Loneliness is killing us softly.

The most important relationship you will ever have is the one you have with yourself.

It’s Christmas Eve.

The wind whips in red dust from the Gobi desert and I have to cover my mouth with my hand to stop from choking.

I can barely make out the grey high-rise just 20 meters in front of me as I head up the road to the local Chinesified McDonalds.

I feel utterly alone. Isolated. Like an unmoored ship drifting in a sea of red sand.

I hate McDonald’s and yet it is the only familiar thing that I can find in this far flung district of Beijing.

A ghostly reminder of a life long gone.

The dust blinds my future and shrouds my past.

I stop multiple times uncertain if I should continue….maybe it would be better to turn back…

But I hurry on.

I am too embarrassed to sit and eat my Chinese flavoured burger there and hurry back to my grey apartment.

As I shoulder open the door strip off three layers of winter protection and sink my teeth into hopeful memories of western civilisation my tongue grates on sand.

This is the worst Christmas ever.

As someone who has lived in several different countries I am no stranger to loneliness.

It is an inevitability of leaving your comfort zone.

Something that comes with the territory of moving country.

It's a tricky one. My two years in china where some of the most exciting and adventurous of my life so far.

They were filled with intense social interactions. I don’t think I have ever met more people in my entire life and yet they were also two of my loneliest years.

The more people I met the lonelier I felt.

It probably shouldn’t surprise us that loneliness poses serious health risks.

It is in fact as bad as smoking and alcohol and can significantly shorten life spans.

Anecdotally I am more likely to get physically sick, as in catch a cold or the flue, when I am feeling lonely.

This should be all the evidence we need that our psychological state of mind has a direct effect on physical well being but it never is.

We require studies. Research. Bodies of evidence.

And even when we have that it takes years to change the cultural conversation and years after that before any actions are taken.

Loneliness kills. Literally.

These are some of the findings of the largest longitudinal study on relationships.

The discussion around loneliness does keep cropping up here and there.

It’s one of those maddening realities of modernity.

No amount of technological innovation, no scientific breakthroughs or godly feats of human engineering can change this one fact.

It’s perfectly reflected in the book I’m obsessed with right now - Red rising. A science fiction version of the hunger games with several more layers of depth.

The lowest class of people in this book - reds -have nothing. They are essentially an enslaved race with no rights no possessions and no future and yet they have community, connection, family and friends.

This is what keeps them going. It is the one thing they have to live for - each other.

A rational empirical explanation of the world is not enough.

We are not rational. And we are not one dimensional.

We exist not merely in the physical but also in the emotional and psychological.

Social ostracism used to mean physical death.

Humans could not physically survive in isolation for the majority of human history.

It is only in the last few 100 years that we have develop technologies to sustain our physical form in isolation. However that seems to have come at the expense of our emotional and psychological needs.

When a friend cuts us off, when our ideas are attacked when our identity is called into questions out psychological immune system kicks in.

That rush of emotion you feel when someone challenges a long held belief that you have?

That is a literal life or death situation.

You feel under attack, and if you don’t have much self awareness you will automatically start defending your position, beliefs and identity without even stopping to wonder if the criticism has any validity.

It has been burnt into our nervous system and it’s not going away any time soon.

That is what made that Christmas a particular low point in my life.

I was a self identified minimalist, anti consumerist and also thought of myself as someone who eats healthy.

Choosing to go to McDonald’s on Christmas Eve went against most of the beliefs and values that I held.

It don’t want to be melodramatic but I died a psychological death that night.

I chose feeling just a little less lonely over a large part of my own identity.

Germany has been a great teacher in this respect.

I feel like my psychological self has been given a major work out since living here.

I have also learned to respect but also distrust my psychological immune system.

Yes, it’s trying to protect me but it is an ancient system that does not understand the modern world.

Somehow I feel like we developed all these institutions to create and nurture relationships such as the family, marriage, religion, schools, work etc.

And then just started to dismantle them without really thinking about the knock on effects.

Friendships are institutionalised when we are young. We make friends through school and maybe some other extra curricular activities that we engage in.

Kids don’t spend a huge amount of time thinking about whether they click.

If they share the same values or political views. If they are aligned in their life goals.

There is a pool of 20-30 kids to choose from.

They make friends with a few maybe enemies with a few and the rest remain indifferent.

What binds them together is the daily contact and shared experiences in a structured environment.

Why cant we do this in adulthood?

Well we can actually, it just requires a bit of effort that we are not always willing to invest.

“People believe that friendships happen naturally, and if they fail, there is nothing to be done about it but feel sorry for oneself.

In adolescence, when so many interests are shared with others and one has great stretches of free time to invest in a relationship, making friends might seem like a spontaneous process.

But later in life friendships rarely happen by chance: one must cultivate them as assiduously as one must cultivate a job or a family.” Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly.

To be honest, I disagree with this sentiment to a degree.

I think friendships don’t necessarily bloom in adolescence because of shared interests but because they are institutionalised through school college university or whatever else it is that you do.

This doesn’t have to stop in adulthood.

I fundamentally don’t believe that humans were designed to live together in such massive numbers.

This is why we create our own tribes.

I believe the potential for meaningful relationships increase in adulthood because you have more resources, you (hopefully) know who you are, what you believe in who you want to attract and who you want to repel.

Friendships require regular and repeated contact. That’s why friendships at school or uni felt so close. Because you saw each other every day and did a whole number of different things together.

That’s why joining a sports club or going hiking or having some sort of automated ritual where you meet friends every week without having to put effort into finding an appointment is so important.

If you live in a big city there are hundred of groups that you could join to pursue activities with others.

Is it a coincidence that parents with young kids tend to make friends with parents with young kids? Or immigrants from the same country just click? Or singletons hang around with more singletons and couples attract other couples?

Ideally it is your values and beliefs that form the basis of your relationships but in reality it is often just proximity and lifestyle. And that’s ok.

Am I weird for spending so much time thinking about this stuff?

I understand that most people don’t spend much time thinking about this in any kind of depth.

Loneliness is uncomfortable and it is far easier to find a distraction than to sit in that sensation and ask yourself why you feel that way.

The reality is that “friends” or people is often the distraction that we engage in to avoid the fact that we feel lonely.

A common misunderstanding is that you need people to feel less lonely.

But it’s not about the number of people in your life, it’s about how you feel inside.

Externally most people would have thought I had a lot of friends in China. My life was full of social engagements.

Sometimes loneliness is not about reaching out but about turning inward.

In my experience loneliness is an inside job. It is inextricably linked to the relationship that you have with yourself.

The feeling is not always connected to people but to meaning. If you have work that fulfils you or a strong purpose in life you can have a non existent social life and still be at ease with yourself.

If you know who you are, if you are confident in your identiy and live by your values and beliefs then you will naturally attract those who resonate with you.

That Christmas Eve in Beijing I was lost. I had no idea who I was, what I was doing or where I was going.

That’s why it all felt so hopeless. I had no friends. No vision. No life philosophy and because of that I couldn’t see a way forward.

As the dust settled on Christmas Day I made a promise to myself. A promise to explore my feelings, not to repress them.

To untangle the mess of confused beliefs not to ignore them. And to work out what was truly worth living for.

If you’re feeling lonely it’s not something to be ashamed of it’s your call for change.

The relationship we have with ourselves is the longest relationship we will ever have and it pays immense dividends to treat it with respect, love and kindness.

I wish us all the best of luck in the coming year ahead.

Thanks for reading.

If you found this helpful it would mean the world to me if you shared it with someone else.