Loneliness is self-reinforcing

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I ended my loneliness story by asking what your loneliness story looks like.

I also asked Twitter for their favorite works on loneliness. I’m listening to one of their recommendations now, an episode the Gray Area podcast called the loneliness epidemic.

It got me thinking about what barriers might exist to people talking about their loneliness. And how self-reinforcing loneliness can be.

In the episode, Ezra Klein asked Vivek Murthy if people are really more lonely today than in the past, as the data is conflicting. Murthy talked about the shame of loneliness.

Murthy described how it’s actually really hard to know. People are really loathe to admit they’re lonely. A team of researchers got better results when they developed survey questions that would point to loneliness without actually asking about loneliness.

Murthy said that to admit you’re lonely feels like admitting that something is wrong with you. That there’s a reason people avoid you. This is one way loneliness builds on itself. It’s hard to work on a problem you can’t admit you have. It’s hard to admit to having a problem you’d be ashamed to have.

Loneliness also shrinks parts of your brain associated with decision-making. It makes you hyper-vigilant to social rejection and less able to benefit from social interactions.

Loneliness also builds on itself by being a bit repulsive. I mentioned scarcity mindset in my last post. Being starved of something often makes it harder to get enough of it.

If I go into a social interaction starved for connection people often pick up on it. Research shows that humans are really good at picking up on subtle cues about the other person’s emotional state. Any awkwardness, lingering eye contact, nervousness, etc. can betray that I’m lonely. People tend to want to avoid lonely people. They are often afraid a lonely person will violate their boundaries, afraid that the person is lonely because they suck, afraid that loneliness is contagious. Often, all this is even harder because it’s operating subconsciously. Neither I nor the other person might even be consciously aware that I’m lonely. The vibes will simply be off.

I also briefly mentioned in my previous post the third way loneliness can build upon itself. “My takeaway from all this was that the vast majority of kids just kind of sucked. They were boring and immature.” Unchecked, loneliness can also lead to misanthropy. If the problem isn’t me, it must be them. Or maybe it’s both of us. But either way, it makes sense to not want to take all the responsibility for my loneliness upon myself. And hell, other people are at fault, at least to some degree. It’s shitty to be repulsed by loneliness. People are shitty to each other all the time. No misanthrope lacks for good evidence to support their dim view of humanity. It’s not that I’m wrong for seeing how shitty people can be. But focusing in so hard on humanity’s faults makes for a lonelier and less happy life. It decreases my motivation to connect. And all I get in return is a tiny salve for my fragile ego.

Three things helped break the cycle for me:

1. Finding a way to admit I was lonely

2. Shifting the blame away from me or others

3. Creating a virtuous cycle

Admitting to the loneliness

I had actually been working on my loneliness for some time before I admitted that I was lonely, to myself or anyone else. Reading career blogs in my first job, what I recognized was that I didn’t have a professional network. What I admitted to myself was that I was stupid for not realizing this was an important thing to establish for myself sooner. But learning how to make “professional connections” helped me develop the tools I needed to make friends.

Realizing it’s not foundational

Succeeding at making professional connections, and then friends, made it clear to me that I wasn’t unable to do this earlier in my life because there was something fundamentally broken about me or other people.

I saw that it was the tools, not the wielder.

When I wanted to start blogging I needed to learn how to use LiveJournal. When I wanted to start connecting with strangers, I needed to use new tools.

Eye contact, asking questions, taking an interest, not diving straight into what I wanted to talk about most, taking up 50% of the conversation, smiling, etc. were tools I used to connect with people.

They worked better than the tools I was using before. Those old tools might point to how I was raised and the fact that I’m probably Autistic. But they don’t define me. I can always work on learning how to use new ones. And the fact that these tools worked showed there was nothing fundamentally wrong with other people. They just, for whatever reason, respond better to these new tools than my old ones. But also there are also plenty of people who respond better to my old tools. They’re usually also Autistic. Many of them live in DC and are libertarians.

Flipping the cycle

Loneliness is self-reinforcing. But so is connection. It’s not like I flipped a switch and suddenly became the life of the party. I still have a lot of social anxiety. People are always surprised by how much. Rather, it’s that success built on itself.

Having a few seemingly successful social interactions under my belt helped me go into the next conversation with more confidence and less anxiety. Even rejection helped, because it was usually so much less painful than I anticipated. Armed with my new tools, every interaction started to feel like an experiment on the tools rather than a judgment on myself. If the conversation sucked, maybe the tool wasn’t that great or I didn’t use it right or they were just having a bad day or whatever whatever. But it didn’t mean I sucked, because this other tool worked this other time with this other person.

As I kept running experiments I kept getting better at using the right tool the right way at the right time with the right person. The stakes went down. My confidence went up.

It’s still nerve-wracking. I remember genuinely believing at one point that success would continue linearly and at some point my social anxiety would reduce to basically zero. That didn’t happen.

What happened, honestly, is that at some point I realized that I was exhausted. Yes, I could go into a room and do a reasonable job charming people for a few hours. I could even do this multiple times per week. But it had stopped getting significantly easier. Once I realized that being charming was a muscle I’d have to work out to maintain for the rest of my life and not a habit I could slide into thoughtlessly and with ease, I got really disappointed and kind of gave up for a while.

Then I read the Autistic ladies describe “masking” and it all made so much more sense to me. I’m always going to default to being really direct, skipping small talk, hyperfocusing on my obsessions, having weird mannerisms and facial expressions, being confrontational, arguing intensely, talking too loudly when I’m excited, being kind of monotone otherwise, being inappropriate, oversharing, etc. It’s always going to take a lot of effort to seem normal and unthreatening and friendly. It’s going to take even more effort because I have a vagina but my default behaviors are not very much in line with the behavior we’ve coded as feminine. If I had a penis and acted the exact same way I’d be liked a lot more because people would be less socialized to interpret my behavior as aggression or rejection and are far less offended by a man exhibiting anything other than obsequiousness.

So it goes.

I got over the giving up portion by realizing that one key to life is finding the people who can more easily tolerate my default behavior. I realized I felt energized by people who I felt little need to mask around and drained by people who made me feel the need to mask hard. It turns out that some people really like argumentativeness and don’t really mind weird facial expressions. Some people will overlook some talking too loudly in exchange for a truly unusual level of honesty and straightforwardness. My life stopped being as much about charming a room and started being more about deeply connecting with a few people who could inspire me.

I still get worn out by the vast majority of social interactions. I still get anxious when I think about seeing people, even people I know and love.

But I’ve found so many people who are more than worth the trouble.

And, I’ve learned so much about myself along the way.

I guess I’d like to close this by asking you: How might your life change if you ran an experiment? What’s something you want in the social arena? A couple to play Bridge with? Someone to play online games with? Someone you’d feel comfortable asking to pick you up after surgery? (Another allusion to the last post.) What’s a tool that might help you get closer to that goal that you could try using, just to see how it worked?

It doesn’t matter whether it works.

You run an experiment to both sate and stoke your curiosity.

The point isn’t even connection. Because that would indicate it’s a destination and it’s not. It’s a process. I think the goal is to work on removing the barriers to connection. To keep stretching to see how connected you can get. To pursue connection with the fervor that it warrants. To break the patterns that disconnect you and see where a virtuous cycle can lead you next.