Let's begin! Becoming a connected human starts here.
Hello you wonderful human.
Welcome to the HUMANS:CONNECTING blog.
This is a special place: where you and I can spend some time together to talk about things that you may not be able to do anywhere else in your life.
It’s a special thing to know that you can be wherever you are in the world and at any point in the future after I’ve written and published these words and it’s still just you and me, spending some time together.
It’s hard to convey just how excited I am to be here with you. That may be a strange thing to say when loneliness is one of the key themes of this blog. After all, ‘lonely’ and ‘excited’ are two words that you won’t often read in the same sentence. But this blog is not just about loneliness. It’s also about human connection and how you can become a more connected human after accepting and then sitting with your loneliness.
Loneliness and human connection are two halves of the same coin.
We’ll be getting into loneliness and aspects of human connection in future content. That content will, I hope, inspire you to take some steps towards getting the connection you need. For now, I simply want to say thank you for reading this blog and for taking the step of reading these words. Opening the blog took courage, because no one really wants to engage with this content unless they need to. I love your courage. That kind of courage will move mountains.
To borrow from Neil Armstrong, opening this blog may have been one small step, but it can be a giant step for you becoming a connected human.
But here I am, getting ahead of myself in my excitement. I do that.
Let’s get back to the basics.
This blog is for you
You’re already aware of loneliness and you suspect that maybe you’ve been experiencing it in your life. You may have just become aware of it, or you’ve been carrying the thoughts and feelings of loneliness around with you for years.
And while you’re aware of loneliness and that you may have been experiencing it in some form or other, you also want something that you can do and use in your life to help you feel connected.
You’re in the right place for that.
What you can expect here
The words you read in this blog will be rooted in lived experience, mostly mine. The work here at HUMANS:CONNECTING stems from my frustrations with the shortcomings of support for loneliness that I encountered when I realised that I was experiencing loneliness as I entered mid-life. Advice on loneliness was for the elderly and the bereaved. I was neither, and I had real trouble finding advice that spoke to me and I could do something with.
I chose to do something about it, rather than stay frustrated. Fast forward eight years to the time I’m writing this, and you’re now reading the words I wish were available to me.
I really wanted no-nonsense and practical advice. I didn’t want to translate generic advice and apply it into my own life. I didn’t want to read dense language written by academics that I needed another degree to decipher and apply to my life. I didn’t want advice from websites that focused on mental health and wellbeing. Honestly, the advice there seemed so clinical and somehow fed the belief that I was broken.
I know that there’s a stigma to loneliness. I know that you know it, too. I have no time for the stigma of loneliness. Sure, I respect it, and I acknowledge that it’s there, but I’m done with pussyfooting around it.
I’m here to destigmatise loneliness. And we destigmatise loneliness just like we destigmatise everything else: we talk about it openly and honestly and say its name frequently. If you’ve listened to an episode or two of the HUMANS:CONNECTING podcast, you’ll know what I mean about how talking openly and honestly about loneliness is a powerful way to destigmatise it.
While I will be writing the blog, it’s not just me working at HUMANS:CONNECTING. There’s a whole team here who are also here for you. They may write a post from time to time, but mostly it’ll be me here with you.
The posts will generally be based on me wanting to give you some information about loneliness and human connection that will inform you, support you, challenge you and inspire you to become a connected human.
The posts may come from seeking to answer some of your big questions. They may be from some thoughts that I’ve been having, observations that I’ve made and conversations that I’ve had with others working on loneliness and human connection. They may be book reviews or some thoughts on issues about loneliness and human connection that are happening in the nascent social health and wellbeing sector.
But this blog is always going to be all about you. It’s about giving you something to reflect upon and is useful for you as you begin the process to become a more connected human.
What this blog isn’t
This blog is not professional advice. It’s also not crisis support. And because I don’t know you yet, it’s also not personalised advice.
The blog – just like our podcast – is not here to give you the quick fix to loneliness and instant feelings of connection. You may have tried some of those already and you know that the theory is often far tougher to apply.
There is a simple fix to human loneliness: it’s human connection. But simple does not mean that it’s easy to apply.
Finally, this blog is not AI-generated. The blog titles may have been generated by AI after it zhuzhes what I’d originally come up with (I struggle to come up with punchy and catchy headlines), but the content is all from me and other humans.
I’m very firm on this. It’s inconceivable for me to write and speak on human loneliness and how you, me and all humans can connect when the words on loneliness and human connection have been generated by a non-human entity.
Besides, this is a very intimate space. It’s me writing and publishing these words and you taking some time in your day wherever you are in the world to reflect on human connection and how you can become a more connected human. There’s no way I’d give that to a non-human entity who can’t perceive the joy it brings.
Who am I to be doing this?
I’ve been doing this work so long that I feel like my loneliness story is plastered everywhere.
Like your story, my story of loneliness goes back years – like, back to childhood. Honestly, there’s probably a multi-volume book in my story and experiences (For the record, I’d like Ryan Reynolds to play me in the movie adaptation of that book). Rather than throw it all at you in this first post, I think it’s best if my story and experience come up organically in posts as the issues arise – just like they would in a real conversation.
I want to be clear: I didn’t want to be lonely. My life’s plan didn’t include me becoming a global loneliness thought leader nor did it include my name and the social enterprise I founded being synonymous with loneliness. My story of becoming a more connected human starts when I accepted that I was experiencing loneliness and started choosing connection.
But the super-quick abridged version is that I spent a lot of my life saying and doing what I believed was the right thing. I was the master at saying the right thing to the right person at the right time to get the right outcome. I had a great – and successful – career in the Australian Public Service, which included time spent living and working overseas as an Australian diplomat. I was married to a wonderful woman, the father of two amazing children, and we had our own house with two cars in the garage. We had a group of friends and family who always wanted to see more of us. I was living a life I’d wanted to live since I was a teenager.
But somewhere along the way in all the effort to fit in and show that I was made of the right stuff, I lost me. And because I wasn’t being me but was wearing a mask, the connection that those around me were trying to give me wasn’t registering. The mask was getting it and very little penetrated behind it.
I was terrified of being called out as being too much or not enough, so I strove for perfection. I was also terrified of being found out for being not straight or that somehow my career was all a big mistake. I strove to make everyone happy and never give cause for digging deeper or going behind the carefully constructed façade.
I was terrified of being seen and heard, while all the while desperately wanting to be seen and heard.
I know you know exactly what I mean by that last sentence.
I was great at hiding behind my mask. But maintaining the mask was exhausting and I felt so terribly lonely.
Fast forward to now, and proud to say that I’m me. I’m me within myself and I’m now me in the world. I’m a Dad to two sons, a partner to Jeff, a son, a brother, a cousin and a friend. I love deep conversations over a good coffee.
I love moving and challenging my body and being in awe of what it can do and how it’s keeping me alive.
I’m endlessly curious. I love to travel and explore the world. I take photos and I passionately believe that the 1990s was the greatest musical era ever. I’m also a massive plane nerd/avgeek, so I’m happy to nerd out with you if you also love airlines, airports and planes. This is a safe space to talk about Airbus’ current dominance and Boeing’s woes.
It’s not all rainbows and unicorn farts. Life is still life, but I’m excited to be living my life and meeting life as me. That makes all the difference.
I’m also excited to be right here with you to serve you, support you, challenge and inspire you towards becoming a more connected human.
That said, if you can’t stand the suspense of letting me and my story unfurl naturally and you really want to know more about me and my story of loneliness, read this on The Lonely Diplomat and this on The Loneliness Guy, two sites I’ve created over the past six years to support humans experiencing loneliness before creating HUMANS:CONNECTING.
Let's end your loneliness
Blogs will always end with a suggestion for you to use in your life to help you become a more connected human through using the advice that’s come up in the blog. But that’ll start in the next post.
For now, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any future content as it gets released into the wild.
Seriously, subscribe. Social media is a fickle beast, and unless you subscribe and get an email direct to your inbox, you can never be guaranteed that you’ll see our content. We’d hate for you to miss it and sit in your loneliness any longer than you need to.
Have you subscribed yet?
Until next time, be awesomely you.
~ Phil
Important:
All views expressed above are the author’s and are intended to inform, support, challenge and inspire you to consider the issue of loneliness and increase awareness of the need for authentic connection with your self, with those most important to you and your communities as an antidote to loneliness. Unless otherwise declared, the author is not a licensed mental health professional and these words are not intended to be crisis support. If you’re in crisis, this page has some links for immediate support for where you may be in the world.
If you’re in crisis, please don’t wait. Get support now.
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