Lonely in the crowd

Why is it that in a world where we can contact 1000s of people at the click of a button, we are more disconnected than ever?

You can be in a room full of people and still feel like you don’t exist. You can be at a dinner table, in a classroom, even in a relationship—and feel deeply, painfully alone. But with one person, one real moment of connection, that loneliness can lift. Not because the number of people changed, but because the nature of the encounter did.

Martin Buber, the existential philosopher, spoke of two ways we relate to the world: I-It and I-Thou. We need both. The I-It mode is how we get through the day. It’s functional. It’s how we navigate systems, roles, schedules. We see the cashier, the colleague, the stranger. But we don’t really see them—not as people. We see them as categories, functions, things.

In contrast, the I-Thou encounter is something else entirely. It’s intimate. Personal. It’s when we meet another human being not as a role or a label, but as a person—with presence, dignity, complexity. It’s not about analyzing someone. It’s about experiencing them. Feeling seen. And seeing.

More than the sum of the parts

It’s like learning to play an orchestral piece. At first, you don’t hear the music—you see notes on a page. You break it down: one instrument, one bar, one line at a time. Each part must be learned in isolation. It’s necessary. But it’s not the experience of the music. It’s practice. It’s scaffolding. The I-it of the music.

The real experience only comes when you step back and hear it all at once—the full orchestra, the rise and fall, the tension and release. The beauty, the power, the ache. That’s the moment when the music moves you. And you can't get that by focusing on fragments alone.

The I-It relationship is like staying in the notes. It gets us through the day. But the I-Thou is the whole piece played aloud. It’s what moves us. It’s what makes us feel.

When life is reduced to fragments—checklists, labels, surface-level roles—we lose the experience of being moved. And without that, something in us flattens. We begin to mistake connection for function. We stop feeling alive in each other’s presence. And slowly, we stop feeling seen at all.

We are together, and not together at all. Physically side by side, but absent in presence. Because we move through the world in an I-It mode—seeing others as roles, profiles, functions—we’ve stopped really meeting each other. And the result is profound loneliness. The kind of loneliness that statistics now confirm: young people, more connected than ever through devices, are lonelier than any generation before them.

What Social Media Has Cost Us

This is where social media enters the picture. In theory, it connects us. But most of the time, it strips people down to objects. A selfie. A soundbite. A few seconds of video. We judge, we swipe, we scroll. And the people behind those images? They become blurred—flattened into content, data, performance.

Even when we resonate with a post, it’s rarely an I-Thou encounter. We aren’t truly meeting someone. We’re evaluating them. And in turn, we start to see ourselves that way too—something to be judged. Quantified. Liked or ignored.

Over time, our self-worth becomes entangled with metrics: likes, comments, shares. Our opinions are no longer explored in dialogue, but tested in the court of public feedback. And when no one responds—or worse, when they reject us—we begin to lose trust in our own voice. Or we become defensive. Reactive. Performative.

And all the while, the deeper part of us—the one that longs to be known—is left waiting.

We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for - John Keating, Dead Poets Society

The Loneliest Connected Generation

In his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt points to the sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and loneliness that began around 2010—the same time smartphones became constant companions. We didn’t just gain access to each other. We lost something too.

We lost the art of deep conversation. The ability to sit in silence without reaching for distraction. The muscle for complexity—the capacity to hold the truth that someone can be both wonderful and flawed.

Today, even when we’re physically together, we’re often not with each other. Teenagers sit side by side, not speaking. Or they text each other from two feet away. And it’s not just them. We all do it. We’ve become fluent in I-It—and nearly illiterate in I-Thou.

We cancel quickly. We categorize even quicker. And we rarely stop to wonder what might change if we stayed long enough to actually know someone. Not just their bio. Not just their opinions. But their personhood.

We are surrounded. But we are starving—for presence, for depth, for the feeling of being met. Not as a role, not as a brand, not as a fragment—but as a person.

You can be surrounded by people and still feel like a ghost. When everyone is an “it,” no one is fully seen. And without being seen, we vanish—even to ourselves.

To recover that, we need to practice the rare and radical act of truly seeing each other again. Putting down the phones and sitting with each other.