Let's Talk About Loneliness: The Search for Connection in a Lonely World - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Simone Heng is a human connection specialist and former international broadcaster for Virgin Radio Dubai, HBO Asia, and CNBC, among others. www.simoneheng.com

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Chapter 1 | Silence: The secret loneliness epidemic

Self-connection is defined by Tim Sitt, a child and family therapist and registered social worker, as ‘the process of being in touch with the worthiness and wholeness of your Self regardless of the form of experience you are having. These forms could be feelings, thoughts, expectations, beliefs, or attitudes.’ In a nutshell, self-connection is an awareness of your own experience. Without self-connection – effectively knowing ourselves deeply and intimately – we cannot connect well with others. Instead, we send an avatar of ourselves into the world, and people connect not with us authentically, but with behaviors born of our triggers and the lingering remnants of our trauma. In our increasingly busy and digitally distracted lives, it becomes easy to avoid the inner work of getting to know ourselves better, and avoidance means stunting our ability to connect well with others. The journey to getting to know ourselves better is a large part of what we’ll deal with in this book.

The 2018 Cigna Loneliness Index surveyed 20,000 Americans and discovered that loneliness had reached ‘epidemic’ proportions, with almost half of participants registering as feeling ‘always’ or ‘sometimes’ alone. In 2018, the UK government appointed its first Minister for Loneliness, who was charged with tackling what former Prime Minister Theresa May called the ‘sad reality of modern life.’ As you’ll read throughout this book, a lack of human connection can lead to many different issues that you may not immediately link. Hoarding. Rage. Addiction. Depression. And because of the shame associated with saying ‘I’m lonely,’ we’ve been suffering silently for a lot longer than anyone wants to admit.

The Loneliness Epidemic
In 2003, I stood watching my father give the eulogy at my Chinese grandmother’s funeral. I’d just returned to Australia from studying in Switzerland for a year and, as a family, we’d made the trip to Singapore. My father had been away, a migrant in another country, for almost 20 years. His relationship with my Teochew grandmother consisted of peppered phone calls with months of silence in between, a tenuous link at best. Regardless, he had to give the eulogy because he was the eldest son in a Chinese family, and that was what was expected.

I looked up at my father, his slight paunch encased in a white polo shirt like a ripe Christmas pudding. I observed his humble demeanor, always head bowed, facing the mole on his hand that had been getting darker from time spent outside playing golf. He had only recently started taking one weekend day off each week from work at his newsagent’s. He still didn’t even know how to use sunscreen; that’s how rarely he took a break. He would come home from golf with arms like Cadbury’s Top Deck chocolate: white beneath his capped sleeves and deep brown on his forearms, then apply sunscreen, like an after-sun aloe vera treatment. Gosh, that made my sister and I giggle. My eyes became blurry as I shifted focus from his tanned forearms to his kind eyes.

I heard the sound of his voice paying tribute to a grandmother I barely knew and didn’t speak the same language as. I was out of my own body. A dangerous thought flashed in my mind like rogue lightning in a summer sky: Oh my gosh – I’ll have to do this for my father one day. I’ll have to get up at his funeral and grieve him and say all kinds of nice things about him in the past tense, and I never want that day to come. Little did I know, almost a year later, I’d be up there, on a pulpit, in a church, surrounded by a sea of sobs, paying premature tribute to Robert Heng.

Because at that very moment, as he was speaking, eulogizing my grandmother, a cancer was growing inside him. A cancer which, by the time it was discovered, would overwhelm his small body and kill him. It would be so painful that they would have to infuse him with morphine like I infuse my morning tea with chamomile. Fast, strong, and so pervasive that his color would change to jaundiced yellow just like the hot water in my tea. It wasn’t like global warming. Here, there were no warning signs. It just happened, and our world ended. Like the cancer growing in my father, there’s a cancer secretly growing in the body of the human race. It isn’t COVID-19, and it isn’t global warming. It is a cancer that poses huge threats to our mental and physical health and our entire way of functioning as a species. It’s shrouded in shame and whispered about in communities. It befuddles TikTok-using teens with high anxiety. It exists behind keyboards and Messenger texts, between friends on social media. This secret illness is an epidemic of loneliness. The ill effects of loneliness have long been well supported by research.

According to one meta-analysis, a lack of social connection heightens health risks as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, or having an alcohol use disorder. Loneliness and social isolation are twice as harmful to physical and mental health as obesity. Even sadder is that it took a contagious virus for us to see how badly a lack of human connection affects us because, like the cancer inside my dad, loneliness has been killing us softly long before we had a clue.

Defining Human Connection

What is human connection? What is this term, so often thrown around, but seemingly intangible? It is so much easier to explain why we need it than what it is. From my conversations with digitally reared teens, I think knowing how to define human connection may be vital for Gen Z, who emerged as the loneliest of all generations in the Cigna Loneliness Index. How do we know when we’re making, or are in the presence of, a genuine human connection?

We have all experienced that moment where, when we meet someone for the first time, we’re on the exact same wavelength. Our opinions, morals, values, and worldviews are in sync. We see so much of ourselves in the other person that energy starts to spark off as the conversation flows and flows, and by the end of the meeting, we’re inspired to hug, shake hands, or, in some way, physically touch our new friend. The connection feels right in our gut. It feels almost safe for us to disclose our vulnerabilities to this new person because we see so much of them in ourselves. I think we can agree that these connections feel distinctly different from shallow conversations shared over drinks at some business networking event. Finding new authentic connections can sometimes feel like walking around a barren desert and stumbling upon a member of your tribe that you’ve been stranded from!

By surveying people online, I got some incredible definitions, and they are worth featuring because of certain trends that recur. Here are some of my favorites:

• ‘No one lives, or is meant to live, on their own. For me, this is powerful and humbling because it gives everyone a clue that we’re all bound in a deeper sense.’
• ‘Human connection is the transfer of message, thought, or emotion to another.’
• ‘Human connection, to me, is the sharing or exchange of experience, either through emotions or messages.’
• ‘We might not see eye to eye, but the ability to connect to something beyond ourselves is an intrinsic part of being human.’
• ‘[Human connection is] the experience of feeling close and connected to others. It involves feeling loved, cared for, and valued.’
• ‘Human connection is about communicating with another person heart to heart. Without heart, there is no human connection!’
• ‘Human...