Being alone isn't being lonely | Ankit Shah | TEDxPineCrestSchool

It's working well, it's turning into a drama, great, that's me. I spent forever trying to figure out how to start today's talk. There's something about loneliness that feels gross. who here has been

lonely

lately because it's alright well someone wants to raise their hand to that but in general I don't think it's something most people want to raise their hand to because I don't but I get it and most Most of us are actually

lonely

and we spend a lot of our lives trying to feel a little less lonely, sometimes we succeed but many times not so much and there are countless studies that confirm this but to be honest they are all pretty boring and not It doesn't really help to improve the problem.

Let's take a look at some of these deaths. 46 percent of American adults report that they always feel lonely sometimes. Gen Z you guys are the loneliest generation with a loneliness score of forty eight point three the national average is 44 and loneliness living

alone

and poor social connections is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, but my favorite loneliness probably increases the risk of death by 29% the comforting thing is we're all going to die anyway the fact is feeling lonely sucks but what exactly do we do about it this is something i think about every day and i've heard many different answers to this question say hello to your neighbors try to have more meaning conversations invest in deep and consistent friendships introduce yourself to your friends join a meeting, club or group say yes to that party even if you don't know anyone no one tries to date and these are all great answers and i have spent much of the last decade doing exactly these things for myself and trying to help other people do the same in my daily work.

I work at Facebook where I support community builders trying to help other people find people like them on the nights and we On the weekends I run a community organization called T with Strangers we make it easy for people to find meaningful conversations with groups of people in their local neighborhoods and almost every weekend I get my friends together for hikes, potlucks, game nights, you name it. and all the moments in between I'm almost always studying how human connection works, what unites us, and why it always feels like society falls apart in these experiences. loneliness I've been lucky enough to find some of the best friends like a people's dream I can FaceTime unannounced and they actually answer I have a partner and a dog I love coming home to every day my dog ​​is really cute and I belong to communities that allow me to express parts of me that are really important to me, but I'm not telling you all of this because I'm trying to pat myself on the back, I'm telling you this because despite investing pre-I put all my energy into feeling a feeling of connection.

Loneliness somehow manages to creep into my life, scattered in moments every day. It doesn't make sense, but maybe you can relate if you've ever been with your friends. funny but for some reason you still feel funky or just out of touch when you just FaceTimed someone you really love and they suddenly hit you to help get into your bedroom or when you come home from dinner and a big fat wave of existential angst just washes over you for no apparent reason it's this inexplicable loneliness that finds its way into the cracks between all the things you do to feel a little less

alone

and if you're like most people in these situations or if you are like most people who find themselves in these situations you do what most of us do you take out your phone and find literally anything else in the world to think about my mom calling me maybe post a picture , maybe you're going to tweet something, maybe a lot of people are going to like and comment on what you post and for some reason you still feel empty inside and that's because loneliness isn't just feeling connected to the people in your life it's also feeling connected to yourself i think this is a loneliness secret i don't think enough people talk about it oh that's me on my phone and this is the next slide but to feel less alone we not only need to connect with others and be alone we need to connect with ourselves and practice

being

comfortable when we are alone and when I say alone I mean without your phone with nothing to distract you By yourself, that sounds boring, uncomfortable, scary, but it's also very important because at the end of the day you can't escape yourself and there's no reality where you're always going to have people around, so at some point that empty feeling that you get that empty feeling you get when you scroll on your phone for a long time doesn't really go away doesn't change after five or 10 years doesn't change when you get twice as many followers or 10x2 followers in other words you are going to need to be comfortable in your own skin you are going to need to keep you company at some point and i hate to say it but there is nothing that makes

being

alone easier than being alone so where do you start before that we get there, let's talk about where you end up wellness could only be seen and then we'll work backwards from there.

One of the reasons we usually find being alone so torturous is because we don't really know what we're going to discover and one of the reasons is because we don't really know ourselves outside of time, we can actually feel like strangers to ourselves, so what does it look like when you connect with someone you don't even know? I mentioned earlier that I run a community organization called T with Strangers where we bring strangers together to have meaningful conversations and I think what happens in these conversations the useful framework for thinking about how to get to know yourself the way these conversations work is simple a host in our community puts an hour in a place on a website five strangers check in no one knows who's going to show up until they get there no one knows what they're going to talk about they just meet in a cafe and talk for two hours that's all in In the last seven years our community has had more than 10,000 of these conversations around the world and more than 50,000 people have participated.

I myself have counted about 2,000 of those people because I posted these conversations over 400 times and the way these conversations start is almost always with small talk about how your day has been, what neighborhood do you live in, where are you. you're from origin, why did you sign up for this anyway? Can you believe what is happening in the news lately? You watch that TV show, etc., and the small talk is weird. but you have to talk about something while everyone settles into their seats after a few minutes although I usually try to shake things up hey I know we could talk about tv shows and current events for hours but if you're up for it I would love to to try and get to know you, so I raised some questions that are open-ended, are personal, maybe a little bit awkward questions like these right now, if you get any of these through a stranger, it gives you a hole. in your stomach that's normal for what it's worth it's so awkward to ask how to answer but that's the point because it's never really about answering the questions specifically it's more about bringing a degree of social courage to the conversation by creating a space that makes it a little less awkward to be curious and ask follow up questions and maybe listen to make eye contact maybe pay attention and not constantly be thinking about what you're going to say next while someone else is talking you know what it happens in the course of one of these conversations it's quite magical it's so much better than small talk at the beginning it's this feeling that's so weird when you feel like the people you just met two hours ago are people you've known forever you have a lot in common with them you shared stories with them that you forgot even existed and you learn things about them that they would never have thought to share with you. igo beforehand you feel like you are really seeing them as a whole person and you feel that they see you as a whole person also you don't know everything about them but you also know that you don't know everything about them this feeling is what comes to mind when i think about the polar opposite of that emptiness or existential fear is a feeling of wonder of curiosity of optimism and this may seem strange because well, you yourself are a person who does not sit down and start having small talk with yourself that you do not have.

The big open questions and follow up you don't give yourself a hug goodbye when you leave when you're about to leave and go do something else but there are parts of this experience that I think are worth noting first outside at tea time, the conversations they are spacious everyone agrees to sit together for two hours and we don't take out our phones so there is plenty of time to talk and plenty of time to think no one knows who will be there. almente there and I don't know what they're going to talk about. There is no selection of who is going to come and there is no predetermined theme, so you have to wait and see what happens.

This makes it very difficult to edit. a feeling that you don't really feel like you're putting on a show it's being real what the breadth in time with yourself would be like in the ideal scenario you let go of your rush to get to a better place at tea time the small talk at the beginning of the conversation is not comfortable it is not interesting but it is necessary because it sets the stage for what comes next in the same way the first moments that you are going to spend alone in your head start to wonder why you are wasting all this time it is so boring that you could be doing something more interesting, more productive, more social, but over time you start to lose your sense of control and then it comes back to tea time.

The spaciousness encourages curiosity, since no one knows anyone at the table. question is a little more comfortable asking someone what the story is behind it when they share something you want to know a little more about curiosity creates moments for people to share stories about where they come from and why they think what they think in fear to judgment is pretty limited because unless you plan for it, you probably won't see these people again, so you feel a little more receptive to others. Then you stop looking for how to make your time with ourselves useful, productive, or interesting.

You also start to get curious about what you have been thinking lately. You realize that your first thoughts are actually someone else's. Maybe something you read on the internet. heard someone talk and then you really start to notice things that are actually coming from your own mind feelings questions about why you feel the way you do random observations about your surroundings maybe even a question about how it all ended up like this association start to form in their head between ideas that seem totally unrelated and it almost feels like a wall is melting in their mind and they start to see things they didn't know we are there the more you think the more questions you have and your The impulse before getting this all over with actually became an urge to keep digging down this rabbit hole you're in.

Let's go back to tea time again the stories and ideas t What comes from asking these questions playing with each other's ideas manifest in an inspiring feeling of all that feeling that this conversation even happened between a group of people who were little girls clumsily talking hours ago is both disturbing and mind-blowing. of course you would never have expected a group of people who have nothing to do to be people you ended up feeling so invested in and aware of and before you know it everyone has to go on with their own lives. tea time is over. and it's back to the real world, we may never see each other again, but this is good while it lasted, people are so much more interesting when we give them space and curiosity, they blossom before us, how does it all manifest when you? you're hanging out with yourself you remember that wall that was melting down all those things you saw that you didn't know were there until they actually showed up you start to focus on them and when you're deeply enchanted by or one idea or another you just poke your head through the wood something else you wouldn't have expected everything in your mind you start to have patience with yourself and realize that the best ideas in your head are the ones that need some time to emerge, you may have had some judgments about whether it was worth it think about the ideas but then maybe I'll change my mind and then maybe I'll change my mind again and then maybe a third time, maybe he's discovered something and maybe it's deep or maybe it's just a trivial memory of a friend with that you once had a small talk but can you remember it but time is up to get back to the real world this was nice while it lasted who would have thought i could having learned so much about myself and my thoughts all I had to do was sit withthem now if you haven't spent that much time with yourself you probably won't experience what i just described in the first few attempts to be alone you might never experience that but you will find your own version of the perks they are great first you start to know who you really are getting bored is part of it, but in that boredom you start to be a little less afraid of what you're going to see that doesn't mean you're going to like everything, but when you start asking yourself questions, you start to understand why you do the things you you do, why you believe in the things you believe, maybe you will stop. caring so much about what other people think and changing it to enjoy the process of becoming who you are instead of trying to create an identity or image to serve other people's opinions maybe you actually form an opinion of yourself secondarily First of all, connecting with others becomes an easier way because when you recognize how complicated you are, you start to give other people a little bit of a break because you accept that they are also complicated in their own way, which you may not understand, but they exist in Instead of judging people. and letting yourself be guided by your preconceived notions, you start to ask more questions to understand the things that didn't make sense to you in the displacement and when you start to feel your feelings yourself, you don't project them onto other people because the more secure you are. put yourself in your own skin the more space you create for other people to be themselves, even if they don't enjoy alone time as much as you do and lastly, the more you practice, the better you get at putting your own life in perspective. curious with yourself the more you discover why you react to things the way you do by noticing these patterns you essentially build a muscle that helps you reason through your emotions you move through life with more purpose more comfort and less unexplained anxiety Like ending that FaceTime call and then sinking into the emptiness of your bedroom wondering why you're so lonely, maybe you find yourself reflecting on how grateful you are to that friend, maybe you text them and say hi , it was great i love talking to you and then you go to bed feeling good about the fact that even you have these strong relationships in the first place it's very different so yeah now you know a little bit about how it can feel to be alone and what are some of the advantages exactly how do you get there it would be nice if there was an easy answer a retreat you could go to maybe an app you could download maybe one TED talk you might hear but the real answer is practice for me practice is taking long, silent walks in nature is leaving my phone in my bedroom and taking a book into the living room is taking a long shower before bed just to think about myself day is making coffee when i wake up in the morning as i leave my phone on the charger and he is washing dishes without covering my air pause in his writing for a few minutes in the morning before i let the whole world into my head they are all little things but they all share some thin gs in common they are silent they don't involve my phone and they all involve doing one thing at a time for the best part it's all the things that fit into my life almost every day that's what practice is what gives you it gives my mind the space to experience curiosity and the chance to find a sense of being alone it still makes me feel very uncomfortable but it makes me less scared and for me that is a pr ogress, thank you.