Miami can be a lonely place. Ten Days of Connection can make it a more welcoming one | Editorial

Loneliness, disconnection and a weakening of bonds that create community. Those are what Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, calls “the quiet challenges” that so many of us struggle with now, and even before the pandemic.

Loneliness, he says, is more prevalent than diabetes, but just as much of a public-health crisis — and one that he has made a central theme in his work.

It may seem unusual for the nation’s top doctor to focus on something that seems to be more about our emotional than our physical selves, but Murthy — who visited his hometown of Miami last week — believes loneliness is threaded through many of society’s problems. Lack of trust in institutions or even our neighbors, misinformation that so many have embraced through social media, healthcare-worker burnout, rising levels of anxiety and depression in teens — many of those issues have a common root of disconnection, alienation or loneliness. COVID made it all more acute.

We’ve seen that sense of disconnection at play during the pandemic with people refusing to mask up even when they knew it could save others. And we see it right in our own town. Miami has a reputation as a playground where the fun never ends, but it can be a hard place to make deep friendships or create your own tribe. Yet those ties are crucial to our well-being and may well help us solve some of our toughest challenges.

‘On their own’

“To me, this is the difference between being 330 million people who are just out there on their own versus being a country, being one community of people who recognize that we have got to look out for one another,” Murthy said, during an interview with the Miami Herald Editorial Board and reporters.

He wrote a book about it in 2021, “Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.” He’s not the only one taking loneliness seriously. In the United Kingdom, for example, as Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer wrote, there’s actually a government “loneliness minister” and a #LetsTalkLoneliness campaign after surveys indicated that up to a fifth of adults there felt lonely most or all of the time. Likewise, Japan created a minister for loneliness and isolation in 2021.

Loneliness is associated with all sorts of ills, both physical and mental. It’s been linked to heart attacks, dementia and premature deaths, and yet we don’t think of it as a public-health problem.

We’ve learned to treat loneliness as a “bad feeling we’ve got to figure out or put up with,” Murthy said. “The reality is it’s much more than that. It’s a warning signal that’s similar to hunger or thirst that tells us when something we need that’s critical for our survival is missing, and in this case it’s social connection. That warning light has been flashing for a long time but we haven’t seen it. . . . It’s time for us to recognize what’s happening.”

We have to reframe the issue. This is not something confined to older people, and it’s not necessarily about isolation. Murthy said he has spoken with college students, young parents — even members of Congress — who said they felt deeply alone despite having people all around them. He’s spoken to people who told him they felt they had to bear the burdens of life alone, that no one had their back, that if they disappeared tomorrow, no one would care.

When he talked with the Board, he was fresh out of a meeting with a group of Miami LGBTQ+ students. He said they described feeling as if they didn’t matter and that they had to fight just for the right to exist in a world eager to marginalize them. He said they felt “disheartened.”

“None of us,” he said, “wants to have our kids feel this way.”

A new conversation

We need to have a conversation — as a country and locally — about how we’ve filled our lives. We build our lives around work, fitting in friends and family around those demands, Murthy noted. He argues that we need to turn that equation on its head, and make relationships the center of our lives.

“We can have the best science, we can have the best policy, we can have the best resources to invest in programs. But If we don’t have a community where people feel connected to one another, where they trust one another, then all of those resources will have limited impact.”

Murthy is bringing national heft to the issue, but in Miami, we’ve been fortunate to have a program called 10 Days of Connection that has been around since 2017 to tackle this very problem. Dozens of local organizations, including the Miami Herald, a co-founder, take part in events and efforts during the first 10 days in May designed to break us out of our bubbles and silos and risk getting to know people who aren’t necessarily like us. As a letter from the other organizations that co-founded the initiative astutely says: “The antidote to polarization is not silence. It is discourse. It is connection.”

And, “Instead of writing each other off, it’s time to hear each other out. To focus on what unites us. To see the humanity in one another and to find healthy ways to build community with those from different places.”

Take a look at 10daysofconnection.org/2022-calendar, and create your own connection experiences. And while you’re at it, share your own approach to making new friends in this town. Share your wisdom in the form below.

The pandemic has been hard on everyone but valuable lessons may yet come out of it, including the need to extend ourselves on behalf of others. Participate in an event. The 10 Days of Connection takes some of the “ick” factor out of getting out there, meeting people and actually talking to them about something deeper than the weather.

Take the 10 Days of Connection plunge.