Loneliness - A Modern Epidemic

As many of you know, I'm loathe to use the term self-care. Many of the world's religions and spiritual traditions consider cherishing or clinging to the self as the fundamental source of suffering. Why would we take care of the thing that's the root cause of what makes us miserable? That being said, I acknowledge that burning the candle on both ends is ultimately depleting, and depletion hampers your capacity to fully participate in life.

This past week I delivered a presentation on self-care to rural mental health providers. I arrived armed with my usual array of slides, charts and factoids, all in the interest of delivering an argument for what I consider to be the basics of self-care; sleep, cardiovascular exercise and meditation. While I do not feel that this list is exhaustive, I generally focus on these three as the first-order foci in developing a sustainable self-care regimen.

The first two hours of the presentation included several double-takes at my watch. I could scarcely believe how quickly the time passed, and by the time we broke for lunch, I had two-hours of material left and only one hour remaining in my presentation. Over lunch, I tried to gauge what material was going to be most useful, and what material to ditch. As part of this inquiry, I asked a lot of questions about the state of rural mental health, and the problems that these providers were commonly seeing.

I expected to hear many various and diverging views of the mental crises facing rural America, though I was surprised by the rapidity and uniformity in how my lunch mates characterized the fundamental problem faced by their clientele. While suicide, depression, opioid addiction and the like are huge problems in rural America, the people I spoke with considered these to be downstream problems; the reaction to a bigger/deeper problem, and not necessarily the problem, itself. The upstream source? Loneliness.

I could almost feel the grief that these mental health workers faced in their daily workday marathon. The isolation arising from geographic separation, the decline of community-based activity and the proliferation of internet pseudo-intimacy has devastated these formerly close-knit communities. And downstream from this loneliness and isolation are the aforementioned problems.

The remainder of my talk diverged pretty significantly from my script. We worked with loving-kindness and compassion practices. After wending and winding our way through several dozen slides, numerous graphs and untold number of factoids in the morning session, the discussion of self-care ultimately came back to care and concern for others.

In southwestern Wisconsin, it's not uncommon to see
horses and buggies.

The human animal is among the most social of all creatures, and our very survival was evolutionarily tied to our capacity to come together. Now that our survival is all but guaranteed by functional sanitation systems and reliably potable water, to name a few contributors, we may no longer need the herd to fend off a wily saber toothed tiger, though our need for community is every bit as strong. I came away from this talk with a deepened appreciation for the power of community in supporting healthy humanity.

On my drive to the venue, I passed through some of Wisconsin's beautiful countryside. As I neared my destination, I passed by a horse and buggy that was traveling the other direction. Inside the buggy the two young occupants were laughing uproariously, clearly cherishing their moment together. In sharing this experience with my lunch mates, they reported that the increased incidence of mental health problems in rural America appears to have by and large bypassed the local Amish communities. We all contemplated how for all our modern, technological advances, the best medicine for humans appears to be connecting deeply with other humans.

May we all enjoy plenty of time with friends, and find time within busy-ness to maintain these vital connections.