Togetherness Doesn't Find its worth in scoreboards

​Once again this week, I find myself connected to the story of a young person taking their life. I find myself in this place more and more these days. I have a couple of young persons I call my sons, so this place scares me. Maybe scares me more than any other place.

I've been writing the story of my life the last month or so. I feel compelled this morning to share a small chapter of that story with you.

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Is it possible that popularity is only grooming us for loneliness?

Is it possible that popularity is not a gift, but a curse? Evil disguised as a blessing?

It was the first great collapse in my life - going off to college. It was the first great fall, under which so many other dominoes would ultimately fall.

I remember my first college class. There were more people filling the endless rows and seats of that class than there were in my entire high school graduation class. All the popularity in the world means nothing when you are suddenly surrounded by a sea of strangers. Strangers who have no interest in electing you the president of anything. Strangers who have no interest in asking you to join their team, let alone making you their captain.

I don't remember what that first class was, but I do remember what it felt like to be lost. As I look back, it's easy to wonder if that was the beginning of lost in my life. The beginning of alone. Or is it possible that day, in that class, my eyes were opened to something popularity had always hid from me?

That day I discovered popularity will abandon you when the going gets hard - in the unpopular moments of unfamiliarity. And the unfamiliar have no interest in filling the void it leaves behind.

That was four decades ago. Popularity wasn't nearly as popular as it is today. It didn't yet have scorecards like 'likes' and 'loves' and 'shares' and 'views.' The world hadn't quite figured out yet how to leverage unbridled popularity for profit.

And power.

But it has mastered it today.

A February 2021 CDC survey revealed that young adults (18-25 years old) suffer high rates of both loneliness and anxiety and depression. According to the survey, 63% of this age group are suffering significant symptoms of anxiety or depression.

That number is not some. It's not many. It's rapidly approaching most.

In their report - 'Loneliness in America' - the authors write: “As a society, we do little to support emerging adults at precisely the time when they are dealing with the most defining, stressful decisions of their lives related to work, love, and identity. Who to love? What to be?”

I worry about our young people. Lured into the allusion of togetherness by the myth of popularity.

I worry about our young people, scared away from the potential of togetherness for fear it looks like popularity. A popularity that has rejected so many of them.

Popularity is seductive and it is threatening. It is a villain and it is a comforter.

It can hold the loneliest of us wholly together like glue. Until it's gone. Like cheap glue.

And you're left surrounded by strangers.

Maybe in that moment you turn to something that has always agreed to be there, no matter how unpopular you get to feeling. Alcohol, maybe.

Or something else.

But more and more, I feel our young people are choosing to turn to nothing at all. They look at the dashboards and the scoreboards and feel totally abandoned by the game. And they quit.

They don't fit in with strangers and they've been abandoned by popularity and they have never been exposed enough to togetherness to know it's togetherness that's at the heart of their most painful longings.

So they quit.

Their world collapses like dominoes. Only these days, I fear the collapse is much more rapid; the dominoes much fewer.

It would be many decades beyond that first college class when I would feel the sense of togetherness that exposed the myth of popularity, that undid the damage inflicted by seas of strangers.

It's made me wish for a world of togetherness. One that doesn't need scoreboards to measure worth.

Togetherness doesn't find it's worth in scoreboards.

It finds it in one another.

I wish for a world of togetherness.