Letter 6: Why We Feel Alone in a Connected World

“We are whole, complex, beautiful beings trying to navigate a world that tells us we are not enough.”

—Adrienne Maree Brown

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Dear Future Human,

We are not powerless. We are not alone.

It’s easier for me to feel and say this now, but it wasn’t when I first embarked on this journey. I knew with every fiber of my being that we are all connected—part of the same living whole. But that knowing cut both ways. That sacred awareness became my burden too, for every fracture, every sorrow, every conflict I witnessed in the world reverberated within me, as if the world’s wounds were my own.

Can you imagine what that must have felt like, living in my body?

And yet, deep inside, I knew people meant well—that if they behaved in ways that didn’t serve their well-being, there must be a reason, some explanation I wasn’t seeing. This inner voice—this deep Knowing—haunted me throughout my early childhood. I felt a profound connection to every human being I encountered, read about, or engaged with. I observed how kind, generous, and helpful people could be toward one another—and yet, I also witnessed how brutally mean, hurtful, and destructive they could become.

It didn’t make sense to me.

There had to be something else at work—something not immediately visible. I realized that if I wanted to help ease suffering, I had to devote my life to learning—not just about human behavior, but about the mind, about perception, about the invisible forces that shape us.

The drive to uncover what’s truly at play, coupled with my insatiable curiosity and a deep sense of the adventure of being alive, led me on a lifetime journey to solve this puzzle: What is preventing us from choosing to be loving and caring toward ourselves and each other—all the time?

And what would life look like if we did?

I imagine some of you may think I’m a naïve dreamer, while others may have been troubled by the same question—and like me, have been searching in your own way for answers. For me, there was no choice but to pursue this inquiry as if my life depended on it… because it does.

The gift—and burden—of my deep sensitivity, the ability to feel people’s pain, fears, dreams, and joys as if they were my own, left me no alternative but to devote myself fully to solving this puzzle. Every cell in my body drives me to protect and heal by exposing the illusion of separation. No matter how different we appear on the outside, I knew we are one.

This journey has taken me on countless miraculous adventures as I’ve explored the inner workings of the human psyche and the many forces that shape its development. In the beginning, I had no idea of the magnitude of the undertaking. Like many students of human behavior, I assumed that studying psychology would provide the answers I was seeking. It didn’t take long to realize that psychology was only a fragment of a much larger picture.

I came to see that understanding human behavior required exploring many interconnected fields: evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, philosophy, spirituality. Each played a significant role. Even within psychology, I found the field highly fragmented—each school of thought (Freudian, behaviorist, cognitive, humanistic, etc.) focused on one or two dimensions of the psyche, believing it held the key, while overlooking the larger systemic context.¹

The deeper I went, the more I realized how our entire educational system is built on compartmentalization. Knowledge is divided into separate disciplines—biology, history, physics, chemistry, political science, philosophy, religion—each with its own experts, with its own language and methods. There are no classes that explore how these fields intersect, interact, and influence one another—or how they shape us.

Even research itself is fragmented—broken down like tasks on a factory floor. This issue is perhaps most visible in Western medicine, where the body is treated as a machine, each organ examined in isolation, disconnected from the intricate web of systems it belongs to.²

Over time, I came to understand: our obsession with parts—whether parts of the body, the family, the community, nature, or even fractured parts of the self—has separated us from experiencing the fullness and interconnectedness of life. We’ve lost our felt sense of relationship—to ourselves, to each other, and to the living world. We’ve forgotten how we—and everything else—fit into a vast, magnificent whole.

We’ve been deafened by the noise of separation, and in the process, have lost contact with the Signal that unites us.

No wonder, then, that in my forty-plus years of working with people from all walks of life—across socioeconomic, religious, and racial backgrounds—no matter how successful or powerful, whether single, married, living with children or roommates, the one pain point nearly everyone reported was the same: how alone they felt, even when surrounded by people they loved.

Dear Future Human, I hope you're beginning to feel the deeper current running through these letters. Maybe, by now, a few themes are starting to surface:

We are nature—not separate from it but made of it.

We belong to wholeness.

You are not, and never were, alone.

Understanding the roots of our suffering is not just for insight, but for healing. We are participants in an ongoing evolutionary unfolding.

Underneath it all—we are love.

Inside the wholeness of love,

Ronit

1. Gregg Henriques PhD, Psychology's Fragmentation Trap, Psychology Today, January 2014.

2. Laurence Sperling, Silos in Healthcare are Bad for Us. Here's the Cure, World Economic Forum, November 2020.

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