Tell me if this sounds familiar. You wake up on Monday morning, get ready for work, commute to work, work for eight or nine hours, commute home, spend your free time watching television, playing video games, scrolling your phone or computer, and eating, and then you go to sleep and do it all over again five times until the weekend. Then when the weekend rolls around, it’s more of the same — just without the work. Maybe you go to the gym, run some errands, do an activity, or meet up with a friend, but those events seem to be rare occasions.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the life that many people in the workforce live, me included.
When I first started working full time, it became my life. Go to work, go home, go to work, go home, repeat until Friday, become happy on Friday for some reason, then spend the weekends at home alone. It wasn’t uncommon for me to try to avoid telling people about my weekend on Monday morning because I always spent the time alone and never had anything good to share.
I realized I was living the box to box lifestyle!
I invented the term box to box lifestyle to describe when your life is spent going from one box to another. One box is your home, the other box is your workplace. Pretty much the entirety of your life happens in one of two boxes or commuting between them. If you work from home, your house serves as both boxes.
Living box to box for a day or two isn’t a bad thing, but I imagine for most people reading this, that scenario isn’t just a one-time thing. It pretty much describes your daily life — and your weekends aren’t much different. The problem with this is that the routine of working a job, then going straight home for a technology-fueled isolation session, is that it’s the perfect breeding ground for loneliness, as there is very little room for real social connection.
What is Loneliness and Why Do So Many People Feel It?
If 3 in 5 people experience the same thing, would it be reasonable to say that a bigger trend is playing a significant role? Probably yes, but it definitely requires some further investigation.
The thing is, 3 in 5 Americans reported feeling lonely with more people reporting feeling like they are left out, poorly understood, and lacking companionship, according to Cigna, an American worldwide health services organization. This number has been rising significantly and all indicators point to the continuation of the alarming trend. This is not just limited to the United States. Many developed countries are experiencing a similar trend, according to Statistics Canada and the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness in the United Kingdom.
So what exactly is this loneliness thing so many people seem to be experiencing? If you’ve never consciously thought about it in much detail, imagining someone experiencing loneliness may sound like them staying in their room all day talking to no one with no friends and no romantic relationship, which may be true, but that is far from complete.
According to many experts, loneliness isn’t necessarily about being alone or isolated. Instead, it’s about feeling alone or isolated. Although being physically alone and isolated often leads to feeling alone or isolated, loneliness is not just limited to those who are on their own.
Celebrities, who are often the complete opposite of physically alone, who often have their significant other and entourage always around them, and who are often chased by their screaming fans and chaotic reporters, can feel very lonely. College students who are constantly around people in their dorms or in classes can feel very lonely. Even members of a loving family who all live under the same roof can feel lonely.
The feeling of being alone or isolated doesn’t come from not being surrounded by people. Instead, it comes from a lack of connection. When you don’t feel connected to another person, yourself, an idea, a task or activity, or the world, the feeling of loneliness creeps in.
Happiness is in Social Relationships
One of the world’s longest studies of adult life, done by Harvard, found that high-quality social relationships are the strongest link to lifelong happiness, even over money or fame. Social ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.
At the end of the day, the only things that will really bring true meaning to your life are your relationships with other people, whether they be close relationships or relationships with acquaintances, community and society, and yourself. Pretty much everything you do in your life is in service to your relationships. Our modern technology, status, money, perfect photo moment obsessed culture tends to lose sight of this at times.
I think this is something we all know instinctively but haven’t yet logically connected. Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my life weren’t because of fancy meals, luxury events, or vacations, but because I was with someone that I really cared about. My happiest moments growing up were sitting in a McDonald’s or in the dining room of a Superstore with my best friend; on a patio outside a mall in Japan drinking juice with my brother, or on a drive with great friends singing along to music.
If you ask an elderly person about their biggest regret, you will most likely find that it has to do with their relationships with the people they care about. It’s almost never about work or money. When we understand that social relationships are tied to happiness, we can see why social relationships remain among the top priorities for people, up until their dying breath. We can also see how unfulfilled social relationships end up as people’s biggest regret.
Let me be among the first to actually come up with a complete guide that covers all the aspects of social relationships and solves the problem of how to maintain them and thrive within them — not just throw a collection of unrelated “tips and tricks” at you like you’d see in an internet article or online video.
My ultimate goal in writing this book is for you not to wait until you’re 80 years old and on a hospital bed to realize that social relationships are the most important part of life. Instead of looking at our actions and behaviors in hindsight, I want us to look at them with foresight so that we have the chance to actually enjoy life while we have lots of it left in us.
Outside the Box to Box
Outside the Box to Box: Experience the Joys of Connection by Creating a Rewarding Social Life, is my book that’s officially coming out in mid-late May 2021, and it’s the first-ever holistic guide to go about creating the social connections you crave by becoming someone capable of doing so.
The reason why I wrote this book is because when I had this problem, there wasn’t a book or resource that laid everything I needed to do in order to create a social life I love in a way that was easy to understand and actionable. Almost all books focused on either social skills, dating, or general self-help mindsets. Don’t get me wrong, all those books are important, but they don’t necessarily tackle the root issue. When I struggled with my social life, it wasn’t because I was crazy ineffective at socializing. Maybe I needed to touch up a few things but that wasn’t my main issue. Dating books did help, and that was another area I needed to work on, however, any benefit was indirect since they are different topics. More overlap than manipulative type dating advice like pick-up or the female equivalent would suggest but still indirect. And I read more than my fair share of self-help books but I found myself trying to piece together the information myself to make it work in my social life instead of it being present and relevant in the first place.
Outside the Box to Box is going to provide you with a simple yet effective roadmap to identifying what you want to get out of your social connections, and how to intentionally develop those relationships. It will also show you how to develop 6 core skills and traits you need to have to make those social connections possible, and many of them are not mentioned or explained properly in many books that I’ve read to this date.
In preparation for my book launch, I’m giving away digital copies of my book for free to help drum up anticipation for my launch. All I ask is that you leave an Amazon review and buy a discounted copy of the book ($0.99 for Kindle) on launch day. If you would like to preview the book, please visit rocketshippublishing.com/giveaway