Drink from a Silver Cup of Self-Worth

Loneliness is one of the red, radioactive Awful-Land elements in the Periodic Table of Worthiness and one of the most painful.

I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness of late.

I was working on America’s tune “Lonely People” and the refrain kept repeating in my head:

“Don’t give up until you drink from a silver cup, and ride that highway in the sky.”

An amazingly simple and very powerful phrase when you think about it.

Loneliness is so vastly different than solitude. I personally LOVE solitude in the rare moments when I can get it. For one thing, it’s completely voluntary and pleasant. You can go inside your own little sweet world and think out and cultivate all kinds of new ideas. I remember people I knew, funny things I’ve done, and interesting places I visited from around the world. Often, I laugh to myself about it all.

There are distinct types of loneliness depending on age, place, and circumstance. Been there and done that!

As a child, I was shy, nerdy, and just did not fit in although I tried. Many kids like me sit by themselves at lunch or worse, try to join a group and get completely ignored. The group just puts up with our dweeby presence until the bell rang.

Teenagers have it particularly tough, particularly now. All adolescents need to feel a sense of belonging and not just having Fortnite friends. Physical presence has been missing and with it, the opportunity to learn social and non-verbal cues, voice, and subtle body language.

The transition from school to the work world has been at best turbulent. Many young adults are underemployed. Working from home is boring and lonely. Staring at a screen for hours adds to that sense of loneliness as we are reduced to 2×3-inch rectangles.

Just me in my box. Yay Zoom!

During a recent meeting of eight other people, I felt like I was watching an episode of Hollywood Squares with me in the center Paul Lynde box.

I just don’t see any normality to dating in a pandemic. Swiping right on people like a page from in an old LL Bean catalog is just too weird and disposable. If you arrange a meet-up, you need to show your CDC proof of vaccination card! How do you read a face wearing a mask? Eyes can be telling, I guess. Kissing? How does that work?

Sex? Awkward! Probably not. Maybe? Who knows?

There’s the loneliness that occurs within a marriage. An executive who commutes 20 hours a week and needs to be on call is met at the door by his unhappy wife with a list of all the things he failed to accomplish at home. And then there are the women who stay in horrible marriages due to feeling unworthy of anything better or out of economic necessity. Nights are the worst times.

Where’s their silver cup?

Loneliness, when you’re over 65, is difficult. People at this age begin to lose spouses, friends, siblings, and purpose. One of the worst features of senior loneliness is fading relevance. Nobody seems to care and somehow, life is passing you by. Your experiences and wisdom are relatively dismissed with a laugh and a sarcastic “OK, Boomer”. I see my people in elastic incontinent undergarments as disposable as they are on a flatscreen. The Who sang our anthem lyric:

“Hope I die before I get old. Talking bout my generation.”

And people die. They die alone in hospital beds on ventilators needlessly because they were unvaccinated. There are millions in the world with no Pfizer, no Moderna, and no Astra Zeneca access. They die by suicide like Amanda did, in September, National Suicide Awareness Month in America.

Father MacKenzie darns his socks alone. Eleanor Rigby is forgotten.

Now that I have you good and depressed, what can we do about loneliness and getting out of Awful-Land?

What’s needed is a change of thought, a paradigm shift that goes from ME to WE.

To make that connection, we need to target attachment and belonging as our goals. If you think of socialization as a very random process of folks bumping into each other and eventually adhering, you’ll have a visual image to keep in mind.

Getting on social media, dating apps and the like is vanilla and a bit lazy. We need to have an actual, physical presence to connect in a tangible way. Hard to do in a pandemic but it can be done safely.

Join this. Join that. Sign up. Be on the team. Show up (88% of life is just that). Push yourself out of inertia. When the roll is called, shout “Here!”

Put forward your Worth [Wo], Beliefs [Be], Faith [Ft], Friendship [Fr], Values [V], and Humanity [Hu] to help others in the process. Take the pledge to become a Worthy Warrior [Ww] and join others to make your corner of the world better. The Positivity [Ps] that comes forward will attract people to you.

Because loneliness is a self-centered state, the fix is being other-directed. To get from ME to WE takes empathy. Among the shortages out there right now is a major empathic scarcity. The ability to be empathic is unique to humans and forms the basis of Humanity [Hu] and mutual Understanding [Un].

With empathy, guess what happens? Connection and Belonging.

ME becomes WE.

Tell your story of how you went from ME to WE. You can do that right here on the Being Worthy website by sharing your feedback.