Loneliness and the Need for Human Connection

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A Need to Connect

In the movie “Cast Away,” Tom Hanks portrays a character who, upon being stranded on an island for several years, forms a deep relationship with a volleyball. The depth of this connection is hugely disproportional to the objective nature of the object. A volleyball is quite incapable of interactive communication, despite how strong a fan’s desire during a game may be for that to be true. Regardless of a leather ball’s lack of an ability to converse or its possession of any agency to engage in relationship building, Hanks’s character draws a face on it and proceeds to converse, forming a bond that, when the ball is lost at sea, results in profound emotional pain. Whatever can be said about this Hollywood depiction of human psychology, the need to have relationship bonds is something we all share due to our inalienable humanity. Further, that need can and will, when unfulfilled, push us to project a connection that exists only in our imagination. Our need to connect can lead to "false" positives, to our detriment.

For those who may not be aware of the movie reference or simply don’t appreciate Hanks’s acting as much as I do, the rise in toxic fan culture, or just entertainer worship itself, is a continual example of our capacity for creating relationships, even deeply emotional ones, despite the lack of any truth to their existence. Video examples abound of fans getting to meet the actors who play their favorite characters, often cosplaying in connection to that character, and the person is overcome with emotional expression. Does the person know the actor? They do not. Are they friends or compatriots, or have they formed an adult, honest, reciprocal relationship with the actor? No to this question as well. The connection formed is with a fiction, the actor being simply a representation of the fan’s projective fantasy. The only difference between the relationship here and that portrayed by Hanks with the artistically modified ball is the form of representation.

Incidentally, it is little wonder that fans believe themselves to have an outsized role, or believe they should have such a role, in how characters are depicted, who represents them, and the stories accompanying them. The entirety of the exercise exists in their mind, a realm that is increasingly divorced from consequential forms of reality by the digitalization of entertainment and the exclusivity with which people live their lives in it. The world of “Ready, Player One” is a techno-fantasy only because we haven’t reached the level of technological progress to build it, but in lesser form, it already exists. I’ve worked with people for whom the entirety of their relationships are digital, where the physical connection exists only to the extent of their fingertips meeting the keyboard.

This is not a place to note the consequences of such a life and the world it creates; it is only to point out that our capacity for relationship building, with strong emotional responses, is an intrinsic part of our humanity. We can no more stop forming connections than we can stop acting on our cognitive biases or breathing.

Loneliness Leads to Lower Human Threshold for Relationship Formation

The epidemic of loneliness, affecting upwards of 30-60% of Americans depending on demographic, leads us to seek out connections, sometimes regardless of the actual humanity that exists in the other. Research out of Dartmouth College, published in Psychological Science, notes that a belief in loneliness or isolation lowers the threshold at which people declare the presence of animation or humanity in slowly morphing facial images. Confronted with the same progressively morphing images, those who believed they possessed secure attachments required far more human features in the morphing images before declaring they were alive. The alarming part of this was that typically, people are far more cautious when declaring the existence of a face being animate or alive. The strength of this finding is that regardless of the people’s real-life relational world, the mere projected belief that such was absent caused this caution to diminish.

If forming relationships with non-human forms resulted in a reduction in loneliness, there’d be a case for encouraging it, albeit with some likely caveats. However, paradoxically, the opposite seems to be the case, particularly when it concerns gaming. Research out of the University of North Carolina looked at the connection between anxiety and gaming, with the idea being that people with high anxiety use gaming as a way to form relationships more easily in a reduced-threat environment. Rather than helping reduce anxiety and loneliness, those found to play more hours actually increased their sense of loneliness. The substitute of non-human forms, driven by how loneliness pushes us to form any relationship at all, did not solve the problem; it, in fact, made it worse.

Reduced Humanity is Self-Reinforcing

The feedback loop from the research noted above is not difficult to see. Anxiety over the potential pitfalls of seeking human relationships combined with loneliness leads to engaging in activity that, at the surface level, appears less threatening, only to increase the sense of loneliness that drives the person to find less and less humanity in relationship building. One can only speculate, and many have, at the role such a loop may have in the increasing toxicity of the terminally online.

Empathy is the ability to connect a characteristic one has with another through imaginative projection. This is why empathy has limits, as it depends on perceived shared characteristics and the personal reflective capacity to make the connections. Generally speaking, the existence of empathy is negatively associated with behavior that is harmful or negatively impacts another because the other person is imaginatively an extension of oneself. This is where empathy can turn dangerous and lead to various forms of stalking and, similarly, of othering or dehumanization. In the former, the extension of oneself makes the other person no longer an individual with their own agency and needs. In the latter, the other no longer exists as an individual as well and, therefore, can be dismissed as possessing any worth to be considered for consequences and thus ethical consideration.

Coming back to the research out of Dartmouth, the projected story of loneliness or lack of emotional attachment leads people to see human-ness in faces where few real characteristics are actually present. When it comes to the utilization of empathy, when it comes to determining the safety or care that another person is giving, the accuracy of such judgment becomes less and less as we do so from a place of loss or lack.

Actively Engage with the Human

The relational principles I've developed and helped people incorporate into their lives broaden the understanding of human relational reality. In this case, two principles concern the subjective nature of perspective and how relationship as a way of being is the foundation of our existence. These lead to recognizing that our relationships form out of the contextual nature of the stories we embody. Embodiment is not just a turn of phrase; it’s a term to acknowledge that we exist as conscious beings in bodies of flesh and bone. The combination of story-making through empathy and an embodied experience points to how our relationships are only as honest, open, and beneficial as the breadth of our stories allows.

There is never a moment in our lives when we are not in a relationship with something or someone. We are always in a relationship; all that changes is the form such takes. By reminding ourselves of the reality of our relational existence and the power of our stories, we can begin to be more careful in our decision-making when dwelling on narratives that lead us astray.