Opportunities to Get Close
Beyond changing the way we think, technology is propagating yet another obstacle to closeness: it has unwittingly reduced our opportunities for getting close through natural circumstances. We really don’t need to interact with people much anymore. When it comes to getting essentials done — eating, shopping for goods, cleaning our clothes, getting around town — we can handle almost every task on our own.
In past generations, friendships and other kinds of relationships would arise organically when we ran into one another in our communities. But today we no longer need to be in our physical communities. We don’t need to go to a restaurant, since we can have our food delivered. We don’t need to go to a classroom to take a class, since we can take the class online. We don’t need to shop in stores, since we can order everything from Amazon. We don’t even need to go to a workplace to work.
As someone who’s lived and worked in Silicon Valley my whole life, I’ve seen the effect of this trend firsthand. In the modern workplace — the one championed by Silicon Valley — remote working is customary. Even the smallest start-ups have at least some employees working remotely at all times. As the tools and technology for remote working improve, teams can certainly complete their projects despite physical separation. The work will get done. But how is the slow dissolution of our work communities affecting us? How does it feel to work with people you can’t really get to know?
When I ponder these questions, I think of the time Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, ordered all employees who worked remotely to get back into the office or face termination. The move was criticized as a step backward for the modern workplace. How could a technology company reject the very advances it had helped to create?
Yet if you spoke to anyone who worked at Yahoo! at the time (as I did), you’d hear nothing but praise for the decision. As my friend who worked on Yahoo!’s mobile team put it, “The remote workers really were like nonentities. I would email these people every day and have calls with them every week, but if they’d passed me on the street I’d never have known it was them. It’s hard to make a company culture with ghosts.”
Of course, there are undeniable benefits to working from home, especially for parents. Most employers recognize these benefits and have encouraged more and more of their employees to work remotely. But while the benefits of remote working are undeniable, it’s also hard to deny that it’s substantially harder to get to know or start to care about coworkers when you never see them. I don’t imagine any former on-site employee would say he felt closer to his coworkers after he moved off-site.
And maybe you don’t even want to; after all, it’s not required to have a warm, close relationship with your colleagues. But what if you did? Wouldn’t it feel wonderful to know you had at least a few people available between 9:00 and 5:00, Monday through Friday, to talk to about something that matters? If you were not close to any of your coworkers, wouldn’t that be a missed opportunity?
Work may be just one missed opportunity for close relationships — one that we could theoretically make up for in other areas of our lives. If working from home increased closeness within our family, there would be little effect on our overall loneliness levels. The problem is that technology is erasing many of our opportunities to get close — so many that we hardly know where to find any organic opportunities at all.
For these missed opportunities, seen as small sacrifices for the larger benefit of a more efficient life, really do add up. It is harder to make friends when you don’t get coffee with your coworkers before your morning meeting. It is harder to have a magical moment with a stranger when you never meet any strangers. You will be lonelier if you never see anyone face-to-face.
This lack of organic opportunities for closeness is a huge part of why you’re struggling with loneliness. The good news is that you have it within you to create new opportunities. The people who will someday know you well and care about you deeply are already out there. Let’s learn how to find them!
Questions for Reflection
• When you’re feeling lonely, what do you do to comfort yourself? Do any of these strategies involve your computer or your phone?
• Which relationship in your life — new or old — needs to be taken off-line?
• In what area of your life could you start creating opportunities for more closeness?
Pick a way to limit your device time that still works with your lifestyle. Some ideas include “device bedtime” — turning your devices off after 9:00 each evening; “device Sabbath” — turning your devices off on Saturdays or Sundays (or any other day that feels right to you); and “device sabbatical” — taking a full week off from technology once or twice a year.
Chapter Summary
We are not lonely because we are flawed; our tech-centric environment is working against us in three specific ways:
1. It promotes mediated access, not direct access. More and more, interacting with other people through a device is becoming the norm and is replacing in-person interaction. This poses a problem because it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to access each other’s inner worlds through a device.
2. It is teaching us new and unhelpful lessons about how to interact. Tech products value efficiency above all else. Because we interact with tech products so much now, we are learning to believe all interactions should be efficient above all else — a technology mind-set that does not lend itself well to creating closeness.
3. It is reducing our natural opportunities to get close. Technology has made it so that we no longer need people the way we once did. We no longer need to be in our physical communities the way we once did. This reduces spontaneous opportunities to get close to others.
Now you understand the basic framework for reducing loneliness: closeness is what you’ve been craving, you can attain it through increased mutual knowing and caring of others, and your technological environment is getting in your way. Before we move on to the practicalities of creating the closeness we all crave — starting with how to pick partners — we need to let go of some outdated ideas about what “should” alleviate loneliness. These myths will trip you up along the way if you don’t first work to dispel them.
Most of us grow up believing in certain “solutions to loneliness” that we know from experience fail as often as they succeed. And when they fail, we blame either ourselves or the other people involved. . .when in reality, we should be pointing a finger at the solutions themselves.
This is a new kind of loneliness that requires a new solution. In this chapter we will work to dismantle the top three outdated myths about what we should be doing — and to whom we should be looking — to feel less lonely.
1. Love is a reliable solution to loneliness. You may be wondering why I maintain that the antidote to loneliness is closeness and not love. Yes, love is a powerful, ecstatic force that brings people together. Love is one of the highest highs human beings can experience. But can you be in love with someone and still feel lonely in your beloved’s presence? Absolutely.
2. Some types of relationships are inherently closer than others. Most of us believe that some relationships should feel close — particularly family relationships. But is believing this a reliable solution to the problem of loneliness? Someone can have two living parents, three siblings, and a spouse — and still feel desperately alone.
3. If you’re lonely, just be around people. It sounds