Do you often feel lonely? If you do, you may spend a lot of time wondering whats wrong with you.
It may seem as if everyone else but you has lots of friends. It may seem like everyone else is always getting invited to go to exciting parties. And it may seem like youre the only one who is left at home, waiting for the phone to ring, wondering why no one ever calls you to invite you out.
Actually, loneliness is much more common than you might think. There is actually an epidemic of loneliness in many societies today.
This may surprise you.
After all, so many millions of us in the modern world are jammed close together in large teeming cities, and we have at hand all the technological conveniences that are supposed to bring people closer together, such as e-mail, telephones, faxes, and the Internet. Why are so many of us more lonely than ever?
The reason is that society has changed very rapidly in the past two or three hundred years. Many of the social factors that used to make it easy to make and keep friends for a lifetime have disappeared.
Families have changed a lot in recent decades. A hundred years ago, most families were...