Elementary school was lonely. High school was lonely. University is even lonelier.

In each class, you walk in, sit down, and notice that everyone around you is sitting at their desk on their phone. The person you sit beside doesn’t look up from their screen or even recognize that you are there. You’re nothing more than a body that has entered a room surrounded by people who would rather be doing anything but sit in a classroom, learning about a subject that they don’t care for, earning a degree that they don’t value, to one day have a job that they don’t understand what it means to have.

Universities were initially intended to be a place of higher learning. A place to come closer to understanding truth, to find our place in the world, and to find a community to help satisfy our social needs. Sadly, in the 21st century, what university has devolved into is a job mill, where if you’re attending for any reason besides the intent to find a high paying job, you’re deliberately looked down upon. If you are in any faculty that isn’t a rigid science or a social service, you have to justify to a person why you’re even there, as though other disciplines are somehow self-justificatory and that yours is lesser in comparison.

If I ask someone what their major is, they tell me they’re majoring in computer science, and I smile and say “that’s awesome, good for you”. They ask me the same question, I tell them “psychology”, or “philosophy”, or “English”, and I get the most condescending smirk out of the corner of their lips and a “Oh… Interesting.” as a response. It is difficult or impossible to make friends within your own program, and this antagonism and condescension between programs further entrench our feelings of loneliness and isolation. When your own classroom filled with students learning the same material and leaving with an identical degree feels isolating, your hope of finding belonging elsewhere on campus dwindles. Even the options that most faculty members will suggest aren’t particularly appealing. No one attends sporting events, it’s rare to see the pub filled on any night besides Thursday, and residence feels like a ghost town, so where do you go to fulfill these needs?

Sadly, more students are turning to alcohol, drugs, pornography, toxic dating apps, and social media to find their sense of belonging. This comes at the detriment of their skills in relation to face-to-face interaction. People don’t know how to hold conversations anymore. People don’t feel like there is anything about themselves which is worthy enough of expression, and relating to others is getting more and more difficult.

I don’t want to pretend like I am not one of these people. In my first philosophy class of this semester, I sat down and a gentleman beside me introduced himself and tried talking to me. I felt shocked, as that had never happened in an intro class before, and then I discovered that I was indeed one of those people. I had usually attributed that social ineptitude to freshmen, that it was just a social awkwardness that hadn’t been sorted out since high school graduation, and that it came naturally with the anxieties of leaving home and entering “the real world”, whatever that means. I found myself hardly saying anything to this gentleman, and instead just proceeded to take out my phone and browse Facebook or some other social media platform that I couldn’t possibly care for.

This sort of interaction has almost grown meaningless to me, as though regardless of how much effort I exert to reciprocate and hold the conversation that I will still feel lonely, so what’s the point? Why should I try to encourage conversation between myself and others when our conversations are almost unanimously surface level, and they are never around long enough to foster a greater, more meaningful relationship? People are also far more emotionally intelligent than we often give credit for, and can tell when the conversation is disingenuous or forced, so it leaves the patient worse off as well.

While universities often propose events aimed toward community involvement, these events often do not post high attendance, particularly among young people. They also tend to be scheduled around the busiest times of the year, such as exam period, reading week, etc., when students are in their highest state of stress and are pushed past their limit of exhaustion. These events try to serve as a sort of band-aid fix, to try and provide incentive for the loneliest students to make connections within their immediate campus community. However, often when you’ve reached this point of feeling lonely, it is too late for most students to realistically be expected to establish these relationships. If you’re already past the point of feeling motivated enough to rise out of bed, having the expectation that you’ll get out and socialize is unrealistic at best, fantasy at worst. The remedy for addressing loneliness-on-campus needs to be proactive rather than reactive, and this is what can make the problem most difficult to address.

“Loneliness” itself is also a hard concept to wrap our minds around without using the word “lonely” or “alone” to describe it. I most often feel the most lonely in a crowded room or at a public event, so it can’t necessarily be just the physical state of being by yourself. I want to propose, instead, a different way of thinking about loneliness.

Loneliness, as far as I can tell, isn’t rooted in a lack of social interaction, but instead, rooted in a lack of isolation and self-reflection. Not in isolation in the way that you may immediately think of, but rather constructive solitude, spent thinking critically about how you can make yourself happy, how you can make time for what makes you happy, and how you can surround yourself with those that make you happy. Take time to show love for yourself. To eat healthy, to prepare nutrition-dense meals, to consume less caffeine, to exercise, and to practice a self-care routine. These, as far as I can tell, are the only possible remedy to our struggles with self-worth and personal identity, and the consequences of our ever-developing loneliness.

A challenge: take time to yourself every day. Practice constructive solitude, focused on self-development and self-care, and make sure you take a little time each day to do what makes you happy. Explore what makes you happy. Take a yoga class, go hiking, read a book from a genre you’ve never explored before, or connect with a family member you haven’t talked to in a while. Finally, once you’re checked in and at peace with yourself, invest heavily into your relationships with others, and reap the benefits of finding a circle in which you feel you truly belong.

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

-Kurt Vonnegut

Let’s find a way to foster a community that cures loneliness at the roots. A community that teaches us how to love others, but most importantly, ourselves.

Let’s talk.