Anti-Loneliness Club

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Loneliness has been on my mind since 2020 – yes, because of the isolation of lockdowns, but also because I moved to Mercer County from New York in January 2020. When we arrived, my husband and I spent each weekend exploring, signing up for library cards, looking for community events, and gradually meeting our neighbors. Then, we all know what happened in March 2020. I’ve lived here ever since, but in some ways, because of the strange, stressful pause, I still feel brand new.

Last year, the Surgeon General published a report on loneliness. The full title: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Why is the Surgeon General issuing an advisory about loneliness? Is it a medical problem? The report demonstrates that it is. I was shocked to read that “(l)acking social connection can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day” (page 8).

Before really reading through the report, I did what probably most librarians did: I hit Ctrl-F and searched for “librar.” The word “libraries” appears four times, highlighted as “social infrastructure.” Social infrastructure is a community’s shared spaces: libraries, of course, as well as parks, senior centers, daycare centers, churches, and other institutions and policies that bring people together. The importance of social infrastructure is investigated at length in sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book Palaces For the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. Klinenberg studied the ways these spaces and institutions, including public libraries, can increase our sense of belonging. He argues that being together is essential for our well-being as individuals and as a society.

“Social connection is a fundamental human need,” reads the Surgeon General’s report, “as essential to survival as food, water, and shelter. Throughout history, our ability to rely on one another has been crucial to survival. Now, even in modern times, we human beings are biologically wired for social connection. (…) Despite current advancements that now allow us to live without engaging with others (e.g., food delivery, automation, remote entertainment), our biological need to connect remains” (page 9). Libraries are part of the social infrastructure that fosters connection in our communities, and I wanted to learn more about how to do that with intention and care.

In Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection, doctor Jeremy Nobel writes that, because social connection is as essential as food and water, loneliness is an essential emotion. Everyone feels lonely during their lifetimes, and like hunger or thirst, it tells us we need social connection. There is a lot of advice for lonely people available: get out there and meet people! Go to a local bar. Volunteer. Take a class. None of that is wrong, but I think it misses how hard doing those things can be for some people, how complicated loneliness can be, and all the things that compound loneliness like illness, trauma, age, and poverty. Project UnLonely suggests that creative self-expression is one of the best doorways into more connection. “For many lonely people, a primary source of their disconnection from others is their broken connection with their inner selves,” writes Nobel. “When we feel lost to ourselves or inside ourselves, for whatever reason, making a connection with others feels fraudulent, elusive, or impossible” (page 29).

If we lonely people (everyone, at least sometimes) can connect to ourselves through creative expression, that can also be a means to connect with others. Nobel’s initiative, Project UnLonely, hosts “Creativity Circles,” in which participants are guided through storytelling and art projects together. I was inspired to create a program at the West Windsor branch “in which what has been made is not only shared but received” (Project Unlonely, page 31). I call it Anti-Loneliness Letter Writing Club, and though it is a “club,” everyone is welcome. The idea is pretty simple: we get together each month to write letters and to be together. I see it as addressing loneliness in several ways: we’ll reach out to people in our lives through letters, “gifts of connection” (Nobel, 240); we’ll be together with members of our community; and finally, I hope it will destigmatize loneliness, an essential human emotion.

I hope you’ll join us for Anti-Loneliness Letter Writing Club. We’re meeting on March 6 at 10am. Of course, there are many other ways to create and connect at the library. Most branches have regular craft programs and some, including West Windsor, have a knitting and crochet circle. Reading groups and writing workshops provide a rich scaffold for discussion and connection. There are game nights and chess programs, and you can stop by our puzzle tables, where I often see strangers connect over the simple joy of solving.

If you’d like to read more about social connection, loneliness, and friendship, I’ve compiled a list of books in our collection here. You’ll find many more by searching our catalog.

This One Wild and Precious Life: The Path Back to Connection in a Fractured World by Sarah Wilson

"Many of us are living with the sense that things are not right with the world and are in a state of spiritual PTSD. We have retreated, morally and psychologically; we are experiencing a crisis of disconnection--from one another, from our true values, from joy, and from life as we feel we are meant to be living it. Sarah Wilson argues that this sense of despair and disconnection is ironically what unites us--that deep down, we are all feeling that same itch for a new way of living. Drawing on science, literature, philosophy and the wisdom of some of the world's leading experts, and her personal journey, Wilson offers a hopeful path forward to the life we love."

Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Vivek Hallegere Murthy

"In Together, the former Surgeon General addresses the overlooked epidemic of loneliness as the underpinning to the current crisis in mental wellness and offers solutions to create connection and stresses the importance of community to counteract the forces driving us to depression and isolation.”

We Need To Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends by Billy Baker

“At the age of forty, Billy Baker discovers that he's lost something crucial along the way: his friends. Other priorities always seemed to come first, until all his close friendships had lapsed into distant memories. When he takes an assignment to write an article about the modern loneliness epidemic, he realizes just how common it is to be a middle-aged loner: almost fifty million Americans over the age of forty-five, especially men, suffer from chronic loneliness, which the surgeon general has declared one of the nation's "greatest pathologies," worse than smoking, obesity, or heart disease in increasing a person's risk for premature death. Determined to defy these odds, Baker vows to salvage his lost friendships and blaze a path for men (and women) everywhere to improve their relationships old and new.”

You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships As An Adult by Lane Moore

“Part memoir, part self-help, You Will Find Your People uncovers the complex, frightening, and often vulnerable process of building real, healthy friendships and finally creating your chosen family. Moore takes readers on a journey that examines and challenges the ideas of friendship we've seen in pop culture, answers every question you've ever had about friend breakups, and teaches us how to fearlessly ask for what we want in friendships once and for all.”

The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays by Athena Dixon

"What does it mean to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of an online world? Searching for connection, Dixon plumbs the depths of communal loneliness, asking essential questions of herself and all of us: How have her past decisions left her so alone? Are we, as humans, linked by a shared loneliness? How do we see the world and our place in it? And finally, how do we find our way back to each other? Searing and searching, The Loneliness Files is a groundbreaking memoir in essays that ultimately brings us together in its piercing, revelatory examination of how and why it is that we break apart.”

This Long Thread: Women of Color on Craft, Community, and Connection by Jen Hewett

"Be inspired by the work and stories of innovative women of color who are making exceptional contributions to the world of craft. The diverse range of textile artists featured include knitters, quilters, sewers, weavers, and more who are making inspiring and exciting work, yet who are often overlooked by mainstream media. Weaving together interviews, first-person essays, and profiles, this book explores the work and contributions of women of color across the fiber arts community, representing a wide spectrum of age, region, cultural identity, and economic class.”

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke

"When Kristen Radtke was in her twenties, she learned that, as her father was growing up, he would crawl onto his roof in rural Wisconsin and send signals out on his ham radio. Those CQ calls were his attempt to reach somebody--anybody--who would respond. In Seek You, Radtke uses this image as her jumping off point into a piercing exploration of loneliness and the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another. She looks at the very real current crisis of loneliness through the lenses of gender, violence, technology, and art. Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to Instagram to Harry Harlow's experiments in which infant monkeys were given inanimate surrogate mothers, Radtke uncovers all she can about how we engage with friends, family, and strangers alike, and what happens--to us and to them--when we disengage. With her distinctive, emotionally charged drawings and unflinchingly sharp prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully reframes some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments."

- by Corina, West Windsor Branch