Member-only story

The intersection of “service” and “loneliness”

Ted Bauer
2 min readApr 21, 2022

Written a bunch about loneliness in my day, in part because I often feel it — here’s maybe the first one I did, here’s one on loneliness at work, and here’s one I got screamed at about on Twitter for “being an apologist for white supremacy.” So that was fun.

My pastor is doing a sermon series on loneliness right now. We exchanged a couple of emails about it before he did the first sermon, which was yesterday. It was a good to great sermon, and the sad part is that if you looked around the church, a few Subdivision Sarahs and Sammys were looking at their phones, which is the essence of not being present, which is part of why we have this whole loneliness epidemic, even if people deny it exists. So that was sad.

Then, later in the day I actually felt kinda lonely, and I was going to reach out to this small group I have through that church, but I realized across the other three couples, you had one baptism going on, you had one kid in the hospital with breathing issues, and in the third couple you have them building a nursery for an impending child. So that only increased my own feelings of loneliness, but I’m also not going to reach out to someone in a position where I know they won’t really be able to respond, because that’s going to make me feel worse, and then I’ll probably want to drink, or some shame spiral will be created, and that’s…

--

--

Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

No responses yet