The Loneliness Epidemic

Why So Many of Us Feel Alone--and How Leaders Can Respond

Mettes, Susan

• Verlag: Brazos Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781493432769
• Thema: Theologie & Religion
• Thema: Christliche Kirche

What makes people lonely? And how can Christian communities better minister to the lonely? In The Loneliness Epidemic, behavioral scientist and researcher Susan Mettes explores those questions and more. Guided by current research from Barna Group, Mettes illustrates the profound physical, emotional, and social toll of loneliness in the United States. Surprisingly, her research shows that it is not the oldest Americans but the youngest adults who are loneliest and that social media can actually play a positive role in alleviating loneliness. Mettes highlights the role that belonging, friendship, closeness, and expectations play in preventing it. She also offers meaningful ways the church can minister to lonely people, going far beyond simplistic solutions--like helping them meet new people--to addressing their inner lives and the God who understands them. With practical and highly applicable tips, this book is an invaluable tool for anyone--ministry leaders, parents, friends--trying to help someone who feels alone. Readers will emerge better able to deal with their own loneliness and to help alleviate the loneliness of others. Foreword by Barna Group president David Kinnaman.

Part 1
Understanding an Epidemic

1
Lonely Americans

Studying Our Loneliness

I can’t remember at what point I realized that I would probably go two years without a hug. Nobody knew how much worse the pandemic would get, but I knew I would be stuck in place for the duration. My friends felt a world away. Phone calls with my family had become strained. I couldn’t tell how they were really doing or articulate how I was handling the stress. The fact is I had stopped showering altogether, and I was watching the Lord of the Rings movies repeatedly.

I believe winter was approaching when the realization about huglessness hit me. Holidays loomed in the near future, and I wondered if I could deal with a Thanksgiving by myself, with horse meat instead of turkey.

I was in Central Asia. It was 2004.

That period, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, was one of my deepest experiences of loneliness. I was in a community where only one person I knew spoke English well. I could talk on a pay phone with people in the United States—through a very bad connection where I could always hear a third person breathing on the line—once every two weeks. I got sick a lot. I didn’t bathe much since the Turkish bathhouse was open to women just one day a week, during a time when I was scheduled to teach. People I didn’t know would come to my house to ask me to help them cheat on their English tests. I started talking to myself.

But there were bright spots. On Sunday nights the main television station would air Jackie Chan movies. I watched them with my tiny sixty-something landlady/roommate. We would sit next to each other on the floor cushions, and she would slap my knee during the funniest parts. Laughing at the same thing with another human was like gulping down chocolate milk after a hard run.

It dawned on me that my students were lonely too. They had come to a boarding school with Dickensian meals and discipline, and they missed their families. So I designed a class or two based on the Townes Van Zandt song “If I Needed You,” covered by Emmylou Harris. It was good teaching material because it used the subjunctive mood properly, but I mostly played it because it felt good. Like many of the Bible passages on loneliness, the song doesn’t use the word lonely or loneliness, but we all knew the underlying meaning.

If I needed you, would you come to me?

Would you come to me for to ease my pain?

The song connected with me and my students because it was a cry to someone we trusted, a cry of vulnerability, a cry for belongingness and to be taken care of in our low moments. In the song, someone answers that cry. In our real lives at the time, the answer was wait.

My students and I are not the only ones to look to music and art when we feel most lonesome. Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist are a husband-and-wife team who have made dozens of albums in their twenty-five-plus years as part of the band Over the Rhine. Widely respected for the beauty of their lyrics and music, Over the Rhine is among the groups that seem to be assigned to a different genre with each album they put out.

As Bergquist once said when kicking off a 2019 concert near Washington, DC, “We’re going to bring you down. It’s what we do best.” Their music is emotionally complex, and much of it is undeniably lonesome. Detweiler told me, “Karin and I have often referred to songs as ‘safe containers for pain.’ Songs can hold something for you (both the writer and the listener) and, in so doing, help you release something heavy that maybe you don’t want to carry around every day. The song will do the heavy lifting for you.”1

Is that why it felt good to listen to music about loneliness when I felt lonely? Detweiler affirms that there can be a cathartic effect. He says, “I don’t necessarily understand it, but ‘lonely’ songs can make us feel less alone, like we are seen, like others have been there too.”2

In fact, the song “If I Needed You” still whisks me back fifteen years to a daybed in a little room on a steppe where Scythians’ horses had grazed, where I sat smelling like sweaty wool and writing long letters in Word XP.

And it turned out well enough. Some of my prayers for hugs were answered in the form of packages. The bird flu pandemic resulted in a few hundred deaths but was brought under control. I made a local friend or two. I acquired a taste for horse and was able to celebrate holidays with my wonderfully warm, funny house church.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States—killing hundreds of thousands—millions of people were stuck at home and feeling the way I did when I thought I would not get a hug for two years.

Or were they?

More than one survey revealed that people in the United States did not feel more lonely months into the pandemic and social isolation than they had before. What can explain this? And what explains the rise in loneliness in the years leading up to that point?

Why, when we have so many means of communication and getting close to each other, are we more lonely than ever recorded? Why did we seem to stop getting lonelier just when our ability to connect in person shut off suddenly?

The answers lie in a few themes woven through the chapters that follow: belonging, security, expectations, and closeness.

The Research

Most of the statistics in this book come from two surveys conducted by Barna Group as part of their OmniPoll series.3 People could take these surveys online. Just over one thousand participants completed the first survey between February 18 and March 4, 2020. Throughout the book, when I write “in the winter of 2020,” the data comes from that survey. This represents a more normal time in the lives of Americans, so I use it often for more generalized statements about Americans’ loneliness. One thousand participants completed the second survey between April 28 and May 11, 2020. Throughout the book, when I write “in the spring of 2020,” the data comes from that survey.

Data scientists at Barna weighted the results from the two surveys so that the proportion in age, ethnicity, education level, region, and gender would match the proportion of Americans in those groups, allowing for better extrapolation. There’s reasonable certainty that if a different group of US adults took the surveys over again, the statistics we’d get would be about the same—within a few points of the winter and spring 2020 surveys.

A third, earlier Barna study looked at young adults around the world. This is the Connected Generation report.4 Since this applies only to young people, I don’t refer to it as often. However, it has some fascinating insights about differences in how young people around the world feel.5

Statisticians and researchers have to look at a number of factors to decide what the data is saying—and whether it’s worth talking about. In this book, I try to report differences that have a very low likelihood of being accidental (that is, they’re statistically significant) and are also big enough in magnitude to make a noticeable difference in life.

Intuition is a wonderful gift for a researcher. However, intuition should never stand untested. Without quantitative results, we’d never know whether it was our assumptions or a real understanding of people that led us to our conclusions.

Barna Group has been studying and interviewing people for decades, and their research brings people’s actual thoughts and experiences to the table, rather than researchers’ guesses at them. A key part of what Barna and I did was to ask questions that would confirm or deny that my educated guesses about loneliness were accurate. Some were and some weren’t.

Loneliness is difficult to measure and compare from person to person because it’s subjective. People who say they feel lonely are lonely. And sometimes people who don’t say they feel lonely are lonely too.

To study loneliness, we can use a number of techniques to try to get reliable information on loneliness in big groups. We can ask people how often they feel lonely, how lonely they feel, when they feel lonely, and how long they have felt lonely. We can also ask indirectly about loneliness. One often-used battery of questions, the UCLA Loneliness Scale, uses this technique. The questions include “How much of the time do you feel you lack companionship? How much of the time do you feel left out? How much of the time do you feel that you are ‘in tune’ with other people?”6 The scale asks people to answer with responses like “often,” “sometimes,” “rarely,” or “never.”

Asking people to say whether they felt lonely often, sometimes, rarely, or never leaves us with yet another very subjective measure, and it’s hard to draw conclusions when one person’s “often” may be weekly and another’s may be daily. So, in the Barna studies, I asked respondents how often they had felt lonely in the past week and allowed them to select a specific, yet not too specific, time frame (“not daily but during at least one day”). In this book, when I talk about the frequency of loneliness in the Barna studies, it’s based on answers to that question.

In addition, I asked those who had felt lonely in the past week how painful their loneliness was, giving a seven-point scale and guidelines at the bottom (“barely noticeable”), middle (“intense”), and top (“unbearable”) of the scale. When I talk about the intensity or pain of loneliness, I’m talking about answers to that question.

In the course of the research, when I looked on as focus groups discussed something and as I read the conclusions of the researchers I cite here, I felt a ping of wonder and affection for people. How amazing that we form bonds so easily! That we give each other so many chances! That we are willing to endure so many sorts of unpleasantness for the sake of relationships and people we care for!

And usually, I also experienced twinges of frustration. Why do people fail to take care of themselves and of others in ways that would be so simple? Why say and believe things that are obviously untrue?

People are indeed wonderful and frustrating. Moses knew it, and so did Jesus. Both of them had a sort of unrequited (or under-requited) love and the desire to save people who didn’t want what was good for them. Addressing social problems often come...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Understanding an Epidemic
• Part 2: When Loneliness Defies Stereotypes
• Part 3: Protecting against Loneliness
• Appendix A: What the Bible Says about Loneliness
• Appendix B: Should We Look for a Cure for Loneliness?
• Notes
• About the Author
• Cover Flaps
• Back Cover