O P I N I O N
MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY
By Brian Chicoine
Real life connections are vital!
I was recently talking to a friend about personal connections, and we were discussing how even though GenZ, (born 1997- 2012), are more connected than any generation in history, they are the loneliest, and have the highest suicide rates of any previous generation. (GenAlpha has just reached adolescence and GenBeta started in 2025, so limited to no stats are available on them).
I was still thinking about the conversation and human connections when I heard “Look Away” from the band Chicago. Diane Warren, who wrote the song, wrote, “I know I wanted to be free. Yeah, baby, this is how we wanted it to be.” It kinda sounds like someone who can’t make up their mind is looking back and thinking about their decision. First they tell their partner that they should end it, but then they have second thoughts about what they said and think that maybe they should take them back. It could simply be that they want the person back…but do they really want the person, or do they just want a relationship? Do they just want a human connection?
Another seemingly simple line was in the movie, “Solo Mio,” (which my wife and I recently saw and both highly recommend, by the way). Toward the end of the movie, Matt Taylor, (played by Kevin James), said to his ex-fiancé, Heather, “We didn’t want to lose what we had because we were afraid of being alone.” This line, along with many – if not most – ‘80’s love songs, sums it up…we do not want to be alone; we desire human connection.
From the beginning, humankind was connected to one another. We were created to be connected to God and to each other. It all started with the first couple, Adam and Eve. They were to work together and to oversee all the animals that God had created…and God said it was good. We were created to be together because it is good to have human connections!
There is something about being together that is, for the large part, missed today. For example, I remember that when I was growing up in the ‘80s and bought a video game system, that it came with two controllers and we had to have a person come over to play if we were in a multi-player game. We had to be next to each other; in-person. Don’t get me wrong, playing with people all over the world is cool, but sometimes we miss the human connection if we are always virtual.
In addition, social media has allowed us to live in our own siloed lives, free from in-person human connections. We can spend countless hours scrolling through our feeds, and can be more motivated by ‘likes’ or ‘loves’ rather than personal connections. I am not saying that social media is inherently bad…it does serve a purpose. We have just unfortunately allowed it to replace real-life in-person human connections. We were not made to be alone, in fact God said that it is not good for humans to be alone, yet we allow ourselves to develop virtual relationships over real in-person ones.
There have been several writings on the benefits of human connections, including one by UC Berkeley, that listed the following five benefits of these connections on our wellbeing. According to the writing, these benefits include:
- Boosting life expectancy
- Acting as a buffer in difficult times
- Increasing one’s ability to recognize and accept similarities and differences, (there will always be both), which fosters empathy and self-awareness
- They can expose us to new ideas and perspectives
- Help us be more authentic as we end our reliance on others to tell us who we are
In closing, I want to say that re-connecting with people in-person, although doing so may not totally solve the trend of isolationism or the loneliness that young people are experiencing, in my opinion would greatly reduce it.
While I do not believe that social media or gaming with people in different areas should stop, I do believe that there needs to be a balance. People need to get out of their homes and connect with people in real life. People need to have real-life, in-person connections, not just virtual ones. Doing so will greatly reduce the alarming trend of isolationism and loneliness.
As always, please email your thoughts and opinions to mythoughts603@gmail.com.