Name: Remember That EVERYONE Is Lonely
Uploaded: 2025-07-29T17:45:25.000Z
Duration: 2 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

One of the reasons why we tend not to make friends as often as we might comes down to a powerful background idea whose full destructive force we may not even be aware of, the belief that any decent person already has all the friends they need. Somewhere in our minds, the notion has been lodged that only very sad and inept people would, at this stage in their lives, still have a space in their social agenda for a new entrant. Almost everyone else – anyone worth knowing, talented, interesting or good – would long ago have acquired the gang to which they are now continually and irredeemably wedded. What this punishing idea misses is the extent to which a feeling of loneliness and disenchantment is in reality an ongoing and universal possibility, in no way limited to those of reduced appeal. Right now, the enchanting actor is, despite the crowds, perhaps lonely, as is the fated concert pianist, the renowned biologist, the skilled airline pilot, the miraculous neurosurgeon and that rather nice-looking person you've just spotted in the corner of the room, laughing animatedly with a group of fashionable companions. It's open to anyone of sensitivity and charm to fail to find the right sort of allies, to have outgrown their friends from school or university, to not have landed on congenial spirits at work or in the sports centre and therefore to be spending a lot of their evenings on their own. And we can know this for certain of other people because we know it, first and foremost, from a very reliable source – ourselves. We need to battle the modest part of our minds that reads our isolation as a selective punishment and vanquish it with a crucial bit of evidence available directly from our own experience. Other people who know us at a social level almost certainly find it hard to imagine the degree to which we are exposed to loneliness and how much we would still like to locate a wise, tender, funny and interesting new friend. We have built a predominantly cold and guarded society by imagining a thesis which we implicitly know to be untrue on the basis of our experience. The next time we spot an interesting person, we should stop contravening the moral of our own lives. We don't have exactly the right people in our social circle and nor, most probably, do they. So we can afford to shed our false background ideas of social life and go up and say hello.