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

[Applause] it's working okay it's building up to drama great that's me I spent forever trying to figure out how to start today's talk there's something about loneliness that just feels gross it would be kind of awkward if I asked you all to raise your hands and ask the question who here has been lonely lately because okay well somebody wants to raise their hand to that but in general I don't think it's something that most people want to raise their hands for I don't but I get it and most of us actually are lonely and we spend much of our lives trying to feel a little bit less lonely sometimes we're successful but a lot of the times not so much and there's countless studies that confirm this but to be honest they're all pretty boring and they don't really help make the problem any better let's take a look at some of these deaths 46 percent of US adults report sometimes they are always feeling lonely Gen Z that's you guys is the loneliest generation with the loneliness score forty eight point three the national average is 44 and loneliness living alone and poor social connections are as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day but my favourite loneliness is likely to increase your risk of death by 29% the comforting thing is that we're all gonna die anyway the fact of the matter is being lonely sucks but what exactly do we do about it this is something I think about every single day and I've heard a lot of different answers to this question say hello to your neighbors try having more meaningful conversations invest in consistent deep friendships introduce your friends to one another join a meet-up or a club or a group say yes to that party even if you don't know anyone try dating and these are all great answers and I've spent much of the last decade doing exactly these things for myself and trying to help other people do the same in my day job I work at Facebook where I support community builders who try to help other people find people like themselves on nights and 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 pretty much every weekend I'm bringing my friends together for hikes for meals for game nights you name it and all the in-between moments I'm pretty much always studying how human connection works what brings us together and why it always feels like society falling apart in these experiences I have found what a lot of people say is actually on the other side of loneliness I've been lucky to find some of the best friends like a dream of people I can FaceTime without prior warning and they'll actually pick up I have a partner and a dog that I love coming home to every day my dog is really cute and I belong to communities that let me express parts of myself that are really important to me but I'm not telling you this all because I'm trying to pat myself on the back I'm telling you this because despite investing pretty much all of my energy into feeling some sense of connection loneliness still somehow manages to sneak itself into my life scattered in moments every single day it makes no sense but maybe you can relate if you've ever been out hanging out with your friends having fun but for some reason still feel funky or just out of touch when you just get off a FaceTime with someone you really love and then it suddenly hits you help enter your bedroom feels or when you come home from a dinner party and a big fat wave of existential angst just washes over you for no apparent reason it's this unexplainable loneliness that finds its way into the cracks between all the things you do to feel just a little bit less lonely and if you're like most of the people in these situations or if you're like most of people who are in these situations you do what most of us do you take out your phone and you find literally anything else in the world to think about my mom's calling me maybe you post a picture maybe you'll tweet something maybe a ton of people are actually gonna like and comment on what you post and for some reason you just still feel hollow 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 secret of loneliness that I don't think enough people talk about that oh that's me on my phone and this is the next slide but to feel less lonely we don't just need to connect with others and be left alone we need to connect with ourselves and practice getting comfortable when were alone and when I say alone I mean without your phone without anything to distract you from yourself that sounds boring uncomfortable scary it is but it's also very important because at the end of the day you don't get to escape yourself and there's no reality in which you're always going to have people around so at some point that hollow feeling that you're feel that hollow feeling that you get when you're scrolling on your phone for too long it doesn't really go away it doesn't change after five or 10 years it doesn't change when you get double the followers or or 10x2 followers in other words you're gonna need to be comfortable in your own skin you're gonna need to keep yourself company at some point and I hate to say it but there's nothing that makes being alone any easier than being alone so where do you start before we get there let's talk about where you end well being alone could look like and then we'll work backwards from there one of the reasons why we generally find being alone to be so torturous is because we don't actually know what we're gonna find out and one of the reasons for that is because we don't actually know ourselves out of the time we can actually feel like strangers to ourselves so what does it look like when you connect with someone that you don't even know I mentioned earlier that I lead 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 helpful framework to think about how to get to know yourself the way these conversations work is simple a host in our community puts up a time in a place on a website five strangers sign up nobody knows who's gonna show up until they get there nobody knows what they're gonna talk about they just meet at a cafe and they talk for two hours that's it over the last seven years our community has had over 10,000 of these conversations around the world and more than 50,000 people have participated I myself have accounted for about 2,000 of those people because I posted these conversations over 400 times and the way these conversations start is almost always with some small talk how's your day been what neighborhood do you live in where are you from originally why'd you sign up for this thing anyway man can you believe what's happening in the news lately you watch that TV show etc etc and the small talk is awkward but you got to talk about something while everyone's getting settled in their seats after a few minutes though I generally try to switch things up hey I know we could talk about TV shows and current events for hours but if you guys are up for it I'd love to try and actually get to know you so I posed a few questions that are open-ended they're personal maybe they're a little uncomfortable questions like these now if getting asked any of these via total stranger gives you a pit in your stomach that's normal for what it's worth they're just as uncomfortable to ask as they are to answer but that's kind of the point because it's never actually about answering the questions specifically it's more about bringing a degree of social courage to the conversation creating a space that makes it a little less awkward to be curious and to ask follow-up questions and maybe to listen to make eye contact maybe to pay attention and not constantly be thinking about what you're gonna say next while someone else is talking you know what happens over the course of one of these conversations it's pretty magical it's way better than the small talk at the beginning is this feeling that's all too rare when you feel like the people you just met two hours ago are people that you've known forever you have so much in common with them you shared stories with them that you forgot even existed and you learn things about them that they would have never thought to share with you beforehand you feel like you're truly seeing them as whole people and you feel like you're being seen as a whole person as well 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 of the polar opposite of that hollowness or existential dread it's a feeling of wonder of curiosity of optimism and this might seem weird because well you yourself are one person you don't sit down and start having small talk with yourself you don't pose big open questions and ask yourself follow-ups you don't give yourself a hug goodbye when you're go when you're about to leave and go do something else but there are parts of this experience that I think are worth highlighting first off at tea time the conversations are spacious everyone agrees to sit together for two hours and we don't take our phones out so there's a lot of time to talk and a lot of time to think nobody knows who's actually gonna be there and they don't know what they're gonna talk about there's no curation of who gets to come and there's no predetermined topic so you kind of have to wait and see what happens this makes it really hard to edit yourself whatever comes out unrehearsed and it's unplanned in a sense you don't really feel like you're putting on a show it's being real what would spaciousness look like in time with yourself in the ideal scenario you let go of your rush to get somewhere better at tea time the small talk at the beginning of the conversation it's not comfortable it's not interesting but it's necessary because it sets the stage for what comes next in just the same way the first few moments that you're gonna spend by yourself really in your head start wondering why you're wasting all this time it's so boring you could be doing something more interesting more productive more social but over time you start to let go of your sense of control then what happens back to tea time spaciousness encourages curiosity since nobody knows anybody at the table there's no such thing as a dumb question it's a little more comfortable to ask somebody what's the story behind that when they share something that you want to know a little bit more about the curiosity it creates moments for people to share stories about where they come from and why they think what they think in the fear of judgement it's pretty limited because unless you plan on it you're probably not gonna see these people again so you feel a little bit more accepting of others when you stop looking to make your time with our self useful productive or interesting you also start to get curious about what you've been thinking about lately you realize that your first few thoughts are actually someone else's maybe something you read on the internet maybe something you heard someone talk about and then you actually start to notice things that are actually coming from your own mind feelings questions about why you feel the way that you feel random observations about your environment maybe even a question about how it all ended up like this association start to form in your head between ideas that seem entirely unrelated and it almost feels like a wall is melting in your mind and you start seeing things that you didn't know we're there the longer you think the more questions you have and your previous urge to get this all over with actually evolved into an urge to keep digging down this rabbit hole that you're in let's go back to tea time again the stories and ideas that emerge from asking these questions playing off of each other's ideas they manifest themselves into an inspiring feeling of all that feeling that this conversation even happened between a group of people who were small talking to hours ago awkwardly is both unsettling and kind of mind-blowing of course you would have never expected a bunch of people who you have nothing to do it to be people you ended up feeling so invested in so aware of and before you know it you all have to get on with your own lives tea time is over and it's back to the real world we're likely to never see each other again but this is nice while it lasted people are so much more interesting when we give them space and curiosity they happen to bloom before us how does all manifest when you're hanging out with yourself remember that wall that was melting all those things that you saw that you didn't know we're there until they actually appeared you start concentrating on them and when you get deeply enchanted by one idea another one just pokes its head out from the woodwork another thing that you wouldn't have expected all in your own mind you start to grow patient with yourself and you notice that the best ideas in your head are the ones that need some time to emerge you might have had a few judgments about whether the ideas were worth thinking about but then you maybe change your mind and then maybe you change your mind again and then maybe a third time maybe you discovered something and maybe it's profound or maybe it's just a trivial memory from a friend that you once had an inconsequential conversation with just but can you remembered it but time's up got to get back to the real world this was nice while it lasted who would have thought I could have learned so much about myself and my thoughts all I had to do is sit with them 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 at being alone you might never experience that but you'll find your own version of it in the perks they're great first off you start to get to know who you actually are being bored is part of it but in that boredom you start to be a little less scared of what you're gonna see that doesn't mean you're gonna like all of it but when you start asking yourself questions you start to understand why you do the things that you do why you believe the things that you believe maybe you stop worrying so much about what other people think and trade that in for enjoying the process of becoming who you are instead of trying to craft some identity or image to serve other people's opinions maybe you actually form an opinion of yourself second connecting with others becomes a way easier 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're complicated too in their own ways which you might not understand but they exist instead of judging people and letting your preconceived notions guide you you start to ask more questions to understand the things that didn't make sense to you on the offset and when you start feeling your feelings yourself you don't project them on other people because the more secure you get in your own skin the more space you create for other people to be their whole selves even if they're not enjoying as much alone time as you are and last you get a lot better at putting your own life in perspective the more you practice curiosity with yourself the more you discover about why you react to things the way that you do by noticing these patterns you essentially develop a muscle that helps you reason through your emotions you move through life with more sense more comfort and less unexplainable anxiety for example instead of ending that FaceTime call and then sinking in the emptiness of your bedroom wondering why you're so alone maybe you find yourself reflecting on how appreciative you are of that friend maybe you shoot them a text and say hey that was great I love talking with you and then you go to bed feeling good about the fact that you even have these strong relationships in the first place it's way different so yeah now you know a little bit about what time alone can feel like and what some of the perks are how exactly do you get there it would be nice if there was an easy answer a retreat you could go on maybe an app you could download maybe a TED talk you could listen to but the real answer is just practice for me practice is going on long silent hikes in nature it's leaving my phone in my bedroom and bringing a book to the living room it's taking a long shower before bed just to think about my day it's making coffee when I wake up in the morning while leaving my phone on the charger and it's washing dishes without plugging my air pause in its writing for a few minutes in the morning before I let the whole world get into my head they're all little things but they all share a few things in common they're quiet they don't involve my phone and they all involve doing one thing at a time in the best part they're all things that fit into my life pretty much daily that's what practice is it gives my mind the space to experience curiosity and the opportunity to find a sense of all being by myself still makes me super uncomfortable but I'm way less scared of it and to me that's progress thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 217,555

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Communication, Community, Happiness, Personal growth, Society

Id: 4W1E6m1EUAU

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020