The Human cost of a lonely World

Source : Kutlwano

Author : Otshidile Onkabetse

Location : Gaborone

Event : Readers diary

Are you lonely? Or know someone who is or might be? How do we gauge loneliness in a world that’s busy and consistently loud? Can you tell if someone is distressed, isolated, or socially pained when in solitude? Or is loneliness visible in a crowded room? 

There is so much to do, places to go, people to meet. At just one click of a button, loneliness disappears right? Wrong! In a world that is so digitally advanced and connected, I reckon the biggest defect and incapacity of such rich technology is its inability to touch the soul. Food for thought!

Loneliness is a pandemic! It’s not just a feeling that visits when one is in solitude. You can be in a crowd and feel lonely, you could be having the time of your life at a party, or session with loved ones and friends and still be lonely. You could have the big house, the car, the job, the perfect spouse and children, or cat and dog and still feel lonely. You can have it all, your desires met and still that gap forms, between what you innately desire and what the world around you cannot fully comprehend or satisfy.

I read up on the indicators and was baffled by statistic on the loneliness index, which state that “loneliness is linked to approximately 100 deaths every hour” (World Health Organisation, 2025).  So, loneliness can kill!! This might seem trivial if you’re not a statistic or if these are just numbers to you. But when you look closely, these are human beings whose quality-of-life diminished owing to distress, perceived or actual isolation and all the associated forms of loneliness. In a world where 8.3 billion people live, (count yours in this statistic) …...loneliness creeps in! 

On an ordinary day when you take a moment to strip off everything that appears to fill you up and keeps you connected and occupied; music, nature, technology…there remains a huge gap between what gratifies us temporarily and what doesn’t. Even when there’s no apparent lack, when a person’s needs and wants are fully met, yet one still feels void of human connection in a way that nothing makes sense. 

Mother Theresa, an epitome of love and compassion is quoted to have famously said: “The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved”. Is it not a paradox, that in a world that ‘sells ‘love’ in various packages, loneliness is a rooted pandemic! 

Are we just ‘going with he flow’ of life?  We are surviving on world trends, which come and go, which are also in constant competition, and survival mode, waiting for the next big thing to replace it in a fast-paced modern world. 

Such a life thrives on humans’ capacity to consume and follow and modernisation and globalisation are leveraging on this...but at a great cost to humankind. Even to the point of death.

If you’ve ever asked yourself the question of why we are here on earth, is there a reason. A greater purpose, a higher calling? Or are we merely here, to take up space and leave with only human legacies to account for... I think we are selling the creator of the Universe short. 

I think the loneliness we feel can only be filled by Him. He created us for His Glory ( read that again) and perhaps the truth here is that we consume ourselves and fill ourselves up with things that are man-made and very temporary, which eventually reveal their transient nature to us, because they constantly need to be replaced, upgraded, to make us ‘feel’ a certain way. 

These things are fleeting because they are made with human hands. Perhaps even one not so religious would agree that the fullness of anything can come from the creator. Humanity will always feel a sense of deprivation, because what is truly filling and sustainable comes from a God Humanity doesn’t acknowledge or care to seek. 

Humanity thrives in its own hopeless inventions, though innately knows there’s something greater that exists. This is not me being preachy but being truthful. A human being cannot fill a God-sized vacuum for it can only be God-filled. We are lonely as a people, because we have not fully allowed the One who created us with all these desires to satisfy them.

In the book of Romans, the Bible talks about a groaning of creation and how the deepest part of our being longs in expectation for the coming of Christ and that is where our true satisfaction comes from. So, does this mean in the meantime we are lost till the coming of Christ? 

To the contrary it means because He has given us capacity to seek Him in this lifetime and never said we should go at it alone. He has given us both Grace and access to him directly. It is Him we truly should seek filling up from, not from the systems of the world, which offer temporary pleasures, yet leave us longing for more and have no capacity to truly satisfy.

So, are you lonely? The solution is in a prayer. Ask God, the one who created you, to meet you at your point of loneliness even when you don’t understand it’s complexities.  Only He can fill you, only He can truly satisfy even the most unexplainable void, emptiness and loneliness within you. Human beings are just human beings; they can only do so much. Computers and other systems of the world are created by Human Beings who can only do so much. Stop looking for permanent solutions in a temporary world, which can only offer passing solutions. ENDS