ArticleThis year my annual Spotify wrap (Spotify’s summary of my listening habits) was awash with nerdy podcasts, lo-fi, acoustic covers, easy listening and pop. However, it also confirmed that my Spotify account is not my own. Also on the list were Harry Potter audiobooks, Disney songs, a Fact Detectives podcast, and plenty of Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick duets from the Trolls movies. Thanks to my kids, my ‘listening age’ is 14 years younger than my actual age. I’ll take it.
What we listen to says a lot about us. Australia’s most streamed song this year is “Ordinary”, from American Alex Warren. And our most streamed Aussie song was “Riptide”, from Vance Joy. Both are odes to connection and relationship in an age of struggle – a recognition of our need for others in a tough world. They might also reveal that great invisible grinch: loneliness.
We might be navigating low unemployment and strong inflation, but we’re in a connection recession. The economics of Christmas is about more than mere economics.
We lace the holiday season with curated social media posts, parties, presents and indulgent feasts. But amid the festivities, more and more of us are struggling to find connection. Reports suggest that while Christmas is considered Australia’s most meaningful public holiday, 30-40% of Australians continue to struggle with loneliness through the Christmas season.
In his book The Siren’s Call, author and TV presenter Chris Hayes notes that loneliness has grown as society has become richer. Greater wealth often leads us to close ourselves off from those around us. Stronger security systems. Bigger gates. Larger houses. Smaller front porches.
Our screen-centric lives aren’t helping either. We get annoyed when people call us unexpectedly. We talk to each other less. We see each other less. And the old practice of dropping by someone’s home without warning is now considered as audacious as a wartime military ambush.
Our levels of virtual connection and actual disconnection are both at all-time highs. We have more than 5 million apps to choose from, but one of the least used apps on any smartphone is the phone itself.
And the physical damage of loneliness can be the same as smoking around 15 cigarettes per day.
Loneliness can quickly escalate from being privately unhealthy to being publicly corrosive too. Mass shootings, growing knife crime, gang violence, hateful protests, neo-Nazism and sovereign citizen groups feed off a sense of exclusion. Extremism expert Dr Kristy Campion confirms that most people join extremist groups and causes for pro-social reasons – looking for meaning and belonging. Derangement seems to start with estrangement.
Harvard University’s Global Flourishing Study instead declares that we are primarily relational, and therefore connection and community are fundamental to flourishing. Author and speaker Brené Brown agrees, writing in her latest book Strong Ground that “We are neurobiologically hardwired for connection. And in the absence of connection, there is suffering.”
We may have built a world around cost-benefit utility maximisation, but we seem to need long-term connection more than short-term dopamine hits. Black Friday, Boxing Day sales and ’grammable holidays don’t cut it. We’ve been told that we’re homo economicus (rational and self-interested) but we’re actually homo relationalis (creatures seeking connection and belonging).
I remember the magic of childhood Christmases – an extravaganza of food, family, road-trips, music and backyard cricket. As I got older, I became less excited about the presents and more excited about the people. Now, with children of my own, recreating the joy for them has confirmed my childhood suspicions: it was always about the people. In fact, the Christmas magic we experienced as kids was simply the outworking of the love and sacrifice of our parents.
A closer look at my memories settled it.
Christmases are best when people give of themselves for others.
We seem to do best when we live as though our lives, like our Spotify accounts, are not our own. The origins of Christmas—the biblical account of how God’s love for his creation drove him to join it, as a person—foreground that truth.
In gift-giving season, it’s an act of self-giving that models for us what makes our Christmases most joyful: giving ourselves away to others. The Bible’s daunting call to love one another, to bear each other’s burdens, to journey together, could be read as a handy prescription for how best to produce Christmas cheer – by spending ourselves on others.
Max Jeganathan is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX). He served as a political and social policy adviser in the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, and is undertaking a PhD in law on human dignity. This article was first published in The Canberra Times.