I read the following comment in the ‘The Guardian’ newspaper quite a while ago - ‘The dilemma, I’m 22 years old and going into my fourth year in medical school. I have been using study to escape loneliness, insecurity and anxiety that arose from the stress of the course and my failure to establish friends’.
Another person wrote in The Telegraph “‘Life looks good on the surface - so why are we all so lonely? ‘But you can’t be lonely,’ a friend tells me crossly. ‘You’re out every night.’ The backhanded compliment makes me laugh. But it also makes me sad. On paper my life sounds glamorous. Denying you feel lonely makes no more sense than denying you feel hunger’” These are the comments of a high profile journalist who looks as if she is living the high life but most certainly doesn’t feel as if she is.
A new national commission investigating loneliness in the UK, launched in January 2020, shows that a fifth of the population privately admits they are ‘always or often lonely’. But two-thirds of those people would never confess to having a problem in public. Here is the problem - loneliness is the devastating unseen result of the pressures and emptiness of modern life when people live devoid of real purpose and meaning.
