What Lonely Men Won't Say Online (Or In-Person)

Insisting everything's fine doesn't make it true.

Photo of Derek MacDonald by Isobel Straub

I don’t care how easy social media makes it to keep in touch. A few years ago, I wanted to delete it all—even if it meant losing touch with friends I’d known my whole life.

Walk away from likes, comments, shares. Every profile, gone. Just disappear from the internet entirely and spend my time with the people I cared about instead of scrolling past them. Then I’d focus on in-person connection instead of connection requests.

But everyone uses social media. It gives us the ability to keep up with lifelong friends and family. We get to see people we don’t run into on a daily basis. We feel included in their lives, and believe them to be part of our own, because we skim through their posts. But for as much time as we spend on those damn platforms, are we really all that social?

I’m not convinced.

Men don’t know how to talk to each other anymore.

If social media magically and mysteriously vanished overnight, I think we’d be forced to reckon with the discomforting realization that we don’t know how to talk to people. Like at all. I’ve written about the male loneliness epidemic before—mostly to point out that it’s deceptively mislabeled. What we’re really up against with male loneliness comes down to two things:

1. an inability to be vulnerable.

2. a discomfort accepting vulnerability.

It’s a misguided matter of being shown that vulnerability is bad, that it makes you less-than, and that men aren’t supposed to be seen as emotional. For the record, behavior doesn’t have a gender. But I’m using the male label here because it’s what’s being tied to this insidious stereotype.

So, not only are we not supposed to tell anyone when we feel hurt, dejected, or othered… we’re conditioned to not let other people tell us those things about themselves, either. To stand on a stage and say such a thing would likely illicit a riot. I’m kidding, of course—the crowd would act like nothing happened, just as they’ve been taught to.

Social media separates us more than it connects us.

I was camping with my partner, Isobel, this week when something rattled me that I still haven’t been able to shake. We were sitting next to a fire pit at a picnic table in our lake-front outcropping. Taking turns, we pulled cards from the stack between us. Each had a prompt written on it designed to spark less common, deeper topics of conversation. The one that stuck with me? Describe the others’ social media use.

What came to mind worried me—not about Isobel’s relationship with social media, but my own. After years of using social media regularly (primarily Instagram) I burned out on it. I didn’t like what it’d done to me. I felt... addicted… tethered, even. Dysregulated, addled, unfocused, and easily agitated.

I wanted more mental clarity—I’d have settled for any, really. Without social media, I wondered if I might even be able to move through the day without that baseline-level of ramped anxiety I’d gotten used to.

So I quit.

Goodbye, dopamine itch.

When I uninstalled my social media apps, I hadn’t realized I was ending friendships.

I’d reached a breaking point where I needed to prioritize my mental, emotional, relational, and professional well-being. But with my social media exit, suddenly I wasn’t one of the guys anymore, either.

That was almost 4 years ago.

Leaving social media also meant bowing out of group chats with a variety of people. I knew it might mean fewer memes throughout my day, but I didn’t know it also meant missing out on life updates. Or that it would snowball into getting overlooked for get-togethers.

My departure from social came just after I’d first got sober. And at the time, my main focus was on rebuilding my life. I think the decision to stop scrolling, sharing, and caring so much about my online profiles really helped me do that—especially in the early days of trying a new life on for size. The absence of social media seemed to accelerate the mental clarity I’d desperately wanted.

But here’s the problem: I did a whole lot of journaling and not much picking up the phone.

Having friends ≠ having a social life.

My friends and I do still keep in touch. These are groups of people who’ve collected each other over many, many years. But my closest friends don’t live close. The few who do work opposite schedules than me, which makes it hard to spend time together. And life’s pulled us in different directions (marriages, kids, careers etc…)

Recently, a few of us got together to spend a weekend catching up. It’s something that took months of back-n-forth, prior planning, and a few reschedules. When the time finally came to pack my bags and get in the car, I realized I was nervous. Which shocked me. Because these people are like my chosen family. And yet, we’ve gone from seeing each other weekly for belly laughs to meeting up yearly to congratulate belly bumps. Without social media, staying in touch has become far more spread out.

It took all of ten seconds after arriving for us to start cracking jokes and falling into familiar rhythms. That night, we’d spent hours reminiscing under a clear New England sky. Many life updates and shooting stars later, after heading to bed, I searched my brain for any reasonable explanation for why I’d been nervous for the trip. I found an ugly truth I couldn’t ignore. It’s one that men are told not to say out loud:

I’m lonely.

The irony is that I know I’m not alone in feeling that.

• 30 years ago, 55 % of men reported having at least six close friends.

• Only 27 % of men have six or more close friends today.

• 15% of men have no close friendships.

Isolation doesn’t happen all at once—it’s the kind of thing that sneaks up on you.

Without social media, I’m not someone people see in their feed anymore. And because I was so wrapped up in trying to figure my shit out, the phone calls stopped coming, too.

We’ve all been focused on living our lives. Does scrolling past familiar faces once in a while really check the box for connection? I don’t think so. I think we all face a moment of reckoning where we suddenly wonder what happened to the people we laughed with daily, but haven’t seen in years.

These are the conditions that create isolation, lead to depression, and perpetuate loneliness if left unchecked:

1. Friends you don’t see in person.

2. Spending most of your time by yourself.

3. Struggling to find joy in hobbies you loved.

4. Working too much and pinning your identity to it.

After naming my loneliness that night, I started asking myself how I’d wound up here. I know better (at least, I thought I did). I’m no stranger to bouts of depression, and over the years I’ve found many ways of pulling myself out of deep shit.

You have to make it hard for yourself to isolate.

It takes a whole lot of work, but that’s what makes us human. Connecting with people and reconnecting with people is the most potent form of self-care you can do. Driving back from that long-overdue weekend of catching up with friends, I listened to a podcast Isobel had sent me. It was an episode of Modern Love called “Where Did All My Male Friendships Go?” featuring a conversation with Sam Graham-Felsen, who wrote a New York Times essay about the decay of his deep male friendships.

Woof. Talk about topical.

Realizing I’d let myself drift into hermit mode, I came up with a plan. I’d follow Sam’s advice from the episode and use the TCS method:

• Text friends once per week.

• Call them once each month.

• See them once every three months.

There was another problem I couldn’t ignore, too. After my social media hiatus turned isolation, I needed to get comfortable interacting with people again. Believe me, I know how silly it sounds. But I’ve long struggled to communicate in ways that made me feel understood. Often, it felt like it did just the opposite.

Practicing your communication skills is a step toward reconnecting with people.

Truth be told, this is why I originally started a newsletter and a podcast. It was to regularly practice stringing my thoughts together. Picking up the phone to call a friend would’ve been too easy, right??

Anyway, I hatched a new piece of the plan, finding a goal that would force me to work on my communication skills. That’s when I decided I’d prepare a story to tell live at The Moth. I’d been to plenty of those as a spectator. So, I’d just read some books and watch some youtube videos on storytelling. And then I figured I could practice structure by launching a daily email series. That way, when I tell my story, it’ll finally land in a way people will connect with… ideally, anyway.

The way I saw it, I’d feel less misunderstood, maybe meet some new people, and find the courage to start picking up the phone again. Ultimately, I knew I’d have to find more ways to commit myself to regular socialization.

But this was a start.

We’re often the source of our own suffering.

Uncovering my loneliness felt like “finding the second arrow”, an idea from the Buddhists describing how we beat ourselves up in addition to whatever already happened.

After months of phone tag, a friend and I got together to go hiking this week. We’d both been busy and there were no hard feelings between us for it. Life happens. But while walking, we discovered we’d each felt bad about the amount of time since last seeing each other. Upon realizing this, my friend laughed easily and reminded me of that second arrow theory. A lot of the time, those first arrows are the shit beyond our control that life throws at us. But the second arrow we aim at ourselves. This is the avoidable stuff. It’s the suffering we pile-on with negative self-talk, guilt, and blame.

I picked up a useful way of navigating hardship—avoidable and unavoidable—from my time as an outdoor educator and guide. Fittingly, I’ve called it my GPS: Grace, Pace, and Space. Feel free to use it.

• Grace – give yourself a break. You’re doing the best you can.

• Pace – adjust to what you need. Some is better than none.

• Space – clear the clutter. Give yourself room to succeed.

Choosing not to fire the second arrow is a huge win.

So is realizing when you already have.

What we want is on the other side of what we fear.

“Please welcome our next storyteller to the stage—Derek MacDonald!”

Welp, this was it… I’d been picked to tell a story at the Moth. Going to these monthly storytelling events has become something of a tradition for Isobel and me. That night, I’d surprised even myself. Putting my name in and telling a story on stage meant I’d hit my goal. But that wasn’t even the highlight of my night. After telling my story, I’d watched from the third row as the other storytellers took the stage.

That’s where things shifted. Applause rose and fell. One by one, nine other brave souls stepped up to the mic and shared vulnerably about themselves. And with each new storyteller who got up there, my brow furrowed a bit deeper. The words they used weren’t anything like mine. Theirs felt… like a complete depiction of what they’d experienced. But mine? My words felt more like… like a lawyer explaining defensible statements? That’s when it finally dawned on me: I realized I’d been recounting evidence every time I shared bits of myself with people rather than reliving a memory with them. When you aren’t shown how to share vulnerably—or make space for others to—it’s easier to collect evidence than it is to share what happened and offer your feelings.

That night at The Moth, I learned the difference between “why’d you do that?” stories and “what happened?” stories. These come from what you were asked as a kid when you got in trouble. For example, I was always asked, “why did you do that?”, but the question everybody else seemed to be answering on that Moth stage was, “what happened?”

Maybe that’s what it takes to repair a social life: sharing more “what happened” stories. I’m certainly going to try. And I hope it leads to connecting with people again, beyond social media. Because, while we’ll respond to “why’d you do that?”, the one thing that us lonely men won’t directly say is, “I’m lonely.”

onward.

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P.S. If you’re new to my work, I think you’d also enjoy my blog. That’s where you’ll find everything I publish, including my daily email series.