Search Google Images for the word ‘lonely’ and you’ll find hundreds of pictures of individuals by themselves. But an often unspoken lesson we learn as we get older is that loneliness hides in strange places. Loneliness can lurk in the middle of Manhattan where you are, in fact, so un-alone that it’s easy to feel swept up in the current of unending shoulders brushing by you. Loneliness can lurk in college, the supposed ‘best years of our lives’, where there is so much to do, and yet nothing at all thanks to anxiety or lack of funds to participate. Loneliness can lurk in friendships that don’t look like they once did, but would perhaps be too painful to cut off. Loneliness can lurk in families who support each other, but still don’t really know each other, just as it can in distanced families who don’t support each other at all. Loneliness can lurk in retirement, despite immense pride and relief over a career well spent, and never again having to respond to a midnight email. Loneliness can lurk in the spaces where there is so much good, and where people would give anything for the on-paper version of your life, but you still feel an unignorable absence of something intangible.
Loneliness doesn’t discriminate. We all feel it at some point, regardless of what our surroundings look like or what stage of life we are in – but we really don’t talk about it. Loneliness can shape shift, so it’s not always the glaringly obvious problem, which means we don’t often address it. To so many people, loneliness is the noise we know our car shouldn’t be making, but the check engine light isn’t on yet so we keep driving. Then we get so used to the noise we forget about it completely, until our car starts smoking in the middle of a road trip.
We have far too many metaphorically noisy cars being ignored today. So many that United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has deemed loneliness the next devastating epidemic. In his recently released advisory, Dr. Murthy states, “Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation has been an underappreciated public health crisis that has harmed individual and societal health…”, quickly followed by dozens of statistics from years-long studies. For example, the advisory says that “a synthesis of data across 16 independent studies shows poor social relationships (social isolation, poor social support, loneliness) were associated with a 29% increase in the risk of heart disease and a 32% increase in the risk of stroke.”
And this isn’t just isolated to the United States. Campaign to End Loneliness is a company in the United Kingdom conducting research and fighting chronic isolation across the nation. According to their recent studies, “In 2022, 49.63% of adults (25.99 million people) in the UK reported feeling lonely occasionally, sometimes, often or always.” The Joint Research Centre in Europe also recently released a study discussing the health impacts of loneliness on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the key findings was that “loneliness is affecting all regions of Europe, with reported loneliness levels of between 22% and 26% across regions. This is in contrast to pre-pandemic times, when loneliness was lowest in northern Europe (6% reported feeling lonely in 2016).” In 2022, The British Medical Journal, released a study called “The prevalence of loneliness across 113 countries: systematic review and meta-analysis”, which corroborates more of the same with available data at the global level. What Dr. Murthy deems an epidemic for the United States, is actually a pandemic spanning continents.
If the unspoken lesson we learn as we get older is that loneliness hides in strange places, the unspoken antidote I am posing may sound similarly strange: a reframing of social media.
Social media is a series of tools designed to help humans network. Just by its very definition, social media should be a prime catalyst for interconnectedness, but as many of us have felt, it’s largely had the opposite effect. Social media has been so vilified in my lifetime, that I ultimately decided to delete all of my accounts, and I’ve stayed rid of them for over six years. As an introvert, I can say there was immediate relief upon deletion of my digital footprint. Over the course of the years though, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel out of the loop. I hovered my finger over the reactivate button more than once.
It took an international move for me to more seriously flirt with social media again out of the desire to stay connected to my old life, along with the quietly creeping hope of creating connections in my new life. Upon my reentry to the digital world over half a decade (and several life lessons) later, I had the stark realization that the problem wasn’t social media, it was how my younger self was using it.
As I was packing for the move, I had a laugh over the size 78 font warning label on my screwdriver that read, “This product is not intended for use as a dental drill or in medical applications. Serious personal injury may result.” If my dental surgeon destroyed my teeth because she used a screwdriver, I wouldn’t be mad at the screwdriver. I’d be mad at the surgeon. Using any tool for something other than its intended purpose violates just about every warning label in existence. While social media may not come with a warning label because its usage boundaries are far more gray, it is a series of tools that I believe we’re using largely incorrectly.
But I am confident we can course correct, at least to a non-immaterial degree, and get some corners of social media back to driving connections instead of driving wedges.
As a 30–year-old getting settled in a new country at a particularly busy juncture in my career, I never imagined a fresh relationship with social media would be the wind in my sails I needed to fight pangs of loneliness amidst the chaos. One night before my move, I was feeling a bit anxious and needed something for my brain to chew on other than whether or not I packed enough US to UK plug adapters. So I downloaded Twitch.
I’ve always enjoyed video games, and I was well aware that Twitch existed, but I was never previously vested in the incredibly narrow scope I had incorrectly assigned to it. Why would I watch people play games when I could just play them myself? I gave it a shot anyway because my computer was on a boat somewhere in the Atlantic and I wanted to scratch the gaming itch somehow.
The second I opened the Twitch app, I saw a girl around my age on the front page streaming a game I was dying to sink my teeth into. I clicked into her stream and quickly saw that she was smart, funny, and amazing at gaming. Every morning over the next few days, I would watch her stream as I woke up with my coffee. It was oddly comforting having something to turn to that wasn’t the same Netflix show over and over again. It was a real person on the other side of the screen talking about anything from life ponderings to her thought process for the way she was tackling the game in front of her. I slowly began engaging with her other viewers via the baked-in instant messaging feature in the app, and over the course of a few weeks it felt like I was part of a loving, welcoming community.
Most streamers on Twitch also have a Discord server to facilitate further connection within the community. Discord servers have discussion channels spanning gaming, art, food, music, memes, and anything else you can think of. As I began plugging myself into these sub-communities, I realized I was making real, meaningful connections. What started as me commenting alongside hundreds of others as we watched the streamer play a game, over time became me listening to music with a handful of like-minded people in a Discord server, and talking about what particular sounds in a song make our brains tick. Fast forward even further, and after nearly a year of playing games together, listening to music, and bonding over the hot topic of the day, I’ve met several of these people in person. They’re now what I would deem some of the best friends I’ve ever had.
We figured out how to use the tools correctly. We organically found each other through a tailored funnel of mutual interests. For me, Twitch and Discord have fostered connection through gaming, but there is so much more that they offer. Twitch has streamers that share their art, cooking, music, comedy, everything. But the magic isn’t just in surfing channels that might pique your interest. The magic is in coming together over a shared interest, finding your people, and helping your virtual neighbor feel a little less lonely. It sounds much easier said than done, and in some ways that’s true, but it doesn’t have to be.
My experience in redefining my relationship with social media, creating real relationships with people through gaming, and even getting the courage to begin streaming myself has genuinely changed my life. I feel more connected and less alone than I have in years. The beautiful thing is that I know my story isn’t unique. There are people all over the world, of all ages, finding their communities, gaining the courage to engage, and combating loneliness. And there could be so many more. I want to help accelerate the rate with which people are reshaping their relationship with social media, and finding healthy, supportive ways to build friendships. I want to help people combat loneliness and build their guild.
Build Your Guild is in the incorporation process to become a non-profit that combats loneliness by breaking down the barriers of entry for community-building in social media. Regardless of age, it is intimidating breaking into new social circles. Build Your Guild aims to host events at colleges, and local community centers, to guide people in finding their niche within social media, with a focused effort on Twitch and Discord, so they don’t have to go it alone. Build Your Guild will also host streams on Twitch alongside other streamers to help share their journeys, and amplify voices of others who have overcome loneliness through social media. There is a virtual home for everyone, and real friendships to be forged by knowing how to properly use the tools available to us.
Regardless of what your version of loneliness looks like, there is a way to fix the noise your car shouldn’t be making, find your community, and build your guild.
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Build Your Guild is still in its infancy. The Build Your Guild site and Twitch account are actively being worked on. In the meantime, to stay up to date on announcements, follow the founder, joolskee@, on Twitch.