 Do you experience loneliness? Maybe when you feel lonely, you get very sad like this. Or maybe your loneliness looks like this. Or maybe your loneliness looks like this. My point is, is that not all lonely people look sad. Sometimes some of the loneliest people are the ones that look the happiest on the outside. Hi guys, this is Linda. In this video, I'm gonna be talking about why are we so lonely? Isn't it ironic that we are more connected now to each other than ever with smartphones, internet, social media, and yet we are seeing the highest numbers of loneliness that we've ever seen. The age group that's said to have the highest levels of loneliness is 16 to 24. Our young adults, our youth, our adolescents are facing loneliness more now than ever. 40%, almost half of the entire world's population of 16 to 24 year olds are experiencing some degree of loneliness. Why is that? Most people would think that it's the older age group who experiences more loneliness after they retire. But actually the age group 75 and above only reported 25% loneliness. So why is this? How could this be? Loneliness doesn't discriminate how much money you have. Loneliness is not for a certain age group. Loneliness is not for a certain gender, certain type of people. Loneliness does not discriminate and has equal opportunity to hit every single one of us. Do you experience loneliness? Or do you know someone with loneliness? Or have you had an episode of where you really felt lonely in the past? Let me know in the comments below. I would love to hear your stories. When I was between this age group 16 to 24, I totally remember how lonely I felt. I had a lot of friends, maybe you guys too. Maybe you have a lot of friends, a lot of people around you. You live in a big city. There's no outward reason to be lonely, but something inside of me and maybe inside of you, something inside of me felt so, so empty. It was like a hole that I couldn't fill up with no matter what I did. So it made me ask myself and wonder this question as I now am older than that age group. It makes me wonder, what was it about that time in my life that made me feel so, so lonely? Now this is not to say that if you're not in the age group that you don't feel loneliness because no matter how old you are, anyone is susceptible to loneliness. It's not something that is only for young people or only for old people. In spiritual practice and also in brain education, we say that one experience is loneliness if you don't know who you are and what you want. Think about it. On a deep, deep human level, what is it that you want and who are you beyond your name, beyond your religion, beyond your nationality, beyond your gender? I can say many things about myself from that checklist. My name is Linda. I'm 30 years old. I'm from Los Angeles. I have a bachelor's degree in theater arts from UC San Diego. I'm a YouTuber. I have all these different labels, but beyond these labels, who am I? Who am I as a human being? If my name weren't Linda, if my name were Jessica, would I be a different person? So from my own experience, what I've seen and the people around me who have reported being lonely, loneliness comes from a disconnection with yourself. Disconnection meaning you're here, you're alive, you're moving, you're functioning, but you don't really know what is going on inside of you. Whether that be some kind of physical pain or tension, we don't really recognize that physical pain and tension until it becomes so bad that it really hurts or it becomes so bad that we become bedridden and sick or it becomes so bad that some kind of outside symptoms like rash or some kind of sign comes up where it really slaps us in the face. And people who are disconnected, we don't know what we want. We don't know what kind of emotions we carry. It might seem like everything is good, fine and dandy, but a lot of us carry anger and sadness inside particularly sadness that we don't even realize that we have. And a lot of people don't know exactly what it is they want. They have some clues and ideas of what they think they want, but nothing really clicks. Nothing feels like it's the right thing. I remember I used to feel like that. I would try so many different things but nothing really felt right. So I felt like I was in this like little bubble and nothing was clicking, nothing was working, nothing struck me like a lightning bolt from the top of my head and told me, ah, that's the right thing. And when I was in that stage of really not knowing who I was, disconnected from my body, disconnected from my brain, disconnected from my emotions, that was when I experienced extreme emptiness and loneliness. Loneliness is a real mental disease. I hate to say disease, but it's a mental disorder that is prevalent in our society and yet no one wants to talk about it. It's still a bit taboo for anyone to come out and say, I am lonely. People are gonna judge you and you're afraid of people saying, oh my God, she's a loser, she's a Debbie Downer, I don't wanna hang out with her. It's still taboo and kind of socially unaccepted to say you're lonely or even talk about loneliness and talk about your past experiences or current struggle with loneliness. Let's break that cycle. Loneliness is nothing to be ashamed of. Loneliness is something that a lot more people are experiencing than you think. It's not something that only you are dealing with or someone you know is dealing with. Let's break the taboo and start the conversation of loneliness. It's a real problem and we need real solutions. We need people to come out and really talk about it. And more so now with the rise of social media and the internet, we don't really have a reason as much as we did before of really connecting with each other face to face. I really think there's huge value in connecting with people face to face, connecting with them on a human level. But because we have the internet, because we have social media, we don't really need to socialize like that. People feel satisfied talking to each other on Twitter or talking to each other on Reddit, just having internet relationships. And in some cases, I even see nowadays which really breaks my heart, people friends who are out at a restaurant, they're sitting down together, they're with people in person and yet they're not talking to each other and they're just on their phones like this. We've forgotten how to connect. We've forgotten the value of connecting with each other, connecting with ourselves. And because the phone is so attractive, because social media is so attractive, we get absorbed in that and we don't understand the repercussions of continuously being addicted to your device like this and giving all of your attention and focus to your devices. There are a lot of young people, especially that loneliness age group 16 to 24, who have total and utter anxiety when their phones are even five minutes away from them. If they don't have their phone in their hands, they feel anxious. But have you thought about being five minutes disconnected from your thoughts, disconnected from your emotions and disconnected to your body? Why doesn't that give us anxiety? So in our modern age, we're gonna have more technology, more artificial intelligence, more ways to disconnect with ourselves than even now. Who knows what will happen? Maybe 10 years, 20 years from now, if we keep going at this rate, if our young people don't know how to connect with their thoughts, emotions and their body, what if 20 years from now, the 16 to 24 age group, instead of being 40% lonely, what if 60% or 80% or even 100% report signs of loneliness? And it's so tragic that with those rising statistics of loneliness, we also see rising statistics of youth suicide. We cannot keep going like this. This is not sustainable. This is not how we want to live our lives. And it's so heartbreaking that a lot of people who are facing loneliness don't know how to come out of it. And they don't know how to come out of it because they don't know the root cause of loneliness in the first place. The root cause of loneliness is disconnection. Disconnection with my body, disconnection with my emotions, disconnection with my thoughts and therefore disconnection with other people. So how can you get connected to yourself? The easiest, fastest and my most favorite way is put down your phone. Even if it's for an hour, even if it's for 10 minutes, wherever you are, put down your phone.