Belonging Beyond the Self: Healing Natural Loneliness The Quiet Belonging We Forgot

Jacob Rodenburg
Executive Director, Camp Kawartha
Trent University, Environmental Education
Published June 5, 2025

So many teenagers tell us they feel lonely.

Their digital lives—filled with followers, likes, and scrolling conversations—give the illusion of connection, but lack the depth and nourishment of face-to-face relationships. In a world where the average child spends over seven hours a day in front of glowing screens, many are missing something essential: the kind of sustenance that comes from being truly seen, heard, and held in real community.

We have a word for when we feel disconnected from other people: loneliness. We even have a word for the antidote—social: our innate need to be with others. But isn’t it strange that we have no common word for another kind of loneliness—a deeper, more invisible kind? The loneliness that arises when we feel cut off not just from each other, but from the living Earth itself?  From the soil that grows our food, the sun that warms us, the trees that cleanse our air, the birds that sing our mornings awake?

This kind of loneliness is harder to name, but no less real. It’s what happens when we lose our sense of being part of something larger—when we forget that we belong to a vast, unfolding story that includes not just our own lives, but the lives of those who came before us, those who will come after, and the more-than-human world that surrounds us.

We’ve been taught to think of ourselves as separate, sealed in our own bodies.  We imagine the world around us as filled with objects to be used to fulfill our needs and wants. But as environmental philosopher Neil Evernden reminds us, we are not “skin-encapsulated beings.” Every breath we take is an act of reciprocity: we inhale the oxygen gifted to us by plants, and exhale carbon dioxide that feeds them in return. We are part of a grand conversation, whether we realize it or not.

And when we forget this—when we break the thread between ourselves and the living Earth—we feel it, even if we don’t have the words. We call it restlessness, emptiness, anxiety. But perhaps it’s a form of homesickness: a longing to return to our rightful place in the web of life.

Go for a walk in the woods, and this truth begins to re-emerge. Listen to the liquid notes of a wood thrush rising and falling, notice a bumblebee gathering pollen. Watch a fallen log slowly return to the soil, becoming food for mosses, fungi, and beetles. In that moment, you are reminded that you belong. You are not alone.

Connection isn’t just something we need from other people—it’s something we also need from place, from planet, from the pulse of life itself. We can help ourselves and our children feel less alone not just by seeking social bonds, but by tending to our ecological ones. By planting a garden. By watching the stars. By expressing gratitude to the very life systems that nourish us. By living, as best we can, in relationship.

This is the medicine for natural loneliness: remembering that the self is not an island.  We are a tiny trickle joining an immense river of life. We are not the whole story—but we are a small but integral part of it. And with care, with love, with agency, we can shape that story—not just for ourselves, but for those generations yet to come.

And in doing so, we find ourselves arriving home to the very place where we belong.