Our practical isolation has an expiration date

​I had an opportunity to present at a community resilience conference this week. My presentation was on the science of human connection; we are designed to NEED connection.

The thing I found most interesting at this resilience conference - almost all of the speakers and presenters gave presentations centered on a common truth:

Human resilience does not happen outside of human connection.

One of the speakers, author and researcher Tim Klein, has done a lot of research around student success in higher education. Klein indicated one of the greatest predictors of student success, which he defined as students finishing college in six years with a solid sense of what they wanted to do next, was having meaningful relationships with professors or other college staff members.

The grave news of his research was over 70% of students he interviewed didn't have that.

Listening to Klein, I reflected on the truth of my own college story. It took me 11 years to get my 4-year degree. I had no clue what I wanted to do once I got it. And not one single time in that 11 years did I ever have a meaningful conversation with a professor or a staff member.

In fact, today, I couldn't begin to give you the name of any non-student connections I made in those 11 years.

I have a college degree, but I would never include that degree on my list of successes.

I also reflected on this. I know my mental health challenges started long before I got to college, but they blew up when I got there. And listening to Klein, I realized that college exposed - without me witnessing the exposure - that I was living in practical isolation.

I left the superficial popularity I experienced in high school and entered one of the loneliest worlds I would ever know. On campuses full of thousands of people, I was lost at sea.

You would think that would have pointed me toward those professors with wide open doors. But often, loneliness doesn't drive one toward connection, it increases one's need to hide from it.

Connections are built on being able to say "I have a hardship in my life." And if you've never been able to say that, no open door policy in the world makes you feel like you want to start doing it now.

Popularity is often built on being good at hiding "I have a hardship in my life." Popularity will always want to protect you from revealing hardships and challenges and secrets. It can be a best friend that way.

But hiding has an expiration date. The anxiety and depression of practical isolation becomes too much to bear.

For some that expiration comes in college. For some it comes in marriage. For some it comes in their first job or their last one. For some it comes when they become a pastor. Or a parent.

And maybe it even comes on a death bed, but the expiration date always comes.

I believe we are living in a day when those expiration dates are coming quicker and quicker, and with it comes a rise in suicides and overdoses and addictions.

I stayed drunk and blacked out and significantly numbed through most of college. As a result, I missed the most important lesson college was trying to teach me, one that would have prevented a lot of grief in my life: you can't make it through life living on the energy of superficial connection.

Eventually, even the strongest of superficial connections with alcohol won't protect you from that truth.

These conferences scare me in a way. In them you practice and experience the beauty of meaningful human connection. It's hard. In so many ways it goes against the current of the relational wiring many of us have.

It's true that we are wired to need human connection. Many of us have experienced life in a way that leaves us rewired to run from connection.

But in these spaces where you are prompted and encouraged and safely pushed into human connection, often with complete strangers, you feel like it's the last thing on earth you want to do. Yet, in the aftermath, you feel like you have just experienced the most authentic and reliable answer to all human challenges.

Research suggests it's so, the feeling you get when you escape the prison walls of social isolation confirms it.

It scares me because I know many of us don't have conferences to push us into those meaningful connections. But I want to encourage us all to push ourselves into them. I want to encourage us all to beat that expiration date on our practical isolation.

Maybe it starts with a simple text or message to a friend. Maybe it starts with a cup of coffee. But I would encourage you to start it with this question:

"I'm curious about something, do you ever feel alone?"

Chances are it's a question you've been needing to ask, and chances are really good it's a question your friend has been needing to hear.

Maybe ask that question at your next book club meeting, your next church small group, your next dinner party. All of those things have the opportunity to be superficial connections, and yet they all have an equally great opportunity to be a mass escape from practical isolation.

I know. That would take a lot of courage to go there. But I assure you that you'll receive nothing but gratitude in the aftermath.

Because we need each other even if the vast majority of us have no idea how to live a life with each other.

It's true though, now more than ever we need each other.

Open door policies are no longer enough. We have to grab a few hands and walk people in.