Diary of a Theologian

Everyone's Lonely: Thoughts on a Greg Brown Song

On a cassette tape from the turn of the century, which is to say 24 years ago, Greg Brown performed his then-new song. On its face, “’cept You and Me, Babe” is a love song. But today what stands out is its critique of technology, its taking notice, early on, of what cell phones and the internet were doing to people.

    This is how it begins: “Half the people you see today are talking on cell phones, Driving off the road and bumping into doors.” We might change “talking” to something else—texting, perhaps—but many drivers, with phone in hand, go crashing. And pedestrians in crowded places bump into things because their eyes are not on the world but on their screen. Brown turns ironic: “People used to spend quite a bit of time alone. I guess no one’s lonely anymore.” 

    The second stanza puts us in a rainstorm. No one is outside: “They’re all at home living it up on the internet.” The same ironic comment follows: “So I guess no one’s lonely anymore.”

    These lines, from the year 2000, border on prophecy. Today there is an epidemic of loneliness, well-documented, tied closely to the strange ways that social media (contrary to its name) has diminished sociality. Social media has made us less social. People don’t know how to be alone with themselves anymore, and they don’t know how to present their “selves, [their] souls and bodies,” to one another or to God. The cell phone and the internet—the technology for being connected with anyone and anything at any time—have, ironically, made us lonely.

    All of us can see how this is true of others, yet many of us tend to think of ourselves as exempt. This loneliness is happening to “people” out there, but, “you and me, babe,” we’re the exception. But that’s not true. I wrote this on my computer, connected to wi-fi, and frequently checking out other things on the Net. You’re reading it on your phone or tablet or something else with a screen. Who says we aren’t, in this ironical Greg Brown sense, lonely?

— 

    The only true cure for loneliness is to connect with the One who is always with us. The first, baby step is to turn this off, breathe deeply, and open your Prayer Book to, say, Morning or Evening Prayer.

— 

    Out & About. I announced last week that the next “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will be on “Hamlet” on January 26, followed by Bessie Head’s Where Rain Clouds Gather on February 23. Regarding our March 23 reading, Parts of a World by A. G. Motjabai, you can check out John Wilson’s essay on how he came to champion the author: https://www.christianitytoday.com/2011/06/partsworld/

    On the Web: Wipf & Stock has all its books at halfprice through November, free media mail shipping: wipfandstock.com. The code you need is CONFSHIP. They publish literally thousands of theological books, including yours truly’s Post-Covid Catechesis and several volumes in the Pro Ecclesia series, not to mention Being Salt by somebody named George Sumner.

Four Thousand Weeks

It’s a best-selling book from 2021, Four Thousand Weeks, with the subtitle “Time Management for Mortals.” If you live to be 80 years old, your life will have had about 4,000 weeks. Put that way, a human life seems pathetically short particularly over against the wide range of things we feel we could do, and want to do. There’s never enough time to do what I want! Oliver Burkeman, the author, invites us to take limitations, human finitude, seriously. We are built to have more capacities than we can turn into actions and products. We are built to desire to do more than we are capable of doing. Wisdom begins with the realization: we are mortals. We are called to accept that we cannot do everything, and there is no time-management-system that can fix our problem.