JOYCE FEGAN: Time to let the loneliness out of the sheds...

Joyce Fegan asks how is it we have managed to engineer the most connected society of all time while also creating an epidemic of loneliness?

JOYCE FEGAN: Time to let the loneliness out of the sheds...

Joyce Fegan asks how is it we have managed to engineer the most connected society of all time while also creating an epidemic of loneliness?

Every so often I drive past this small building that has a sign outside that reads “Men’s Sheds”. I’ve been driving past this particular building for years. I wondered if it was what I thought it was — a place where men went to meet up, to avoid feeling lonely.

In my mind I pictured retired men mostly, maybe single men or widowed men, and fathers whose adult children had scattered like the four winds, never to call Ireland home again.

I imagined all these guys coming together, and I wondered was it awkward for them initially? Walking through the door was akin to saying out loud, “I’m a bit lonely. I’m in need of a chat.”

I saw more of them popping up around the country. And then, at 32 years of age, I started to think about loneliness.

The author John Boyne had been on the radio with Ryan Tubridy in February 2017, he was talking about the book he had out at the time, The Heart’s Invisible Furies. The two men talked about loneliness. John, a man in his 40s, talked about his own experience of loneliness. Loneliness, in my mind, was a feeling only experienced by 80-year-old bachelors living in the west of Ireland.

And then I realised the anonymous feeling I had been carrying around with me was in fact loneliness.

It was a slow, dawning realisation. I was newly married, from a large family, had a wide circle of friends, a job I got satisfaction from and one that came with decent, supportive colleagues. Everything was perfect on paper. But the feeling on the inside didn’t match up with the life on the outside.

I lost the assumption that loneliness was something octogenarians in Connaught had the monopoly on and I started looking around at everyone; new mums, who were home alone and solely responsible for their infant’s life, college graduates “from the country” who were up living in Dublin and part of the rat-race commute.

My own loneliness had caught me off guard, but surely I wasn’t the only one under 80 to get a waft of it? I asked my father had he ever felt lonely during his life. He’ll be 70 soon and has a very active social life. He said that, as the youngest of four, when all his siblings went off and got married, he’d had his brush with loneliness. It was the Swinging Sixties, he was in his 20s and living close to the capital. Everything, again, looked good on paper.

To say you’re lonely is a bit embarrassing isn’t it? We’ve just reached a stage in Ireland where some of us can admit to feeling anxious. Braver ones still might mention feeling low. But lonely? Who one wants to declare themselves a Billy No Mates?

But loneliness is not about the quantity of friends you keep, it’s about the quality of the connection you maintain.

Connection is underpinned by that daring act — honesty. How often do you respond with “fine” when a family member or an old friend asks you how you are? And the trouble is we get used to saying it. Honesty, after a while, starts to become an unfamiliar and scary concept.

In my own life it was social media and instant messages that caused the loneliness. My group of friends could stay in touch via a buzzing WhatsApp group, with some living in the southern hemisphere, others in America, and some being first-time mums.

When life is busy and priorities change, it is easy to reach for the phone and think it’ll help you to maintain your most valued friendships. But WhatsApp can never replace face-to-face connection.

The ability to check-in with a WhatsApp message or survey a friend’s life via Facebook gives you the illusion of connection. But connection isn’t something that can be faked.

This week, I drove past that same Men’s Sheds. It was on the same morning I had read all about “the movement of Men’s Sheds” in this newspaper. I read of stories of connection and community and support. There was one woman, in the west of Ireland, whose builder had let her down at short notice, for a charity event she needed to construct a platform for. Someone thought to contact the local Men’s Sheds.

Within an hour, six men, aged from 55 to 75, had come together, tools in hand, to step in and save the day.

That same day I met one of those valued friends, who’s home from America. She told me that her parents, rain, hail, or shine, take off every morning at 8am to go for a walk with six friends. It’s their way of checking in on each other: “Who’s had a hip replacement?” and “Who needs a few shepherd’s pies for the freezer?”

See, these wiser generations use their phones not as a replacement for connection but as a tool to organise ways to connect.

These phones and apps and social media platforms are the microwave meals of friendship. They give us instant, easy ways to connect with friends, but are they actually nurturing relationships?

It’s estimated that 400,000 of us will suffer from loneliness at one point or another — that’s according to Tilda, The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing.

Women, despite our reputation for being open with our emotions, are more likely to feel lonely (41% of women compared with 33% of men). And research done in Germany found that loneliness peaks at around age 30, not 80 as the stereotype suggests.

Human beings thrive on social connection, it’s as fundamental a need as food or shelter. And yet how is it we have managed to engineer the most connected society of all time while also creating an epidemic of loneliness?

Next time you go to send a WhatsApp message, maybe take a leaf out of the Men’s Sheds groups, and use it to arrange a meet-up instead of as a paltry stand-in for connection.

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