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,

In my previous letter, I shared how in early adolescence, I felt trapped, drowning in grief and pain. I knew with every fiber of my being that we are all connected, part of the same living whole. Yet that sacred knowing carried a cost. Every fracture I witnessed, every sorrow, every conflict in the world reverberated within me, as if it were happening inside my body. The world’s wounds felt like my own.

Deep within me, I knew that most people meant well. When their behavior contradicted that truth, I believed there must be some reason for it, something I could not yet see. This inner knowing followed me throughout my early childhood. I felt an immediate bodily connection to every human being I encountered, those I met, read about, or engaged with.

Early on, I observed how kind, generous and, people can be toward each other. And at the same time, I often experienced them as brutally mean, hurtful, and destructive. My body felt the contradiction, but I couldn’t make sense of it.

I felt compelled to discover the underlying cause of this apparent contradiction. I sensed that if I wanted to alleviate suffering, I would need to devote my life to understanding this mystery. This drive set the direction of my life. I became devoted to understanding the forces that prevent us from choosing love and care, for ourselves and each other, even when we so deeply want to. It took me on a lifelong journey to find the answer to the same painful question: What is it in and around us that blocks us from meeting our needs and truly connecting with each other? And what would life look like if we were able to remove those blocks?

I imagine some of you may read this and think I am a naïve dreamer. Or perhaps you may have been troubled by the same question. Maybe, like me, you have been seeking, in your own way, to better understand us.

For me there was no option but to pursue this inquiry as if my life depended on it… because it has, and it does. The gift and burden of my deeply empathic nature—the tendency to feel others’ pain, fears, dreams, and joys as if they were my own—left me with no other choice. Every cell in my being drives me to protect and heal us by revealing the illusion that we are separate, even when our differences feel convincing.

We really are One, just as I understood when I was a four-year-old on a bus.

My journey has taken me on many miraculous adventures as I pursued a study of the inner workings of the human psyche, and all the possible elements that contribute to and impact its development. At first, I had no idea of the magnitude of this undertaking. Like many students of human behavior, I believed that studying psychology would give me all the answers I needed.

It didn’t take me long to see that studying psychology was only a small piece of the puzzle. I discovered that I needed to learn how the various fields— evolutionary biology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, spirituality, and neuroscience play major roles in shaping human behavior.

Furthermore, even within psychology, I discovered how compartmentalized the field had become. Each perspective—Freudian, behaviorist, cognitive, and others—believes it has the answer, while in reality each focuses on one or two aspects of the psyche. The more I studied, the more I became aware of how our educational system itself compartmentalizes education and encourages specialization across various fields. Biology, psychology, neurophysiology, politics, culture, and religion—all are investigated by different thinkers using different methodologies as if they exist in isolation from each other.¹

This fragmentation makes it nearly impossible to see how these domains continuously shape and influence each other. Research is broken down into discrete parts, much like a factory floor divided into single actions and segregated tasks. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Western medicine, where the body is often treated like a machine, as if each organ and its processes were not in relationship with, or influenced by, all the others.²

Over time, it became apparent to me that our focus on parts—parts of a body, parts of a family, parts of a community, parts of nature or even fragmented parts of the self—has distanced us from experiencing wholeness. In losing sight of the whole, we have lost our connection to ourselves, to one another, and to the living world around us. We no longer perceive how we, and everything else, naturally fit into a magnificent, interconnected whole. We have become lost in the noise of separation and lost touch with the Signal that unites us.

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

Dear Future Human, I hope you are beginning to get a better sense of my intention with these letters to you. Perhaps some themes are beginning to emerge—we are nature; wholeness; you are not alone; a seeking to understand the causes of our suffering in the service of alleviating it; that we are part of the evolutionary creative impulse; that we are love!

With all my heart and soul,

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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