Why Am I So Lonely as an Adult?

Today, I'd like to talk with you about something that an enormous number of people are carrying right now and mostly carrying alone, which is its own bitter joke. It's the feeling of being lonelier than you ever expected to be at this point in your life. Now, I'm not talking about the dramatic kind of lonely, the lonely that has a clear cause that you can point to. This is very ordinary, sort of lonely where you have a phone full of contacts and a calendar that's somehow empty and exhausting at the same time.

And in there lies a realization that you can't actually remember the last time someone just dropped by. Or the last time you saw a friend without it having to be scheduled three weeks out, like an appointment. And I'd like to start with how this tends to feel from the inside because the feeling itself is part of the trap. When you say you're lonely as an adult, the loneliness almost never can be reduced to just that. It visits itself upon you and makes it a verdict about you.

And you start to wonder very privately whether something is wrong with you, whether you got worse at this friendship thing somewhere along the way. Other people seem to have their group, their people, the thing that looks effortless from the outside and you're sitting there doing the maths on how much work it would take just to assemble an evening with three friends who all happen to be free at the same time. And you draw a very silent conclusion about yourself from that.

You decide you must have let it slip, that you're bad at friendship now and you tend to keep that conclusion to yourself, which of course makes the whole thing worse. Now the conversation you'll hear about this when you do hear about it tends to go in one direction. And I want to tell you what that is honestly because it's not exactly wrong. It's just aimed at the wrong floor. The advice is essentially that this is a skills problem and an effort problem.

And the solution is for you to try harder and put yourself out there, join a club, take up a hobby with other humans in the same room. Be the one who reaches out first, be more vulnerable, be more open, download the app that's apparently for making friends. And underneath all of that, however gently it's phrased, sits an assumption that the reason you're lonely is that you personally are not doing enough. That connection is sitting there and it's available to you the way it always was and you've simply stopped reaching for it.

So the fix is more initiative, more courage, more of you. And I am going to take you underneath all of that because I don't think you just got lazy. I think something structural fell away beneath all of us and we're being told to make up the difference with willpower and effort. For almost the whole of human history, friendship wasn't something you produced through effort. It was something that happened to you because of where you stood.

You were embedded for use of a better term in a street where you knew the neighbours because you couldn't avoid them in a workplace that people stayed at for decades together in a church or a union hall or a corner shop in a town small enough that the same faces kept turning up, whether you'd planned it or not. And the crucial thing about all of that, the thing we've almost entirely lost is that it generated friendship without anyone having to decide to make a friend.

Closeness came from the repetition of seeing the same people over and over again on a daily basis almost, bumping into the same people over and over again with no agenda, no appointments in the same places until familiarity quietly thickened into something you'd have called a friend without ever being able to name the day that this friendship started because nobody scheduled it, nobody had to be brave. It was just the natural sediment of a life lived in one place among the same people.

Here's what I think almost no one will tell you about being lonely as an adult. The friends you had at school or in your twenties were never built on you being good at friendship. They were built on proximity and repetition, the same people in the same dorm hall or break room or street over and over with nowhere else to be. You didn't make those friends they accreted over time out of a shared life you were just standing inside of.

And then you graduated or moved for the job and the shared life dissolved and we kept the word friendship but lost the ground it used to grow in. So if you're sitting there at 35 or 40 wondering when this got hard you didn't get worse at people the soil they used to grow in got paved over because look at what we actually did. We optimized for mobility which meant nobody stayed anywhere long enough to accrete. We moved for the job then we moved again for the lifestyle we made the car and the screen so good that you can go weeks without a single unplanned encounter with another human being who knows your name.

We turned the third places the pub the church the bowling league into things you have to make a special effort to seek out where they still even survive at all. We replaced the corner shop where you'd run into people with a feed that stimulates the running into and gives you none of its substance. You don't even need the corner shop anymore because everything can be purchased on your phone and delivered to your door sometimes within hours.

But what we were quietly dismantling brick by brick was the entire invisible architecture that used to manufacture closeness on our behalf so that we never had to. So when you're doing the maths on how much effort it would take just to get two friends free on the same evening and deciding from that that you must be bad at friendship when it doesn't happen. I want you to consider that you're not failing at something that's actually available.

You're trying to produce by she force of texting first and putting yourself out there a closeness that used to be produced for you by simply living among the same faces. It's like being handed a slab of bare concrete and called a disappointing gardener because nothing's growing. You're not a bad gardener. There was never any soil. Your loneliness isn't a floor in you. It's a missing structure and you've spent years blaming yourself for a village that got torn down long before you showed up.

Now this is the part where I would like to be very mindful. I'm not going to hand you the doom version of this. I'm not telling you the village has gone forever and so you might as well make peace with your isolation. I'm telling you something more useful and I think more demanding which is that the work in front of you is different from the work you've been told to do. You haven't been failing at friendship. You've just been under resourced for it.

The answer to a structural problem was never going to be trying harder inside the rubble. The answer is that you have to become in some small and deliberate way a builder of the thing that used to build itself. What that means in practice is humbler and stranger than the advice usually is. It means you stop chasing the feeling of friendship and you start manufacturing the conditions that used to produce it. Proximity, repetition, the same people, the same place on some kind of rhythm with no particular agenda.

It means that the most powerful thing you can do is not a grand act of vulnerability with a stranger but a decision to show up to the same thing every week, the same run, the same table, the same anything until the faces stop being strangers and you won't have set out to befriend a single one of them. It will have happened on its own because you kept on showing up where they were. You're not trying to make a friend. You're rebuilding by hand on a small scale.

The conditions that make friends without you, you're laying down soil. So if you take one thing from this, let it be that you can stop asking yourself why you're so bad at making friends as an adult because that question was a trap from the very start. The kinder and far more useful question is this, where in my week do the same faces show up again and again on a rhythm with no agenda? That's the whole secret that no one hands you.

Take one thing, the same run, the same coffee shop, the same volunteer shift at the same time and just keep showing up long enough that the strangers become regulars and the regulars quietly become friends. You won't have set out to befriend a single one of them. The closeness comes the way it always did, not from courage or vulnerability or from being interesting, from simply being there again and again until the being there is enough.

And none of this is a verdict on you, even though it's been pretending to be a verdict for years. The structures that used to hold us are genuinely gone and the world that replaced them is faster and freer and lonelier and that's very real. But a missing village is a thing you can begin to rebuild one rhythm at a time in the small geography of your own town in your own week. The people who come out of this era least alone won't be the ones who were best at friendship.

They'll be the ones who understood that the soil had to be laid back down by hand and they started laying it. If anything in this episode made you want to explore what you just heard more deeply, I've made it very easy for you to do so. In the show notes there's a link to access a book called Before Approaching the Threshold, which is the gateway to this work. Alongside this you'll also receive free 14 day access to the Atlas and intelligence trained on everything written and recorded in this body of work, which is there to think alongside you on whatever you're actually sitting with.

Both are free to start and the link to access them is in the show notes. This was Michael Loria and you're listening to the architect speaks.