Feeling lonely isn’t really about how many people are around you. How many mates you’ve got saved in your phone, how many group chats you’re sitting in half muted that you never actually open?
No. Not even close.
You can be standing in a room full of people who know your name, your job, your footy team, and still feel like nobody in that room actually knows you. That’s not being alone. That’s something else.
It’s Not About How Many People Are In The Room
A lot of the men I sit with aren’t isolated. They’re surrounded. Married, families, mates, workmates, footy club, cricket club, soccer on Saturday and Sunday. There’s plenty going on around them. But they come into the room and tell me they feel alone. There’s something missing inside, and it’s not because their life is empty. It’s because something underneath it is.
That’s what feeling lonely actually is, most of the time. Not the kind where nobody calls. The kind where everybody calls, and it still doesn’t touch the thing underneath.
The Mate Who Knows, And The Mate Who Doesn’t
Picture the blokes at the pub after the game. Everyone’s laughing, everyone’s got a beer, everyone’s into the umpire’s terrible decisions. And one of those blokes drove there that night after a fight with his wife, or after finding out his old man’s sick. And not one person in that circle knows.
He’s right there. And this is the thing with us men. We carry a lot of stuff, and he’s right there carrying it, and in carrying it alone he can be the loneliest person in the room.
There’s a difference between a mate and a mate who knows. Most men have plenty of the first, and not many of the second.
What Feeling Lonely Actually Feels Like
It’s not sadness exactly. It’s not anger either. It’s more like a flatness. A restlessness. A bit hollow. The kind of feeling you can’t quite put your finger on. Some of us might call it boredom. Some of us wouldn’t call it anything at all.
Feeling lonely, where do you actually feel it in your body? In the chest? The gut? The shoulders? A flatness sitting somewhere in there, and when you notice it, it’s like, oh, there it is again.
Nobody writes blogs about loneliness. We don’t even want to admit it, really. But it was never about how many people are in the room. It’s about how many of them actually know what’s going on inside us.
“I Don’t Reckon I Could Call One Of Them”
I’ve had a bloke sit right there in that chair and say something like this to me: “I reckon a hundred people would turn up to my funeral, and I don’t reckon I could call one of them tonight and tell them the truth of what’s going on deep inside myself.” This isn’t rare. Around one in seven Australian men report to feel lonely.
Ouch. And that’s not a rare thing to hear in this chair. That’s most weeks.
You can have a hundred contacts in your phone and not one person who knows you’re not okay. That’s the real gap Are You Okay Day is trying to close, and we do that once a year. But the moment it actually matters is the other three hundred and sixty four days.
What Do We Do With This
Join something, not for small talk with everyone you meet, but for the one person in it worth being honest with. And this week, message one person. Doesn’t have to be your best mate. Say something true instead of the social throw-off. You know the one. “Hey, how you going.” “Good, yeah, good.” We all do it. It doesn’t have to be big. Just true.
If you’re carrying this loneliness, feeling that hollowness inside, chances are someone else near you is carrying it too. Expressing it, being a little vulnerable about it, is how that starts to shift. Not bottling it up until it turns to restlessness. Learning to feel it, so it can actually heal.
That’s what this channel is here for. Planting that seed. Calling it out, gently, and starting the conversation men aren’t always given permission to have.
If any of this landed for you, drop a comment on the video and let me know. That’s usually where the real conversation starts.
Feel It To Heal It.
Be Gentle.