So often when we talk to women about where they are at in their worlds, we have one topic that comes up time and again. It is the idea of loneliness. A lot people feel lonely. Eric Jacobsen joins us on episode #131 of the allmomdoes Podcast to chat with Julie Lyles Carr about loneliness, what we are missing from our lives, and how we can make some changes to get that human connection we are all craving.
On this episode:
Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:00:00] Today on the allmomdoes Podcast I’m Julie Lyles Carr and I am welcoming today Eric Jacobson. There is a topic that I just feel that bubbles up. So often when I talk with women about where they’re at in their worlds and what’s going on, of course we always have to talk about. The feeling of overwhelm and how to balance all the things in our lives.
But once I think that I do hear resonate at times, even if someone has a hard time putting voice to it is the idea of loneliness, the loneliness that a lot of people feel, whether that is moms with little bitty kids, and she feels kind of trapped in the house all the way to a woman who her kids have moved on and she’s trying to really craft a new season. Loneliness seems to be a common. Theme. So, Eric, thank you so much for being with us today. I know you have such profound wisdom about loneliness, but give us a little information about yourself, where you live your life, all the things.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:00:54] So I’m a pastor in Tacoma, Washington, which is just South of Seattle for those of you who don’t, aren’t familiar with the Northwest. I am married got four kids myself, and they’re all, well, one still at home. The rest of them are somewhat launched in college and graduate school and whatnot. So yeah, three dogs, four dogs. Okay.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:01:13] Four dogs, very impressive.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:01:15] Chickens and chickens.
Now see, now I just feel like a less than. I’ve just got two cats and a dog. So I just, I feel like, I feel like when you’d start moving into livestock, then you really understand how domesticated somebody is. Yeah.
I’m not, I’m not super involved with the chickens though. That’s fine. Okay.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:01:32] We won’t hold it against you.
I love it. So, in your work in pastoring, do you find that people often, even if they have a troubling time identifying it. Do you find that sometimes at the core of what people are wrestling with is loneliness and how do you begin to identify when you’re with someone that loneliness is really the core issue of what’s going on.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:01:53] Yeah, I think it’s just everywhere. I mean, I think we, you know, our lives have gotten super busy and I think our lives have gotten fragmented where we’ve got sort of a little bit of community, you know, in our workplace. Or we have a little bit of community in some of our kids’ activities or a little bit of community through our church and some of our regular routines and it’s all spread out.
And so I think people don’t have the kind of continuity. Of relationships that they’ve had at other points in their lives. A lot of people look back to their college days as these really fulfilling times where they would see people, the same people multiple times throughout the day, and they’d really enjoy interactions, but now it feels like, you know, even our good friends, we only see sometimes every couple of months, cause it’s really hard to get our schedules aligned and, and just setting all that up.
So yeah, almost everybody I’ve talked to is is dealing with, I don’t know if they always use the word lonely, but I think there’s kind of a longing for more relational connection. And I think it’s probably broader than just relationships. Loneliness is what everyone’s talking about right now. But I think it’s sort of a lack of belonging, a sense of not only disconnection from the friendships we wish we had, but also a disconnection from the place that we live and just kind of that old sense of like just walking around and being known by the community.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:03:05] Right.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:03:06] There’s a longing for that.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:03:08] I definitely had that longing. I wouldn’t have identified it as understanding that’s what it was, but for a very long time, we moved around a lot when I was a kid. And when my husband and I were expecting our first child, we moved back to the town that he had been raised in since he was a six week old, right.
His parents were both principals at elementary schools in that community and the magic Eric that it felt when I would go into a grocery store and someone would know me or would know Michael. And, and it was just this sense of oh, I have a place now, which was not really something I had experienced due to the moves that I had gone through as a kid.
so what you experienced in the grocery store is a piece of the puzzle, which I think sometimes gets left out. I call it kind of civic, belonging. So it’s different from like your small group at your house or your family or your husband. These are all important too. You need that, but. But what you’d experienced at the grocery store at your husband’s place, where you’re known by the community, you don’t maybe don’t know that that checker super well, but the fact that they know your husband’s name and it’s sort of seen him grow up and whatnot.
I don’t know. I feel like that’s something that’s really missing and we don’t think about it. Like, I think the church, for instance, really, you know, let’s get small groups going. Let’s do marriage seminars and all that. Stuff’s really great, but the church doesn’t have a lot of on their radar, kind of how do we help people connect to the places they live in that civic sense?
I have a similar, I don’t know, you know, I’ve only lived here. Well, you know, 13 years now, but my church is just about half a mile from my home. I ride my bike or I walk, but when I walk, if I were to walk home right now, I would be greeted by name by at least 12 people, store owners, and people walking in the neighborhood.
They don’t know me super well, but I just, that really makes me feel like I belong to this community.
Right. I love that phrase, civic belonging. I had never thought of it that way. And it really is a profound thing because every time we moved, we did the things that you’re supposed to do. We always found a church home and my brothers and I went to public school and we got very involved in the schools and, you know, we were good neighbors.
We did all those things, but you’re right. The piece that often was missing was that sense of civic belonging. I love how you distinguish that. One of the things that I think is interesting, I’ve been in ministry for many years now as well. And I have to say prior to the pandemic, um, I was around a ton of people.
All the time, all the time, recognized all the time and still have grappled with feelings of loneliness, even though I’m saturated and people sometimes are the place where I’m like, I cannot people anymore. So Eric writes that about when it’s not that you’re isolated, you’re out there, but there’s still a sense of where do I fit and why do I sometimes feel lonely?
Eric Jacobsen: [00:05:52] Yeah, that’s a fairly common experience for a lot of people is to be around people and still feeling lonely. And I think that can have a variety of reasons for why, why that’s happening, but in some cases, the kind of connection that we long for is different from what we were experiencing. You know, being with people who really know us know our story and we can be ourselves with, as opposed to people that we feel like we have to perform in a certain way, or they’re expecting something from us.
And so being, being aware of. The quality of the community connections that we’re desiring can be part of it. I mean, part of it too, can be where you stand on the introvert extrovert kind of thing. Like sometimes, you know, we really long for human connection, but we have for introverts, I don’t know. I don’t know where you stand on that, on that spectrum, but for introverts, it’s a mixed blessing to be with people.
You know, you, it does drain some of your energy. And so you have to make sure that there’s time to be alone and to be in solitude. But I think solitude is, is actually. Quite wonderful. That’s kind of the chosen isolation, but loneliness is where you, they want to be with people, but there aren’t people to be with.
And so I think part of what happens when not, especially in ministry, when you’re surrounded by people, um, but they may not be the kind of people that we can really let our hair down with. And really who really know us well enough that if it feels like we’ve made the kind of connection that we want.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:07:06] Right. And I think, you know, depending on someone’s given profession or how well they’re known in a certain community or whatever, that ability to truly be as real as you need to be, that your soul sometimes needs to be able to say, well, here’s all the things you’re right. I think that can be a very isolating moment in terms of knowing who you can be real with.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:07:24] The other thing I just thought of, and back to those civic relationships is one of the things that I think people experienced. I think particularly women in this way, as a lot of our relationships are tied to obligations. You know, we’ve got, we’ve got relationships, our kids and our husbands and, and other people there.
And they they’re wonderful in some ways, but they also, we have, we have to do something to maintain the integrity of those relationships. And that, that can be part of the exhaustion of daily living is these pile of, to do lists and whatnot. And one of the things that’s kind of nice about these civic friendships that I’m talking about, that civic belonging is even though the checker at the store, you know, they don’t know you super well.
I mean, that’s not that intimate kind of belonging that you want. But they don’t make a lot of demands on you and you can just sort of enjoy chit chat with them. There’s something satisfying about that. Just they’re not, they don’t know me as their pastor. They don’t know me as somebody that needs something, but I can just talk to them about random stuff and it, I don’t know, it feels it’s, it’s a light kind of relationship.
Again, it’s not everything we need, but it’s a piece of the puzzle. Absolutely. And, and I do find it. I’m going to refer back to like hallmark Christmas movies, you know, this idea of civic, belonging. It’s something that I see over and over again that speaks to a felt need of people, because what do you all always find in some of these movies that show just this longing for Christmas and home.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:08:39] And that kind of thing is that person who can walk through the town square and everybody’s like, Hey, so, and so, and there is that place where it’s just, and it’s not an agenda full kind of experience. There is really something of value. I think in that to have that, Hey, how you doing with the, the checker at the grocery store?
I love that. Now you have a beautiful metaphor for taking a look at the things that often contribute to a place of loneliness or of not feeling a sense of belonging. Unpack for me, this concept you have about three pieces of glass. How these three pieces of glass oftentimes get in the way of the connections that we really long for.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:09:17] I’ll start with the third, because that’s the one that’s probably most obvious to people. Obviously the smartphone has really changed the way we interact with people. Right. And everyone’s, I think most people are somewhat aware of it’s a mixed blessing. Oh. So many things we can do with our phones. We wouldn’t want to do without them for very long, however, When you’re at the grocery store line, or if you’re waiting to pick up your kids from school and you look around and see that everybody’s staring down at the screen and ignoring the human people that are like within five feet of them, you feel like, ah, something’s not right about this.
You know, we’re choosing interesting cat videos or something over the actual person in our proximity. It’s okay. So people are aware of that. But what I try to do with these three pieces of glass, I try to trace that. Back a little bit into some other sort of societal wide decisions in which we chose less face to face human interactions for something else.
And the first one, which is somewhat surprising to a lot of people is the automobile, which has a windshield, right? It’s a, that’s your first piece of glass and simple observation is sometimes we treat people differently or often we treat people differently when we encounter them driver to driver.
Really nice people sometimes say really unkind things were making unkind gestures to other people when they encounter them as drivers. Right? My premise there is that when we encounter people driver to driver, we don’t see another human being usually behind the other wheel. They’re a competitor. For lane space, for parking space. And they’re a danger to us. If they’re irresponsible with drinking or sleepy and driving, they can actually kill us or kill our, our loved ones. And so they’re a threat to us. And so we treat them differently. And so we, we act differently when we pass each other face to face on the sidewalk than we do driving next to each other.
You know, we made a decision for a lot of reasons to make driving kind of the main way we’re going to get around for a lot of good reasons, but what we’ve made didn’t account for us, how that would impact our. Civic relationships with one another and of lose opportunities to interact in that way. With that change came to a little bit of how we change our home design.
You know, we have a garage in front, our homes kind of turned towards the backyard instead of towards the front. So we used to have a front porch. We’d sit on the front porch in the evening and neighbors would walk by and they’d interact in that way. But now because the car and a lot of other reasons, we, we designed our homes in that other way.
We’re not sitting on our front porch any longer. There’s no more neighborhoods stroll talking with neighbors. And so my premise is we got a little bit lonely in that we got, we sort of missed the neighbor interaction, and the TV came in as a second piece of glass to fill that gap. And so now we have these really interesting interactions with TV characters and reality show characters.
And they’re way more interesting in some way, is that our neighbors, They’re not real relationships, right? They don’t demand anything of us. And so we kind of almost had a voyeuristic. We kind of, we get really worked up in our emotions and we get. Yeah, we’re sad and we’re happy. We’re cheering for team Edward or whatever.
The, you know, we kind of get into the, that thing, but we’re not really having a relationship with them. And so once again, we’re spending a lot of our time instead of having real human relationships, having these screen media. So we’ve designed a world in which you can wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee and watch your morning show go right through your house to your garage, drive in your car, completely sealed by glass park in the, in the, in the basement of an office building, take the elevator up, work in a cubicle and return all day and you haven’t really had any face to face civic interactions. You might’ve seen you’re a family member or a coworker, but you haven’t any interaction with other people outside of your home.
And then I, you know, the idea as well, there’s a couple of breaks in that system, right? You might have to go pick up your kids from school. You might have to go to the grocery store to get groceries, but now we’ve got this third piece of glass that we take with us that sort of protects us from actual human relationships in that setting and the, and the third piece of glass, unfortunately brings out the worst side of both the car and the TV. You both are really mean to each other on our smartphone. Sometimes you can say there’s no. Yeah. You know, we’re, we’re just as mean in our smartphones, as we are sometimes driving our cars. We’re also, we’re also kind of voyeuristic. We get really caught up in like a human interest story or a cute cat video or whatnot, you know, it’s really pulling on our emotions, but we have no actual connection with that person or that cat for instance.
Uh, and so we’re, we’re, we’re using up a lot of our empathy on these things rather than asking the, the other parent at the pickup. Hey, how’s it going today? I mean, some I’m not, some parents are really good at doing that. I want to paint too broad of a brush, but there’s just this, this kind of tendency to avoid opportunities for human face to face interaction.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:13:39] Right. And you know, at the time that we are having this interview, Eric, we’re in the midst of still, I mean, people are beginning to come out, we’re going into different stages and phases of having been in lockdown. But it’s interesting because there’s another piece of glass, which is sort of the only way people have been able to interact a little bit in this particular time period, which is through video conferencing, those kinds of things through their computer. So what do you think we’re going to see on the flip side, as things begin to open back up. Okay. I think you’re so onto it. That what people have probably really missed in this time, at least the people that in my world, they’re missing a big gatherings there.
They liked the energy of the event. They like all that kind of thing. But I think what they’ve also been missing, that they haven’t necessarily been able to put voice to. They’ll say I just miss people. And you know, in my particular home we have been on lock down with nine people. I’m really not missing people to be frank here.
We’re good on people. I am an ambivert. So that’s where I land on that scale between introvert and extrovert. But yeah. I am finding it interesting that people are. I think what they’re really missing is what you’re describing, which is that civic interaction. In my particular neighborhood, it’s a very active neighborhood.
People are exercising a lot. There’s a lot of guilt that goes flying by my front windows. Eric it’s people like living their best lives, exercising and all that kind of stuff. I know, I know it’s a little bit condemning, but yeah. We do have a neighborhood that is very friendly. And I will say for the most part, people have, but I’ve seen even more people out sitting on their front porches calling out to one another chatting from a distance more than I’ve ever seen.
And so I think it undergirds this notion that we do long for that civic experience that’s civic contact. What do you see having done such a deep dive into this topic? What are you noticing during the process of the lockdown and who do you think will be on the other side? Who do you think we’re going to come out the other side to, what are we going to value and how is that going to be expressed?
Eric Jacobsen: [00:15:39] So, yeah, a couple of things. I think there’s obviously, there’s, there’s fun ironies in these, you know, I’m, I’m talking about the problems of screen made it communication, right as that’s the only way we communicate with I’m, I’ve turned this way to live livestream and I’m during the greeting time, I’m telling people to take their phones out and text, you know, in the church and say, hello and all that other things we’ve learned are independent because we can do a lot more with screens and maybe we thought possible and that’s.
Not a bad thing. I think, you know, we’ve got shut-ins in our church that are now, you know, once this pandemic is over, we’re going to be a lot better, do a lot better job, keeping them connected to the church body because we’ve done some of these upgrades to our screen abilities. That said, I think this is also making us realize how much we really just long for the human connection.
You know, these zoom calls are effective, you know, we can have, we’ve transitioned to all of our church meetings and we’ve done family birthday parties on zoom and all these kinds of things and those things work okay. But it’s also kind of making it really obvious that it’s not ultimately what we really want.
We really want to be in each other’s presence. I, you know, I’ve never been anti-technology. I use my phone all the time and I’ve made a lot of friends through the internet, you know, people who are interested in the same thing, but I always think technology for me at least needs to land in a face to face human connection.
It’s always my goal that eventually this person that I met, you know, in one way or another, in a non face-to-face way, eventually we’re going to have coffee together or a beer together, and we’re going to be able to kind of have, uh, you know, some kind of connection. Hopefully we’re going to all remember how much we need face to face contact.
And I think the third thing kind of, as you were suggesting with your neighborhood is I think it’s made us more aware of the value of our proximate relationships because the lockdown has kind of kept us homebound, to some extent, you know, we canceled a big trip this summer. We, you know, we can’t for awhile we couldn’t drive very far. Weren’t supposed to drive very far. The main thing we could do to get out of her house and go for a walk. And the main people we saw when we went for a walk was our neighbors. And so we ended up talking, we know our immediate neighbors pretty well, but then the neighbors two blocks down, you know, we got talking to and whatnot.
And I do think that it’s, it’s sort of forced us all to think about who are our neighbors, part of the, the other side of these glass, things that I’m saying are part of a problem is they, they really opened up our world. We can have relationships with people across the globe pretty easily. We can constantly connect with people who aren’t in approximate distance from our, where we are.
But I think there’s something special about the people who live within a mile of where we live or from, you know, with our church as well. Okay.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:18:07] Right now, talk to me about something that. I feel like I’ve been noticing in the ministry space and I’m trying to figure out exactly what we do about it. I find that sometimes people will tell me how lonely they feel, how longing they are for connection, how longing the are for sense of belonging.
And yet. Gotta be honest, Eric, their friendship skills have never been honed. So they walk into this space feeling lonely. And a lot of times, as church leaders, we’re encouraging people. We want you to feel like you belong. We want you to be here, all those things, but they lead out so deeply with their needs.
And a lot of those needs are legitimate. A lot of those needs come from a really deep story or a place of hurt, but they’re wearing out the people around them. Which then has the ironic effect of isolating them even more, making them even lonelier because people see them coming from a mile off and it’s like, I don’t have the energy to try to deal with this person today.
So what are some of the skills that we need to do a good self check on to make sure that we’re not actually part of the issue too when it comes, feeling lonely.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:19:21] Yeah. That’s a great insight. And I, unfortunately I don’t have the answer. It’s not in my book, so readers, you know, I wish I could say, yeah, I do it. Yeah. And I think that’s a real issue and it’s, I think there’s things we can do within the church community to help our, I mean, I think what’s interesting is because so many of these skills of interaction, I would say kind of eroded over the last 50 years as we sort of prioritize other ways of communicating. We’ve, we’ve become a little more uncivil with each other. You know, you’ve described really well, one sort of relational problem that people bring to the context where there’s a lot of them out there.
And so I think at one level, you know, we need to do a better job teaching within the church. We have to teach things like hospitality. We need to teach things like how to have people over for dinner, how to have a friendship. Sometimes these things it’s almost embarrassing how simple they seem. And yet people have really lost the skillset for interaction.
Another thing, this isn’t quite exactly how you frame the question, but so as I talk about civic belonging, there’s a lot of elements of that, that support that and encourage that. One of them is a concept of third place. I’m not, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but Ray Oldenburg, I think coined the term and it’s this idea that everyone needs a third place, a place between work and home that you can kind of stop in and, and, and checkout. And he’s thinking about like coffee shops or bars or whatnot, your kind of regular place where you show up. And there’s no agenda that, you know, the regulars gather there. There’s kind of an ongoing conversation that happens there. And one of the things he said that happens in the third place where it was more common in our culture is it has kind of a social training effect.
If you’re at a table with other people and you’re exhibiting behavior, that’s less than ideal that group’s going to self regulate it. They’re going to move to another table. Someone might call you out, you know, in that kind of setting and, and you actually learn what’s appropriate, uh, by having those kinds of interactions.
And so, again, it’s not necessarily something that church can solve on its own, but I think if we, if we can encourage like third places in our community and places where people gather and whatnot, more opportunities for us to learn how to have normal conversations, how to be appropriate with the level of sharing that we do, how to, you know, deal with sort of difficult political topics or what kind of topics are, you should be a little bit careful, you know, if you don’t know someone super well, um, all that stuff doesn’t get trained when we interact through screens, you know, we can kind of, if we don’t like somebody, we can unfriend them, we can, you know, there’s just so many, like it’s less likely that our edges are going to round it off.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:21:44] I love that concept of third place. I. Absolutely see the truth of it because you know, a lot of times within our workplace or within our churches, that can’t always be the place where we get honed. I know that iron supposed to sharpen iron. I’m not talking about that, but I’m saying, you know, it’s we as leaders, right don’t want somebody going to small group and getting blasted out of the water because they’re just socially awkward or something. And, you know, we want them to feel that sense of belonging, but to open yourself up to go into a setting in which you can really observe socially what’s going on and what’s being received and how it’s being received without the buffering of, well in the workplace, we have to do it this way, in church we have to do it this way. I think that’s a really, really brilliant thing.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:22:27] It needed another, another place where that I’m sorry, but button there, but another place where this happens, and again, that doesn’t solve the problem with the really chronically lonely person in your church. But, but the family dinner table is not a bad place for some of that training because yeah.
We’re kind of trained as adults, especially adult Christians in small groups to be really polite sometimes too polite to one another. But the dinner table, you know, you’ve got siblings that are just ruthless sometimes you know, if it’s well moderated, you know, I love the idea of one of my teachers, rich mal used to say, you know, we, we learned the family dinner table, stay at the table with people we disagree with.
And that’s a lesson that, that is really valuable. In the civic realm and in the church. And if we, as parents are aware of that training component, we’re training our kids to learn to be civic and civil, even when they really don’t like the person sitting across the table from them. Um, it’s gonna have all sorts of good impacts on them and our society.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:23:19] Yeah. That’s a great way of looking at that third place. That’s fantastic. And Eric, tell me, I think that one thing I’m seeing, that’s interesting, that I think is relatively new. Maybe not, but is this idea that work is somehow the work environment is somehow almost supplanting our social lives, our family lives, our church lives like the function of what has been family socializing, faith community.
People are wanting to find all of that in there work lives. And it’s one thing I’ve watched people scramble with through the pandemic. Is they miss the physical environment of work. It’s not that it’s the task that they are employed for. It’s all this what we’ve been calling for a number of years now, sociologically the work culture and all of that.
Is there a place where we can lean in too heavily into our work environments to try to be all the things when it comes to resolving this sense of loneliness?
Eric Jacobsen: [00:24:16] Well, there’s a lot, a lot of reasons why I work has probably become increasingly important to our sense of identity and our sense of connection.
And that is one because we, we, we, we tend to be kind of a hard working culture. Some of us get trapped in that sense of what, yeah. We earn our value by the things we produce at work, and that that’s a theological problem in some ways. But the other thing about work that I think kind of speaks more to my topic is work tends to be the kind of regular environment in our workplace we see people. Five days a week. Normally, one of the things that I, I kind of key in on my book is that friendship is important, but you can’t program friendship or it’s very difficult to program. And sometimes people like, Oh, people are lonely. Okay. Let’s set them up with three friends. You, you, and you are going to call this person and done it, you know, and that works okay. But it usually doesn’t work because you just don’t know how, who is going to connect and how are people gonna connect. So friendship normally grows when there’s proximity, frequency of contact and kind of a shared experience. That’s why college for a lot of people is where a lot of friendships are formed.
You see people. Live near you day and day and day and day over and over and over again, you formed these friendships. Well, the workplace is one of the places outside of the home, where that happens, you know, where we see people over and over and over again, we have a shared project that we, and so we do tend to form a lot of friendships and that’s, that’s not altogether bad, but that sometimes I think what’s challenging about that is we also have very transitory culture.
And so those work families don’t last forever. And so people move on you retire. And so I think work teaches us something about how friendships are formed, but I don’t think we want to form all of our friendships with just work colleagues because they’re not usually going to endure the person who’s transferred to another company or the person who retires.
And so I think we need to replicate some of that regular approximate shared experience kind of connection with people, um, outside of work as well.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:26:06] How do I overcome the three pieces of glass that may be keeping me from the relationships I was really. Designed for, and I know this is a tricky question in the midst of also being, you know, somewhat locked away, shut down, having to be very cautious about how we’re handling physical presence with other people.
But yeah. How do I conquer it? Because you know, for a lot of us are. Work tasks are on that phone. And for a lot of them, the necessity of being in a vehicle, a certain set of time a day is just part of our daily lives. And, and when you get home and you’re worn out from the peopling, you’ve done, the television is often a GoTo.
How do we begin to obviously. Continue to have the presence of these three types of glass in our lives, but not allow them to be running us.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:26:54] That’s a great way of framing the question and it’s not easy to solve bend in a lot of cases, we have to use the car. We like to use the TV and the phone is really integral to the things we have to do.
So I don’t, I’m not suggesting we sort of throw any of those things away, but I do think that they become kind of habitual in a way. And I think we can maybe train ourselves to raise the question of, can I do this in a more face to face kind of way? You know, for instance the phone. Yes. We accomplish a lot of things, but we also, I even, you know, as much as I really value and really talk about civic friendships, when I’m in the grocery store line and everyone else’s, you know, looking at their phone, I’ll pull my phone out and there’s no reason I to pull my phone out.
I just, I kind of go through that. I check my Instagram, check my Facebook, see if anyone needed a little blah. But I, you know, I don’t need to check it at that moment. So even just training myself to not pull my phone out and keep my face up so that I’m, at least my face is available for some kind of eye contact with somebody or some kind of just to be aware of that or with the car. Yes. We need to jump in the car and get there, but there may be ways that we can walk to certain destinations depending on where we live. And it’s going to take a little bit longer. But the pro side is we’re going to have some opportunities to connect with people. So for instance, in my community, I, like I mentioned, I live within a half a mile, a little over a half a mile from my church.
So I always take my bike or I walk to church. And that is such a valuable experience for me. That’s when I connect with my neighbors and I show up to church feeling really connected to where I live. Some of our members live 30 minutes away and they’re not ever going to be able to walk to church. And I don’t, I don’t want them to move to my neighborhood, you know, there’s a lot of reasons why they live, where they live and that’s wonderful, but some I’ve even said adjusted, you know, you know, and we’ve got a good parking lot, but we do, we do run that parking space sometime.
And as our church grows. That becomes an issue. So one of the things I’ve been talking to my church about is if you live 30 miles away, uh, you can, there’s plenty of parking, like within a mile, all of our church, there’s lots of neighborhoods with plenty of parking. Why don’t you leave a little early park, half a mile away.
And why that’s the last half a mile?
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:28:51] That’s cool.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:28:52] It’s a little bit. So I think one of the traps we get into is we think efficiency is the most important value that trumps all other values. And efficiency often comes with a cost, a human cost. You know, we can do this more efficiently, but we’re going to take the person out of the equation.
And so I guess what I’m suggesting is keep in mind that, you know, at the end of the day, what, when the things were built for us for human relationships. So don’t always take the person out of that relationship. Always try to think of how it kind of reinserted the person into my daily tasks. I’m not just buying something at the store, I’m having an opportunity for interaction.
So yeah, maybe I won’t put my headphones in when I’m doing my shopping, you know, so that I can. Be aware of the fact there’s other people here that, uh, I might be able to connect with in one way or another.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:29:33] I love that. The book is Three Pieces of Glass: why we feel lonely in a world, mediated by screens.
Eric, thanks so much for being with me today.
Eric Jacobsen: [00:29:42] It’s been fun conversation.
Julie Lyles Carr: [00:29:43] Be sure and check out the show notes that our content coordinator, Rebecca puts together each and every week. A big shout out to Donna. She is our producer and helps make sure that the audio quality and all the things the way they need to be so that you can get the episodes.
I would love to ask you a big favor. Would you do this for me? Would you go and subscribe? And like the podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, it really does help get the word out. And if you leave us save fives. Star rating and a really sweet review. You might just get to hear your review read online here on the podcast.
I would love to connect with you on all places social. You can find me Julie Lisle scar. I particularly love Instagram. So come see me over there and while you’re on the web, be sure and check out allmomdoes.com, which is our blog and website. It’s an incredible resource for you. And of course, allmomdoes on the socials.
And we also have the allmomdoes discussion group where I check in and chat with you throughout the week about the episodes. So would love see you there as well. I’ll see you next time right here on the allmomdoes podcast.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the AllMomDoes Podcast so you don’t miss a single episode!
We’d love for you to leave us a shiny, 5-star review to help others find us. Your review could be featured on the podcast!
Follow AllMomDoes
Follow AllMomDoes on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest & Instagram and subscribe to our newsletter
Follow Julie Lyles Carr
Check out Julie’s book Raising An Original. Follow Julie Lyles Carr on Instagram and Facebook
Text Podcast to 89419
Get an easy reminder every week reminding you of new episodes. Simply text the word podcast to 89419!
