation of closeness between people. The bad news is that this means you will need to make a conscious effort to overcome these obstacles. The good news is that your loneliness is really, truly not your fault.
You are not lonely because you are less likable than your grandparents were. You are not lonely because you are flawed. You are lonely primarily because your environment is working against you.
There are three specific ways in which technology is making it harder for us to get — and stay — close:
1. Mediated interaction (interaction through a device) is becoming the norm.
2. Technology is teaching us certain lessons that are not helpful for creating closeness.
3. Technology is reducing our natural opportunities to get close.
Let’s talk a little about each one.
Obstacle 1: Mediated Interaction
More and more, our default mode of interacting with one another is through a mediator — a device. This is the first way in which personal technology is putting up roadblocks to closeness: it is making mediated interaction the norm. Mediated interaction, by definition, is not direct access to one another. Remember, closeness is defined as direct access to another person’s inner world. The more we replace in-person closeness with mediated interaction, the harder it is to understand anyone else’s inner world — or for them to understand yours.
If mediated interaction were simply making a phone call or video chatting while saving up for a plane ticket to visit friends and family, I wouldn’t see it as exacerbating loneliness. Technology is extremely useful for keeping relationships going in between periods of in-person togetherness. The issue is that mediated interaction is replacing in-person togetherness. Phone calls and video chats become a problem when they start replacing plane tickets all together.
One type of mediated interaction that deserves special attention here is social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, to name just a few. In some ways the combination of mobile phones and social networks is the perfect storm of mediated interaction. It feels so much like you have people around. You can feel as if you are carrying people around in your pocket at all times. But is this ability really making you happy? Is it really making you feel less alone?
Tell me you haven’t felt disappointed when someone close to you posts on your Facebook wall instead of calling to wish you a happy birthday. Tell me you haven’t found it annoying when someone repeatedly “likes” your Instagram posts while simultaneously ignoring your attempts to hang out. Maybe you’ve gotten excited about someone you met on a social network, only to find out it was all smoke and mirrors. We’ve all received an email or text from a friend with an odd tension to it. It’s too short or too brusque, or just . . . off. A slightly accusatory tone? Maybe she’s mad at me. She’s mad. I’m