What causes people to be isolated?
- Julie R. Neidlinger
- Apr 14
- 11 min read
What causes people to be isolated? Why don't they find other people if they are lonely?
There are two reasons isolated people do not attempt to connect with others even if they could, and it has to do with human communication and conversation:
The conversations we use to establish initial connections are painful.
Some people have communication tendencies that shut conversations off.
What causes people to be isolated?
To save space, let’s imagine this paragraph is all the usual introvert stuff that might also apply but isn't part of this particular discussion.
There are also other reasons for isolation. Disability, hearing loss, rural locations, transportation or weather challenges, illness, substance abuse, domestic abuse or troubles, low self-esteem, aging, lack of funds and access to the places people are gathering, working from home, retirement, anxiety—the list of why people are isolated is long.
We can't forget the peculiar phenomenon of how isolation occurs despite our increasing online social presence. The more we connect with people with a digital bridge between us, the further the chasm can grow without us realizing it. The digital bridge is there, after all. We don't realize we've made ourselves into an island until we're out with real people and don't recognize the bridges it might take to connect to them.
But what about those people who are isolated and could connect with other people but seem to choose not to? Why do they seem to self-isolate and avoid connection?
People self-isolate because typical conversations become painful.
I’ve been called a “prickly” person.
I don’t disagree, but each prickle grows out of a wound. It’s the only way to keep people from continually poking the same spot. I drop something sharp there, something that snaps back with a witty joke and gets a laugh, and people move on from that soft spot, and I pretend something doesn’t hurt.
I’m running out of creative ways to talk about professional failure, I wrote in my journal. At least people have stopped asking me about my relationship status.
There are only so many ways to lighten the mood, get a laugh, and redirect the conversation about an area of disappointment and failure in your life before it becomes easier to avoid people altogether.
“It is how it is,” I might say to stay chill when the conversation is a repeated pressing of a soft spot. “We’ll see what God has next” if I want to project a faith larger than a mustard seed. Or maybe I’ll find ways to joke about it to get a laugh so everyone feels fine and no one is uncomfortable when they realize they poked a soft spot in front of the crowd.
I don’t blame people.
We all do it, unconsciously asking questions that hurt people.
It’s difficult to start any conversation with someone we’re not familiar with any other way. Good conversation is difficult; casual conversation is easier and fits in most social situations. We carry on these chatty, non-committal, surface-level, establishing conversations to forge at least a minimal connection with people we care about so they know we care. And the majority of people can respond in a tidy manner about their relationships, job titles, andactivities.
I’ve never been able to, for any of it.
One of the reasons I have veered more into spending time with my immediate family is they know the ins and outs of my life, and I know theirs, and we don’t have to establish anything. We get to the guts and talk about it. A very close friend is the same, so I am glad I have one.
But I know I’ve grown more and more isolated and less inclined to join or participate in activities with people because of this problem. I truly don’t know how many more times I have a clever or witty reply to the establishing questions left in me, and if I were to answer honestly (which I have once or twice), only the crickets seem to know what to do for several moments until someone changes the subject or I whip out a joke and get everyone laughing.
Everyone loves a comedian.
Comedians often are some of the most depressed and internally conflicted people around.
Our get-to-know-you conversations are standardized, not individualized.
When we meet new people or haven’t stayed in touch with old friends, our conversation starts (and sometimes stays on) establishing topics that our culture seems to have determined to be benchmark or demographic-determining queries.
What is your relationship status? When did you meet? (Common in your 20s and 30s, but it drops away when you reach your 50s, thankfully.)
Do you have kids and if so, what are they doing?
What is your job? What do you do for a living? How is your work life going?
These establishing questions seem innocuous and make sense in that we try to figure out who a person is (their identity) so we know what we can talk about. They also provide the details we can expound on and try to mirror our responses so we can find common ground.
The problem begins when the answers to these questions are not typical, are not easy, or cause pain. Look at them; they are the questions about the most important things in our lives! The potential to hurt someone is great.
And as questions, they aren't that useful. They are so direct they don't do the best job in finding out about a person anymore than a census survey would.
What questions should you ask when meeting someone the first time?
The best quick advice I can give for someone to be a good conversationalist in terms of connecting to people is to listen more than you talk.
Beyond that, I'd say you should supplement that good listening by asking questions that encourage the other person to talk. These should be genuine questions that allow the person to open up on their own terms without you prying open a wound. You should connect with a person before poking a soft spot, but we tend to do that backwards.
Some of my favorite kinds of questions that don't cause pain right out of the gate include:
Have you read any interesting books are articles lately? Watched any good films or shows lately? It's a good question because they get to set the tone and topic, and you can encourage them in something they are interested in and get them to open up.
What's the latest adventure you've had? I then might prod them on for information about travels, hilarious stories, etc. If they say they don't have adventures, I might say "going to the grocery store can be an adventure in this town!" and we might get some funny stories going.
Any news? It's my family's go-to opening salvo for every phone conversation, and I even sometimes explain that when I meet a new person so they feel like I've let them into my family secret. That lets them choose what they want to talk about and I can listen for follow-up questions.
Where are you from? I then start asking questions based on what I might know about that place and encourage them to share memories of that place, or their favorite place.
What kinds of things do you like to do in your free time? I don't judge whatever their answer is, only ask questions if it seems they'd like to talk about it. It's a chance for me to learn.
If you haven't talked to a person in a long time or stayed very close, or are meeting someone for the first time, this is a good list. These are questions that don't tap into assumed milestones in life, the uncomfortable ways we measure if a person is a "successful" human being.
You can learn a lot about a person asking these kinds of open questions instead of directly asking them in a way that might hurt.
Instead of asking about their relationship and forcing them to admit they just got a divorce, you might ask about hobbies and discover they are divorced in way they allow you to realize it.
"I'm divorced, six months ago," vs. "I've had a lot of time to golf these days, and am enjoying it. My wife and I split up so I decided to learn to golf to clear my head."
You can understand, if you're listening, what they might be struggling with as they let it leak out on their own terms without you asking them directly.
Five kinds of people who make connection difficult.
Connection between human beings via talking should be natural, but conversation—that awakening and lighting up of the mind and ideas—is where connection happens, while talking is often merely transactional.
Conversation is made difficult by five types of people whose communication tendencies can halt or slow the flow of connection and actually create defensive disconnection.
The minefields: any misspoken word can set it all off.
These are the folks who might be fine for a light-hearted chat about the weather, local news, remember-whens, and any other topic that has little value or importance other than to kill time and flap the jaw. It’s the old acquaintance you meet for dinner and won’t see for another five years.
But as you talk to them, you get the real sense that they could be a nightmare to know more closely. The wrong word, the wrong action, and they will light you up like a Tesla parked in front of the DNC headquarters.
All talk is kept purposefully vague, pleasant, and devoid of strong opinions. Bobblehead figurines are the role models here as you smile and nod and delve no deeper. These are people who are full of traps; the wrong comment and topic, and they’ll pull you in and destroy you. Try to forge a relationship, and you’ll regret it down the road because you’ll never be able to live or speak honestly without all of their kitchen cutlery ending up somewhere in your back.
'My idea of good company, Mr Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.' 'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.' — Jane Austen, Persuasion
The blowhards: they attack any set of open ears they can find.
They don’t converse. They just talk. And talk. And talk.
They talk at you, over you, and after you. They can’t read the room and don’t pick up on cues that the talking needs to stop. They don’t care enough about others to ask them questions and give them a chance to converse; they just want a living carbon-based sentient being to sit there and hear their words about their hobbies, their family, their vacation, their boss. If you try to treat it as a normal conversation, they wait for you to take a breath and pick up right where they left off as if you hadn’t said a word.
These are the people who, when we see them coming, make us pick up our phones and pretend to be in conversation. We pretend to be leaving in the middle of important work or wear our headphones plugged into our pocket. For introverts, these folks siphon gas, giving you nothing but taking all of your energy. They want you to hear them.
To be fair, I’ve come to realize that listening is something people need.
When you are lonely, you need to talk some of that out. It can come out in a massive talking dump, like a blowhard. I’ve had to learn to smile and listen, draining away inside and praying that God would give me patience and grace to soldier on in attentive silence, picking up on the real need beneath all the words and summoning the courage to ask questions to prolong the functional soliloquy.
The toppers: they know and have experienced everything to a greater degree.
Scott Adams did well in creating the Topper character in Dilbert, the annoying guy who views conversation as a means to establish his undeniable excellence in whatever context is at hand.
If you talk about the weather, they’ll tell you how much more extreme their weather is. If you had something bad happen at work, they were at the top of the World Trade Center on 9/11. If you talk about your plantar fasciitis—a surprisingly realistic topic once I hit my 40s—they’ll tell you how they almost lost their leg in the wars. In fact, you don’t really want to talk about any medical topics with a topper because it’s going to get gross. I imagine at my funeral, the topper will somehow manage to top my death. At least I won’t have to hear it.
Conversations become cautious; before mentioning anything, you weigh the potential for a topper story, trying to find something that surely couldn’t be a target for topping, choosing your words carefully, and crossing your fingers.
I suspect that if I were to find myself in Oxford or Cambridge, the toppers would be more knowledge-centric. In my life, having never been to such illustrious locales, toppers tend to want to talk about wellness, food purity, extreme exercise, strange diets that have excluded an entire category of macronutrients, more natural and less modern life, endless sports activities, conspiracies, and the like.
These are not terrible topics, as any topic is poised for delight in the presence of good conversationalists, but the toppers don’t know how to converse about them; they only know how to establish a hierarchy with them at the top. They know more, have done more, have experienced more. They don’t understand the give-and-take of conversation.
With a topper in the room, the conversation inevitably falls silent as people change the subject time and again. After all, if the supreme expert and king of everything is present, another topic must emerge so the rest of the jester court can have a say.
The scold: you're doing something wrong for sure.
The topper is related to the scolder (see my infamous Diet Coke post) in that they both use their life as the understood definition of normal and proceed to inform you of how you don’t align.
It may be done in gentle ways, possibly without awareness that you aren’t in agreement with their assumptions about what is normal and good. They might not realize their bold opinion statements have silenced others in the room who realize this is not a good place to say anything to the contrary.
Many times, I’ve been in a group where the conversation has deviated into “Can you believe people who do/don’t ____?” and I sit awkwardly because I’m one of those people. I have to literally decide if I’m up for a fight. These days, I’m usually not.
The inquisitor: they must know everything there is to know.
Like the other four types of people, this is all of us, at some point. We are all curious cats in search of being killed. Sometimes we don't (or chose not to) pick up on cues that someone doesn't want to talk about something any more.
On the receiving end of the inquisitor, particularly if they're coming at me in a kind of "therapeutic" way in that they think I just need to talk it out, the exhaustion is real.
Sometimes, I just don’t have the words to explain something. Why my work life sucks. What I think about losing a client. What am I up to these days. How I feel about my brother nearly dying. What plans do I have next.
Trust me, I’m asking God the same stuff. You can’t expect me to respond if He isn’t.
I’m a writer, sure, and maybe someday those words will come, and I’ll put them on paper, but maybe they won’t, and I want that to be okay instead of being pressed to express.
And now we come full circle, don’t we?
We’re back at the start, the inability to respond to establishing conversations in which inquiring minds want to know. People want to get into your brains and heart and guts but in a tidy way. Sometimes surgery is in a sanitary operating room, but sometimes, it’s a corpsman dumping sulfa into a wound and dragging you from the frontline.
So I just avoid people when I can, and keep it light when I can’t, when life is happening on the frontlines. Which is almost always.
