We Have To Talk About Loneliness

A new documentary called Cher And The Loneliest Elephant that premiered this week on the streaming service Paramount+ captures the best and the worst of humanity. The worst: cruelty and neglect of an elephant named Kavaan who lived alone, shackled, in a small space for over 20 years. The best: an enormous collaborative effort to free and transport this massive animal across the entire continent of Asia. And, of course, Cher. Cher makes everything better.

The timing of this story coming to our tablets, phones and laptops could not be better. Like this suffering elephant, we have all been struggling with confinement and loss of connection over the past year, caught up in a dilemma that can only be solved by a collective effort. In his book Together: The Healing Power Of Social Connection In A Sometimes Lonely World, former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy writes about a pandemic of emotional isolation that was in shadows before COVID-19 brought it clearly into focus, something we need to address as a community for our collective physical and mental health. We need to talk about loneliness.

“When I was Surgeon General, I was coming to see that beneath so many of the stories I was hearing — whether it was about the opioid epidemic or violence in communities or people’s struggles with depression and anxiety and chronic disease — were these threads of emotional…