How to Fight Loneliness

Last fall, just days before reading week, I found myself trying to hold the attention of 100 burned-out, overworked undergrads in a class at Toronto Metropolitan University. By that point in the semester, most students are more interested in a few days off than in listening to someone like me, a 31-year-old grad student and academic support coach delivering a workshop on study habits. I’d delivered these workshops before and always found it challenging to elicit engagement—the anonymity of being one face in a crowd makes it easy for students to fade into the background. 

So this time I tried a different tack. Instead of asking students to speak individually, I used an app, so that students could respond to my questions on their phone. Their answers were projected on a screen at the front of the room and, instead of engaging with almost no one, I was engaging almost everyone. 

It worked great, until I got to a seemingly innocuous question. I asked the students if they ever got together in study groups—that time-honoured campus tradition, which can take place in pubs, libraries or dorm rooms, building community and camaraderie along the way. I was surprised when the overwhelming majority of students said no, they did not participate in study groups. I asked if they wanted to. The overwhelming majority said yes. I asked if they’d be willing to start a group. Again, no. 

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I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d stumbled on a sign of a deeper problem: despite having access to modern communications technologies these students weren’t communicating—they were lonely. Connected, but literally isolated in a crowd. The problem became clearer during private sessions with students over the next few weeks. One of these was with a student I’ll call Luis, a second-year undergrad who’d come to Canada from Ecuador. Our conversation started with study habits but soon veered into different territory: his loneliness. He’d tried to meet people during the fall semester. He’d followed classmates on social media and spoke to them in class. He’d even grabbed meals with them occasionally. But he didn’t make deep friendships. Then came winter. The days became short, damp and cold, and his peers were more comfortable holing up at home than going out. Some acquaintances from class would send memes and messages, but no one followed through on meeting up. 

Then I met another student, who I’ll call Owen. His best friend throughout high school had recently ghosted him, for no reason he could understand, and he was finding it hard to make new friendships at university. His peers all connected over social media—but again, these shallow relationships never went anywhere offline.

The more I listened to these students the more I found myself relating to their stories. I’m more than a decade older than them, but I feel more and more like I’ve forgotten how to speak to people—even longtime friends. We still send memes and updates to our group chat, but meeting up in person has come to feel different, less easy. I thought this might just be part of getting older, that friendships fizzle as people build families and careers. Or, in my case, maybe academia and its endless reading and writing had eroded my social skills. 

Now I think something else is happening: the social media we’ve increasingly come to rely on as our main means of connection is impairing those same connections. This might seem overblown, but the more I dug into the research around perception, cognition and social media’s effect on socialization, the clearer this effect has become. Now, what began as a concern brought on by conversations with students has become the focus of my doctoral research.

It’s true that, on one hand, social media is connecting us like never before—we can access and share a wealth of information with an enormous, omnipresent audience of friends and strangers, anytime we wish. On the other hand, social media harnesses (or, exploits) some of the signals we rely on while socializing and leaves others by the wayside. We are social creatures, and this perceptual manipulation has consequences. Social media interferes with the processes we use to form our sense of self, of community and of reality. Building and maintaining intimate relationships can be uncomfortable, and social media provides refuge from that awkwardness—and ultimately makes us less able to navigate that awkwardness. 

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Much of my work focuses on what scholars and scientists call “embodied cognition.” This means that the processes involved in our thinking and our interactions are not restricted to the brain—rather, they involve our entire physical being. This means we don’t form relationships based solely on the words we say (or type) to one another. We rely as much on our physicality: gesture, body language, mimicry, eye contact, physical touch and the way we move, when learning how to relate to one another. 

But my problem, and I suspect my students’, is that too much of our social lives has become primarily mediated by screens, where we aren’t dealing with people so much as digital representatives. Eye contact is impossible. Touch and movement, out the door. Body language and mimicry likewise. Human society has relied on these kinds of physical cues for thousands of years, and they evolved over a far longer period of time: early humans lived in communities, hunted in groups and practised what we now call alloparenting (the “it takes a village” approach to child-rearing), and they did it all before spoken language even evolved. Instead, they relied on miming and other physical processes to communicate what scholars and scientists today call “prosocial” emotions—those that lead to social cohesion and co-operation. 

Social media takes all the physical cues and processes humans have long relied on and reduces them to swipes, taps and presses. Perhaps this is in part why my Gen Z students belong to what is easily the most well-connected generation in history, yet report such crushing loneliness. Policy Horizons Canada, the federal government’s strategic foresight agency, has stated that we are facing an emerging asocial society—a crisis of loneliness. And it cites younger generations, who have grown up with social media, as one of the loneliest subsets of Canada’s population. Sometimes, they’re even proudly so. Consider the surplus of memes circulating on social media about the joys of having plans cancelled and staying home alone, rather than dealing with the awkwardness or uncertainty of in-person socializing—an awkardness compounded by social media itself. 

While the relief might be relatable, flaking makes it hard to move surface-level relationships offline and grow them into meaningful friendships, even when we want to. We’ve been tricked into thinking that we can make socialization more convenient, but this convenience only makes it easy for us to avoid the uncomfortable but necessary parts of interaction. When we frame avoidance as convenience or comfort, we cheat ourselves out of opportunities to develop those embodied senses. So they atrophy. Eye contact becomes uncomfortable. Touch becomes rare and difficult. 

One final experience I recently had with a student drove this home—let’s call her Adina. She had moved to Canada from Ethiopia, to study and escape conflict in her country. Just like Luis, she’d done her best to make friends, and she was usually in daily contact with peers online. Once in a while, she’d go for coffee with a classmate, but if she ever tried to deepen their conversation beyond superficial pleasantries—sometimes by describing her anxieties about what was happening back home in Ethiopia—her friend’s responses grew polite but muted, and the atmosphere became awkward. It felt like they wanted to leave. It’s hard, she told me, to feel close with people when it seems like everyone can’t wait to get home and be alone.

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It’s understandable that someone might be uncomfortable hearing about personal trauma. We all worry about saying the wrong thing. But that discomfort is important. We need to be willing to speak honestly even when it’s uncomfortable in the moment. We also need to be willing to hear each other out and give each other enough grace so that these conversations become possible. This is how intimacy develops, and how prosocial emotions lead to social cohesion. Adina’s friends might have felt awkward and preferred the refuge of online communications—being in touch without being there. They can send each other memes and messages, play games or share a video call, all while dodging any weirdness or discomfort. 

It’s easy, maybe even clichéd, to point at members of a younger generation and claim they’re doing things wrong—that my generation socialized differently and is better for it. I’d be wrong to do so, I know. First of all, there are definitely people who use social media to improve their lives, sometimes by finding communities and supports not available in their everyday lives. And I know that the detrimental effects of living online are affecting me, and older people too. But the pressures that push me toward convenience are the same ones that amplify my desire for human connection. I often find myself on social media, telling myself that I’m just staying up to date on news, or unwinding. Really, I’m just caught in an ouroboros of doomscrolling and loneliness.

So I’m trying to change. The first step I’m taking toward deepening my friendships is saying yes to hanging out, and committing to those yeses. If people aren’t extending invitations to me, I’ll do it. I’ll invite people out to coffee, for some gaming, for a movie. I’ll plan hikes, potlucks and gallery walks. I’ll make these hangouts consistent, giving my friends a better chance to commit to them. Most importantly, I won’t post about them, and I’ll ask my friends not to, either. If our other friends want to share in these experiences, they’ll have to commit too.

This is easier said than done, I know. The allure of convenience is hard to resist when we have to stretch ourselves thin just to cover basic things like rent, groceries and the rising cost of everything. Time is a resource that no one seems to have enough of. Even the high achievers in my life—academics at the top of their fields, sports psychologists working with Olympians, businesspeople planning their next trip while working on corporate mergers—are not immune from the ease of social media. In-person meetings can now be facilitated over Zoom instead of lunch. Invitations for coffee can be left unacknowledged until things slow down and our schedules open up—but at the pace of modern life, who knows when that might be? And when we manage to find free time, it’s easy to tell ourselves that we deserve to spend it alone decompressing, unwinding, recharging our social batteries. During that alone time we’re likely to find ourselves scrolling our phones. The cycle starts again. 

If we want to begin building deeper relationships we need to choose the hard thing, to unplug. It may not be easy at first, as we re-engage our social muscles. We must choose to see discomfort as an opportunity for growth, and awkwardness as a prosocial emotion—a sign of empathy. Over time, we’ll become better communicators, better friends and better people. That friction is necessary. Like our ancestors, we’ll find a way, together. It’s who we are.

Matt McCready is a Ph.D. student at Toronto Metropolitan University. In his research, Matt investigates new media’s effects on intimacy.