Spending Your Days Alone Is Ruining Your life. There’s A Better Way.

PSA: You’re spending way too much time alone. It’s time to rediscover the joys of being a Physically Social Being.

Image by Vikings

Here’s a strange thing to think about: Most of us spend practically all day alone. 

Hours of solitude and lack of physical proximity to other human beings have become such a normal part of everyday life that we don’t even think about it anymore—and yet, this would have once been considered an unhealthy, undesirable, and even bizarre way to live. 

Since the pandemic, aloneness has become our default state, and it’s hurting us in ways that we’re often unaware of. It is now ‘normal’ to be alone in front of a screen for the vast majority of your life. It also became unusual to have an in-person interaction with someone outside of your direct family. It sounds a bit crazy to put that into a sentence, but it’s true. 

There is a sense of mild but pervasive dissatisfaction, loneliness, and loss of vitality that I have observed in many of my clients who work remotely and spend most of their days online. It usually takes us a while to get there, but our sessions together often lead to the realization that their solitary lifestyle may be undermining their enjoyment of life and a general sense of motivation and gusto. 

Regular texting, emailing, and Zoom calls with coworkers, clients, and friends might give us the illusion of connection, but we all know that Zoom is not the same as being with people. We’ve come to assume that digital communication is enough to meet our basic needs of being social beings in the community. It’s not. We are training ourselves to cope with not having this fundamental human need and we know that something doesn’t quite feel right.

The real solution here is obvious. We need to start spending way more time in the physical company of other people—I’d go so far as to advise committing to at least one meaningful in-person engagement per day. Being above this threshold is what I call a Physically Social Being (PSB), and it’s truly the best thing you can do to not only boost your well-being but also to improve almost every aspect of your life. 

Being a very social person myself, I experienced deep loneliness during the pandemic. My mental health was not on-point, and I wasn’t enjoying life. I started to feel lackluster and down most days. Once I was able to safely start being with friends and family in person again, I committed to trying to be with one person other than my wife—in person—each day. At the time, when I shared this with others, I usually got responses of “Woah, that’s intense”, or “That’s a lot. If I saw one person a week, it would be a good week.” Let’s pause and let that sink in for a second. 

While most of us are socializing much more now than we were at the height of the pandemic, we still haven’t fully reclaimed our pre-pandemic social lives—and even before COVID, our lifestyles reflected decades of declining social interactions thanks to technology and shifting cultural norms. In a survey of 2,000 people conducted in January, Newsweek found that 42 percent of people said they are "less sociable" than they were in 2019, while 37 percent said their friends are less sociable now. According to another January 2023 survey of 3,416 American adults, only 43 percent said that they socialize with friends in person on a daily or weekly basis. Nearly a fifth said they do so less than monthly (19 percent) or rarely/never (16 percent). In 2014, we spent over six hours a week with friends, on average. It’s been dropping steadily since, and we’re down to less than half that now: just two hours and forty-three minutes a week. It’s relatively safe to say that we are in some kind of economic recession, but another recession is also occurring right before our eyes, a “friendship recession.” 

This isn’t normal! If we went back a half-century, the average person would likely be engaging in person with at least 30 people they knew each day, and in some cases many more. In their community, at the grocery store, and their place of work, everything would be handled in person. People could largely get their social needs met through normal life. 

A fictional example to illustrate this point: Everyone loves Ragnar Lothbrok from the TV show Vikings, the ninth-century Viking farmer turned warrior. He’s charismatic, healthy, strong, and full of life—thanks in large part to his lifestyle. Ragnar’s secret life hack was that he spent 90% of his time outside in nature with other people. That was his default state. He was constantly around people, regularly breathing the fresh air and taking in the sunshine, operating in an environment of connection and belonging (I admit not all the time!) with other people and the natural world. If he wanted to be alone, he had to make an effort to create that experience for himself. 

Today, our lifestyle is almost the exact opposite. Just about everything can be handled digitally or remotely. And just like that, the way we have lived since the dawn of humankind has shifted to an unnatural one of isolation. For many of us, it now takes tremendous effort to be a PSB, to live aligned to your true nature as a social creature.

It’s sad to say, but if you want to be social in 2023, it requires a good amount of intention and effort to make that happen. It’s no longer built-in. For me, it’s required quite an effort to constantly reach out to people and arrange gatherings, hikes, teas, meals, etc. It takes a lot to cultivate or break into a community, especially when you move to a new town. My wife and I are relatively new to the Boulder area. We’ve both pounded the pavement, getting to know all kinds of people in search of our tribe and we can now thankfully say it’s starting to pay off. We have an abundance of nourishing connections to engage on any given day, and it feels awesome. 

And yet, most of my friends have let this area of their life slide for various reasons. It could be a lack of intention or energy, a fear of rejection, or just being out of the habit of making plans and putting yourself out there. It happens—I get it. But don’t let it become your permanent state. If you’re able to push through the resistance and start making more social plans in whatever way you can, it will pay off exponentially. (More on that in my post on Relational Abundance as the number-one indicator of a good life.) 

Being a PSB comes with endless benefits. After hanging with a great friend, I feel soothed and relaxed yet energized. It’s like my snow globe has been shaken in the most nourishing way. This is the single most important thing I can do for my personal well-being—more important, I dare say, than meditation, exercise, eating well, and getting good sleep. 

When I have a day or two where I don’t see a friend or have a deep in-person conversation, I feel scrambled in so many different ways. I get sad, I get down, I get muted, I get strategic in a bad way, I feel threatened, I’m not energized, and I’m not fun. It sucks. Sometimes I can feel like I’m in a bad mood for seemingly no reason. A genuine, in-person connection is my number-one go-to for shifting my state. 

Ask yourself: Are you connected in the community? Have you found your tribe? Do you have enough people that you spend time with on a semi-regular basis? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” don’t worry, my friend—just start making plans. All it takes is intention and effort to start reclaiming a life of joyful connection. Call a friend for a coffee date. Schedule that dinner. Go to an in-person meditation or yoga class. Keep doing it until it becomes a daily habit, and watch yourself start thriving on a totally new level.