Loneliness: The Millennial's Plague

Loneliness is the virus that is killing our generation.

The online connections we can make, while they help us stay in touch, have also hyper-exposed us to one another.

We can have a 2-minute conversation with a stranger and gain access to a library of their likes and dislikes merely by friending them on Facebook.

After setting up a date, we can go ahead and find out everything we would've learned on that date. Rather than hearing it from the person, studying their face and looking into their eyes--connecting like real human beings, in other words--we can find out everything we think we need to know online. And then we wonder why we're so awkward with each other.

This is not another anti-Facebook rant. FB is not the enemy, but merely a piece of technology, a tool. It can be used for good or bad.

The enemy is much deeper and more sophisticated. The enemy wants us to feel disconnected, inadequate, lonely.

The enemy wants to make us forget that we are loved.

I have felt the signature emotion of our generation. It is a deep longing, buried so as to be almost invisible to us, in the back of our hearts. Its calls echo up to our minds and manifest themselves through our desperate measures in search of connection.

The longing burns like an inferno within us, and we long for connection, communion. But we aren't looking for it in the right places.

Consider the picture above. Yes, it's funny, but think about what it implies: that guy is miserable unless he can turn someone on. If we think that way, then we truly will be "forever alone," whether we find someone or not. The egotistical joys of pleasure are fleeting, and leave us feeling worse in the long run.

We think that romance will quench the fire. We look for a date. Sometimes we get absolutely desperate. We try. Sometimes we fail.

And we might find someone, even the right person, but we soon wake up and realize that, despite the ring on our finger, we are still the same. Life goes on. Turns out Marriage, wonderful as it is, doesn't complete our happiness like we thought it would. And that fire still burns.

We turn to friendships, sometimes. They help. They give us a true connection like Marriage, and they are an essential part of life, but they still do not complete us.

And so that feeling remains. You know it well. It's the one that somehow, time and again, gets you to scroll down that Newsfeed, looking...for what? The moment you stop, you realize that the Newsfeed is an infinite void that promises something, but never really delivers.

There is a deep emptiness within every individual. We are tricked into thinking it's our job to fill this emptiness, but we are running against a brick wall if we try. This space can only be filled. We cannot fulfill ourselves.

I believe in a personal God. God is personal because He is a person, He knows you as a person, and is open to relating to you that way. And there is nothing and no one in the universe powerful enough and big enough to fill that emptiness that burns inside you except for Him.

He made the space infinitely large so that He could fill it, complete our personalities with supernatural Love. Nothing else is going to cure our loneliness.

So how do we start to cultivate this relationship, if the loneliness we face has been weighing us down lately?

The answer is the opposite of what you would expect: go off alone for a while. Take a walk every day for a week or month, visiting public places and secluded natural hideaways. Eat a meal alone without reading or playing with a smartphone. And then, when your distractions and self-consciousness have melted away, you will start reaching for Him. You see, God is always there, but sometimes we shut Him out and the only way to get ourselves seeing Him again is to go back to the basics.

"You will seek me and you will find me," says The LORD, "when you seek me with all of your heart."

~ Jeremiah 29:13