Imani Monica McCullough was an extremely shy child. The Atlanta resident lost her father when she was a teen and years later watched her mother lose a battle with Parkinson’s disease. She survived an emotional divorce, and in 2022 she was diagnosed with follicular non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Though she had written a book on loneliness and started a spinoff group to foster connections, she struggled to deal with her own feelings of isolation.
“I felt more lonely than I ever had even though there were people around,” she said. “Last year, I admitted to my sister I was feeling lonely, and it was hard to get those words out. Having mechanisms where we can share our truths and know we can do so without judgment is crucial to eradicating the loneliness epidemic.”
Loneliness and isolation have always been a staple of the human condition, but last year, when U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a 71-page advisory declaring it an epidemic, it created a sense of urgency.
There were discussions about how to remedy the epidemic, who should remedy the epidemic and why the epidemic can’t be remedied. Some researchers even suggested there is no loneliness epidemic at all.
Loneliness has hunkered down in our frontal lobes, leaving many of us wondering if we are participants in or witnesses to this epidemic. In either case, we no longer have the option to ignore the fallout to our health and well-being as a country.
The condition of being lonely wasn’t widely recognized until the 1800s, when societal change began gnawing away at our social connections. The impacts of those changes have only magnified over hundreds of years.
We live far away from family members. We are less religious. We get married later in life or not at all. Most recently, we lived through an isolating pandemic that exacerbated the already increasing loneliness. And now many of us work from home, reducing our connections with coworkers.
It used to be that older adults garnered much of our concern when it came to loneliness. But today, statistics show loneliness looks different. Young adults ages 18 to 25 now have the highest rates of loneliness, while loneliness has decreased among people ages 50 to 80.
Some of the proposed solutions to the loneliness epidemic — finding a religious community, joining clubs or sports, calling a friend if you have one — seem more like an attempt to return to an idyllic past rather than embracing what we know lies in the future.
Part of the challenge in addressing loneliness is in understanding what loneliness is.
Murthy’s advisory and many researchers define loneliness in similar terms. “A subjective distressing experience that results from perceived isolation or inadequate meaningful connections, where inadequate refers to the discrepancy or unmet need between an individual’s preferred and actual experience.”
Some people can have a gazillion friends and feel lonely. Some people can spend the bulk of their time alone but feel fine. That makes it hard to find a one-size-fits-all solution.
When McCullough wrote her first book, “You are Not Alone,” in 2009, she realized how many people were looking for an outlet to discuss and address the loneliness they were feeling.
“Sometimes you don’t tell your friends that you are lonely,” she said. “We operate out of shame or fear or judgment, and we don’t realize how many other people are feeling the same way.”
McCullough began organizing retreats to locations as near as North Georgia and as far as Italy to invite people, mostly women, to find connections with strangers who were in the same state of loneliness. “The women we pull in by and large are there because they want more connection,” she said. “YANASisters provides the space to say I am looking for a friend or I feel disconnected.”
Other Atlantans have taken up the challenge to combat loneliness as well.
Three years ago in September, Anna Olsen hosted the first ATL Friends meetup. Olsen wanted to create an environment where people 21 and up felt safe admitting they were lonely and not feeling shame about it. Last week, on social media, the group offered a series of friendly reminders for building friendships: feel worthy of connection; protect emotional health while friendship building; embrace diversity in friendship; be authentic; don’t give up when things don’t go as planned; and take it slow and lean on existing friends and family for encouragement while seeking new friendships.
Last month, Mirtha Donastorg, business reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reported a $1.65 million pre-seed round of funding for two Decatur-based founders, Maya Watson and Lexi Nisita, who created a social connection app called “why?!.”
Why?! creates discussion prompts for users that can be used online or in person. “We don’t think technology can solve loneliness,” Watson said in the interview. “We don’t have this, like, lofty view that somehow we’re going to be the ones to save everything. What we’re trying to do is just focus on closeness.”
Instead of building connections focused on religion, sports or other common interests, these groups allow people young or older to bond over the state of being lonely. There is no fear, no judgment and no shame, and that feels like a step in the right direction.
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