“When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.”
 -- Tennesee Williams American playwright. (1911-1983)

I used to be the one patting the do-gooder’s knee. “It’s not about you,” I’d croon.  “I know you lined up nine experts and stapled 200 handouts and only eight people came to the FRG. But was good for those eight people, wasn’t it?”

Those days are over, friend. The next time someone complains to me about lack of attendance at a school meeting, church group or ship function, I’m swear I’m gonna snap. 

“Don’t you get it?! We are not JOINERS!” I’m gonna holler. “We are a whole generation that does not join things. We exchange e-mail addresses. We don’t attend meetings. We look stuff up on the website.  Face it, groups-of-all-kinds, it’s over. We’re not that into you!”

Everyone would stare at me openmouthed. And, those same eight people would form a committee to deal with my welfare.  

I can’t help it. Seems to me that technology has eliminated the need we used to have for all kinds of groups. The information and instruction and friendship I used to find when I went to ship meetings, I now get online.

I see this kind of progress making us all a little more capable of standing on our own two feet. So shouldn’t the school and the church and the ship just recognize this, fix their website and quit begging our attendance?

Maybe no. Sociologist Jean Twenge says that even though I’m right that the current generation of young people are not big joiners, she says I’m dead wrong about the ultimate value of standing on your own two feet. Especially when it comes to the frequently moving, frequently stressed military family.

In her book, “Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before,  (Free Press, 2006)  Twenge says that this belief that we need to stand alone all the time even during deployment is one of the strange offshoots of being trained from toddlerhood to focus on the self instead of the group.

“We were taught to believe in ourselves and that we have to love ourselves first,” said Twenge in a recent interview. “The downside of this is that the self is not a very good support mechanism. For mental health we need other people.”  

In the research Twenge collected for her book, she found that people with good social connections — the ones who attend meetings in person and make time for friends and eat with people who do not appear on television--consistently trump the own-two-feeters.  Joiners have less anxiety, less depression, fewer physical ailments. 

“Human beings are social animals,” said Twenge. “We are hardwired to need other people.” 

So why don’t we do it? Why don’t we have that biological itch that sends us running to the meeting desperate for a cup of bug juice and some eye contact? 

Maybe because the computer and the TV and the phone don’t belch or cough or get up when you sit down next to them. Maybe because we feel like we are plenty connected with thousands of people we communicate with online. Bring on a generation that has ever been more connected.

But get real:  I don’t have anyone I could ask to jump-start my car, do I?  I haven’t invited one person to go for a walk since I moved here. No one online notices when my allergies are bothering me or when I have a good hair day.

Maybe that’s why Twenge says that we are a generation starving for affection. 

“We live on a junk food diet of instant messages, e-mail and phone calls rather than the healthy food of live, in person interaction.” 

I think she’s got me there. Yes, I feel full to bursting with connection. But that kind of connection doesn’t really feed the bones of our lives. I hate to admit it, but we do need our church groups. We do need to see the thousand expressions that dash across the face of the Kindergarten teacher. We need tocomfort a girl whose sailor just left her for the first time. We need to be comforted in our turn. 

That kind of in person connection nourishes in a way that our online connections never will. I just hope I still  to remember how to go out there and do it.