Loneliness

A Few Words from Jim

December 2023

According to Psychology Today, Loneliness is the state of distress or discomfort that results when one perceives a gap between one’s desires for social connection and actual experiences of it.

I recently attended a technology conference and one of the key themes was that social networking and always connected technology has actually created a lonely society. I started to see more and more references to it as something negative about society that the tech industry exacerbated and somehow needs to fix. 

I thought it would be ok to start talking about it and learning about it together. 

I remember during COVID lockdown seeing playgrounds taped off by police tape. We took away playing together and being together to protect ourselves from the spread of the virus. I have been curious about the future social implications from this.

You can read a published interview on the research behind loneliness on page 8. 

Over the next several issues I’ll find more material to share, so we can learn together. 

Being an entrepreneur can be very lonely at times. I remember when I grew Project A to 50 employees, it was one of the loneliest periods of my life. 

Sometimes we grow our business and sometimes we shrink it or hit the pause button in order to survive. That can be very lonely as you face the stress of hard decisions. 

I was at a Holiday Party the other night and someone said to me as I was leaving, “I love your business journal, I read it all the time” and I thought about it while driving home. 

Putting the journal together, sharing it and learning along with you makes me feel a social connection to you and I appreciate you for it. 

Happy Holidays to you and yours and I’ll see you next year. 

Thanks for reading…

 Jim
Jim@SouthernOregonBusiness.com 

Check out SOU’s new Office of Student Belonging and Engagement (BE) – it seems to attack loneliness head on by giving students a place to BE and maybe we should do that for our employees as well. 

Thank you True South Solar for being a new advertiser.