Relationships

Why You Feel Lonely Even When You’re Surrounded by People

This post kicks off a short series on relationships — what it looks like to actually love God and love people well, one stage at a time. Before we get to dating, friendship, or anything else, we have to start somewhere more basic: almost everyone I talk to is lonely, and most of them are surrounded by people.

I grew up in a small town where I knew basically everyone from kindergarten through senior year. I had a rough stretch in middle school, but I never really felt alone — I still had family and friends from soccer. College broke that. I went to school in Southern California knowing one person, and our dorms ended up on opposite sides of campus. I remember being so homesick that I didn’t call my family for the first two weeks, because I knew I’d cry, and I didn’t want to be the kid in college crying to his mom. If that’s ever been you, you’re not alone in feeling alone.

The Loneliness Epidemic Is Real

Loneliness isn’t new — it’s a human problem that has existed as long as humans have. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t gotten worse. Despite being more digitally connected than any generation before us, young people report feeling more alone than ever, and covid didn’t help: a lot of people spent critical years of social development isolated, with the internet as the only form of interaction available.

A few numbers worth sitting with: a 2021 Harvard study found that 60% of young adults report feeling lonely on a regular basis. Separate research has found that spending two hours on social media actually increases feelings of loneliness — connection at a distance doesn’t seem to satisfy the need for the real thing. And roughly 1 in 5 millennials report having no friends at all, while 27% say they have no close relationships.

That breaks my heart, honestly. God cares about your friendships — he cared enough to build the need for them into you from the very beginning.

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”

Genesis 2:18

But that promise doesn’t fully solve the problem, because plenty of us feel lonely even when we’re surrounded by people. Marilyn Monroe put it this way: “I can sit in a crowded room and feel completely alone.” Katy Perry has said something similar — that she can be surrounded by a million people and still feel alone. Community alone isn’t the whole fix.

The Real Disconnect Isn’t Between Us — It’s From God

The biggest problem underneath our loneliness isn’t that we’re separated from each other. It’s that we’re separated from God.

Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

Ephesians 2:12–13

That’s the hope of the gospel: we’ve become friends of God. His own children. And it’s a closeness that comes from all three persons of the Trinity — we’re children of the Father, we have a friend and advocate in the Son, and the Holy Spirit actually dwells inside us. That’s about as close as closeness gets.

Why Information and Willpower Don’t Fix It

I can preach all of this at you, but knowing it and living it are two different things. Most of us try to close that gap in one of three ways, and none of them actually work long-term.

The first is information — the idea that if I just understand the truth clearly enough, I’ll change. But we all know better than that already. I know I should work out, and I still don’t. I know scrolling my phone at night is bad for me, and I still do it. Knowing isn’t the bottleneck.

The second is willpower — just gritting your teeth and stopping. This gets you further than information does, but it has a ceiling. Discipline lasts exactly as long as your willpower does, and for most of us, that’s not very long.

The third is doing it for someone else’s approval. I’ve done this one myself — when I met my wife, Mary, I wanted her to like me, so I went cliff jumping with a group of friends to impress her. That kind of motivation might get you moving briefly, but someone else’s approval was never going to scratch the itch it promised to.

What Actually Works: Turning God Into a Habit

Augustine said it simply: “you are what you love.” Whatever you keep putting yourself into is going to shape who you become. Too often people give their lives to Jesus and nothing downstream actually changes, because the rest of their life never got rewired around him. The gods competing for our attention today aren’t Zeus and Hades — they’re our phones and our streaming queues, quietly working to keep us looking at them instead of at Jesus.

The way out isn’t hype, it’s habit. Silence and solitude. Reading Scripture. Prayer. Worship. Every relationship takes effort, including this one — if you feel far from God, it’s probably because you haven’t reached toward him lately.

One Small Gesture

There’s an old story that circulates in youth ministry circles about a high schooler who watches a classmate get shoved to the ground, books scattered everywhere. He almost keeps walking — he’s got a full weekend planned — but something makes him stop and help pick up the books instead. He learns the kid’s name, walks him home, and ends up inviting him to hang out that weekend. A real friendship grows out of it over the next four years.

At their graduation, the kid who’d been knocked down gives the class speech — and reveals that he’d planned to end his life the weekend they first met. He’d already cleaned out his locker so his mom wouldn’t have to. One small gesture, from someone who almost didn’t stop to help, changed everything.

You never know what someone else is carrying. God puts us in each other’s lives to impact one another, for better or worse, and the small gestures matter more than we usually give them credit for.

Two Questions to Sit With

How are you loving God? And how are you loving the people around you? Over the next couple of posts, we’re going to walk through what that looks like at different stages — in dating, in friendship, and beyond. But it all starts here, with those two questions.