The One You Feed - Emily White on How to Deal with Loneliness

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Emily White is a former lawyer turned writer. She is the author of Lonely, Learning to Live With Solitude. She has written for the Daily Mail,  the New York Post, the Huffington Post, and The Guardian. Her latest book is called Count Me In: How I Stepped Off the Sidelines, Created Connection, and Built a Fuller, Richer, More Lived-in Life.In this episode, Eric and Emily discuss how to deal with loneliness and strategies for finding belonging.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Emily White and I Discuss How to Deal with Loneliness and…Her book, Count Me In: How I Stepped Off the Sidelines, Created Connection, and Built a Fuller, Richer, More Lived-in Life.Understanding loneliness and the difference between depression How “social depression” lifts when you connect with othersBelonging is feeling welcome and neededHow it takes time and effort to find belongingFinding belonging in something you valueThe difference between public belonging and private belongingEmily White links:Emily’s HomepageTwitterExplore the science behind weight loss and partner with your healthcare provider for a healthy approach to your weight management, visit truthaboutweight.comWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with Emily White, you might also enjoy these other episodes:How to Become Unlonely with Jillian RichardsonCommunity and Connection in an Online World with Emma GannonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I think for a lot of people it's because they expect belonging to be there right away and it never is belonging is something you always have to work at Welcome to The One You Feed.

Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Emily White. Emily is a former lawyer turned writer. She's the author of Lonely, Learning to Live with Solitude. Emily has also written for the Daily Mail, the New York Post, the Huffington Post, and the Guardian. Her latest book, which will be released in January, is called Count Me In, How I Stepped Off the Sidelines, Created Connection, and Built a Fuller, Richer, More Lived-In Life. Hi, Emily. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm happy

that you could join us tonight. You've got two books that I found both pretty interesting, so I'm looking forward to getting into discussing each of those in a little bit more detail. But we will start with the theme of the show, which is the parable of the two wolves. So there is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd

like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I found the parable almost kind of hauntingly apt to the work that I've been doing over the past seven years. I started by writing about loneliness, and loneliness had been a really defining theme in my life for a long, long time. And I'd say that would be kind of the first wolf, the wolf we don't like. And if you had told me when I was writing my first book, which was about loneliness, that I would go on to write a book about connection, I wouldn't have believed you. I wouldn't have believed that second better wolf was out there and in me as well. But I did go on, so I feel like I've sort of, I mean, to stay within your parable, traveled from one wolf to the other.

And I guess the main thing I take from the parable is just the truth of it, that you wind up with what you feed and that you can choose what you feed. And I traveled from loneliness to connection by making some specific choices and feeding that decision to connect. And I was kind of surprised with where I landed. But I like the parable because it does represent these choices that we can make in life and how those choices shape us. And so your first book was titled Lonely, and it was about your experience with loneliness as well as you spent a lot of time sort of studying loneliness in general. Can you share a little bit about what you learned in the researching and writing of that book? Sure. Lonely was published in 2010, and I was writing, so I wrote it kind of in my mid to late 30s,

and I was writing about a period in my early 30s, early to mid 30s, when I was extremely lonely. That would be the bad wolf. And I was sort of driven to write the book because I needed to understand what was happening to me. I wanted to learn everything I could about loneliness. what was happening to me. I wanted to learn everything I could about loneliness. And so I learned about, I taught myself about the physiology, the psychology, the sociology,

everything really I could to understand loneliness and to understand the role that it had played and was continuing to play in my life. And I found, I mean, it's not everyone who can spend sort of four years reading about their demon or their bad wolf, but I found doing so extraordinarily helpful. It was sort of like a sustained period of mindfulness where I just stared at what the problem in my life was. And I learned a lot. I talked to, the irony was, I think one of the things that helped is I wound up talking to just a huge number of people, mainly in the U.S., about loneliness, but also all over the world. And it was really, it was a great way to learn about more, about something that had been confronting me my whole life, really. really. So what are the main themes out of that book? Tell me a little bit about what loneliness is, maybe what some of the main causes are. I'm curious about, as you and I were talking briefly before the show, there's a couple things I'm always curious about in regards to loneliness, a couple things that come up to me when I think about it. And one is really the connection between loneliness and depression, or I've heard people say that

sometimes depression is, or yeah, depression is masquerading as loneliness. And then the other thing I'd be curious about what you learned in that book is about the phenomenon of being lonely while in a group of people or around other people. Sure. I think a lot of the confusion between loneliness and depression arises from the fact that it's okay in our culture to say that you're depressed, and it's really not totally okay to say that you're lonely. So people are kind of blurring the waters, muddying the waters intentionally there. For me, I knew I was lonely as opposed to depressed because for me, depression has a tendency to blot emotions out. And I found my loneliness was extremely acute. It was an extremely intense sense. And I knew what was wrong. You know, depression, and again, I'm speaking for

myself, is often sort of this global sense of what's wrong, you know, and I knew what was wrong. You know, depression, and again, I'm speaking for myself, is often sort of this global sense of what's wrong, you know, and I knew what was wrong. I felt too alone. And a lot of people or some people who write about loneliness and depression will talk about social depression. And by that, they mean that it lifts when you feel connected. And I think when people say they're depressed and lonely, what they often, but sometimes they are. I mean, you can be clinically depressed and lonely at the same time. But I think a lot of the times, I like the notion of social depression. We don't use that term in conversation. It's only used when people are writing about loneliness. But the notion of

feeling better when you're connected is just so intuitively sound. And I found for myself that what I was calling depression or what I was calling loneliness lifted when I found more connection. And that kind of flows into the sense or the idea of being lonely in a group because I firmly believe that you can be lonely on your own and you can be lonely in a group. My loneliness hit at its absolute worst. I used to be a lawyer,

and I was spending every single day in an office filled with... I practiced a specific type of law, so these were like-minded people who had decided to join the same firm, and I felt entirely alone. And having... I think there's a fatigue that goes along with hiding depression, but I think there's a special fatigue that goes along with hiding loneliness because you have to pretend that you feel connected when you don't and that's exhausting.

And so I think in some ways it's easier to be lonely when you're alone because at least no one is asking you to pretend to be something that you're not. It's often, I hear this repeatedly, I've heard from many, many, many thousands of lonely people and a lot of people will talk about, and this is a dangerous thing that goes back to your who do you feed parable. The danger is you feel better when you're alone, when you're lonely in some ways, and that can just start feeding the loneliness. Is there a definition that you use for lonely or certain causes of loneliness that we could maybe explore? It gets just kind of pedantic when people start defining loneliness. I think everyone knows what it is. And when you start seeing the written definitions,

they seem to sort of start to break from the lived experience of loneliness. I always say loneliness is a sense, a subjective sense, because you can be with people, you can be in a marriage, you can be anything, of being too much on your own

and feeling vulnerable and unhappy and resentful and angry because of it. It's the isolation that's the problem. And again, that sets it off from depression because so many things could cause depression. Whereas with loneliness, it's this sense of just being asked to be too much on your own. And what causes that loneliness? What causes, say, for example, or what are some of the causes of people who are in very similar social situations, for example,

one to feel very lonely and another to not feel so lonely? I think not getting what you need from that social situation. I mean, some people, I mean, you know, the idea has been put forward that we have different social needs. And so I might actually need more than you socially. And if that means not being met, maybe I'll get lonely and you don't.

But I think, I mean, and this is where we just start getting into, you know, which is what I think as opposed to the research. I think we're entering an era where we're on our own so much. You know, Eric Kleinberg's book, Going Solo, was a bestseller because he documented what so many people were experiencing, which is the experience of living alone. And if you live alone and if you don't have a lot of contacts outside of the home

and maybe your workplace isn't particularly social, I think it's becoming increasingly hard for us to make the ties that we need to fend off loneliness. And I guess I'm sort of supported in that, sadly, by the fact that loneliness rates are going up depending on what group you look at, but almost all of these studies are carried out in the States, some are in England, I guess. Loneliness is just kind of increasing across the board. There's one exception to that.

It's kind of an anomalous study involving teenagers, but I think we're growing lonelier as a society. And I, and that's part of the reason I wanted to write count me in, which is my second book about connection to see what can we do about that? You know, the question I got so many times from so many people was, you know, how do you feed the second wolf? How do you

connect in a disconnected era? And I kind of attack, I guess I explored would be a nicer word. I explored the problem for personal reasons, but I wound up getting really, really interested in what do you do in this sort of, in what Eric Kleinberg's called the going solo era. He uses that in a positive sense, you know, that you can live alone and be happy, and I think that's absolutely true. But I think going solo is kind of another way of what Robert Putnam called the bowling alone era. You know, if you

get book after book with these titles, they're kind of telling you something about how we're living our lives today. And so you went on to write, you referenced it there, your new book, which I think is coming out in January, called Count Me In. Yeah. And so in the book, you talk about a definition of belonging that is belonging equals the sense of being welcomed, needed, or accepted by a group, plus a sense of fitting in or matching with that group. I found that a really, that was put forward by the University of Michigan nursing professor Bonnie Hegarty in the 90s. University of Michigan nursing professor Bonnie Hegarty in the 90s. And I kind of made note of it when I started my research. But then as I started living the book, I found it was just bang on. Like there's some academic definitions of belonging that seemed to me to just kind of fly right past the point. And I thought that one just nailed it. You need to feel welcomed and needed and you need a sense of fit.

And so there's kind of two things that need to be in place. And when those things are in place, I explored this through volunteering. I explored it through faith. I explored it through political protest. I explored it through neighborhood. She's right. I mean, you actually do get a sense of being part of something, I keep saying larger than yourself, but I think it's so important because so many of our social ties today are about us and about our one-on-one relationships. And I was,

for personal reasons, was really looking for something other than that. And I think what I came to call Hagerty's Rule kind of captures what it was I was looking for. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston

is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really.

Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHe it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You explored this idea of belonging, and you you determined that you wanted more of that in your own life and you went out to try and find it, which is really what a lot of the book is about. And I think there was a couple things that you just touched on there that I found interesting in the book

and what you talked about, which was that it's – that ability to belong is out there, but that it's not necessarily always easy to find, and there's certainly not a one-size-fits-all thing for belonging, that you have to kind of go out and experience different things and try different things until you find both that being needed and welcome that you talked about, as well as being needed and welcomed by people that you feel like are, for lack of a better word, your people. Right. Or your type of people. And I think, yeah, the book is my exploration of belonging. And I set it out sort of as a series of takeaways or ideas that people could apply to belonging in their own lives.

So I'm never expecting, I'm not, you know, one of the things I did was volunteer zoo inspection of roadside zoos. I'm not expecting anyone to do that, but that's where my search for belonging took me for various reasons. And I think we have an idea that it's easy to connect or it's easy to belong, you know, and you've mentioned having to do more than one thing. You kind of have to try quite a lot of things in order to find a sense of belonging. Sometimes it will appear right at the outset. Other times you kind of have to make your way through the woods and stick with it. I think, and I've seen this happen, I saw this happen when I was writing the book,

is someone would show up once for an event. There was a community garden that I attended and found a great sense of belonging at, and they would show up once and they would disappear. And that might be for the very valid reason that they decided it was the wrong fit. But I think for a lot of people, it's because they expect belonging to be there right away.

And it never is. Belonging is something you always have to work at. You have to, that's why I liked your parable, you have to feed it, you have to stick with it. It's something in a strange way that I think we today have to learn. It's, I don't know that it comes so easily to us anymore. You know, I start the book, early in the book, I talk very, very briefly about my father's life. And my father was born in small-town Kentucky in the late 1920s. I think he in some ways was the inspiration for the book because he just was born into these various senses of belonging. He had an incredibly rich sense of place.

He had a huge family. He had local place. He had his religion and he seemed to know how to belong in a way that I didn't. And my father passed away many years ago. And I think I needed to relearn. I think, I will not say we, I needed to relearn something that he was sort of given that I don't think we're given today. And I think that's a lost us. So I was like, okay, well, how do I recreate this in a completely different setting, in a completely different era? You know, there's

lots of things you don't want to recreate about what my father was born into, but there's kind of a given quality to the belonging that he had that I don't think we have anymore and that I tried to reproduce. And that, I think I found, and that goes back to your parable, I was astonished at how much belonging is out there, kind of just waiting for us. And it was an amazing discovery. It was an amazing feeling to realize that we still can belong today in ways that look really, really, really different from my dad's life, but ways that are still really rich. And I go back, you know, we were talking about social depression. They just,

it gives you this rich sense of connection that is energizing and makes you more enthusiastic about life and just gives you so many more resources in terms of social support and all of those things that I think are really good for us and I think we can create it. Maybe you could tell us about a couple of the areas or things that you tried and found for belonging. A couple that I thought were particularly interesting were the ones around the faith and then the other around the civic activism around some of the animal rights. some of the animal rights. Right. Well, I knew I wanted to try and belong through faith because, first of all, there's a couple of reasons. People are still engaged in faith

in a way that they're not engaged in the PTA anymore. So I knew I wanted to try it. Chris belongs to three or four different PTA groups across the city. He doesn't have any kids, but he just goes. Is he a Shriner, too? Well, only in his house. He's got a little car here. So a lot of people are still engaged in faith, right? So I knew it was something I wanted to try

again, because I had a religious education, meaning I went to Catholic school until I was 16, and I had kind of, and that was maybe the one sort of sense of belonging that I was given, though it's all sort of fraught today. This was in the 70s, I started Catholic school, and I did find a sense of belonging there, and I kind of tried to get away from it into other religions, and it just wasn't working. So I had to come back to Catholicism. So part of the book is about me trying to navigate finding a sense of belonging through faith. And it's tricky, and I come to this as someone who doesn't have trouble with faith. It's tricky, and I come to this as someone who doesn't have trouble with faith. It wasn't a matter of me trying to cultivate belief.

I mean, that was sort of already there, and I would never suggest to anyone that they go down this path, you know, and try and force themselves to believe in something they don't believe in. That just isn't going to work, right? But if you kind of are already kind of tilted that way, faith was interesting because we tend to be, or I was born in 1970, you know, I was born into a faith tradition. It wasn't a choice I made. It was something that was handed to me.

And kind of trying to make that work many decades later in the here and now was interesting and challenging in all sorts of ways that I wasn't expecting, but was also very rewarding. So that was kind of the intuitive thing that I did, which was kind of what happens when you try and find a sense of belonging through faith. And that was kind of a fraught area for me because I'm gay, so you kind of pair homosexuality up with Catholicism and you just get kind of like, you know, electric sparks flying. But it still kind of worked. Whereas the political protest, I did a lot of work. I used to be an environmental lawyer and I did a lot of work in the book. One of the kind of overarching principles that guided my work in the book is that to belong,

you sort of have to root it in what you value. If you start looking for belonging in something you don't particularly care about, in my case, say, team sports, which I'm not putting down by any sense, it's not going to take you anywhere because to me, team sports just which I'm not putting down by any sense. It's just, it's not going to take you anywhere because to me, team sports just, they don't resonate. They don't connect with anything. Whereas for me, animals have always been, became an environmental lawyer largely to protect species. And they've just mattered so, so, so much to me my whole life. So I thought, what can I do? You know, I know there's got to be a way of belonging through animals. And I tried, since I had a very old cat at home at the time, I couldn't foster, I couldn't volunteer at animal shelters. So I wound up, quite to my surprise, and this is

what I mean by you got to feed it, you got to go where the arrows are pointing. Quite to my surprise, I wound up with an animal protest group in Toronto called Pig Save. That involved bearing witness near an abattoir on a very, very busy roadway in Toronto, which is a massive city. And I found it was one of the most complicated forms of belonging that I found, not because of what I was being asked to do, though it is hard if you don't have any experience protesting, if you don't have any experience sort of holding a sign on the edge of a roadway as I did.

But I'll just put it as an aside, you get used to holding a sign on a roadway very, very fast. But because I think, you know, protest involves us joining together, and we don't do that so much in public anymore. So I think my caring, which really started out being about animals and did take me into all these really interesting places related to animals and people who cared about animals, also taught me a lot about kind of joining with others in public today and how unaccustomed some of us, many of us, are to it today. I really had to learn that it was okay to kind of stand with a group in public and,

I really had to learn that it was okay to kind of stand with a group in public. And, you know, our cause happened to be pigs, which a lot of your listeners won't care about or agree with. And that's okay. But I think what's important is learning to stand together for something. And I now feel that that's a skill that I have that I can apply in other areas, you know, if it's climate change or if it's the Keystone XL pipeline, you know, I know how to do that now. And I would, you know, people did one thing from the book. I mean, I'd like them to take a lot from the book, but one thing would be, you know, learn how to be with other people about a cause that you care about, because it's a really great skill to have.

Well, that part of the book was striking because you said something there that I thought was really, really interesting. And it was that you were out there, you know, standing on the roadside sort of protesting about the treatment of these animals and that you realize that there were people who really hated what you were doing. And in a lot of cases, it had a lot less to do with the fact that you, what the cause was, but that in our culture today, caring too much about something is oftentimes looked down upon. It's considered unhip or not cool, and that caring about things in itself was what was being judged. Yeah, I felt that. It took me a long time to figure, I mean, I was with the protest group for quite a while,

and people would always scream the most banal comments. You know, I love bacon, you know, they'd be screaming from cars, so they'd be completely protected, and they were also isolated in their own little vehicles. You know, I love ham. I love bacon. You know, you'd hear the same things over and over. And I couldn't figure out why these people were doing this. I mean, a lot of people drove past, a lot of people would honk in support, but a lot of people felt compelled to scream their love of bacon, which is really not something, no matter how much you like your BLTs, most people feel compelled to scream about.

So I thought, why are they doing this? And the more I stuck with it and the more I looked at people's faces as they were screaming at me, which you also get used to, I realized it was caring. I realized it was caring. Just as you said, they didn't like, you know, in an individualist culture, which we have in spades, you're not supposed to say that you're connected to something else or that what happens to another creature affects you or upsets you. You're supposed to be in your own little self-contained bubble. And if you step out of that and you start

pointing to all the links between us or saying, you know, what happened to that miserable, miserable pig in that horrendous pig truck affects me, you're kind of breaking the rules of individualism. And that's really, really harshly judged. You know, you're called, I was called all sorts of things. I've got a pretty healthy ego, so you know, calling me names doesn't really matter. That also helped with my gay Catholicism, but and I know other people won't be like that, but it was amazing the extent to which people are invested in individualism today, are invested in the idea that we create our own destinies, or that we're all responsible for ourselves or that we're not linked. And that was spelled out for me very, very, very clearly in my

caring project. Yeah, I think it's, you know, I'm not sure exactly what that is. But when you were talking about the feeling of being out there and initially being embarrassed to be out there, and being embarrassed to care about something that really hit hit home with me because there is such a, there's a real vulnerability to showing that you do care about something and that you're willing to stand up for it. And I realized that's something that I am myself, I get very anxious about. Maybe it's starting to change, but if you take a stand for something, you're sort of judged. And I think that's a massive, massive shortcoming in our culture, this hesitation we feel about coming together and taking a stand. Connection is part of that. There's a very, very deep sense of connection and belonging that flows. I mean, I don't want to lose sight of the subject from

being part of a group like that, because when you do overcome the anxiety that you feel, and it's not easy, I'm not suggesting that people are going to go out and do this. For me, it was really, really important to challenge that anxiety. When you are able to connect in that way, it's a very deep, deep sense of connection that you feel to the other people that you're with in that group. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. heart radio app on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts we talked a little bit earlier about belonging versus connection but you there's this idea of public versus private um belonging or connection and that that private connection tends to be very intense so um you know we've got our we've got our good friends and we share a lot of things, but that public belonging tends to be a less intense thing and that that is not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing in a lot of ways. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, I love, you know, I describe public belonging, what people used to call a civic life, you know, and my editor in sort

of a demoralizing moment said, you can't use that phrase because no one's going to know or most people aren't going to know what you're talking about anymore. And I thought, my gosh, she's right. You know, she's right. We don't know what a civic life means anymore. So I kind of stuck with the terms private, which everyone today understands, and public, which is a little more counterintuitive, doing things that don't involve. You know, some of these groups that I joined, I did make friends, but a lot of them, like the community garden, you don't know people's last names.

You don't know where they live, and it doesn't matter because you're still part of the group that's doing the gardening and tending to the tomato beds, and you get to know them in this way that's less intense. And we see that as a failing. Well, you know, these people aren't your BFFs. Well, you know, I have BFFs, and they're fantastic people, but we need more than that. You know, people sometimes say they're too tired to go out, and I say that too. And sometimes what we mean by that is I'm too tired to go and kind of have a high-voltage conversation in Starbucks about my personal life.

You know, I just, it's too much. And there's this wonderful ease that comes with being with people, not having to talk possibly at all, or not having to say much. not having to talk possibly at all or not having to say much. Again, this is getting back to what my dad had. Like he kind of seemed to have this intuitive sense of being with people without, you know, he wasn't one to, you know, kind of have a lot of conversations. But you can be with people in the public sphere or in the civic sphere in a way that's different and it's relaxing because you're not sharing secrets. You're doing things.

You know, there's a wonderful sense of just, you know, having an activity as opposed to just talking. It's great for introverts. You know, I am, in many ways, though it sounds a bit surprising even in the book, a big introvert. And I found that being in these big public groups didn't drain me of social energy. It actually gave me energy because I wasn't exchanging things on a one-on-one basis. And because we have so, so, so many of us have less belonging in our lives, we've kind of lost sight of how important that is. And I think we definitely value our private relationships, but I think we might overvalue them to a certain extent. Or if not overvalue them, they should be balanced with public relationships so that we don't have to be on all the time when we're with other people. What struck me about the book was that just the very way of framing that belonging, and it's again back to that belonging versus connection.

I tend to think of going out there and connecting with people, making a new friend, or, you know, if it's a romantic relationship, or, and I think as a culture, we do a lot less thinking about belonging to groups, and it seems to be very different, as you said, than maybe when, you know, a generation ago. Yeah, I mean, I was fascinated by Robert Pattinson's Bowling Alone. I mean, kind of fascinated is probably the wrong word. I've read it over and over, and I mean, I was fascinated by Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone. I mean, kind of fascinated is probably the wrong word. I've read it over and over. And I just, it captured, I mean, not just for me, it was a huge bestseller. It captured this sense people had that we're missing. Another word that we're not using is community, that we're missing community.

We have our one-on-one relationships if we're lucky, because increasingly people are losing those one-on-one relationships. You know, people's social circles, their private social worlds are shrinking, and we no longer have the public world to support us. So we kind of have less support in general. But, you know, Robert Putnam's whole argument is we've kind of lost or let go of or had taken away from us this public sense of belonging that people used to have and they used to root their private relationships in that larger sense of belonging. And when you take it away, you're putting too much weight on your private relationships. You know,

I used an example in the book where something personally hard happened to me and it was wonderful to go to a group and know that no, not one single person there had to support me. You know, it could be one person or the other, and I could just kind of go from person to person and talk casually about what had happened. And if they wanted to engage, they could engage, you know, in asking less of people, they can give us more. They, they can provide us with all sorts of different ways of support, you know, in a way that my best friend kind of called on to sort of be on, you know, when I have a problem, she has to help. You know, not everyone in our life has to serve that role. And if you free people up from serving that role, they can be so many other things to you. And I think that was one of the best things that I learned in the book, was just how good it felt. And I think this

is why I liked Catholic school as a child, actually, was just how good it was to be kind of part of a group. And that today sounds like the ultimate conformist thing to say. And I think it's actually one of the most radical things you can say in a culture where we're expected to be so much on our own. You know, we don't have to be, we can be with other people too. Well, I think it's an interesting transitional time, because I think that, like everything, there are good and bad sides of everything. And I think that the fragmentation of some of these larger things that there used to be is positive in some ways because I think it allows for – I do think there's a value to individualism. And I do think there's a value to being able to be who you are and the broader that a group gets, the more conformity is potentially needed to fit.

So I think it's an interesting, where do you find that middle ground? I've always been fascinated by an English philosopher, Alain de Botton, and he wrote a book called Religion for Atheists. And his general premise is, you know, he's an atheist, but he looks at everything that we've lost by not having religion in the sense of the things that a religion provided to us as far as the community and the rituals and the support and all that. And that really resonates with me because I do think we've lost a lot of that. And yet, in some ways, I think it's very positive that some of the loss of religious belief, I think, has had also some positive impacts to society.

So it's one of those of finding the right balance between those things. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I write as a 21st century lesbian choice. I mean, that's what you were. our quest for personal autonomy, which is so important. And again, you know, I'm kind of living example of this. I get to live a life openly that no one else in my family would have been allowed to live. We've probably gotten rid of too much. So I think, you know, you've used the word balance. It's really about restoring that balance. And maybe we're at a tipping point where we're realizing we've gotten rid of too much, and we need to start to work to bring some of it back.

You know, but I'm certainly not, you know, emphasizing that we all have to be one thing, or we have to be what we were born into. You know, my chapter on faith is actually about me trying to make various choices other than Catholicism and exploring different faiths and ultimately winding up back at Catholicism. And that's a very different journey, you know, choosing to be there. I guess in a sense I chose my tradition, which is, you know, a mix of individualism and tradition, but it is about balance, and I wouldn't ever want to come across as saying, oh, we need to go back to the old ways where no one had any choices. The takeaway for me that sort of hit, if I tie your first book and your second book together

for me, was that loneliness is a real thing. And I think it's something a lot of people deal with. And we all tend to think there's a tendency to think of the cure for loneliness as another friend or a girlfriend. And I think what Count Me In does as a book is points to a lot of other ways to counter loneliness that are not dependent on those individual very, those very important personal relationships. Yeah, very much so. And I mean, I think it's very doable. I mean, telling someone who's lonely to go find a partner or go find a best friend is a pretty tall order, and that's kind of the advice being given out now.

That's why Chris is at PTA meetings all the time, because that is just not, that has not worked out. But, you know, there's sort of a middle zone where you can get to know people in other ways, and it doesn't have to be a best friend relationship, and you might very well find some good friends in the groups that you join. Exactly. Well, Emily, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. Your book is out in January of 2015, and I'd encourage the listeners to check it out. I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Well, take care, and we will talk again soon. Thanks a lot. All right. Bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any

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