It’s March 2020. I am at home, awkwardly auditioning various corners of my house for a practical, functional workstation. The dogs and cats are confused, their particular Secret Life of Pets variation entirely disrupted by my constant presence. Taking a lunch break means walking steps to the kitchen and peering into a fridge where all the food is mine and there’s no restaurant downstairs ready to take advantage of the potent combo of its convenient location and my work deadlines.

Like millions of others, I was navigating the brand new world of remote work. The virtual workplace was little more than a buzzword a month earlier, but with the COVID epidemic, it arrived quickly, it became immediate… and for millions of us, it never went away.

Cut to 2026. Now the “loneliness epidemic” is a buzzword, not entirely disconnected from the rise of remote work, but also not explicitly tied to it. For me, though, it’s a real and potent connection.

The thesis of this post, in the interest of clarity and transparency, is “I’m lonely and I don’t know what to do about it.” I want to provide some degree of usable insight to the casual reader, but I am also reaching out into the digital sphere, hoping for some ideas or an old friend who has room in their social space for me.

How did I get here? Well, funny you should ask, because that is exactly what I am about to explain. I am a proud loner. I dine out alone, I go to sporting events alone, I go on vacations alone. For years, this worked for me because I had a balance of alone and not-alone time to sustain me.

For a brief period from around 1998 -2002, I was part of a clique of friends who went out together, invited each other to celebrations, and generally were chummy on weekends if not constantly in touch for one-on-one checkins. Outside that timeframe, I have consistently maintained individual friendships and relationships that did not morph into a social circle.

I thrive on one-on-one interactions. Groups are hard. Even watching two friends ricocheting small talk back and forth is enough to overwhelm and shrink me into silence. Parties with multiple foods, multiple rooms, multiple sources of music, and multiple conversations tend to send me into a tailspin. You know the expression, “You must be fun at parties”? Yep, that started with me. I’m Sarcasm Target Zero for that.

My small circle of friends sustained me reasonably well. But the real day-to-day heavy lifting was my workplace. These folks were forced to be with me for 40 hours a week, and I always seemed to sort myself into the pleasant-to-be-around coworker category. It was the same way in school. I have always been the nice one. And we all know how disastrous “nice” can be when it comes to substantive connections.

Many people who know me from those forced-togetherness experiences became quite friendly with me over time. But with almost zero exceptions, nobody from school or work actively stayed friends with me. That is the great quandary of my social life. With the exception of the very small cadre of close friends who have stuck with me, my work/school/incidental friends walked away from me, never to return, rarely if ever checking in or expressing that they missed my presence. Not even out of politeness. Crucially, not even my remaining family has checked in on me since very early in my adult life. (Except the one cousin who was more interested in genealogy than connection. Once she thumped her Bible the first time in my general direction, I was out of there.)

Even before I felt the extreme loneliness I experience now, I was concerned about the retention issue. But since I still had my existing work “friends” and my other social ties, I managed. For the friends to whom I felt the strongest, most genuine connection, I made a couple of outreach efforts, but I found that they were not reciprocated. Many times, friends were too busy and couldn’t find time, or they’d respond noncommittally and leave the reconnection efforts dead in the water.

So what’s the underlying issue here? I don’t know that I will ever get a solid answer. But there are multiple considerations.

• My father was a hermit who thought friends and their pesky demands were a burden, while also bemoaning that no one paid any attention to him. I am for sure following in his footsteps, but I have always thought that I was a kindler, gentler version, flexible and open to friendships.

• Related to this, I understand that humans get back the energy we give out. Maybe most everyone perceives my energy as “stay away,” when all I intend is caution and self-protection. Maybe they would have made more of an effort if they had sensed a different vibe on my end.

• People who are more social than I are perhaps more accustomed to the high attrition rate of friendships. Maybe they just cast their nets wider and take rejection or apathy in stride.

• I think I am a reasonably interesting person. But I am keenly aware that a lot of folks who entertain this view of themselves are mistaken. My fear is that I am just plain boring, or that it takes too damn long to get to the interesting part, or that once you exhaust the interesting parts of my personality, it’s deadly dull underneath. Or somehow, someway, no one is drawn to me.

And that’s probably one of the biggest insecurities that I have. That everyone in my life is just managing me, entertaining me, rationing a bit of their time and effort because I’m nice and I deserve it. Ultimately, I worry that I am a chore.

Finally, there’s the element of self-fulfilling prophecy. The weight of all this second-guessing (Am I my father? Am I boring? Am I just not aggressive enough?) just may not translate into fun times for the people I’m trying to be friends with. It may also translate into, “Oh, God, it’s time to check in with Micah because he’s my friend, but golly does he have a lot of baggage to churn through.”

As it stands today, I try to cherish the very few relationships I can rely on, not overburden those people, and scan for opportunities for new connections. I am excited to try cooking classes or one of the pre-arranged strangers-meet-over-dinner services, but what if I go in desperate and come out mad that I spent $100 for a subpar experience? The only thing more undesirable than Lonely Micah is Desperate, Angry Micah. So it’s a risk.

Impromptu conversations with strangers are mostly out of the question. The part of my father that finds a great deal of humanity difficult to engage with remains with me, and without the safety net of an understood pretense for interaction, I don’t feel confident navigating that space. The mere thought of expending that much emotional energy for such a low probability of a positive outcome exhausts me.

This is the part of the essay where I wrap up and make some sort of Grand Statement. For now it consists of these four placeholder sentences. Sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Loneliness is an open-ended hole, and so is this.