A Metre Away...

In 1933 two-thirds of Western Australians voted to leave the country. Not a petition. A referendum. We marked the box to walk out of the federation and go back to being a self-governing colony of an empire on the other side of the world. The request died on a procedural ruling in London, so we stayed, and we have told the story with a grin ever since. We are the state that nearly left. We like that about ourselves.

We are not unique. We are the clearest specimen of something the whole country is doing quietly. We chose distance and called it independence. Everyone does it now. We just did it loud enough to put it to a vote...

We are proud of the distance. Perth is the most isolated capital on earth and Perthites say it the way you would proudly mention a child's netball trophy their team just won. Two thousand, six-hundred kilometres of desert between us and Adelaide (the next closest city). We call the apartness self-reliance. We raise our kids to manage on their own and treat needing other people as a soft kind of failing.

There is a difference between distance you choose and distance that is good for you. We have stopped checking which one we have got. That confusion is not a Western Australian problem. It is just easier to see from here…

You can watch the second kind of distance in Alkimos at a new housing development at six in the evening. Wide streets and the bins already collected. Not a person out. Every garage door shut. The car goes in, the door comes down, and that is the last the street sees of anyone until morning. The blocks are working exactly as designed. We bought privacy and got something we never priced in.

Drive two and a half hours inland to Narrogin and the deal flips. There you are known whether you like it or not. The town sees your ute outside the pub and has a view formed by lunch. Even a bloke from Broome once told me that if there wasn't a rumour going by midday he would start one. The Broomer-mill was always in full-swing, he called it. No hiding, not much mercy. And this: nobody vanishes. Same state, opposite arrangement. Which tells you the loneliness was never about how far apart the houses sit. It is about whether the people inside them can see each other.

The city sells the version with no witnesses, and we keep buying it. You can stand in a packed bar, like Besk on a Friday, queue is deep for a drink, and feel like the only person in the room. The crowd was never the cure. Loneliness has nothing to do with how many bodies are near you. It is about whether one of them can see you. You can be surrounded and still be invisible.

Turning toward someone is the frightening part. To learn a name, to ask the real version of “how are you?", is to risk that they don't turn back. The phone never does that to you. It asks for nothing and it leaves you exactly as alone as it found you.

It is landing hardest on the Millennials (born ’81-’96) and Gen Z’ers (born ’97-2012) and differently than it did on older generations. Roughly one in three people now reports feeling lonely some or all of the time, up from one in four. Say the word “lonely” and you picture an old man, ninety-plus in a unit in North Perth with the television on for company making a microwave-meal for dinner watching 'Deal or No Deal'. Look past him. The lonely ones are his grandkids…

What loneliness is, underneath the word, is a shortage of intimacy. Not romance, but closeness. Being near enough to another person that they know you and you let them in.

That is the hard thing to measure, so look at the one piece of it that gets counted. A quarter of the young have not slept with anyone at all. Not waiting 'for the one', but just haven't. The under-thirty-fives are nearly level with the over-sixty-fives. Somewhere tonight a man in his sixties will be outpacing the average uni student, and he is doing it from a La-Z-Boy... The plumbing was never the problem. The old have less time and fewer chances, and are doing fine on both. What the young have given up on, is the reaching for a relationship. Sex is only the part of it a survey knows how to count. Close to half are single. The strange part is they want it...they are hopeful about love and, yet are unable to go and get it, which is not a combination we have seen before...

Here is what I think happened. They grew up inside a feed that sells perfectly curated and finished people. Shot in good light, the right angle to show the abs or perfect-bikini-bod from a retreat in Bali, captioned into a life that looks already assembled. Scroll a thousand of them before breakfast and your idea of a partner stops being a person and turns into a 'spec-sheet'. Ask them what they want and stability and ambition come in ahead of shared interests. Two-thirds say they can't find anyone whose priorities line up with theirs. Close to seven in ten say the apps made committing harder, not easier.

Both halves of this are doing the same thing. They are trading the friction of a real person for a smoother version of one…

A twenty-three-year-old woman looks past the blokes her own age, those who are still working out who they are, and goes ten or fifteen years older. To someone who "looks" settled. The mortgage handled, the calm of a man who isn't guessing. It reads as money, but it isn't really. It is the look of a life that has already done the hard part, the finished thing the feed taught her to expect and her own peers can't yet fake. The age gap that would have raised an eyebrow a decade ago barely registers. On one of the big apps nearly two in three users said it doesn't matter at all.

The men are running the same play from the other side. But also, there is something more interesting at play, there are now cases of men who come home to a girlfriend made of software. She is always pleased to see them and never has a bad day of her own. He knows he will never sit on a couch beside her, and the wanting of that becomes a grief he can't explain to anyone. The thing built to keep him company has made him more alone. Reach for the version of a person that can't disappoint you, and you lose the muscle for the one who can. The man with the software girlfriend is just the leading edge. The rest of us are a few steps back on the same road...

We keep waiting for an answer the size of the problem. A government strategy. An app to fix what the apps broke. None of it is coming, and the real cure is the one we trust least, because it is too small to feel serious. It is free. It cannot be felt through glass. And it is standing about a metre away from you.

And whatever the wellness people tell you, it is not courage either. The advice is always the same, "be braver, put yourself out there". That is the exact move the lonely cannot make, the one that frightens them most. The cure asks for less than that. It is a body in a room near other bodies, all of them pointed at the same hard thing, so the turning happens on its own and nobody has to be brave about it...

I have watched it work in the least likely room I know. At the Beatty Park gym before work, full of strangers, dead quiet. Nobody in there is finished. Nobody is lit well. Everyone is mid-effort and red in the face, halfway through something hard, the exact opposite of the feed. A bloke loads a bar he can't quite hold. Before he asks, before he even knows he is in trouble, a hand he has never met lands on it and takes the weight. No profile got read. No box got ticked. The thing the young are so frightened of, turning toward someone who might not turn back, never comes up. The turning is built into the room. Heads down, lifting our own weight, and lifting each other without meaning to.

That is the one thing a girlfriend made of software will never do. She will meet a partner at the door every night of his life and never once stand behind him and take the barbell when the weight collapses on him. A body in a room can carry what a screen cannot. It does not scale. No department can fund it. And it is standing right next to you.

The distance to Adelaide is fixed. We are stuck with that one. The distance to the person beside you is about a metre, and it closes the second you decide they are worth seeing. So decide. Put the phone face down and learn that person’s name. Be the hand that lands before it's asked…

-TK