If you’re lonely and you know it, clap your hands…

Literally an hour before I saw this, my wife “had to” encourage me to text one of my own freakin’ friends about his new job. And I wonder why I spent most of my forties feeling desperately alone.

Loneliness. Oof. This was eye-opening on a deeply personal level. (The political part, sure, also not great. But I don’t want to derail the part of this I can actually control.)

As much as we try to not fall into gender stereotypes — and I absolutely expect women have this problem AND ENTIRELY NEW ONES as they strive to impossibly “have it all” — we’re all carrying a few thousand years of cultural baggage around. This was a massive blindspot.

I, apparently, decided I am not allowed to prioritize friends. And then moped around without doing anything to actually help myself. No wonder my wife gets exasperated with me sometimes. Although maybe it does explain why I am so committed to my new D&D group.

I’d combine this loneliness epidemic with the growing body of evidence that our dopamine addiction to phones has tended to isolate us as well.

It’s all, frankly, embarrassing. Young Me would be ashamed of my lack of social life. And worse, my hesitancy to do anything about it. Don’t get me wrong, I talk to people at work all the time about safe topics aaaaaand sometimes slightly less safe topics. But rarely anything deeply personal.

And Old Me? Well, he is getting a little tired of the regrets and the missed connections. The answer to my loneliness — our loneliness — isn’t in the feeds, I think. It’s out in the world beyond the glowing panel in our hands.

So this might be my late-breaking 2025 goal: be social. Join a club, participate, lead, volunteer, whatever. Take control of my own stupid happiness and be among friends.

p.s. Don’t feel attacked by this. This is r/daddit, and we are better than that.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DFk8dbVyx6F/?igsh=MWVuZ3k0Z2M4aGl1Zg==