photo by Christopher Politano
Two conversations today, one with a retired geologist and another with a young counselor in training, highlighted a jarring reality today for people who are seeking deeper connection:
A lot of other people aren’t.
On one level, I don’t believe that’s really true. I think that all human beings naturally long for connection in a primal way.
But there is no question that mainstream culture is marching down the road of turning all relationships into transactions. Put a healthy child in most schools, give them a phone and you can watch how they increasingly treat their peers as objects. Unless they actively resist the massive social pressure to do so.
Some do. I’m not interested in throwing shade on younger generations who are dealing with shit I never had to deal with back then.
And many of us who didn’t grow up with a cell phone in our hands notice what we are becoming and don’t like it. We may text our friends and scroll social media, but we also make a point to get together in person as often as we can.
If friends are scarce (also a trend), we may look for groups to join, attend social events or even engage in practices specifically designed to train higher quality relationality, like Circling or other forms of ‘Authentic Relating.’
, founder of The Circling Institute, has pointed out how communication technology has gone through a rapid evolution in the last few decades. With widespread adoption of answering machines in the 1980s, for the first time it became easy to communicate with anyone without relating face to face.Today, asynchronous communication is ubiquitous and it’s increasingly common for people not to answer the phone if they don’t know the caller - or just don’t want to talk. And with the rise of AI, more and more people have “conversations” that don’t even involve another human being.
What came through in my conversations today (both face-to-face . . . on Zoom) was that if you are determined to keep cultivating human connection, an unfortunate reality is that your invitations will often fall on deaf ears.
Just because you are dedicated to listening to the other, they might not be interested in listening to you. Just because you are willing to be vulnerable, it doesn’t mean that this openness will be returned. Just because you make an effort to understand the other’s experience, there’s no guarantee they will do the same for you.
How to get the other person to desire connection with you? That’s a vital question, but not my focus in this article. Rather, I’d like to ask:
What do you do when your offer of connection is not received?
Of course, the question of whether or not to even have a relationship with a person like this is always valid. If you are consistently ignored or dismissed, why would you keep showing up? If you can have a better experience elsewhere, by all means, go!
But often it’s not so simple.
Even if you are a person with exceptional agency, autonomy, clarity of boundaries and a cheerful extroverted demeanor, it is inevitable these days that you will sometimes experience a pronounced lack of resonance in everyday encounters. This could happen with family members, at work, or in settings which are already designed to be transactional, such as in a store or restaurant (if payment isn’t already automated).
If you love people, if you love connection - sorry to say, but you are becoming much more the exception rather than the rule.
In Japan, there is a growing epidemic of people, particularly men, who have stopped leaving their apartments. They are known as hikikomori. The trend is spreading around the world, a profound fear of facing the other.
Even as I can feel my own inertia about leaving the house on many occasions, I find it’s increasingly important to push myself to do so. I think it’s important for each one of us - not only for our own well-being, but also as a contribution to keeping social space open for others.
(If this sounds exaggerated, revisit the idea in a year from now, or five years from now - but I hope you won’t wait that long!)
Something that has been helpful to me to recognize is that, even when I feel comfortable and confident (not every day), I will likely encounter people who are turned inward and avoidant. If they cut off communication as quickly as possible, yes, it might be something I said or did - but it might well have nothing to do with me.
And it makes a difference to my own state of mind if I take these things personally.
Others may genuinely want connection, but feel awkward about it (a position that I can easily relate to, especially in years past). For this person, it might be appreciated if I reach out, but I need to listen to my sense of their tempo and willingness for depth.
When I join a Circling workshop, I am accustomed to the series of agreements where I and other participants pledge a firm intention to practice presence and connection even if it pushes our edges. But in the general public sphere, no such agreements exist.
While these realities are unfortunate, it feels important to me to recognize them for what they are. To go around demanding “authenticity” from everyone or saying that spreading disconnection “shouldn’t be that way” is to refuse to see the world as it really is. This kind of view doesn’t serve me.
In our evolutionary origins, we lived as tribes, much larger than today’s family units. We found food and shelter together. We slept in close quarters. We looked into each other’s eyes all the time in order to understand.
So it’s not wrong to crave these things.
When we rest in the arms of another person with whom we feel safe, is there truly any deeper relaxation for our nervous systems?
Yet, if I grieve that I am not received with warmth in the social sphere, I find it valuable to question where I place blame for this circumstance:
Do I blame myself?
Do I blame the one who has failed to see my humanity?
If I’m honest, how many human beings do I actively ignore every day?
Blame could easily be aimed at faceless corporate monoliths, educational institutions or celebrity tech billionaires, but doing so doesn’t boost my sense of agency.
Do I simply grieve what has happened to our world?
“Our world” too is an abstraction and a generality, but if I grieve here, perhaps I can use the emotional release to re-align myself with reality.
Yes, I play a role, you play a role, the rich and powerful play a role, but is blame even useful to remedy this situation?
Instead, I prefer to ask:
How do I put things into proper proportion so that I can feel pro-active again?
Without surrendering my desires, intentions and efforts to experience more of the beauty of human connection in my life, by calibrating my expectations sensibly, I can conserve my energy and maintain my enthusiasm to do it again tomorrow.
The more I observe myself in this practice, the more it feels like a call to fall in love with all of humanity - including those who turn away from me. I may not live up to this ideal just yet, but why shouldn’t I aim to love every person I meet?
Knowing full well how challenging that is, how often it might feel impossible, I can’t think of a better attitude to adopt for the moment we are now living.
I will fail in this endeavor again and again, but still, if I hold that intention, I’m more likely to notice when, where, how and with whom I tend to turn away. Like any other pattern, once I really see it, I can intentionally make a different choice.
The practice will take many forms, but this will be one of the important questions:
How do I stay committed to connection in the face of disconnection?
I don’t think there is an easy answer, but knowing that this particular challenge is only likely to grow helps me understand the landscape I am traversing and prepare as best I can for the journey ahead.
Do you feel like you’re rocking the boat every time you reach for deeper connection?
Are you trying to build or maintain depth in relationships
with people who feel like they have “checked out”?
My deep listening container is a place to fully feel how your body makes sense
of the wild currents of complexity and uncertainty that have become our “new normal”
so you can continue to thrive and live creatively without the guarantees of the past.
An excellent and very timely article, thanks Seth.
What I find most powerful in your piece, is the provocation that disconnection is no longer just a social phenomenon and has become an ontological condition of late modern life. We're not merely failing to connect - we're losing the capacity to be with one another in the deep and reciprocal way that once defined being human.
But let's recognise that the cultural drift you're describing is not incidental, but systemic. It's a result of architectures - technological, economic, institutional - that privilege transaction over relation, convenience over presence, and efficiency over reciprocity.
The rise of hikikomorism is perhaps the starkest signal of this condition, not simply as a psychological pathology, but also as a societal mirror. When millions retreat from the world altogether, choosing the safety of solitude over the risk of encounter, it reveals that our public spaces (social, digital, emotional) have become too hostile, too hollow, or too indifferent to sustain the delicate work of relation. It's also a symptom - not of individual weakness - but of a civilisation that no longer knows how to hold one another with dignity, trust and empathy.
I sometimes wonder whether even the word “connection” has become too thin for what’s needed. We can “connect” in a thousand superficial ways without ever entering into "relation". What I think we're really longing for, is attunement - a subtle, mutual responsiveness that only arises when two beings risk being changed by encounter. It is the subtle choreography of being-together that our culture has forgotten how to sustain.
In that light, the act of continuing to want to reach out and connect - not naively, but knowingly, even when our invitations fall-flat - becomes so much more than being just a personal virtue. It is a quiet form of resistance, and even of civic practice - a refusal to let the dominant logic of isolation dictate the terms of our humanity.
And perhaps, as you rightly imply, the work is not to lament what has been lost, but to learn how to become "civic soil" again - to seed ourselves and grow into environments that nurture the conditions in which relation can once more take root.
You might relate to this: “In June, I wrote about how the most generous thing we can offer is permission to remain opaque. Now I’m thinking the same applies to relational geometry. Not insisting on resolution. Not demanding proximity or distance change. Allowing the careful calibrations people have been making, maybe for years, to stand. … [sometimes] engagement would collapse options you need kept open. These aren’t dysfunctions. They’re compositions. Spatial arrangements that hold multiple possibilities in suspension, preserving geometric optionality through strategic ambiguity.“ https://open.substack.com/pub/shadesofabsence/p/love-is-proximity-pride-is-distance-shades-of-absence?r=16gkv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false