“You know each other — just say hi!” Whether you call it the Gen Z stare or the “RBF,” we’re struggling to stay social and it’s not our fault. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory declared a loneliness epidemic, finding that “about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness,” and “this decline is starkest for young people ages fifteen to 24 [now seventeen to 25]. For this age group, time spent in person with friends has reduced by nearly 70% over almost two decades, from roughly 150 minutes per day in 2003 to 40 minutes per day in 2020.”
Naturally, the pandemic necessitated significant social distancing, leading to less time spent with friends and family. Instead, teenagers invested this time on TikTok, where the hashtag “‘lonely’ generated over 687 million views. Absence (69.6%) was the prevailing theme of the self-perceived cause of loneliness that was expressed. This absence was mostly attributed to a lack of quality in a person’s relationships (33.7%) or having no relationship (32.1%).”
The Class of 2026 began their first year of college in September 2022. Many of us had never returned to physical high school classrooms; some of us had hybrid learning models, and a few experienced “pre-pandemic” life in their senior year.
During much of our first year of college, Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) was not offering in-person sessions as they had prior to the pandemic. In the spring of 2023, The Phoenix reported CAPS finally began to loosen these COVID restrictions. Quoted in an article, CAPS Director Dr. Simone Collins stated, “I would say that due to COVID, we are seeing an increase in anxiety, especially social anxiety. Clients spent a couple of really formative years in relative isolation from peers. They are now relearning how to share spaces with others and how we move through … the world around us.”
We experienced the pandemic’s effects on our friends, families, and communities firsthand. We stopped hanging out. Instead, we video called in our bedrooms with half of our heads on screen. In our first year, virtual office hours were standard, with many professors refusing to meet in physical rooms. Many of us had hoped college would be different from high school, but the world had changed. How were we expected to perform the way we once had? Could we ever return? These are questions that I have no answer to, admittedly. The pandemic brought permanent, irreconcilable instability into our lives. However, I choose to believe we’re not predestined for loneliness indefinitely.
A few weeks ago, Professor Mark Wallace, James Hormel chair of social justice, asked my religion cafe: senior symposium class whether or not we feel Swatties are “brains on legs.” Broadly, we agreed yes. While the visual was vaguely comedic, Professor Wallace presented the idea with a sober expression. This moment stuck with me when I waved to a blank face in Narples, to no reaction. I wasn’t offended. “Just saying hi” … is hard. When there are a million different thoughts circulating ad nauseam, the concept of life outside of your “brain” — even for a second — seems impossible. However, it’s that unrelenting dance between rejection and acceptance that leads to unimaginable happiness.
Over the summer, I read “Love Is a Washing Line” by Rémy Ngamije for Yale University’s Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Workshop. The story, centered on marriage, with boxing as a metaphor for its fluctuation, notes this same tension. Ngamije writes, “Everything has to feel new, even when it is not. You either focus or fold … Sometimes you just have to take the hit without countering. These are the motions. These are the combinations. And every day you work on keeping the line tight.” Ngamije uses marriage as a lens to unfold this tightrope, but, fundamentally, he’s grappling with the ordinary ways we experience intricate relationships.
The act of simply saying “hi” is a ritual as difficult as the next, but a necessary entrance to connection of any sort. Bear with me because I’m about to become a bit “woo woo.” Mircea Eliade, who wrote on the sacred versus the profane, argued that rituals activate the sacred. His sacred can appear in a myriad of ways — many of which are convoluted and narrow minded. Nevertheless, I believe the sacred is your subjective religious experience. For example, Narples is sacred to me. It’s where I break bread with people I care for, activated by its ordinary nature. So is greeting my peers. I see it when their face lights up, they grin, and our energy transfers across from one another.
Therefore, when you don’t wave back, you’re losing a world of connection and possibility that could ostensibly exist. I find that conclusion devastating, considering the earlier statistics. It becomes even more tragic in Eliade’s thesis: we have desacralized the world, and the sacred might be impossible to reactivate. These are synonyms of the same anxiety. Will we always be lonely: spiritually, interpersonally, and romantically?
I reject that supposition wholeheartedly, and I want you — the reader — to prove me right. If you’re reading this, please comment on an instance where you “put yourself out there,” and succeeded. Feel free to write anonymously, if that feels more comfortable. I recognize that I’m asking for vulnerability here. I want to illustrate our community’s strength.
Regardless of your participation, I hope I have convinced you to wave back. Not to preserve my ego, but to take a second and notice the world surrounding us. Perhaps we’ll never experience something like college again, from the accessibility of friends and professors to the teeming sense of possibility surrounding each step. I admit this vastness can feel intimidating, but take each second as it comes. Breathe in, breathe out … and try to enjoy it.
