By MARTY LEVINE
An epidemic of loneliness has been with us long before the COVID-19 pandemic, but personal solutions are at hand, said panelists at the latest event for Pitt’s Year of Discourse and Dialogue — “Reclaiming Connection: How Discourse and Dialogue Can Combat Loneliness and Build Community” on April 2.
“One in two adults reported loneliness ... prior to the pandemic,” said Katie Dealy, former chief engagement officer for the U.S. surgeon general in the Biden administration — one of a pair of panelists at the start of the event. “We’ve seen an increase of the time people spend alone. We add to this a complete transformation of how we get our information and how we spend our lives online. People felt alone. They felt that it was on their shoulders to solve whatever was in front of them.” And the issue became a focus of the surgeon general’s office, she said.
“The solutions are so micro ... because we can’t solve this if we don’t get as personal as we possibly can,” said the other panelist, David Greene, former host of NPR’s Morning Edition and now of the Left, Right & Center podcast. We must also be honest “with our friends about what we need ... this can’t be solved from the top down.”
His job as a journalist, he noted, “is to talk to strangers. ... So I got to see the micro as things have been changing. I’ve felt it myself too. ... Just being able to begin a conversation — I feel those first five minutes to be so awkward and anxiety inducing.” But sometimes, after 45 minutes or so, an interviewee will exclaim with pleasure that “no one has ever paid this much attention to me.”
If you feel lonely you may “think something was wrong with you,” Dealy said. However, “it’s a universal feeling. People all feel lonely at some time.” She compares it to hunger, thirst or fatigue. “Being able to normalize it as a human experience … has been really compelling” and has helped people understand it better.
However, she added, “we know that it has an impact on our health” — in fact, if it happens over the long term, it can be as bad as smoking daily, she said. “Young people show us” what it is doing to the possibility of building new friendships and romantic relationships. “We see a decline in civic participation” locally, at the neighborhood level, and “a decline in trust in other people.”
During a tour of college campuses with the surgeon general in 2023 and 2024, students flocked to address the subject of loneliness, she reported, and “administrators have said students don’t seem very happy, students don’t seem very contented. At all levels it is becoming harder and harder ... to have conversations where you have any friction” and where building trust is needed, she said.
“No one can prove, I don’t think ... that isolation has increased polarization,” Greene said. But as he interviews people “it’s so clear ... the more people who are alone, the more people are listening to a media that is so siloed. (They) have lost the skill of asking questions or being curious” or more likely are holding back their own opinions so as not to be attacked for it. They may in turn isolate themselves from opinions that contradict their own. He labeled it a “morality bias” — the belief that others’ opinions reflect a moral failing. “The idea of giving people a chance is being lost.”
“There are times when we absolutely need to be safe” from encounters with destructive opinions, he acknowledged, but there are times “to feel a little unsafe and dive in” as well as to “look for the opportunities” when we feel open to sharing our own opinions that may be challenged.
“A lot of it comes down to how you ask questions when you are easing into an interaction,” Greene said. Our first impulse to counter someone’s opinion with “That’s not true” will not work to invite them to speak with you. “How can you draw someone out and make a space for someone to reveal themselves in a way that is not accusatory and judgmental?”
He suggested a more inviting response might be: “It’s interesting that you say that. That hasn’t been my experience. Where did you learn that?” Both sides are probably afraid to give up their beliefs, he concluded. “Conversations are beautiful things. Ask questions in a way you’d like to be asked yourself.”
“Leading with curiosity is the number one thing we can do,” Dealy said. “We have fewer moments of serendipitous interactions so we have to create them,” at occasions such as this panel or through the formation of clubs focused on bringing together people for simple dialog.
“How do you be open to talk to new people?” asked panel moderator Carissa Slotterback, Year of Discourse and Dialogue co-chair and dean of the School of Public and International Affairs.
“It is terrifying,” Greene said, and many journalists will admit that, even though it is their job. Dealy suggested, first, offering a compliment to a stranger about something — a traditional start — or, second, “to hone in on the universal” experience you may be having at that moment — “If you can be self-deprecating in recognizing universal moments.”
Members of a student panel, which followed, all reported loneliness as a universal feeling, even for the most social among them.
An administrator’s panel, which closed out the event, acknowledged the loneliness that can be part of faculty work — especially research — as well as the loneliness that is engendered by doing such work at this moment in history, when institutions are struggling to deal with shifting federal mandates designed to change or stop what faculty have long been undertaking.
Faculty are too often isolated or siloed in departments, said Lu-in Wang, vice provost for faculty affairs. “If you don’t know your colleagues and you don’t know the leadership, you don’t know if you can trust anybody. ... It’s really hard to develop a connection.” While shared governance can bring faculty and administrators together, the isolation of faculty work means it can be “hard to make decisions that are best for the institution. Instead you are looking out for yourself.”
Laura Ainsley, manager of Leadership Development in the Office of Human Resources, felt that bigger universities with all their siloed departments actually provided valuable “structures for people to interact” and feel less isolated. She also pointed out a skill to learn — “what’s the language for disagreeing agreeably?”
Ahmed Ghuman, executive director of the University Counseling Center, also appreciated this large institution’s affinity groups, through which he found out that “most Muslim faculty and staff at Pitt didn’t know each other” prior to the group’s establishment, he said.
There are a lot of external pressures now, Wang concluded. We are trying to “safeguard the institution.” As an administrator, involved in planning for the future, “it’s very hard to be in a position where you can’t share about the decision-making process, because it is still in process,” and to be in a position where you “need to help people feel more comfortable and safe without telling them what is going on.”
As panel moderator Clyde Wilson Pickett — vice chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and co-chair of the Year of Discourse and Dialogue — concluded, trust “is something we build in drops, but we lose in buckets.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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