Elevating the Human Experience

Chapter 10Obstacles to Loving Another and Recognizing Their Worth

It is easier for us technically to connect, but often these advances create unforeseen challenges that make us feel more alone and disconnected.

—Vivek H. Murthy MD

Loneliness as defined by social psychologists is the distress or discomfort we feel when there is a gap between our desired social connections and our actual experience of them. The feeling of distress and discomfort is key to the definition as we can notice a gap between our desired social connection and our experience with relative peace. Sometimes the gap, which can feel exacerbated as media shares the abundant social lives of people around us, is not our choice; how we perceive the gap, as the Stoics would remind us, is.

Perceived feelings of loneliness have been on the rise over the past decades. In his book, Together: The Healing Power of Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States, called loneliness a public health “epidemic,” with increased mortality risks similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, being an alcoholic, or being obese. In short, the inability to make the connections that we seek can be a life-threatening issue, in addition to impacting the quality of our lives and those around us who might benefit from the love and mirrored worth we have to share.

In this chapter, I will share some of the obstacles that we may encounter when we are trying to form connections to help find the ...