Imagine finishing a day in which you have done everything expected of you. You answered messages, completed your work, bought groceries, and made it home. There are people you could contact, though you hesitate over whom to call and whether you would be interrupting. Nothing has gone especially wrong, but the evening opens before you without anyone expecting to share it.
That experience carries a particular ache. You are free to do what you want, yet your presence seems to make no difference to the shape of anyone else’s day. The world has room for your purchases, your labor, and your opinions. Finding a place in its affections is another matter.
A new ** Guardian feature**, published October 3, examines youth loneliness and the conditions surrounding it. Its question about a “Lonely Generation” deserves attention beyond the usual debate about screen time.
I find myself asking what happens when belonging becomes something each person is expected to manufacture alone. We encourage people to reach out and find their community, as though community were waiting somewhere with a vacant chair. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the person who follows that advice discovers how difficult it is to enter a life already arranged without them.
There is a familiar language surrounding loneliness. We recommend joining a group, taking a class, volunteering, or inviting someone for coffee. These suggestions offer real possibilities, and many friendships begin with precisely that kind of initiative. The difficulty arises when initiative becomes our entire explanation for why someone remains alone.
Every invitation requires a receiving world. A person who reaches out needs someone with time to respond, a place accessible enough to return to, and a social setting where newcomers are allowed to become more than newcomers. Confidence helps someone walk through a door. What happens afterward depends on the people inside.
This is where the loneliness conversation becomes a question about how we organize life. A town without affordable gathering places presents a different challenge from a town with them. Unpredictable work schedules interfere with recurring commitments. Disability, transportation, caregiving, and financial pressure shape who gets to participate, however sincere an invitation sounds.
We often speak of connection as though it were a personal possession, acquired through the right habits. Belonging involves arrangements between people that no individual controls. Someone has to make room, and that room has to remain available long enough for a relationship to grow.
Treating loneliness entirely as a failure of personal effort compounds the injury. The person already struggling to find a place starts to regard that struggle as evidence that something is wrong with them. A social absence becomes a private verdict about their worth.
The evidence warrants concern, but it also asks for care in how we explain it. ** A study** described by the University of Washington School of Public Health examined school-related loneliness responses from approximately 1.2 million adolescents aged fifteen and sixteen across thirty-eight countries. The survey years extended from 2000 to 2022, and loneliness increased across many regions. The pattern was not universal; the East Asian region represented in the study showed a decrease.
The researchers also examined six country-level factors, including internet use, income inequality, and pandemic measures. None explained increases in loneliness in their analysis. Greater internet use was associated with decreasing loneliness, a finding that should complicate any account in which digital life bears the whole responsibility. These are associations at the societal level, rather than conclusions about what a particular teenager’s phone is doing to them.
Such limits are useful. They prevent us from converting a complex human problem into a morality tale about an allegedly damaged generation. They also remind us that identifying a trend does not establish its causes.
In its ** 2025 report**, the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection called for social health to receive urgency comparable to physical and mental health. That framing places responsibility across institutions and sectors, rather than leaving disconnected people to solve the problem themselves. It gives public language to something that has too often remained a private embarrassment.
My concern begins where these findings meet ordinary life. What arrangements help a person become known, and what arrangements allow them to disappear without consequence? Those questions lead toward schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, religious communities, and the economic conditions under which relationships are sustained.
Friendship usually needs more time than an introduction allows. A first conversation might be pleasant without producing any reason to have a second. People become familiar through returning, through hearing something mentioned last week and asking about it this week. Gradually, their lives acquire continuity in one another’s minds.
Consider the difference between attending a gathering once and returning to a place where someone remembers that your daughter was starting a new job. The remembered detail tells you that the previous encounter continued to exist after you left. Something of your life has found a home in another person’s attention.
Much of this develops in time with no impressive result to show for it. People linger after a meeting, clear dishes together, walk the same route, or wait while someone finishes a story. The apparent inefficiency is part of the relationship’s formation. A conversation allowed to wander reveals things that an exchange organized around a task would never reach.
A culture that evaluates time chiefly by output has difficulty recognizing this work. It sees an empty hour where a friendship might eventually form. It sees a redundant trip where someone might be encountered again. Efficiency eliminates some burdens, but it also invites us to overlook the human value of repetition.
Young people need opportunities to be inexperienced at relationship without that inexperience becoming a public identity. Awkwardness requires somewhere to go. A hesitant first exchange deserves the possibility of a less hesitant second one, rather than being treated as a failed audition for belonging.
There is danger in making usefulness the answer to loneliness. People are often advised to become indispensable, as though providing enough value will secure their place among others. That strategy sometimes produces busy lives and substantial recognition while leaving the deeper uncertainty untouched.
Being useful gives someone a function. Having a place means the relationship survives changes in that function. A person who organizes every gathering might be needed by the group without knowing whether anyone would invite them if they stopped organizing. The distinction becomes painfully visible during illness, retirement, exhaustion, or failure.
Being expected offers a gentler kind of evidence. Someone has included you in their imagination of what will happen next. Your arrival belongs to the evening, even if you bring nothing, say little, or have had a difficult week.
That expectation must leave room for refusal. A community that interrogates every absence turns recognition into surveillance. Healthy belonging allows someone to step back without losing their standing, and to return without having to account for every moment away.
The invitation is credible when it survives a person’s limits. We learn something about our place among others when they accommodate the life we actually have, including the parts that inconvenience the gathering. Belonging becomes trustworthy through that accommodation.
My own history makes this question difficult to treat abstractly. I spent years inside religious life, including years as a pastor, before leaving Christianity. Much of my work since then has concerned what happens when inherited answers no longer hold and people begin learning to trust their own experience.
The intellectual account of that transition is often easier to tell. A person explains which beliefs became untenable, which questions were discouraged, or which forms of authority they could no longer accept. The social account includes a different kind of loss: the calendar changes, the invitations diminish, and people who once expected their presence no longer know where to place them.
Religious communities often join conviction to recurring contact. People gather through births, illnesses, weddings, deaths, and the undramatic weeks between them. Someone leaving such a community might reject its theology while still missing the ordinary continuity of being part of its life.
Acknowledging that loss requires no romantic account of religion. Plenty of communities have made belonging conditional on obedience, silence, or the concealment of identity. For some people, leaving is necessary because remaining requires a sustained betrayal of themselves.
The task afterward is substantial. Freedom from a coercive system does not automatically supply relationships capable of supporting that freedom. People need places where honest disagreement leaves their welcome intact, where changing their mind does not threaten their social existence.
This is part of what I am trying to take seriously through the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. The work extends beyond providing different language for spiritual questions. It involves creating opportunities for people to encounter one another repeatedly while retaining authority over their own lives.
In my work in existential health, isolation belongs among the six core realities of being human, alongside meaning, mortality, insatiability, uncertainty, and suffering. There is a separateness no relationship abolishes. Another person is able to love us deeply without inhabiting our experience from the inside.
That reality should never become an excuse for preventable abandonment. The fact that no one else will die our death tells us nothing about whether someone should sit beside us when we are dying. The limits of mutual understanding do not relieve us of the responsibility to listen.
Existential health involves developing the capacity to meet these realities while participating meaningfully in life. In relation to isolation, that includes tolerating the separateness that remains even in intimacy. It also includes receiving care, risking honest contact, and learning to remain in relationship without demanding that another person remove every trace of loneliness.
The capacity is relational as well as personal. Someone learns that disagreement is survivable through relationships in which disagreement does not produce expulsion. Trust develops through encounters where vulnerability is received with care. We should be cautious about asking people to generate internally what they have rarely been allowed to experience with others.
Belonging therefore has a place in existential health beyond its power to make us feel better. It provides conditions under which we learn to bear reality. A person facing uncertainty with others has resources unavailable to someone required to carry the same uncertainty in social silence.
It would be especially strange for me to dismiss online relationships. Much of my writing reaches people I have never met in person, and ** CNRS** gathers people whose geography would otherwise keep them apart. A conversation across a screen holds real significance when the people participating bring attention, honesty, and a willingness to return.
The medium does not settle the quality of the relationship. An in-person gathering might leave everyone performing competence, while an online conversation allows someone to speak plainly for the first time in weeks. A digital community also has limits, particularly where people need physical presence, practical assistance, or touch.
What deserves scrutiny is the kind of participation a setting encourages. An audience follows a person’s output; a community develops relationships among its participants. Those forms overlap, but a large audience does not establish that its members know one another or have somewhere to turn when life becomes difficult.
The same question follows technologies that offer companionship. A responsive interface offers an experience of being answered. Human belonging also involves another life with needs and limits of its own, a life affected by our presence and entitled to ask something of us. We have to examine what happens to our capacity for mutual relationship when responsiveness becomes easier to obtain than reciprocity.
For those of us building online spaces, these questions carry responsibility. Counting participants is easier than discovering whether someone has become known. A growing membership tells us little about what happens when a person returns after an absence and wonders whether anyone remembers them.
The practical response begins with continuity. A recurring gathering gives people a chance to move beyond introduction. An affordable place to spend time permits participation without requiring repeated purchases. A workplace with predictable hours gives relationships elsewhere a chance to survive.
Welcome also requires attention to how established groups behave. People who have known one another for years sometimes fill every conversational opening with their shared history. They are friendly to a newcomer without making any actual space for that newcomer’s life. The door remains open while the circle stays closed.
Community builders need to notice that difference in practice. A newcomer needs opportunities to contribute without being immediately assigned a job, and opportunities to speak without being pressured into disclosure. Over time, they should have some influence on the place they are joining. Otherwise, belonging remains a favor extended by people who retain all the authority.
There is an ethical test here for any community: what happens when someone becomes inconvenient? Illness disrupts plans, grief changes conversation, and limited money narrows participation. A welcome that evaporates under these conditions offers very little ground for a human life.
This also changes the public question. Alongside asking how to help lonely people develop social skills, we ought to ask what makes their efforts possible. The availability of time, accessible places, and stable opportunities to meet is part of the social provision on which belonging depends.
As I prepare for another CNRS gathering, I am thinking about the ordinary significance of showing up. The conversation matters, and I want it to offer something worth carrying into the week. I also want people to find themselves among others who are learning their names and making room for their lives.
There is no promise of complete understanding in that. People misunderstand one another, miss things, and sometimes fail to respond well. Belonging has to be spacious enough for repair, or everyone will eventually be disqualified by the difficulty of being human.
The world we build should give a person more than advice about becoming connected. It should offer places where returning is possible and where their presence gradually enters the life of the gathering. Someone who has spent months feeling socially weightless deserves the experience of being received without having to become extraordinary first.
An ordinary evening looks different when another person has made room for you in it. You still arrive carrying uncertainty, unfinished questions, and whatever the day has done to you. But someone has pulled out a chair, and you are allowed to sit down as you are.
Writing Vanished brings me back to why I do this work. I want to understand what helps us inhabit our lives more fully—and h…
