Peter Goers: Feeling lonely? It’s your own fault

We are all alone - and if you’re feeling lonely then it’s time to reach out and connect, writes Peter Goers.

Of course, if you are lonely it’s your own fault. There are exceptions to this but if you want a friend, be a friend.

We are all actually alone all of the time as there’s only one of us. It’s up to us to commune, reach out, connect.

I dream of being alone to enjoy my own company and talk to myself. What is writing but, initially, talking to oneself and hoping someone will eventually listen. I also talk to myself at the supermarket and if that annoys other shoppers, I care not.

You have to enjoy your own company. As Phillip K Dick tells us, “It’s not much but I’m all I have”. The problem comes when you’re sick of yourself. So read a book (you’re never alone with a book – books are friends), call someone, get a pet, volunteer, say yes, join a choir and be lonesome no more.

Are you lonely? New data shows many of us are … so what can we do about it?

We are increasingly isolated. Covid made us so. Working from home makes us so. Living through, by and with devices isolates us from the world.

Watching streamed movies instead of going to the cinema isolates us.

So do cost of living pressures. People can’t afford to go out and there’s not enough convenient public transport to get us out and back. Worry leads to loneliness.

Worryingly, a recent survey from the good people at Uniting Communities (who look after so many of us), tells us that the rates of loneliness especially among the young have skyrocketed. More than 90 per cent of them between the ages of 18 and 29 feel lonely often or sometimes.

I blame self-serve check-outs and ATMs inside banks. The young want to use these things because they don’t want to talk to people. They want to live online and this de-socialises them.

And it’s not just the young, there is less connection, less fellowship generally.

We are disconnected. We have lost community. We used to know all our neighbours and now the only ones we know are the ones we hate.

The young sit in darkened rooms gaming (which really means killing people) with strangers. Country people are often more physically isolated yet maintain stronger communities. The best and most beneficial community I’ve known is that of the pastoral families in the extraordinarily named Unincorporated Area (which sounds very sci-fi) beyond Broken Hill. These families live 100km apart yet their sense of community is peerless perhaps because they actually need each other to survive.

Older people can feel increasingly isolated and lonely as their contemporaries die.

Some people are lonely through no fault of their own.

I was once walking to a disco in a tin shed on Easter Island, like you do, and a man picked me up and took me to his house. This is not as it sounds. He showed me pictures of his adored family in Chile and talked at me for several hours in Spanish, of which I understood almost nothing except that this poor man was the loneliest man in the world.

In Bordertown one night I watched some wide boys walk along the Main Street in high spirits, enjoying each other’s company. Later, an African boy loped along alone and his loneliness was palpable. I hope he found friends.

I hope we all find friends and purpose, but we all want what we don’t have. We may long for a soulmate and then push them away. I often resent having to go out and mix, and then resent not being asked out to mix.

Loneliness is an acid in the soul. So either reach out to others or reach inside yourself for fulfilment. The only thing at the end of Lonely Street is Heartbreak Hotel. Quoth Woody Allen, “Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering and it’s all over much too soon.”

Indeed.