Theoretically, we are more connected than ever, yet loneliness is a growing crisis. Research shows that social isolation can be as harmful to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. What’s behind this epidemic of disconnection, and what can we do about it?
In this episode, psychiatrist and theologian Dr. Warren Kinghorn joins hosts Marcus Goodyear and Camille Hall-Ortega to explore the medical and theological roots of loneliness. Drawing on his work with veterans, students, and other communities, Dr. Kinghorn offers a powerful perspective on why we struggle to find belonging—and how embracing vulnerability and deep connection can change our lives.
From the impact of social media to the lessons of faith, from the role of community to the surprising effects of shame, this conversation is a hopeful reflection on what it truly means to belong.
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:10:00
Marcus Goodyear
There’s this thing called doomscrolling. I do it sometimes. Maybe you do too. I dive into my news feed and this or that social media platform. Sometimes it’s an actual news feed of headlines.
00:00:10:04 – 00:00:13:01
News Headlines
Tonight, the worst day for or diving into the world of you today. Secretary of state Mark.
00:00:13:01 – 00:01:49:03
Marcus Goodyear
But I’m not reading stories. I’m not engaging in social media. I’m just scanning the headlines and thinking to myself, wow, I am very different from these people. I mean, why would they believe that? Why would they think it’s funny to share that? It makes me feel disconnected. I feel a sense of fragmentation rather than community.
We aren’t celebrating where we agree, and sometimes it feels like we disagree more than we agree. And then I feel lonely. It’s strange because I’m not alone. I mean, none of us are. There are 8 billion people on this planet, and yet so many of us feel alone. We know this is a problem. According to the World Health Organization, 25% of older adults are socially isolated.
As many as 15% of adolescents are lonely, and social disconnection is unhealthy. It’s just as unhealthy as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. If you’re socially disconnected, your risk of heart disease goes up 29%. Your risk of a stroke goes up 32%. This might be why Japan and Great Britain have ministers of loneliness. Because loneliness is dangerous. But there is hope.
I’m Marcus Goodyear from the H. E. Butt Foundation. This is The Echoes Podcast. On today’s episode, we welcome our guest, Dr. Warren Kinghorn. Dr. Kinghorn is a clinical psychiatrist and a theologian. He’s the co-director of the theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative at Duke University. And recently he was featured in Echo’s magazine, where he talked about the medical and theological roots of loneliness.
I’m here with my co-host, Camille Hall Ortega.
00:01:49:06 – 00:01:52:04
Camille Hall-Ortega
Hi, Marcus. Warren, we’re so glad to have you.
00:01:52:06 – 00:01:54:10
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
I’m so glad to be here. Thank you all. Yeah.
00:01:54:18 – 00:02:02:27
Marcus Goodyear
Yes. Welcome. Now, you are a psychiatrist. And so, what would you say to a patient who tells you they’re deeply lonely?
00:02:03:00 – 00:02:34:01
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
I am a psychiatrist and specifically a psychiatrist who works with veterans in the VA medical system. So most of my patients are men, because that’s the composition. Historically, the military, many of them have served in war. All of them have served in the military. And as you point out, many of them are lonely. And I’m also a teacher and professor at Duke University, and I work with students who are surrounded by other students, and yet many of them also are lonely.
And my clinical work at the VA, when a patient tells me that they’re lonely, which, by the way, just happened to this morning when I was in clinic.
00:02:34:04 – 00:02:34:27
Camille Hall-Ortega
Wow.
00:02:34:29 – 00:03:32:19
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
I would first just want to thank them for telling me that it’s sometimes hard to admit to ourselves, and also to others, that we’re lonely. Yeah, we may feel some shame around that. I’d say thank you for telling me that. And and then I think I wouldn’t try to convince them otherwise. I wouldn’t immediately jump in and say, oh, but there’s these people in your life that you should be grateful for, but rather just accept that experience.
And then I would tell them that I’m really happy that they’re in conversation with me and and connected to me. So the relationship that I can build with the patient is not everything that a patient needs, but it may be a start. That might be a way to build some trust that then could extend to other kinds of relationships in the future.
And then I would start to ask, like, who is it in your life who you have felt connected to in the past, or you might want to be connected to, or you might feel a kind of wound of disconnection from and what would it might mean to begin to take some risks of reaching out to them and putting yourself into a community especially.
00:03:32:26 – 00:04:09:21
Camille Hall-Ortega
I am thankful for the work that you do. And I imagine that the context is huge. The context has a lot of effects on what your conversations look like and what your recommendations look like. I’m married to a veteran. My my husband is a marine Corps veteran until I’ve heard so many stories, but I imagine you have lots of them.
Do you find that post-Covid, or any other factors you’ve seen have really played a part in the number of folks you’re hearing talking about loneliness or coming to you with issues of loneliness?
00:04:09:24 – 00:05:02:17
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Anecdotally, that has been my experience. I mean, Covid was so difficult for all of us and more difficult for some people in some communities and others. But for many of my patients and for also many just in the rest of my networks, I think Covid was a time when we had this enforced social isolation. And I think it’s easy to quantify the cost of virus transmission.
And it was really important that that be quantified. But it was harder at the time to quantify the costs of social isolation and not eating with people and not being with people and not singing with people and not sharing a relationship. So people who were already vulnerable to isolation in the context of that forced isolation often ended up even more so in ways that, frankly, been hard to recover and get back.
And I think people develop habits and communities develop habits. Yes. And there’s a lot of people out there that are still suffering.
00:05:02:20 – 00:05:20:02
Marcus Goodyear
Yeah. You mentioned earlier that sometimes when patients say that they are lonely, there’s some shame attached to that. Do you think that as a nation, we feel some shame attached to the loneliness we felt during the pandemic?
00:05:20:04 – 00:06:50:17
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
I think that shame is actually a really important contributor to loneliness, and loneliness also produces shame. And so there’s a two way relationship there, and I follow Brené Brown on this. I follow my friend Kurt Thompson when he talks about shame from a Christian perspective. That shame correlates with this two part belief, and one belief is that I am not blank enough where whatever that blank is, is whatever we most need to fit into or to be accepted by community to which we need or want to belong.
And then the other part of that is when people realize that I’m not blank enough, like I’m going to be excluded from this community. I teach at Duke University, you know, elite university. That might be something like, I’m not smart enough, I’m not well-read enough, or I’m not, you know, athletic enough or I’m not, you know, progressive enough or I’m not conservative enough or whatever it is that we feel like we need to belong.
And then in response to the emotion of shame draws us into ourself. It actually leads us to disconnect from others because we don’t want to be vulnerable to being ostracized. And yet that then cuts us off from those relationships that we need. And so shame produces isolation. And then isolation produces shame. And we find ourselves in this like, toxic, cycle.
Yeah. That’s very hard to get out of. And I think I see a lot of students in that cycle. I see patients in that cycle. I see myself in that cycle.
00:06:50:20 – 00:06:52:11
Marcus Goodyear
Yeah. Can you talk about that?
00:06:52:14 – 00:07:15:08
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Because I’m a psychiatrist and a theological ethicist. I spent a lot of years in school, and I know what it means to be a student, as well as what it means to be a professor. Yeah. I think about all of those years that I spent in school and all of those times when I didn’t ask the question that I thought was maybe the uninformed question, because I didn’t want people to look at me and say, oh, like you really?
00:07:15:09 – 00:07:17:08
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
You really don’t belong here. Yeah.
00:07:17:09 – 00:07:19:08
Marcus Gooyear
You didn’t want to ask the stupid question.
00:07:19:10 – 00:07:51:10
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Right? And I don’t know that I ever sought out the conversation with either a professor or with friends or with others where I just said I. You’re not sure about these questions? Because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want people to say, oh, yeah, you mean you actually don’t really belong here? That’s what kept me from having connections, having relationships that would have been really helpful in my story, something that played out over a long period of time.
I’ve worked on that, but I think that is something that I think a lot of students feel. A lot of people in workplaces feel. A lot of people in churches feel sometimes.
00:07:51:12 – 00:07:53:09
Camille Hall-Ortega
Some imposter syndrome, right? Some.
00:07:53:09 – 00:07:54:07
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Absolutely.
00:07:54:07 – 00:08:07:11
Camille Hall-Ortega
Yeah. And your neighbor next to you is going, I want to ask this question, but I but I don’t want anyone to think it’s kind of dumb. And you’re thinking the same thing. And that connection would come off if one of you was brave, right?
00:08:07:12 – 00:08:20:27
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Yeah. And the problem with imposter syndrome is we all think that we’re the only one that has it. Yes. And students think that they’re the only ones who have it. But I’m like, well, it’s pretty common. And your professors for students, ones and even professors have it.
00:08:21:00 – 00:08:37:14
Marcus Goodyear
I, I’m not sure I really expected this to get so quickly down the road toward belonging and thinking about, like, belonging, as maybe an antidote to loneliness or our inability to feel belonging as the source of loneliness. Do you think about belonging a lot?
00:08:37:16 – 00:09:46:23
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
I do, and when I when I think about belonging, I’m always finding myself quoting the formulation of my friend and colleague John Swinton and John. When he talks about belonging, he talks about the difference between inclusion and belonging. And because we talk a lot in church circles about how can we be inclusive? We talk in educational circles about how can we have inclusive communities.
And John says inclusion is good. It’s good to want to be inclusive, but it’s a low bar and it’s not enough because frankly, to be inclusive, all you have to do is to not turn away people that come to you. So anybody that is in a church sanctuary on a Sunday morning and has gotten in the door is included because they haven’t been turned away, right?
Right. But John’s point is that inclusion isn’t enough because you can be in a space with 50, 100, 200, a thousand other people, and yet no one is actually caring about you. No one is loving you. No one is even making an effort to connect with you. There’s a belonging is different from inclusion because to belong you have to be missed.
Right. Someone needs to long for you when you’re not there. And to say, yeah, we need you to be a part of us and that’s a higher threshold. But that’s actually what we most need as human beings.
00:09:46:26 – 00:10:11:00
Camille Hall-Ortega
Really good. I think that’s just tapping into some of the things, these universal desires that connect us, that many of us fear, the vulnerability that it requires to sort of admit those needs and admit those desires. But we all know that we all want to be seen and known and loved, and it takes some risk to put yourself out there.
00:10:11:03 – 00:10:43:21
Marcus Goodyear
So you talked about going through shame with community, and then we were talking about these different forms of community where these things we call community, but we’re all sitting down, facing the same direction, not really engaging. Nobody’s missing me. If I’m not there. I definitely feel that. Why is community so hard? I mean, sometimes it feels like a diet and exercise where we know what we’re supposed to be doing and we’re just we’re just not doing it. But maybe it’s not even that simple. Maybe. Maybe it actually is hard. And I’m just curious if you could talk a little bit more about what makes a community thrive.
00:10:43:24 – 00:11:59:27
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
That’s kind of the Genesis three question, isn’t it? Like, why was our world not as as as we know in some ways that it could be. And we have basic needs as human beings to connect with other people from the very, very earliest parts of our lives. Like we become who we are in relationship with those who form us and those who guide us.
And yet we find ourselves like in this world. Ultimately find that those relationships always in some ways let us down. They hold us and they let us down. Even in the best case scenario. That’s actually just part of what it means to live in the world, that we find that sometimes when we need other people, they’re not there for us.
And that’s actually part of how we develop selves who are able to continue to get to go in the world. And though if we find it that those relationships really aren’t there for us, or are abusive or are neglectful, that becomes really hard. And so we begin to to learn like I can only trust in myself. No one else is going to be there for me.
And that leads us to have a sense that the world is up to me to navigate as an individual. And so then you can believe all you want about the importance of community. But if you’re if you’re kind of core belief is that I can only trust in myself because no one else is going to really be there for me when I need it.
It’s going to be really hard to trust.
00:11:59:28 – 00:12:01:18
Camille Hall-Ortega
Some disillusionment there.
00:12:01:21 – 00:12:13:29
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Yeah. And just and just a sense of like, can we actually lean into a community to both contribute to it and to be formed in it in a way that we, that we need as human beings?
00:12:14:06 – 00:12:40:10
Camille Hall-Ortega
I can relate with those feelings of disillusionment where you go, I’ve tried that. I’ve tried that. You know, you join a new church, you’re in some kind of new community, and folks say, you got to put yourself out there. You get to join this small group and try getting involved. And you have one, two, three, a handful of experiences that didn’t meet your expectations.
00:12:40:13 – 00:12:59:02
Camille Hall-Ortega
And then you go, I’ve tried it and it takes some level of something, right? Fortitude, resilience, something where folks are saying, try again and you try again because there’s community there to be had.
00:12:59:04 – 00:13:01:02
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
That’s right. And we don’t stop meeting it.
00:13:01:05 – 00:13:22:23
Marcus Goodyear
Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. You mentioned veterans and students earlier. I assume the veterans tend to be older, although they may not be. And your students tend to be younger, although they may also not be. Are you seeing loneliness as affecting different generations differently, or is it pretty much the same no matter what generation or what age you’re in?
00:13:22:25 – 00:14:24:16
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
I think loneliness affects every generation, and it affects veterans as well as students as well as all of us. So it’s a it’s a broader cultural problem. It does, I think, affect different generations in different ways. So I would very much recommend the Surgeon General, Vivek Murphy’s 2023 report. So he reports in this compiled report that American adults spend nearly an hour per day alone, more than we did in 2003.
So that’s 30 hours a month that we would have been around other people, you know, 20 years ago that we’re not now, that we spend less time with friends. So whereas with into 2003, it was 60 minutes a day, in 2020 it went down to 20 minutes a day, partly because of the pandemic, but there was a full 70% decrease in in-person time among youth ages 15 to 24.
So we might think that for various reasons, older adults would be more lonely in our culture than young adults. But that’s not necessarily the case.
00:14:24:18 – 00:14:43:00
Camille Hall-Ortega
I’m interested because you are in a somewhat unique position in that you’re trained as a theologian, but also as a psychiatrist, and I’m wondering how those two fields inform your work in different ways, or in the same ways, and how that plays out in this context of loneliness?
00:14:43:03 – 00:16:18:25
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Well, it’s hard for me to disentangle those because I am a psychiatrist. I’m also a theological ethicist. I actually started this training by taking two years out of medical school and going coming to divinity school here at Duke. But I would say that the blessing, in my case, of my training as a psychiatrist is it’s it’s just it’s just made me so much more appreciative of how complex and beautiful human beings are in our particularity.
I have a book called Wayfaring, that was just published last year, in which I, I talk about the tendency tours of psychiatry sometimes to just treat people as collections of symptoms that need to be reduced, and what I call the machine metaphor of mental health care. Like we interpret people’s experience of symptoms, we gather their symptoms and diagnoses.
We apply techniques to those diagnoses. We try to reduce the symptoms and we say, oh, that’s good mental health care. But all that is is like technical symptom reduction. Like it’s not actually the kind of vision that, that we need. But I think psychiatric care at its best is, is not like a practice of like just applying techniques, whether those are medications or, you know, particular therapies to a particular problem, the practices of walking with people.
And that’s where I think my theological training like helps to reinforce that, because Christians believe that we’re not just machines and we’re not just collections of symptoms, and we’re not just collections of problems, but we are creatures of God, and we are children of God, and we’re made in God’s image. And yeah, and God knows us and loves us.
And so we come into the world as these, these creatures and God knows intimately and loves deeply and and that affects how we relate to each other.
00:16:18:25 – 00:16:32:14
Camille Hall-Ortega
And then we know that God intended for us to be in community. He he told us in his word, right, that so many references to the body of Christ and.
00:16:32:16 – 00:16:32:26
Marcus Goodyear
Which is.
00:16:32:26 – 00:16:54:26
Camille Hall-Ortega
Important of right the importance of corporate worship from the very beginning. Right. God telling Adam, it’s not good for you to be alone. You need to help me, right? So God has really designed us to be in community, and he made that very clear. And so there’s this beauty in the knowledge of the way it should be, the way that God intended it to be.
00:16:55:01 – 00:17:59:09
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Yes, throughout Scripture, if we’re called into this interconnected relationship with each other and and even more than that, like, you know, the New Testament has this vision that we are members of, of a common body. And that’s pretty connected. And I think that’s that’s one of the reasons why it’s important not to ever think of ourselves as machines, because you can put a machine in a warehouse or in a field, and it’s going to be what it is.
But creatures are not machines, and creatures are. We’re we’re living creatures who need each other and who need nourishment and who care and who need love. And so I always try to how do we not even use language to describe ourselves? Like, like I have a pet peeve about the language of resilience because it’s drawn from physics and you can apply it to a steel bar.
It’s like building back where you were before and, and stress. And in my world of medicine, the language of burnout, which is something that rockets do and machines do, but that we’re not we’re not machines that like burnout and need to be refueled and recharged. We’re we’re creatures who need to be cared for and love.
00:17:59:09 – 00:18:49:11
Marcus Goodyear
So we’ve we’ve talked about a whole bunch of things. I think I want to go back to the idea of, of kids. So you’re you’re working with students and we’re we’ve been talking mostly about people who experience loneliness. But I wonder about the people in relationship to them. And the parents, like, I have kids in college right now and I worry about them.
I mean, they’re they’re doing great. But sometimes you get these calls and you just your heart breaks and, you know, they they want to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a counselor. And that means that something is wrong. And so I worry as parents, parents of college students or Camille has younger.
I have younger adults. Yeah, yeah. How do we teach our kids to find community?
00:18:49:14 – 00:19:14:28
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
I’m also a parent. I also, you know, worry and think about, like what my own kids who are in college and high school and also, yeah, with their friends are experiencing. And do you think it’s it’s just a challenging time to be a kid, to be an adolescent, to be a young adult, as we’ve as we talked about, I mean, there is no one size fits all solution to everyone.
So the last thing I want to do is to come on and say, okay, this is how this is the easy way to get three easy steps.
00:19:15:00 – 00:19:15:29
Marcus Goodyear
Rather than never.
00:19:16:00 – 00:19:23:25
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
That easy. And again, that that’s part of like we’re not machines that like just need to pull out the instruction manual and just kind of make some tweaks like we’re.
00:19:23:28 – 00:19:25:23
Camille Hall-Ortega
We’ve got some individual differences here.
00:19:25:25 – 00:21:38:21
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Yeah. And we’re on a journey and we’re wayfarers on a journey. And so we walk alongside each other. And sometimes you only know what’s needed when you’re really right there in the situation. So placing ourselves even to take the risk of placing ourselves in the way of community is always something that’s important, I think, for for young kids and also for kids as they get as they get older.
And so I think we’ll probably be talking some about social media and, you know, technology and other things. But one of the challenges I think of, of what kids are facing now is that there’s all sorts of opportunities to find ourselves, connection in people who are not actually physically around us and who may not be connected us in other ways, but at the cost of connection to those, like in the places where we live, or maybe even our own homes.
I feel very fortunate that, my wife and I have been part of the same church here in Durham for 21 years, and so my kids have grown up there, and that’s a blessing. And I recognize that that not everyone, for various reasons, has that privilege and blessing to have been part of a community for so long. But that’s a it’s a profoundly important community for us and for our kids, like they’ve known at church that they are now and that they’re live, that they belong.
And to have I’m getting emotional even as I talk about it. But the experience of a as a parent, of seeing other adults come alongside my kids who don’t have to do so, and to say, hey, can we have coffee or can we have conversation? Or I just want to say, I really appreciate you. That means so much.
It means so much to them, and it means so much to my wife and me also. And and I realize that not everybody has that. And I don’t take that for granted. Village, I think. Yeah, but how can we create this villages with each other? And so, so what are our opportunities to do that. So if we’re for parents, how can we invest in the lives of other kids?
You know, if we’re in a church, congregation or community may not have kids of our own, but how can we still be part of that village? That’s like forming and raising the kids around us. What are the opportunities there for us and for those kids that are isolated, like, what does it mean to understand the reasons for that and to try to find ways to to build those connections with others?
00:21:38:21 – 00:22:05:18
Camille Hall-Ortega
This can start to feel a little gloomy where we go, okay, we’re we’re just we’re describing we’re describing this epidemic of loneliness. And you go for Christians like us, we can say our okay, our hope is in Jesus. But in general, when we’re speaking about this, is there, this feeling that it’s going to continue to just get worse or or do we have a more positive outlook than that?
00:22:05:21 – 00:22:58:07
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Yeah, I don’t want to be gloom and doom, in part because I’m a Christian and I, you know, want to have that. I mean, I believe that the Holy Spirit is at work in the world, and. Yeah, and I also don’t want to be, pollyannaish and say that, oh, there’s easy solutions. We’re going to quickly get out of this.
I think the first thing to say is that we live in a culture where there are profound barriers and obstacles toward the kind of human connections that we most need, and that may be as much or more now as it’s ever been. And also. There’s a lot of really amazing connections that are happening, and there’s a lot of communities that are really healthy, and there’s a lot of people who are really healthy and a lot of and a lot of opportunities for healing and growth and the challenge of the pandemic and this enforced, like, you know, almost universally enforced isolation that we all felt has meant that after the pandemic, we actually value what we feel the need for connection because we felt what it means not to have it.
00:22:58:09 – 00:23:57:00
Marcus Goodyear
Yeah. And I mean, you mentioned social media earlier. I think that that is definitely technology is definitely part of the challenge we’re facing. And so for me, Camille, it’s not that it’s all doom and gloom, but that we are in a particular, I think, world pivot around technology that is similar to what happened back with print. Clay Shirky talked about this ten, 15 years ago in a way that I found resonant. But as a result, we’re faced with these technologies that are that are impacting us in ways we we can’t anticipate, and we’re only learning the effects as they happen. So I’m curious if we just take it into technology and think about that for a minute. What are the ways in which you’ve seen people? I don’t think we need to talk about how technology drives us to loneliness. That’s pretty obvious. But what have you what practices have you seen people do to use technology faithfully and use technology lovingly and in a way that that brings communities together, but not superficially?
00:23:57:02 – 00:25:48:28
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Well, I think you’re right. We are in the midst of a cultural reckoning about technology. And I think you’re right that most people recognize that. I see when looking at data on rates of depression and anxiety and other mental health challenges, including positive suicide among college students, which has been tracked in different surveys for the last, you know, several decades.
There’s an inflection point about 2012 where you begin to see increasing rates of self-reported depression and anxiety and also willingness to engaging in mental health treatment on college campuses. That has continued to rise since then. It’s been kind of plateaued at a high level since the pandemic, and there’s lots of things that that are possible contributors to that.
But one sensible reason is that about 2012 was around when we had universal smartphone adoption and universal social media adoption among adolescents and young adults. So all to say, I think there’s real benefits of social media. And, I have a phone in my pocket right now, so I feel the pull of it, too. But there’s also possible harms that we have to reckon with, and there’s very practical things that one can do.
So one is, is, you know, a high schooler or a college student might decide just not to be on particular social media platforms. They’re not all the same, and some are frankly more addictive than others, and also more like the content variation among them. Yeah, so you can just refuse to be on a platform and you might miss out some, but there’s benefits that you can choose not to have an app on your phone and just to access it on a laptop.
That doesn’t keep you off of it, but it may keep the kind of just from dominating all of our attention. You can set time limits. You can, you know, choose to only follow a certain number of people, etc.. So there’s there’s practical ways that I think kids are already navigating this, and I’m trying to navigate it myself too, in terms of like, yeah, yeah and whatnot.
00:25:49:00 – 00:26:44:06
Camille Hall-Ortega
Oh, that’s so, so, so, so good. I’m just I’m thinking none of us are immune, you know, because it starts so young now and it runs the gamut all the way up, you know, to to older folks. And I think of just even my own children where my husband and I were very committed. You know, we’re just not into the screens.
We don’t want this screen time. We’ve got a five year old and three year old. So they’re young. And then you very quickly realize that is very difficult to be avoiding screens. And then you see you there’s so much importance in not demonizing because you’ll go, oh gosh, there are really great learning tools on this tablet here. Right?
There’s this tension between these very obvious dangers and these very obvious advantages. And it’s tough. It’s really tough. Yeah.
00:26:44:09 – 00:28:12:00
Marcus Goodyear
Yeah. It makes me think of Albert Borgmann, who I had the privilege of hearing at Laity Lodge in 2011. And it was it was actually a life changing retreat for me. Albert Borgmann was a philosopher of technology. He died recently and he talked about the affordances of technology and how we just need to be aware of what the afford us to do, which is a strange way of talking.
He’s a philosopher, but also what they take away from us. And kind of the simplest example is the hearth, when our main technology is a hearth in the center of our home to provide heat and food, we gather around the hearth for heat, we cook our food there together, and all kinds of things happen because of that simple technology we gather around it.
But if we have central heating, we lose an opportunity to gather. So let’s switch to Albert Borgmann. This is in 2007. The clip we’re going to hear at the retreat that I was at, he was a speaker at Laity Lodge. Laity Lodge is at Foundation’s adult retreat center. I was at the retreat. Borgmann has this profound way of talking about the cycles of new technology.
He says that technology makes a promise to us, and then it delivers on that promise. But it also betrays that promise at the same time. And so it sends us constantly looking for new technologies. And we have audio from that retreat. So we’re going to listen to him now in his own words.
00:28:12:02 – 00:29:01:19
Albert Borgman Clip
The treachery of what seems to be the success of the dominant culture is that it promises, it fulfills the promise, and then betrays the promise. And so there’s the succession of of hope for this new thing, that new thing fueled by the establishment itself through advertisement and through all the misty eyed reactions to new things. And and there is, in fact, this brief high of. Yes, there it is. There is the new shiny thing. There’s the new wonderful opportunity. And then it ebbs and there is this mildly addictive pattern to it that we get restless. We look for the next new thing, we start looking around and. And then there is the next new thing. And so the pattern continues.
00:29:01:22 – 00:29:02:19
Camille Hall-Ortega
What are your thoughts?
00:29:02:24 – 00:29:04:26
Marcus Goodyear
Yeah. What do you think when you hear that?
00:29:04:28 – 00:29:32:25
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
I think there’s a few things to say about that. One is just from the perspective of why that’s happening. Our attention then is a commodity. Like people make money off of it. Corporations make a lot of money off of our attention. And so how do we focus our attention is in part a question of who is making money off of us and off of our bodies and off of what we do.
And so we have to recognize that this is an economic reality.
00:29:32:28 – 00:29:54:08
Camille Hall-Ortega
Really good. Once I listen to it a couple times, I really enjoyed the quote. And I too was thinking, oh, I want to hear the rest of that talk. But I thought about in this context of loneliness how this all plays out. And we, of course, are in a culture of instant gratification. And there is there are these highs that come with that instant gratification.
00:29:54:08 – 00:30:12:18
Camille Hall-Ortega
But then there’s the ebb, the feeling of something’s missing, a feeling of lack or emptiness. And I believe that that also ties directly into loneliness, that that at its core, is a feeling of something missing.
00:30:12:20 – 00:31:21:08
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Yeah, that’s right. Part of what I struggle with, and I’ve noticed I kind of came of age when the internet was also just coming of age. And so I noticed my own attention is less than it used to be. I’ve gotten it’s getting harder for me to stay stay focused. One thing to just acknowledges that we are in a very unique cultural age, like every other age of human history.
What? I’ve included a lot of time when there was nothing other than the people in the natural world around us to occupy our time and attention. So for a lot of people, that would have been a farm or the kind of rhythms of a village or, you know, there’s, you know, lots of ways that that can happen.
And nowadays, I think just speaking from the first person, I think I often don’t know what to do with myself. If I’m sitting in a place and I don’t have anything immediately in my hand to either read or listen to or scroll through or other things. So what does it mean to actually be able to sit with ourselves in our solitude, and to have the confidence that that space will be filled in ways that we need for it to be filled.
00:31:21:15 – 00:31:22:18
Camille Hall-Ortega
Really get really good.
00:31:22:22 – 00:31:24:18
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Stuff? I’m speaking this to myself, by the way.
00:31:24:18 – 00:31:26:25
Marcus Goodyear
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:31:26:25 – 00:31:27:15
Camille Hall-Ortega
I’m taking that.
00:31:27:20 – 00:31:38:28
Marcus Goodyear
Yeah, yeah I we’re, we’re nearing time, but I just, I have to ask, why does our culture not allow that, do you think or what would it look like for our culture to allow that more?
00:31:39:01 – 00:32:09:08
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
We listen to a clip by Albert Borgmann before another philosopher who I really love and have used and I think it’s really profoundly helpful. Lived a few years before Bergman when its use of pepper. He lived from about 1910 to 19 late 1990s. He was a German philosopher who was German Catholic philosopher who was an opponent of the Third Reich, but then mainly came into his own watching the rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War and what he noticed was that was that Europe.
00:32:09:08 – 00:32:31:16
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
And I think we could also say the United States at that time was occupied with kind of logics of efficiency and production and productivity. And he began to wonder, like, what’s lost in that? So even in our language, even in English, like we talk about the weekend, which is a term of absence, but not holiday, which is what the Holy day, which is what, which is what the Sabbath is for.
00:32:31:18 – 00:32:56:28
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
We talk about going on vacation, which again is a term of absence, but not about going on a pilgrimage or, you know, or a feast, which is a term of presence. And he basically says, we’ve oriented all of our culture around efficiency and production. And I think in our modern United States, even and maybe even especially now, we value ourselves and others values as human beings according to our ability to produce and to consume.
00:32:57:00 – 00:33:24:14
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
And so we’re all participating in this system of like relentless production, productivity and consumption. Actually, the point of human life is the feast, and it is worship, and it is play in the sense of being able to, like, co-create with God in the world and to be able to glimpse the beauty and goodness that’s all around us. And so part of it’s just like finding ways to allow ourselves to glimpse that broader vision of who we are, who we truly are.
00:33:24:17 – 00:33:25:08
Marcus Goodyear
Oh man.
00:33:25:15 – 00:33:26:01
Camille Hall-Ortega
So good.
00:33:26:01 – 00:33:31:06
Marcus Goodyear
I love that. That’s so. That was perfect. Yeah, I think that’s a great place to end.
00:33:31:08 – 00:33:42:01
Camille Hall-Ortega
Yes. Thank you, Warren, for really helping us unpack some of the complexities of loneliness, but also to highlight the hope that we all have. We appreciate it.
00:33:42:06 – 00:33:45:26
Marcus Goodyear
All right, Warren. Thank you, Doctor Kinghorn. Thank you so much.
00:33:45:28 – 00:33:49:14
Dr. Warren Kinghorn
Thank you all so much.
00:33:49:16 – 00:35:17:24
Marcus Goodyear
The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Camille Hall-Ortega, Rob Stinnett and me, Marcus Goodyear. It’s edited by Rob Stinnett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. Special thanks to our guest today, Dr. Warren Kinghorn. Dr. Kinghorn recently spoke at Laity Lodge and you can read a story about that retreat online at echoesmagazine.org. While you’re there, consider subscribing. You’ll receive a beautiful print magazine each quarter and it’s free. You can find a link in our show notes. The Echoes Podcast and Echoes magazine are both productions brought to you by the H. E. Butt Foundation. You can learn more about our vision and mission at hebfdn.org.
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