Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World

by Jennie Allen

I am believing the lie that I’m destined to be alone, and in believing that lie I’m making it into reality, because I am pulling back and judging those I love, guarding myself from them as if they were the enemies.

I want us to trade lonely and isolated lives that experience brief bursts of connectedness for intimately connected lives that know only brief intervals of feeling alone.

Scientists now warn that loneliness is worse for our health than obesity, smoking, lack of access to health care, and physical inactivity.

People who hurt you and who are hurt by you, but who choose to work through it with you instead of both of you quitting on each other.

We’re all just kind of waiting for connection to find us. We’re waiting for someone else to initiate. Someone else to be there for us. Someone else to make the plans or ask the perfectly crafted question that helps us bare our souls.

“Every newborn comes into this world looking for someone looking for her.”

who doesn’t want someone to need them? So why do I keep pretending that my own need isn’t real?

“The more resources a person gets, the more walls he or she puts up. And the more lonely they become.”

Every problem you hear about in the news is not yours to solve.

We can’t have what we aren’t willing to become.

Why are people who live in these specific places—Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California—doing so much better than the rest of us?

We must become the people we want in our lives.

Here is what we are going to build into our lives if you come with me on this journey: Proximity. Communal fires have been in the center of village life, bringing neighbors together to cook, to celebrate, to gather after dark and connect. Who do you see most often, and where? Transparency. Most of the world has never lived with locked doors and fences. And while that might be a necessity in our homes, it isn’t a necessity in our relationships. Who can you most truly be yourself with? Accountability to Others. In many villages this looks like tribal elders, people who have permission to wallop you over the head when you are being an idiot! Village life causes you to live accountable to others. It isn’t comfortable but it is transformative. Who are you living close to that has permission to wallop you when you need it? A Shared Purpose. Living together and working together creates bonds and is how most people have lived in community. Who is near you already, working beside you, and how could you bring more purpose to the friendships you already have? Consistency. It takes time to build friendship and connection. We have to clock hours together over years.

What if we stayed instead of quitting each other when it gets difficult?

We are meant to short-circuit when we are surrounded by people we aren’t engaging with.

If you are trying to make friendship an addendum to your busy schedule, it will never work.

You will never have friends unless you are willing to consistently initiate.

No one can be your everything, but everyone has something to say, something to teach you, and something to bring to your life.

Researchers say that to grow an acquaintance to a good friend takes clocking two hundred hours together.

vulnerability is the soil for intimacy,

the cost of shame is connection.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.