Get Busy LivingI’m Not Alone

Being surrounded is not the same as being connected. A generation of men is quietly losing each other. Turns out I’m not exempt either.

By Michael Shimbo

If I had to guess, I imagine most people who know me would think that loneliness is at the bottom of the list of my concerns. Just a hunch.

And I get it. By and large, I don’t consider myself lonely. After all, I’m a very lucky man to have an expansive network all around the world. I’ve somehow been able to remain genuine friends with outstanding human beings in every city I have ever lived. People I speak to regularly. Buddies who have been by my side for the entire span of my life. By all accounts, that doesn’t frame someone as lonely.

But something odd struck me during a recent solo trip through Italy. A feeling of absolute loneliness. Deep in my core. It hit me like a riptide that kept pulling me further out.

Full transparency? This isn’t a new feeling for me. I’ve felt it when first moving to a new city, or starting a new job, or on solo trips like this before. But it always felt temporary in those moments. A feeling that would pass after meeting someone new or arriving back home. We’ve all felt loneliness at some point. But this trip to Italy—there was something different. Something more, well, permanent.

I’m 51, never been married, and no kids. I’ve never owned a house. The longest I’ve ever stayed in a single place is my most recent seven years in London. Minus the eighteen years I spent where I grew up, I’ve been pretty nomadic for thirty-three years.

I am definitely a rolling stone who has gathered very little moss. Wrinkle, maybe. Moss, no.

But I also miss a lot of what my peers have collected by this stage of life. Most of them have been married. Many are now getting divorced, or married again. Most have kids. Many of those kids are now in college. Why am I like this? Maybe it’s because of my surroundings. Maybe it’s my generation. X does mark the spot for us. Or maybe it’s because of my gender.

15% of American men report having no close friends, a fivefold increase from 3% in 1990. Over the same period, the share of men with six or more close friends fell from 55% to 27%.

Survey Center on American Life, American Enterprise Institute

The numbers are telling. The men of my generation are quietly losing each other, and I’m not exempt from that just because my address book is full. The older I get, the more I see it in the small moments.

Something odd struck me during a recent solo trip through Italy. A feeling of absolute loneliness. Deep in my core.

Travel by myself when I was a younger man typically meant finding other young travelers or couples doing the same things I was. Usually without kids. Definitely before the dawn of retirement was starting to reveal itself. Now I’m at the age where inserting myself into young, adventurous folks’ situations feels both embarrassing and unappealing. My settings are a reflection of who I have become. I am, in fact, a middle-aged man. How the fuck did that happen?

This topic comes up a lot at Seconds. Behind the curtain, we talk about loneliness constantly, though rarely by name. We focus instead on connection, and how much it matters at this stage of life. On how the existing solutions have been either too soft to take seriously or too forced to feel real. Or quite frankly, cheesy and out of touch. But there’s also something much more serious at stake. Loneliness, it turns out, isn’t just a feeling. It’s an opportunity to solve something dangerous.

Loneliness carries a mortality risk equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, with elevated risks of heart disease, stroke, dementia, and premature death.

U.S. Surgeon General, 2023 Advisory on Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation

So what is it about this solo trip that has opened my eyes to something I hadn’t been willing to recognize in myself? Here’s what I’ve concluded. It isn’t the volume of relationships you have. It’s the access you have to other people when you need it most. And whether the ones you can reach are still living a life that resembles your own.

That’s the part nobody talks about. My two loving sisters who will pick up any call I make to them, but are still hundreds if not thousands of miles away. My best friends have been there for me since the day we met, but they aren’t standing next to me when I want to “chin wag” over a pint, as my friend Mike always says. Even my team at Seconds, many of whom are dear friends, live far enough away that a coffee or old fashioned meeting isn’t really an option. You have the people. You just can’t always reach them. And when you do, the ground you're standing on is sometimes no longer the same.

It isn’t the volume of relationships you have. It’s the access you have to other people when you need it most.

The older I get, the more I notice it. My profile is getting harder to match against the people around me. Different choices. Different obligations. Different shapes of day. Not better. Not worse. Just different. But I do notice, more often now, that the people who share my specific pursuits, my attitudes, my appetite for what still might be possible at 51, are harder to find than they used to be.

This is the hidden second layer of midlife loneliness. It’s not only that you can’t always reach your people. It’s that fewer of the people you can reach are still on the same wavelength.

So the work, increasingly, becomes the never-ending pursuit of building connection at the stage of life where it matters most.

This begs the question: what am I actually doing about it? Honestly, I’m still figuring that out.

I came back from Italy and had to say goodbye to my friends in England. After seven years there, there were many. We made plans to stay connected, understanding that it will be harder the older I get.

Just a month later I’m sitting in San Francisco, a city I’ve lived in three times before. The feeling from Italy is back. But this time the effort turns from goodbye to hello. From leaving people to finding new ones.

That’s the part unknown. Do I take the cooking class I’ve talked about for ages? Do I finally learn how to really use my manual camera? Do I get on a dating app? All of them? What feels most natural, actually, is the simplest thing. Saying hello to people. Putting myself in the kind of situations that allow for real interaction.

I honestly don’t feel the need to collect a bunch of new friends. Adding more names to an already endless scroll in my address book. But finding moments of true connection? Yeah, I still need those.

#GetBusyLiving

Michael Shimbo is the founder of Seconds, a pub loyalist, and a builder of ideas. Currently living across multiple zip codes and often found at 35,000 feet.