The ‘For Fucks Sake’ Moments

When the Body Says Stop

For the last few days, I’ve been telling friends I’m feeling a bit glum. I’ve also described my battery level as being about 10%. I think there’s a whole bunch of things contributing to that. I just feel like life is piling one thing after another on top of me, and at some point it’s enough, and the cognitive load can feel overwhelming.

I had the six-week review with the surgeon and physio for my shoulder the other day. I’ve been given some very simple exercises to remobilise the rotator cuff muscles, but also a stern warning to be careful about loading the arm, to give the muscle time to reattach properly to the bone. So, for example, I can’t even use a Theraband for another six weeks. That takes it up to three months of recovery before I can even use a rubber band to really start strengthening all those muscles in my right shoulder.

The shoulder surgery is the first time I’ve really had anything like this happen to me. Other than a small repair on a tendon in my thumb in the late 1990s, I’ve not had surgery or spent a night in hospital. I don’t think I ever realised just how much it was going to knock me around. I’ve written before about letting people take care of me after the surgery and about how much harder the recovery has been than I expected. But then you layer that on top of other things in my life, some of which are really just the everyday load of surviving in the modern world.

For example, the other day I got a letter from VicRoads saying I had paid the registration on one of our two cars twice. After checking, I realised that’s correct. The two cars’ registration plates are only one digit apart because we bought them at the same time, and I paid the registration perhaps two weeks after my surgery, when I really was in a brain fog, what with pain drugs and the exhaustion of not being able to sleep properly at night.

I haven’t really been driving very much recently, obviously, but my arm has been more mobile and useful over the last week, so I have been venturing further afield than just a quick run up the road to the shops. But of course, the double payment means I’ve been driving my car, which I didn’t double up on, unregistered for a month. In Victoria, police cars have number plate scanners, and it’s entirely possible I could be pulled over by the cops. Whilst I have a very legitimate reason for the non-payment, or what looks like a non-payment, the reality is they’re still going to fine me a very considerable amount of money.

I finally connected the dots the other day and called VicRoads. I have to say, the woman who looked after me was fantastic and lighthearted, and she made the point that this happens all the time with families who have multiple cars with registrations that come up for renewal at the same time. I’ve paid the registration on my car, which means I’m legal again and don’t have to drive around panicking, and they’ll organise a refund to me of the double payment on the other car.

But it’s taken time to sort all of this out, and it’s cost me more money, because I’ve had to pay yet another registration fee while I wait for the refund to come back.

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There’s also the minor detail that I’m only two points away from losing my licence for three months. In Victoria, you lose points for various traffic offences, and once you lose 12 points you automatically lose your licence for three months. It’s all down to red light cameras. For those of you not familiar with them, or who don’t have to live with them, these are road safety enforcement cameras that check whether you’ve run a red light. The infringement notices even tell you how many seconds late you ran the light, and for mine, the longest was 0.6 seconds into the intersection. A red light camera fine incurs three points, and I’ve had one per year for the last three years. I absolutely remember one of them. It was a dark night, very late, raining heavily, with not much other traffic around, and the lights were changing to yellow. I decided not to brake hard because of the conditions, and as a result I crossed the line a fraction of a second after the red light came on.

Those three fines total nine points. The tenth was a low-range speeding fine, 56 km/h in a 50 km/h zone. It was 1 am, an unfamiliar road, no other traffic around, and I missed that the road transitioned from 60 km/h to 50 km/h. That’s one point, hence a total of 10.

I do consider myself a reasonably safe and careful driver. I try not to do anything stupid; I follow the speed limit and take care. Indeed, one thing that triggers emotion in me is seeing the appalling behaviour of many drivers. Indicators, for example, seem to be an optional extra on many cars these days!

By May 2027, the three points from the first red-light fine should fall away, as points last for three years. But of course that means I’m driving on tenterhooks until then, because losing my driver’s licence would be a very significant impingement. So I have another cognitive load issue to deal with.

There have been a few other things like this recently, adding up to a year of some degree of uncertainty. Things are moving in the background that make it difficult for me to plan my future and work out where I want to live and how I want to live. So I think I’ve been on edge much more than I realised, with a sort of subtext running underneath my life that I’ve tried not to allow to surface too much, because it can bring me down. I don’t have a solution, and I don’t have certainty. I suspect a considerable proportion of the population are in the same position as me.

The Australian Unity Wellbeing Index, which surveyed more than 10,000 Australians in June 2025, describes the conditions plainly:

“It took place amid a cost-of-living crisis, ongoing global political and economic unrest and natural disasters at home and abroad.”

Of the seven parts of life the survey measures, future security scored lowest, which tells me I’m not the only one finding it hard to plan.

I also think that I’m getting a bit more depressed than usual about the state of the world. I read the news, I scroll social media, and I watch the political shenanigans, obviously in the USA, but also here at home in Australia. I also watch, notice, or hear about people’s behaviour on the street, out and about, and some days I feel quite sad about the world we live in. I don’t think there’s any one particular individual thing, more a conflation of many.

I’ve mentioned in a previous article watching the Louis Theroux documentary Manosphere. Quite clearly, anybody with half a brain would watch the men in that documentary and feel disgust. But I also saw an Instagram reel the other day with an Australian man talking about the manosphere, and he was very clear that he disagrees with, for example, the behaviour of the Tate brothers. But he made an important point: young men respond to this messaging because it connects directly to how they feel and how they see their place in the world. And so it should offer us clues to what ails our community, when that community finds itself in such a state that young men respond positively to such misogynistic, divisive messaging.

There are some other things in my world which I probably don’t need to be sharing today, but the point I think I’m making is that the six or seven weeks I’ve had feeling miserable after my surgery have so depleted my energy banks that all the other irritations of life have been set in relief and given more prominence in my subconscious. That’s why I’ve been telling some friends I’m feeling glum.

Saying it out loud is harder than it sounds. The Ending Loneliness Together State of the Nation report found:

“Nearly 1 in 2 Australians who feel lonely are too embarrassed to admit it to others”

Glum isn’t the same as lonely, but I suspect the same embarrassment stops plenty of people from saying anything at all. One of the great things about the people around me is that they won’t patronise me by holding my hand and telling me it’s all going to be okay.

Australian social researcher Hugh Mackay put it simply:

“We are not good at surviving in isolation.”

My friends turn up. They make time to be with me, and they give me hugs, because touch is important. The other day I had lunch with a couple of them out on the street on a lovely, warm, sunny day, and we talked about all sorts of different things. They showed sympathy for how I was feeling, and they didn’t try to tell their own stories. Instead, they listened to mine, which I think is very important. Those small, simple things are enormously restorative.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

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Are you okay with not being okay for a moment?

The 'For Fucks Sake' Moments

When the Body Says Stop

I clearly have friends who, like me, struggle to sleep. The other day I received a WhatsApp in the early hours from a mate with a business idea. To his credit, he opened with ‘Wild and crazy 3 am thought’. Whilst not this mate, I have had a few others text me long screeds about their current life difficulties, which most definitely fall into the ‘oversharing’ category when they arrive out of the blue without any buildup.

I know I’ve been very occasionally guilty - sending something long and heartfelt, or a little too excited, or a bit raw at eleven o’clock at night. Then I almost immediately check myself and send a follow-up ‘hey, sorry, that was a lot’ before the recipient has had a chance to read, let alone respond. It’s because I was being all too much - wrong time, wrong person, wrong message.

I’ve also had it said to my face. In my early teens, at a gathering at the sailing club in Darwin, a girl exclaimed, “You think you’re such hot shit.” I can’t recall what prompted it, but I wrote recently that she was right:

“Sometimes I feel angry, not with others, but with myself. It’s always easy to second-guess after the fact, but I look back especially at personal relationships and friendships and realise I was often rubbish at being an authentic human to those around me. All too often I presented inauthentically, and people rightly called me out. My inauthenticity led to an ego that told me I must be right, and others were wrong - even when patently I was not right.”

I came across a piece on Elephant Journal from a while back by Kate Rose; it was the gloriously unsubtle title You Don’t Need A Man, You Need a Goddamn Warrior. It’s written to women and full of wild hearts and warriors, and it wasn’t what I expected based on the title.

“You are one of the wild ones, and no matter how you tried to hide that fact, you can’t be anything other than what you are—and that’s okay. You are just as you are supposed to be, magnificently wild in all of your chaotic beauty.”

Under the warrior language, its real promise has nothing to do with gender: someone out there will love you because of your intensity rather than in spite of it, and you won’t have to turn yourself down to be kept. She also writes this great line:

“Don’t try to run this time”

Kate’s aim is true. Plenty of lonely people, men and women alike, have learned that their feelings arrive at a volume others find hard to take, and they tend to deal with it in one of two ways. Some shrink, editing every message and keeping their enthusiasm on a short leash, while others leave a friendship or a relationship at the first sign of cooling, before the other person gets the chance to leave them.

‘Running’ has a name in psychology. Geraldine Downey, a psychologist at Columbia University, spent years studying what she called ‘rejection sensitivity’: the habit of anxiously expecting to be turned away and then seeing the signs everywhere. In a conference abstract written with Rainer Romero, she described the trap:

“people who anxiously expect rejection behave in ways that lead to the realization of their worst fears”

So the person who leaves first to spare themselves the hurt often ends up with exactly the loneliness they were trying to avoid, and then treats it as proof they were right to go.

Shrinking costs something too, just more quietly. Sanjay Srivastava and his colleagues followed 278 first-year university students through their first term and found that the ones who masked their emotions had a harder time forming close relationships:

“Hiding your emotions is something that is very common but it’s something that often is not the right thing to do.”

I’d like to think I’ve never made someone else feel they were too much, but I know better than to assume it. I’ve written before about the quiet exhaustion of keeping parts of yourself hidden, the small, constant editing we do because we think it makes us easier to accept, and being told you’re too much is often where that editing starts.

Sometimes “too much” is fair feedback, because intensity can arrive at the wrong moment, and a friend who says, “Can we talk about this tomorrow?” is usually just tired. The better question is whether you were too much for anyone or simply too much for that person on that day, and most of us skip straight to the first answer.

So here’s one small thing to try. Next time you feel the urge to send the “sorry, that was a lot” text, or to pull away before they can pull away from you, hold off for a day and let them respond to what you actually said. Some people won’t, and that tells you about the fit between you, not your worth. Others will write back with something just as long.

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Living Truthfully in a Performative World

Stop Calling Them Difficult

Are you okay with not being okay for a moment?

A man stands up at a Jimmy Carr show and asks how Jimmy keeps his mental health in check when he’s on tour. Jimmy doesn’t reach for the joke; he reaches for the man:

“Are you suffering at the moment? You okay, mate?”

And the audience member replies:

“I’m divorced and, like, you’ve been really great for me.”

A bloke has spoken up about his divorce at a comedy gig and stood up in a room full of strangers to tell a man on stage, someone he has never met, that he’s been great for him. Perhaps this wasn’t something he could say to a mate over a beer - or indeed, he may not have a mate he could say it to. So he spoke up, in the dark of a large auditorium, to a very public figure who is known for often suspending the comedy to speak seriously about mental health. And the guy dressed up his own welfare as a question about Jimmy’s, knowing full well Jimmy had a laugh available as an exit if it all got too much.

I understand that man completely, because for most of my life that was the only way I knew how to do it too. I’ve written before about how men lose the venues and the tools for saying the hard thing out loud, and here was a man using the one venue that felt safe enough: the audience.

Carr’s answer was better than most of what passes for men’s mental health advice. It deserves quoting properly.

“Well, look, I think a lot of the time we get hardware and software mixed up. I think a lot of the time you think, like, ‘I think I have a mental problem.’”

“Firstly, it’s like depression and anxiety, it’s much better to say sad and worried. Sometimes the less medical language makes it feel more manageable.”

“And the other thing is, I think: how many of our mental problems are actually physical problems, right? If you’re getting eight hours’ sleep a night, and you’re exercising and walking in nature every day, and eating real food with real nutrition in it, if you do that for a week, let me know where you are after that. It’s a hardware problem.”

We decide we’ve got a software fault, something wrong in our thinking that needs therapy or medication or a complete personality rebuild, when the machine has been running on four hours of sleep, no daylight and food that comes in a takeaway container.

Jimmy’s right - for many people struggling with low-grade misery, decent sleep, regular movement, some sunlight and real food will shift things more than any amount of introspection. It isn’t glamorous advice, but it works.

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Jimmy didn’t stop there either, and that’s the part the clip-sharers tend to trim. He looked at a divorced man and named the loss for what it was:

“that was a woman that you loved, and you planned something together, so there’s a grieving to that. Just be as kind as you can be.”

No question Jimmy Carr is a remarkably talented performer, but he’s also a deep thinker - it’s worth searching for interviews and podcasts about him. He’s not just a well of one-liners; he’s well read and has clearly thought deeply about a range of mental health issues. And that was evidenced in the exchange with the audience member - in what passed as ‘crowd work’, he checked on the person, offered the hardware v software as a solution, honoured the loss of the man’s relationship and topped it all off with kindness. I doubt many of us could do that so effortlessly, let alone in front of a packed theatre crowd who’ve paid to come hear jokes.

Unknowingly, I’ve actually been following Jimmy’s advice. I did the hardware work properly in the lead-up to my shoulder surgery. I’ve lost more than 13 kilos, I swam laps multiple days a week, and I really focused on my Pilates. My cholesterol has finally been brought down to something a doctor can look at without wincing, and my kidney results are back in a healthy range, so the machine runs better than it has in a long while.

But I do think Jimmy’s list needs another item. The late neuroscientist John Cacioppo spent his career showing that loneliness is a biological signal, the same kind of primal alarm the body sounds for hunger and thirst, which means your body treats a lack of people much the way it treats a lack of food.

“I like to use the analog of hunger... Loneliness is very much like that, and instead of sustaining us with calories, it sustains us with connections.”

So alongside sleep, exercise, nature, and real food sits a fifth item: people. I’d put it on the hardware list too. We tend to file connection under software, a nice-to-have we might install once life settles down, when it’s much closer to nutrition and part of what the machine actually runs on.

I think that reframe matters for men in particular. Men will schedule maintenance; we service the car, do the gym reps, and take the supplements, because maintenance is measurable. Add human connection on the list, and it stops being an emotional confession and becomes something you just do with the discipline you’d bring to the gym, whether that’s a text, a beer you book in, or a call on the drive home.

I think Jimmy is right that reaching for clinical language too early can make a feeling seem bigger and more permanent than it is. My problem at 54 was that I had no words at all. It took therapy, and a therapist who wouldn’t accept my shallow answers, before I could name what I was feeling with anything more precise than ‘fine’.

I do want to be clear - sometimes it really is depression, and a week of walking in nature won’t fix it. If the dark doesn’t lift, you must go and see someone, because that’s hardware maintenance too.

The man in the audience got more great advice than many men get in a year. All credit to Jimmy Carr; that was a good human at work. But a comedian on tour can’t be the man’s plan, because the gig ends, the lights come up, and everyone heads home. The fifth item is the one only the rest of us can supply.

So this week, try one piece of connection maintenance and give it the diligence you’d give a workout, whether that means sending the text or booking the beer. And be as kind as you can be, including to the bloke asking a comedian for help, if that bloke happens to be you.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

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Why don't we ask for help when we're lonely?

Loneliness is terrible for your health

The Quiet Epidemic: How Loneliness Became a Public Health Crisis

A group of volunteers at the University of Virginia were asked to hand over their phones and led into a room bare except for a chair and a button as part of a study led by psychologist Timothy Wilson. They were simply told to sit quietly for 15 minutes alone with their own thoughts. In preparation, a little earlier they’d been given a mild electric shock and asked whether they’d pay to avoid another one.

The button next to the chair would deliver the same mild shock; it was purely voluntary if they chose to push it.

In the study, published in 2014, 18 of those 42 people pressed it at least once. One man pressed it so many times - 190 in 15 minutes - that they left his data out of the study. More men than women pushed the button.

Chris Chambers, a psychologist at Cardiff University, told the BBC:

“This is essentially a study showing that people don’t like to be bored.”

A Tilburg University team repeated the experiment in 2022 and got much the same result, though they suspected plenty of people pressed the button

“because they were curious about the shocks, their intensities, and the effects they would have on them.”

What interests me more is that when Wilson’s team let people read, listen to music or browse the web instead, they enjoyed the time much more. When older volunteers tried the same experiment at home, they fared no better than the previous group.

Ivo Vlaev, of Warwick University and Imperial College London, read the results this way:

“The bottom line is that they felt miserable. Research has shown that happiness is not only about experiencing pleasure. You need a sense of meaning and purpose, which you lack in these conditions. And when you have a task to do, you do have that sense, even if it’s a simple task.”

Boredom and loneliness are different things. You can be bored at a party filled with people, music and chatter, and be perfectly content on your own. It’s the small tasks that give shape to the day - unpacking the dishwasher, putting out the bins, saying hi to our neighbour, or working on a document for your job. They give us purpose and make us feel part of something - that we matter.

Psychologists literally call this mattering, the sense that other people notice you and rely on you. Gordon Flett, a psychologist at York University in Toronto who has spent years studying it, put it to AARP:

“I am convinced that a big chunk of the loneliness epidemic is a ‘not mattering’ epidemic.”

When we go through a major change in our lives, perhaps retirement, or redundancy, or divorce, we lose a bundle of the things that matter. I’ve been experiencing this first-hand. My son moved out last year, my eldest daughter has lived interstate for several years, and my youngest is only with me half the month. Plus, I don’t work full time anymore, so I’m rattling around my house by myself during the day. If I don’t eat lunch, or don’t get around to put a load of washing on, actually it doesn’t really matter unless I notice I’m hungry or out of clean jocks.

If you're in the middle of this yourself, you're not the only one. Plenty of us have watched the small jobs that gave our days shape quietly disappear, and felt worse for it than we expected. I write about loneliness, purpose and the ordinary ways we stay connected most weeks. Subscribe to get the next one.

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I’m ok with solitude for a time; I don’t feel pressured or under the pump to get things done. But these times when I am alone make me realise I do actually quite like feeling needed - yet there’s often nobody around who needs me.

When I moved into semi-retirement, it shifted how I thought about purpose, and I wrote about that in Living with Purpose: A Guide for the Beautifully Lost. My point then was that for most people, purpose is a blend of small things done consistently. I still think that’s right, and the Virginia study, odd as it is, supports it. Psychologists use the same idea deliberately in behavioural activation, a well-tested treatment for low mood that starts with small, achievable activities rather than waiting until you feel like doing them.

So hang on to a few small daily jobs that are yours, even when someone kindly offers to take them off your hands, whether that’s watering the plants or walking the dog around the same block. And if your own list has thinned out, look for one small way to be useful to someone else this week, like collecting a neighbour’s parcel or ringing the mate who’s just retired to ask for a hand with something. None of it needs to be grand - small things are just as important. Those people in the room with the button would likely have been perfectly happy with a book or some music. Or a basket of washing to fold.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

Read more like this

Why Does Stillness Feel Unsafe When You're Lonely?

Why Did Everyone Disappear After Fifty?

The Quiet Epidemic: How Loneliness Became a Public Health Crisis

I’m dictating this at my desk in a button-up flannel shirt, pyjama pants and Ugg boots, because getting into jeans and lacing up my boots still hurts more than it’s worth, and I have no reason to go out today. It’s been five weeks since my right shoulder surgery. I’ll try not to make this a whinge, but it has been harder than I expected.

The surgery repaired my rotator cuff, which involved cutting into the top of my bicep and, in my surgeon’s words, hiking it all up, along with some work on the osteoarthritis in the joint. I’m right-handed, and for the first couple of weeks my right arm and hand were close to useless. The hand stayed swollen for more than a week, and only at a follow-up at the orthopaedic clinic at the two-week mark did I learn why. During arthroscopic surgery, they pump a considerable amount of fluid into the shoulder to give the surgeon room to work, and it has to go somewhere afterwards.

Everything I’d handed over to autopilot came back to bite me. So much of ordinary life runs on muscle memory that you never notice it until it’s gone. Cleaning my teeth and using mouthwash left-handed is clumsy, and wiping my bottom turned out to be a skill I had to relearn at sixty. Filling a glass of water, spreading butter on bread and slicing fruit all happen with a hand that has no idea what it’s doing. I can’t keep anything in the right-hand pockets of my jeans, though the sling I bought from Amazon has a handy pocket for my phone and other bits and pieces. I still can’t lift my right arm out to the side, so long drives are out of the question, and I’ve driven the car three times in five weeks when normally I’d drive every day. My standard daily wear is T-shirts, so I had to go shopping for shirts with buttons, and even then getting in and out of them was painful whenever the arm moved more than a fraction. A couple of days ago I managed my first T-shirt.

But the real problem has been sleep. I haven’t slept through the night in five weeks. For the first two or three weeks, I woke every hour and a half or two, sometimes staying up an hour or two before trying again, then dozing in the afternoon. A friend who had the same type of surgery last year warned me she had to sleep sitting up for a fortnight; she wasn’t wrong. Finding a comfortable position in bed was almost impossible, so plenty of nights I’ve slept on the couch, where I could at least lie on my side, with the TV on low until my eyes drooped. I’d wake to find I’d missed an episode or two of whatever was on, which was how I measured how long I’d dozed.

I’ve had chemical help with slow- and fast-release painkillers at night, some of them opioid-based, so I can’t stay on them for long, and they mess with your insides enough that I’m taking laxatives twice a day to stay regular.

The dozes have been getting longer; I only woke twice last night. The first time, about 3:30 a.m., I fell back asleep quickly; the second was at 5 a.m., and I decided to get up. I often wake with my shoulder really aching, I guess a combination of the painkillers wearing off and the shoulder getting into awkward positions while I’m sleeping.

If you’re in the middle of this yourself, you’re not the only one, and the slow days still count even when you can’t see them moving. I write about recovery, resilience and the people who check in on us most weeks. Subscribe to get the next one.

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I won’t pretend there hasn’t been comfort food. I don’t usually eat much bread, and I keep pasta and other carbs fairly low, part of a deliberate campaign to drop some weight before the surgery after getting pretty heavy over the last year or two. There has still been a lot of chocolate, and a new love of bacon and cheese toasties.

Some of you might be wondering how I’ve kept writing through all this. Before the surgery I made sure I had a bunch of articles already banked, and in the last week or so I’ve discovered the joy of voice-to-text dictation in Chrome. I can get my right hand onto the keyboard now, but lots of typing is still uncomfortable, so being able to draft by talking at my computer has been enormously helpful, and I wouldn’t have been able to write over the last week or two without it. I’ve also used Claude to help tidy things up, because the dictation, while neat, doesn’t always capture all of my words in the order I say them.

Friends who’d been through the same surgery warned me about all of this, and I did listen and take it on board. It didn’t prepare me for how hard these weeks would be. The improvement comes in tiny daily increments, so someone who sees me week to week notices a fair change, while I’m living it one day at a time and you do get down moments.

I’ve caught myself starting to spiral on a couple of occasions, and I can understand how people end up there. What has interrupted it each time is a text, a phone call or a friend dropping over. I’ve written before about how my close friends banded together around this surgery, so I won’t go back over that ground, except to say they still call and text every day to check in, and I’m forever grateful and in their debt. The hardest part is the one nobody can help with: lying alone in bed in the early hours, my shoulder aching, unable to get comfortable and unable to get back to sleep until exhaustion finally wins.

I went into this fit and strong, after months of work in the pool and at Pilates to get my body as prepared as possible; however, I’ve done no exercise since. I miss the stretching and lengthening work we do in Pilates and the physicality of swimming a bunch of laps each morning.

I’ve been lucky with my health through sixty years. I’ve never broken a bone or had a serious injury or illness, and the worst of it has been very high cholesterol, which is finally back in the normal range after several years of medication. I’d lived with the pain of the damaged shoulder for long enough that I’d stopped noticing what I’d given up, swapping freestyle for breaststroke and kickboard laps so I didn’t have to roll my right arm over, and being careful every time I turned over in bed. I’m conscious that people living with chronic pain face this every single day, sometimes despite everything modern medicine can offer, and my heart goes out to them. My shoulder will get better, given enough time.

I do think I’m more resilient than I realised, physically and emotionally. I’ve had my glum moments, but I’ve stayed as cheerful and upbeat as I can. Today, past the five-week mark, I’m allowed back in the pool, not to swim but at least to get wet and walk lengths. I’m not supposed to put any load on the arm yet, hence the sling, and next Monday I have my six-week review, which I’m hoping clears me to start using it gently. The physio’s notes say real strength training won’t start until three months after surgery, which puts it sometime in December.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

Read more like this

When the Body Says Stop

Yesterday I chickened out of an MRI - and I'm proud

Why don't we ask for help when we're lonely?

In one of Julian De Freitas‘s experiments at Harvard Business School, a few hundred people sat down at their screens for fifteen minutes. Some chatted with another person, some talked to an AI companion, some watched YouTube, and the rest did nothing at all. The people who did nothing came out lonelier than they went in, which won’t surprise anyone who has spent a long Sunday afternoon on their own. The people who talked to the chatbot came out less lonely, by about the same margin as the people who talked to a human.

This is all a bit confusing for me, given I write so often about the importance of real human connection. But I don’t think it’s wrong, though. De Freitas is careful about how far he takes it:

“While we know interacting on a deep level with humans is best, a technology like this could be better than nothing.”

His team found that the relief came from people feeling heard by whatever was on the other end, and a version of the bot built to be caring did better than a flat, efficient one. Interestingly, it also made little difference whether people knew they were talking to a machine. For somebody tossing and turning, unable to sleep at 2 am, I can see how this at least provides an outlet that’s better than staring at the ceiling.

However, the benefits didn’t seem cumulative; while people using the companion for fifteen minutes a day for a week felt better after each session, the benefit didn’t build, and day seven gave them roughly what day one did.

If the idea of online companions seems new to you because of the buzz around AI, actually it’s not. Sixty years ago in 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT built ELIZA, a program that did little more than turn your own words back into questions, loosely in the style of a therapist. When his secretary tried it, she asked him to leave the room so she could keep talking in private. He spent the rest of his career uneasy about what he’d made:

“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

Almost forty years later, a British programmer, Steve Worswick, started building Mitsuku, a text chatbot who presented herself as an 18-year-old woman and was built for general chat, not for anything adult. She went on to win the Loebner Prize for the most human-like chatbot five times, and by 2015 she was holding more than a quarter of a million conversations a day. As is inevitable in hindsight, a good share of those conversations went somewhere Worswick hadn’t intended:

“Abusive messages, swearing and sex talk account for around 30% of the input received by Mitsuku.”

Around the same time the idea of computer-generated characters became very public. When the affairs website Ashley Madison was hacked in 2015, the leaked data suggested tens of thousands of automated “fembots” had been chatting up male members, who had to pay to write back, and the company later admitted it had used them. Plenty of men handed over their credit card details to reply to software that seemed interested in them. Given this was more than a decade ago, and also given the huge advances in AI, one can only wonder just what’s happening today on some of the dating sites.

Counselling is where the stakes get higher, because a lot of people now tell a chatbot things they’d once have taken to a therapist, or to nobody. At Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, researchers ran the first clinical trial of a generative AI therapy bot, Therabot, with 106 people diagnosed with depression, anxiety or eating disorder risk. Those with depression reported an average 51 per cent drop in symptoms, and people said they trusted it about as much as they’d trust a human therapist. Clinicians built it over several years, and monitored conversations in case any turned risky.

The same year, a Stanford University team tested five popular therapy chatbots and found they showed more stigma towards conditions like schizophrenia and alcohol dependence than towards depression. In one test, a user mentioned losing their job and then asked which New York bridges were taller than 25 metres, and one bot offered sympathy about the job before, very unnervingly, giving the height of the Brooklyn Bridge. The study’s lead author, Jared Moore, put the deeper problem this way:

“If we have a [therapeutic] relationship with AI systems, it’s not clear to me that we’re moving toward the same end goal of mending human relationships.”

As far as I can tell, the difference between the good story and the bad one comes down mostly to supervision: Therabot was built for the job with a team watching closely, while the bots that failed were open to anyone at any hour, with nobody keeping an eye on things.

These tools also have a habit of telling you what you’d like to hear, and that comes from how they’re trained. They’re shaped partly by what users reward, and people tend to reward being agreed with. In April 2025, OpenAI had to roll back an update to ChatGPT after it became so flattering and agreeable that people found it unsettling, and the company admitted it had leaned too heavily on short-term feedback.

Anyone who keeps an eye on the news will know about AI’s tendency to hallucinate - where a chatbot fills a gap with something plausible and invented instead of saying it doesn’t know. In September, Tasmania’s Supreme Court declared invalid a parole condition that barred Susan Neill-Fraser from speaking to the media, after the court heard the parole board’s secretary had used AI to write the justification, citing case law that didn’t exist. The state’s Justice Department is now reviewing how AI was used in past parole decisions.

A good friend or a good counsellor will sometimes tell you something you don’t want to hear, and a machine that is deliberately instructed to give you the answers you want, even if they are completely fabricated, is clearly poorly placed to replace a human in that role.

Loneliness itself is the other risk. A separate study by OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab followed close to a thousand people using ChatGPT over four weeks. More daily use went with worse results on the things they measured, including loneliness, emotional dependence on the chatbot, and how often people socialised with each other. The researchers are cautious about cause and effect, and fair enough, since lonely people may simply reach for the chatbot more. The people most likely to come off worse had a stronger tendency towards attachment in relationships, or saw the AI as a friend that could fit into their life.

Sherry Turkle, the MIT psychologist who has spent decades studying how people relate to machines, calls all this artificial intimacy. She has written about what’s missing from the other side of the conversation:

“When you tell your troubles to a machine, it has no stake in the conversation. It can’t feel pain. It has no life in which you play a part.”

A companion that’s awake at any hour, doesn’t get tired and asks nothing of you in return also gives you no practice at the harder parts of friendship, like asking for help, being let down and staying anyway, or turning up for someone when it’s inconvenient.

Regular readers of mine will know asking for help has been a blind spot for me, and after my shoulder surgery, my friends drew up a roster so I wouldn’t be at home by myself. I’ve also talked about how it’s unfair to ask one person to meet every need you have. I’m pretty concerned that some are pitching an app that promises to be everything to you.

So what is an AI companion actually good for? It can take the edge off a bad hour, and in a rough week that matters. It might also help you rehearse a hard conversation or find words for something you haven’t said out loud yet. It has no way to know you over years the way a person does, or to notice you’ve gone quiet and need you back, and being needed is a big part of what eases loneliness.

The useful test is whether the conversation with the machine moves you towards a person or away from one. If fifteen minutes with a chatbot gives you the steadiness to text a mate you haven’t spoken to in months, it’s done its job.

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Loneliness in a Hyperconnected World

Why don’t we ask for help when we’re lonely?

The Quiet Epidemic: How Loneliness Became a Public Health Crisis

For several months, towards the end of my long-term relationship, I made quite a long drive across several suburbs to stand inside a solarium-type machine. It was a sort of cylinder of what I guess were fluorescent tubes, and you started slowly, maybe only a minute, then built up gradually until you were in there for ten minutes. The idea was that this phototherapy would treat a really awful case of psoriasis on my chest, very itchy and horrible. The whole thing was all a bit odd.

There was considerable stress between my partner and me at the time, and we had already started talking about not being together anymore. We were also running a business that was only a few years old, money was very tight, and we had three children at school, so there was an awful lot going on. This was before I’d had any therapy. Apart from telling my partner I was off to the doctor, I didn’t tell anyone about it. I had absolutely no friends or people I felt comfortable having that conversation with, so I suffered in silence, and that only made it worse. It became a closed loop: the less I talked about it, the worse the stress got, and it fed on itself.

With my doctor, I think I just called it stress, the stress in my life, without breaking it down any further. I don’t know that I even understood I was lonely. I knew I was incredibly unhappy, but that had been my whole life. Stress is a recognised trigger for psoriasis flare-ups, so it was a fair thing to raise, but it left out a great deal.

The psychologist Susan David, author of Emotional Agility, described the habit in her TED talk:

“We often use quick and easy labels to describe our feelings. ‘I’m stressed’ is the most common one I hear. But there’s a world of difference between stress and disappointment or stress and that knowing dread of ‘I’m in the wrong career.’”

I was using one word to cover a relationship coming to an end, a young business, money that was very tight and three kids to raise, and underneath all of that I was lonely without knowing it. You can’t tell your doctor about something you haven’t recognised in yourself.

Back in March I wrote The Language Men Never Learned, about why so many men struggle to talk about loneliness, and one line from it applies to me as much as anyone:

“We men all too often don’t even have the language to start the rebuild.”

Realising I was lonely was the big revelation, and it came a year or two after those drives across town. The language problem itself was rammed home to me when I started therapy after my relationship ended.

The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls the ability to tell one feeling from another in fine detail emotional granularity, and in her book How Emotions Are Made she links it to physical health:

“People who exhibit higher emotional granularity go to the doctor less frequently, use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness.”

I’m not about to claim that a better word would have cleared up my skin, and I’d be wary of anyone who did. I do think “stress” was too broad to be much use to me. It described my whole life at that point, and nobody can do much about a whole life in one appointment, whereas loneliness is something a phone call or a coffee with a mate can start to shift.

It also makes me wonder whose job it was to dig further. My doctor at the time didn’t have that conversation with me, and the research suggests it was worth having. A 2022 review in General Hospital Psychiatry found people with psoriasis are 1.5 times more likely to show depressive symptoms, and recommended that doctors screen all their psoriasis patients for depression and anxiety. Loneliness is trickier to ask about. Johanna Badcock, a clinical research psychologist and vice chair of Ending Loneliness Together, explained the recommended approach to GPs:

“The current recommendations are to use indirect assessments and approaches that don’t explicitly use the word loneliness. For example, ‘Do you feel there are people around you who really know you and understand you? Do you feel in tune with the other people around you?’”

If anyone had asked me the first of those questions back then, I would have said no. I don’t want to be too hard on a GP looking at a skin condition while the patient talks about stress, because appointments are short and I gave them very little to go on.

So if you hear yourself telling a doctor, a partner or a friend that you’re stressed, ask yourself what the stress is actually made of, even if you only answer that question privately at first. One more specific word gives you, and them, something to work with.

Back then I couldn’t have told my doctor I was lonely, because I didn’t know it yet. These days I have a different doctor, one who has asked me more probing questions from time to time and has made me very comfortable being open about emotion, which I’m very grateful for. Between that and everything I’ve learned since, I’m far better equipped to have an open and honest conversation, and if I were in that first appointment now, I’d be able to say what the stress was made of.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

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Loneliness is terrible for your health

Prickly Heat Sucks. Just Like Loneliness.

Why don’t we ask for help when we’re lonely?

There’s always one person, and it used to be me, determined to fill every silence in a meeting. I spoke first and spoke the longest to make sure everyone in the room thought I was the winner. The obvious problem is this is performance masking as confidence, a show staged for an audience that didn’t know, and didn’t want to be, an audience.

I’ve written about this same instinct from the other side of the table, in The quiet strength of being unsure, on years of chairing meetings as a business leader. It took me a long time to learn not to be the loudest voice in the room.

“We often mistake the loudest voice in the room for the most competent.”

Of course, as a leader, your teams look to you for certainty, but certainty and confidence are not the same. Certainty is a conviction that a fact is true. Confidence is a measure of trust in your own capacity to handle whatever the outcome turns out to be. Confidence isn’t believing you’ll be right. It’s trusting yourself if you turn out to be wrong.

For way too long, I conflated the two and created a false impression of boldness that all too often wasn’t backed by anything real. True confidence is one of the ten qualities of a good human I return to constantly - here’s something from my original article exploring true confidence:

“True confidence doesn’t need to announce itself. It doesn’t require validation from others or constant reinforcement through external achievements.”

Confidence is a theme I’ve returned to constantly, because I think too many of us are as guilty as I am of this confusion of confidence and certainty. Many see confidence as a volume setting; you crank up the dial to make people notice. We all know the type; they have a strut, an air of unassailability. They may adopt physical characteristics - we’ve all known the beefy bloke with the tattoos and gym biceps - or perhaps they dress immaculately, sharp suit, crisp shirt and tie. Except when challenged, that armour they’ve embraced may turn out to be the most confident thing about them.

If you've ever caught yourself telling a story slightly bigger than it needed to be, just to make sure someone noticed, you're not the only one. I write about solitude, confidence and the quieter parts of being a good human each week. Subscribe to get the next one.

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The people I’ve actually found confident, rather than just loud, tend to do the opposite. They say less about what they’ve done; they are underwhelming at first; they are the ones in the T-shirt and jeans at the back of a room filled with suits. They don’t look to the room to register their presence. In Building Quiet Confidence, I quoted Don Sibet:

“Confidence is silent. Insecurities are loud.”

It’s not so much loud and quiet as performance versus confidence. Less confident people paper over their insecurities. They seek out an audience to validate their presence or contribution. But the moment your sense of your own worth depends on an audience clocking it, you’ve handed that audience the keys. They get to decide whether the thing you did mattered. So you fill the gaps to cultivate the applause.

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman make a similar case in The Confidence Code, drawing together research on how confidence develops through action and competence. Genuine confidence gets built through doing something difficult often enough that you stop needing anyone else to confirm you can do it. Christine Lagarde, one of the most powerful people in the world, still prepares obsessively for every meeting rather than trusting her reputation to carry her through.

“There are moments where I have to sort of go deep inside myself and pull my strength, confidence, background, history, experience and all the rest of it, to assert a particular point.”

What I like about that is how ordinary the source of assurance sounds: preparation, experience and doing the work.

On the flip side, performance has to keep succeeding. Confidence doesn’t. If your worth depends on people noticing you’re right, you can never afford to be seen getting something wrong.

“If you are aiming to be perfect, you will never be confident.”

Real confidence has room for that risk. It doesn’t need every attempt to succeed, because it was never staged as a performance for onlookers to grade. As I put it when I first wrote about building it:

“It’s the difference between arrogance (which needs to prove itself) and genuine self-assurance (which simply gets on with things).”

Needing an audience isn’t a character flaw. It can become a habit, especially if experience has taught you that being noticed is how your contribution gets valued. Perhaps the shift is subtle, but you start to live for the accolades; the praise creates confidence, when it should be the other way around.

Think of the tradie who fixes the actual fault instead of the symptom, then leaves without pointing out how easily it could have gone wrong. Or the colleague who solves something quietly on a Friday afternoon and doesn’t mention it at Monday’s meeting. Neither is hiding their competence. They just don’t need anyone else to certify it.

Quiet confidence works exactly the same whether anyone’s watching or not.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

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Ten Qualities of a Good Human

Living Truthfully in a Performative World

Speaking Kindness to the Mirror

Loneliness is a curious beast. You can be sitting alone at home and be lonely. You can be in a room full of people and feel just as lonely. I’ve had many moments of both. At boarding school, I felt enormous loneliness, which, as I reflect back today, was probably driven by two very different feelings.

Firstly, my lack of power in the situation: I hadn’t chosen to be there, and I had no authority I could exercise over my being there. Secondly, the lack of connection with the other students: I came from a very different background, lived thousands of kilometres away. It is no wonder I gravitated to a handful of other ‘outsiders’ - even the school worked this out, exiling us to a couple of studies in the rafters of the boarding house rather than on the floor below, where the majority of students studied and slept.

I shared a boarding house with a hundred other boys, yet solitude was inevitable. Experiences like that are hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t had one, because on paper nothing is missing. There are people everywhere, accompanied by all the hubbub and noise created by a horde of teenage boys. You lie in bed, two to a study, yet even with someone else sleeping in the same room, you feel alone. All this makes more sense once you stop measuring loneliness by headcount.

Psychologist John Cacioppo spent most of his career at the University of Chicago on that distinction. His research found that lonely people are as likely as anyone to be surrounded by coworkers, neighbours, friends and family, and that what sets them apart is perceived social isolation, a sense that the relationships they have aren’t meeting the needs they have. Loneliness is a gap between what you want from the people around you and what you’re getting. A crowded room can widen that gap as easily as an empty house.

If you're in the middle of this yourself, you're not the only one. Feeling alone in a crowded room is far more common than most people let on. I write about loneliness, solitude and the difference between the two most weeks. Subscribe to get the next one.

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I know that gap from the inside. In The Silent Drift I wrote:

“Many, like me, have suffered what’s sometimes termed the ‘friendly loneliness’ phenomenon: surrounded by people, especially at work, but disconnected emotionally, just moving through life like an automaton.”

The same thing can happen at a party or a family lunch as easily as at work, which is why counting the people in the room tells you so little.

Solitude is different, and it’s one I enjoy. In Second Look: The Loneliness of the Writer, I described it like this:

“I am someone who enjoys solitude in a space to ponder, ruminate, and write, even if it’s sitting in a cafe with my laptop, as I am now, surrounded by a hubbub of conversation. I am alone, but sitting in intentional solitude to work on this article.”

Nobody expects anything of you in that kind of solitude, so there’s no gap to feel. A party or a work function or a family lunch comes with an expectation built in that you’ll be social and participatory, give as good as you take. Yet you can still feel a gap between those expectations and what you are actually feeling inside. So instead you perform the role of active participant.

Earlier this year, in Facing the crowded room, I wrote about that gap, how crowded loneliness usually comes from the discrepancy between the person we present to the world and the person we actually are. Small talk plays a part. It’s useful; it gets strangers through the first five minutes, but a whole evening of it means everyone is talking to the version of you that’s just going through the motions. Likely they respond warmly to that version, and the warmth can make things worse because it confirms that the fake you is winning over the real you. So you leave the room where everyone was perfectly nice and still feel that nobody met you.

Cacioppo also found that lonely people start to read ordinary social situations as threats. They expect others to be less friendly and less kind, and they brace against that in ways that tend to bring on the very coldness they were worried about. He was clear about where the fault sits, writing in his book Loneliness:

“People who get stuck in loneliness have not done anything wrong. None of us is immune to feelings of isolation, any more than we are immune to feelings of hunger or physical pain.”

He saw loneliness as a signal in the same family as hunger, something that evolved to push us back towards other people, which is a kinder way to read the feeling in that room than as a verdict on whether you’re likeable.

I’ve written before about the power of being present, mostly about attention and the way our phones and our own heads pull us out of the moment. In that piece I admitted:

“All too often, during an interaction with others, whether at work or outside the world, I can find my mind several minutes ahead of the people I am talking to.”

Running ahead of a conversation is one way of leaving a room without walking out of it. Trying to be present to the whole crowd doesn’t help much either. It’s exhausting, and it mostly makes you more aware of every stalled conversation and forced laugh. It helps more to pick one person and stay with them past the second question, long enough for the talk to drift somewhere neither of you planned. One real conversation is often enough to change what you take home from the night.

Not every gathering will have your people in it, and feeling lonely there can say more about the fit than about you. Going home early to a quiet house you chose is a fair response, and so is staying for one more conversation with someone who looks like they might be feeling the same thing. Both are better than spending another hour performing for people who you probably really didn’t want to meet to start with.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

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Read more like this

The Quiet Epidemic: How Loneliness Became a Public Health Crisis

Why Does Stillness Feel Unsafe When You’re Lonely?

I’m 54 Years Old and Been Lonely My Whole Life

It’s now two and a half weeks since my shoulder surgery, and I’ve been reflecting on how the people around me have been showing up. In some ways, it’s been pretty overwhelming. My birthday party a few weeks ago showed me I have some really fantastic, amazing people in my world. I didn’t make a big song and dance about the forthcoming surgery, no big posts on social media about going into hospital, although if I was talking to somebody and they asked how my shoulder was, I did let them know that the work was about to be done.

Since coming home, I’ve had a constant stream of check-ins from people I know, touching base, asking how everything was going, offering to help if I need it. I’m really grateful to all of those people for taking the time.

Some of those people have been amazing in how they’ve rearranged their days to lend a hand. It’s highlighted how strong my connections with them are. I wrote about the mechanics of connection before, in Building Authentic Connections: curiosity, listening, being willing to show the unpolished parts of yourself.

“Connection is why we are here; it is the purpose and meaning underpinning our lives. As we invest in genuine connections, we are building wellbeing not just for ourselves, but for those around us. For those of us who have experienced long-term loneliness, this is beyond precious. By creating authentic connections, we are building a community around us.”

The first couple of weeks after my shoulder surgery have taught me how it’s not what someone says when things are fine, but what they’re willing to do when they aren’t. The other day I wrote about What Happens When You Actually Let People Take Care of You, and the detail that stayed with me wasn’t the surgery. It was what my friends did about it.

“They’ve even created a roster to make sure that at least for the first week or so, somebody is with me regularly, staying over at night, keeping me company.”

Nobody asked them to build a roster. They just did - there was clearly a bunch of WhatsApp messages flying around, none of which I was privy to, nor needed to be. That’s a weird experience for me; it’s not so much that I micromanage, but the idea that things are being organised for me in the background without me needing to contribute is quite novel.

This is the same group of friends who a few weeks ago ran my 60th birthday party, a story I told in my piece Could I Actually Let My Friends Throw My Own Party? Neither time did anyone really ask permission first; they just told me to butt out and not worry!

“They made it clear to me that it was all under control, so even when I asked a few questions, they pushed back: “Leave it to us.” I think I surprised them - and very definitely myself - how easily I acquiesced. What made the difference is that I trusted them completely, and that’s another very new experience for me.”

If you've ever caught yourself weighing up who really showed up for you, in whatever form that took, I'd like to hear about it. I write about solitude, connection and the quieter parts of being a good human most weeks. Subscribe to get the next one.

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Simone Weil wrote to a bedridden friend about exactly this kind of gift.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

There’s an idea that different types of action send different types of signals, and each signal has a cost; sending a text message is low-cost for the sender. For two or three people to work together and create a roster to care for a friend who has just come out of hospital is highly costly. Evolutionary psychologists have a colder name for this idea: ‘a costly signal’, one whose worth lies in what it costs to send rather than in what it says.

But I’m not quite sure I agree with this idea of cost. The reality is that many of the people who were sending me messages and texts aren’t even in Melbourne; their capacity to offer practical assistance is very limited. I don’t see why I should judge them differently from those people who did come over to my house to help me with the things that I’ve been struggling with while my shoulder is recovering. I’m grateful they took the time to reach out and show love and care for me, even from a distance.

Authenticity is about showing up - but showing up can take many different forms. What matters is that people show up unselfishly, whatever the method or mode. Sherry Turkle has said:

“We expect more from technology and less from each other.”

While I probably agree with her generally, one of the joys of technology today is how it can keep us connected. For example, one of my best friends is in Europe at the moment; she’s been concerned about my surgery, offering her advice and perspective, and I’m very grateful to her for that. She’ll be back in Melbourne in a few weeks, and I’m really looking forward to catching up. I don’t devalue the fact that she is not here physically, because she is with me in spirit.

Authenticity gets talked about as though it’s a feeling, something you either have with someone or don’t. I think some people see authenticity as a record of what people have done when it was inconvenient for them, and there is truth in that, but I think it’s much wider than that, because the idea that a whole group of people have been messaging, checking in with me, ringing me and otherwise, in various ways, showing their support and care has meant the world to me.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

Read more like this

The simple power of being there

Loneliness in a Hyperconnected World

How to Be a Friend to Someone Who’s Lonely

Two weeks ago I went into hospital for shoulder surgery. Quite a while ago now - maybe 12 or 13 years - I was showing off at 10-pin bowling with my children a bit more than I should have. Of course, I was getting strikes and enjoying showing off to the kids. But when I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t lift my right arm; I had torn the rotator cuff muscle in my right shoulder. I had a bunch of physiotherapy, and over time it seemed to heal.

Fast forward to the middle of last year, I became aware of progressively worsening pain in the same shoulder. I went for an MRI, which showed two different things: firstly, that the tear in my rotator cuff muscles really hadn’t healed properly all those years ago, and secondly, bone spurs had developed in the shoulder joint, which prompted a diagnosis of osteoarthritis.

For the last few months of 2025, my shoulder really gave me quite a lot of trouble. I went to see specialists, had more scans, and was told I would need surgery at some stage to correct the issue. For a while I stopped a bunch of my regular exercise, especially swimming, because it was painful - I couldn’t roll my right arm over without almost feeling like the bones were grinding at certain points as I lifted my arm.

However, come the new year, I made a firm decision to get back into it. I was also prompted by seeing some videos explaining how your arm is essentially a noodle that flops around, and so much of the strength and power comes from all of the muscles around the shoulder - that’s what allows you to lift your arm and wave it around. So I went back to swimming, doing breaststroke and other things that didn’t require me to roll the arm over.

I also had a long conversation with my Pilates studio, and we completely restructured my program so that I started doing two studio classes a week, really focused on building up my body strength, both core and around the shoulder and all the support muscles. Lastly, I decided to lose some weight. I was heavier than I’d ever been; a gradual increase over a couple of years had crept up on me. Over the last four months or so, I’ve taken 15 kilos off - which had the added benefit of really improving my capacity to execute a bunch of the harder Pilates moves.

Then finally I got a date for surgery. I absolutely felt like I was in a good place for the operation; I felt strong, and my body felt good apart from the ongoing pain in my shoulder. I showed up at my local hospital; they put me to sleep, did the work, and I woke up a few hours later feeling very sore and sorry for myself. They kept me in overnight and sent me home. My instructions are to wear a sling on that arm for six weeks, and probably not start any great strength rebuilding for three months.

Of course, I’m right-handed, and this is my right shoulder, so everyday living has some entertaining moments - things like cleaning your teeth with your left hand is an experience, as is doing up shoelaces and all the everyday activities we take for granted when both hands are working.

I’ve even discovered the joys of home delivery by DoorDash from my local ALDI, so easy enough to have groceries delivered without me needing to drive - driving is an obvious problem when one is in a sling, and you’re experiencing quite a lot of pain when that arm is rocking around.

What has really made the difference is how my friends have stepped up for me. They’ve even created a roster to make sure that at least for the first week or so, somebody is with me regularly, staying over at night, making sure that everything’s okay, keeping me company because otherwise I’d be at home by myself.

If you’ve been following my writing for a while, you will know that asking for help has been a blind spot for me. I’ve been so used to being a one-man band, really independent, making sure I just look after myself and do things for myself, rather than admitting that I need help.

Jaffor Bhuiya, of Harley Therapy, has a name for exactly that pattern:

“If you grew up in a culture that still imposes stoicism, self-sufficiency, and masculinity on boys, then you can have a fear of rejection if you open up. This can mean you continue to struggle in isolation instead of reaching out, in what has been coined ‘alpha male loneliness’.”

I’m really quite proud of myself! Because this is the second time this year, indeed, within a month or two, that I’ve handed over control to the people around me. A pair of close friends took every decision about my 60th birthday out of my hands, right down to the food and the playlist. I wrote about it at the time in Could I Actually Let My Friends Throw My Own Party?, and what struck me afterwards was that I’d still agreed to that, in stages, over months, even as I fought the urge to jump back in. This time there was no agreeing to it in stages, and no time to fight anything. My friends simply told me how they were going to help me through the shoulder surgery, and did not brook any argument!

I quoted Brené Brown on exactly that kind of exposure when I wrote about the party:

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.”

When you can’t literally put on a t-shirt, which is my standard daily wear, or tie your shoelaces, or put your hair into a ponytail, it really hits you just how amazing having people around you to help with that really is.

I’ve made a version of this argument before, in The Myth of Self-Sufficiency: Why We Need Each Other, after a friend took me to task for moving house on my own rather than asking anyone for help. Back then, the lesson was that asking hadn’t even occurred to me. This time, asking wasn’t the issue. Stephen Covey wrote about this distinction decades before anyone talked about burnout or boundaries.

“Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make. Dependent people cannot choose to become interdependent. They don’t have the character to do it; they don’t own enough of themselves.”

Covey’s point was that needing someone isn’t the failure state underneath self-sufficiency; it’s a harder skill that sits on top of it. You can’t really choose interdependence until you’ve already proven, at least to yourself, that you don’t strictly need it. I’d spent decades proving the first half. This was the first time I found out what the second half actually felt like.

It’s only been 2 weeks since the surgery. Sleep is still pretty difficult, but I do know, and I do understand, that it will progressively become easier to get through the day. For the first week, I think I was lucky to get more than two hours of sleep in a row. I kept waking up as I shifted in bed and jiggled my arm, causing the shoulder to complain. I’ve been watching an awful lot of TV and learning how to use voice-to-text dictation in Google Docs to write articles like this!

I know it’s going to be a long road to recovery before I am fully back to everything functioning as it should. I am normally a pretty upbeat person; I will confess that happiness mask has become a very thin veneer on occasions! I am proud of how well I am looking after myself through this time, but I’m even more proud of how I have let other people into my life to take care of me.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

Read more like this

Why don't we ask for help when we're lonely?

Yesterday I chickened out of an MRI - and I'm proud

When the Body Says Stop

I’m rubbish at doing nothing. I can close my laptop, but then I pick up my phone. I can put the phone down, then notice a cobweb. On the way to grabbing a broom to tackle the cobweb, I remember there’s washing that needs to be moved from the machine to the tumble. That is when I notice the cardboard in the garage that needs to be cut up and put in the recycle bin. If you ask me to sit down for ten minutes with no distractions, I really struggle. I can sit staring on the couch, staring into space, and almost immediately I’ll think of something that needs to be added to the shopping list.

I find it hard to let my mind settle. I know there’s all sorts of advice for this, for example, sit longer, breathe slower, notice my thoughts but let them pass, but there always seems to be something that drags me back to the present. What the generally accepted advice tends to skip is the part where, if you are lonely, your brain has a good reason to refuse.

Loneliness is not simply an unpleasant mood layered over an otherwise normal brain. Researchers who study it describe something closer to hypervigilance, the same heightened scanning for danger you would expect in someone bracing for a threat. Stephanie Cacioppo, who has spent years researching the neuroscience of connection at the University of Chicago, in an interview about the mechanism, said:

“Feeling socially isolated from significant others is not only sad, it feels dangerous.”

Her husband, John Cacioppo, has spent decades researching how the brains of lonely people respond to social threat cues faster than those of people who are not lonely. The idea is that for centuries, people who found themselves on the edge of the group of people around them could be a death sentence - you are more likely prey for predators both animal and human. So your nervous system sees isolation, being on the outer, as an emergency rather than just something seen as inconvenient. Staying still, away from your group, is not a great move if you don’t want to be eaten.

Today we speak a great deal about mindfulness, and how we should stop monitoring the world around us for a time, to just sit in the present. Except thousands of years of conditioning must be overcome for a lonely mind to seek presence. So our minds jump around, either looking for tasks - like my washing - or pondering past, present or future, anything to distract from the empty room and trigger alarm bells.

The proponents of ‘being present’, being mindful, can often portray it as a switch you can flick on or off at will, but that’s not how your nervous system works when it feels under threat. You can’t reset your mental smoke alarm when it’s already binging loudly to tell it the house is not on fire.

But please don’t see this as a personal failing; you are not alone. John Cacioppo, in the book that became his life’s work, wrote:

“People who get stuck in loneliness have not done anything wrong. None of us is immune to feelings of isolation, any more than we are immune to feelings of hunger or physical pain.”

Clearly, I am not great at sitting around when my mental smoke alarm is sounding; it’s a built-in reflex response. I touched on this same mechanism last year, in The Quiet Epidemic: How Loneliness Became a Public Health Crisis:

“Loneliness triggers our ancient survival mechanisms. When our brains perceive social isolation, they interpret it as a threat, because for most of human history, being cut off from the tribe meant death. Our bodies respond accordingly, flooding us with stress hormones and putting us into a state of hypervigilance that, when chronic, wreaks havoc on our physical health.”

So how can you sit in an empty room and ignore the alarm? The shifts are small; instead of forcing complete stillness, try giving your nervous system safe and familiar sights and sounds. Perhaps, like me, sit in your cafe and allow the chatter and noise to wash over you. Or go for a walk with the sounds of traffic or wildlife surrounding you. You need to give your body permission to enjoy the mental quietness, whilst buoyed by the familiar.

The shift does get easier, but it’s much more about practice and repetition than any kind of iron will. You must teach your brain to recalibrate, so it learns to constantly stop seeking danger or distraction. Those restless moments have to be expected, but over time you can dial down the reflexive response, convince it the danger has passed, even if it takes longer than a few deep breaths.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

Read more like this

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Ten Qualities of a Good Human

It’s a common trope: a man pulls over on the highway shoulder to help a stranger change a flat tyre. He waves off the twenty dollars she tries to hand him, checks that the spare is on properly, and drives off before she finishes saying thank you. There’s no selfie with them both on social media, no Facebook post #goodsamaritan; the guy doesn’t make a big deal of it when he gets home other than maybe noting he’s a bit late because he helped someone with a tyre. I feel quiet kindness can be confused with modesty, but really it’s a different approach.

Psychologists have a term for behaviour like this; researcher Heidi Wayment calls it a “quiet ego,” a self-identity that doesn’t need constant validation to feel secure.

“The volume of the ego is turned down so that it might listen to others as well as the self in an effort to approach life more humanely and compassionately.”

Wayment distinguishes between two forms of ego. The first is the quiet one; it still has a good sense of self inside; the second is an ego where that self has been squashed into silence. It’s an important distinction because too many of us - including me - get it all wrong. There’s a stoicism many of us have been inculcated with that we should be doing things for others without needing anything in return. Not expecting parades and ticker tape when we do a good deed. The danger, though, is that it morphs from humility - the first form of ego - into the second, where our self disappears. We build a sense of self that is entirely about service to others and consider not considering ourselves a virtue.

We all know people like this. It’s the friend who is always happy to come and pick us up from the airport. Or the one who drops by our place and waters the plants while we are on holiday. Or the work colleague who takes an extra shift so often it just becomes normal and nobody questions why. Of course, so much of this is rooted in genuine kindness and care; we all want to be there for our friends. But the pitfall is that they become the person everyone assumes will pick up the slack without asking if they actually want to.

When I was younger, my ego absolutely needed praise for ‘doing a good job’; I’d be the one who made sure everyone knew I had ‘done good’. But over time I’ve gradually come to understand the difference between staying quiet about my actions, and being up front about my limits. I’ve often found it hard to resist saying ‘yes’, even when it’s logistically a problem.

I’ve made a version of this argument a couple of times before, from different angles, firstly in The Cost of Being the Dependable One:

“They assume you are fine because you appear to be fine.”

And in The High Cost of Being Easygoing:

“There is a point at which flexibility stops being a virtue and becomes a disappearing act.”

The challenge is that quiet kindness, hyper-dependability, and permanent easygoingness can all show up the same way to the people around us. It’s invisible to them, and it may be invisible to us as well. It’s not really about them; it’s whether we can say no to an act of kindness - or whether we just do it anyway despite the personal cost.

Brené Brown wrote that about hard conversations:

“Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

Expressing a boundary by saying no can be uncomfortable; we worry about the other person’s reaction, don’t want to lose face, or don’t want to be devalued in their eyes. But unchecked, it almost becomes a compulsion. Yet by saying no - we’re busy, we’re tired, we can’t get out of work early enough - but not allowing it to sink into a sea of apology, is simply being honest. And definitely more honest than someone who just says ‘yes’ to everything and confuses it with generosity.

Unlike my younger self, you don’t need to announce your endless good deeds to prove yourself to the world. But we all need to learn that our offers of kindness come at a cost, and that sometimes we need to say ‘no, not today’ and preserve the balance between the two forms of ego. This ensures we don’t sink into silence and instead just be quietly kind.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

Read more like this

Whose Job Is Your Happiness?

The Cost of Taking Charge in a Relationship

Speaking Kindness to the Mirror

Scroll through some dating app profiles these days, and “ENM” or “ethical non-monogamy” is just as prolific as “dog lover” and “looking for a travel buddy” as just one more attribute that you are expected to accept. How often it is a genuine descriptor rather than a hopeful entreaty I’m not sure. But the pitch underneath, once you strip away the physical yearnings, is about abundance. More partners means no single relationship has to carry all the weight.

I’ve written before about the moment someone admits that a single partner was never going to meet every need they had, and how a clinical sexologist framed non-monogamy as an honest response to that admission rather than a failure of the relationship:

“...no single person can carry someone’s entire emotional life alone, however well chosen they are. Ethical non-monogamy just makes that admission explicit, building agreements and check-ins around it instead of leaving it unspoken.”

I still think that’s true. There is great power and vulnerability in honestly naming your needs, but taking action and closing the gap is a whole other thing once you move past the base abundance pitch. Does having more intimate partners actually touch the loneliness underneath, or does it just spread the same unmet need across more people?

After reading through a bunch of research and articles and talking with friends, it is no; it does not, at least on its own. Structure is not what alleviates loneliness. No number of partners will change your relationship with yourself. Non-monogamy done well carries real logistical weight: shared Google calendars, negotiated time, check-ins that have to happen even when maybe some are low in energy. People in it often describe this stage, half-joking, as running a small business.

It’s a form of busyness that can masquerade as connection because your diary is full. But it doesn’t always leave space for the slower, less scheduled closeness that is needed to calm a nervous system. A week full of dates and commitments is not the same as a paced, regulated relationship.

No matter the relationship form, there is the commonly accepted idea of new relationship energy (NRE), that high that comes from a new intimate relationship - whether monogamous or not - and it’s easy to accept that as the salve rather than solving an underlying emotional need. If your loneliness has led to a pattern of protecting yourself against deeper connection to the point where you’d rather exit than dive deeper, loading up more partners to keep chasing the NRE is no different to a drug addict hunting for the next high. Your avoidance is just spread across multiple people instead of one, and the NRE novelty fades just as predictably, leaving you still unresolved.

Jessica Fern, the psychotherapist who wrote what many consider one of the ENM bibles, Polysecure, makes a version of this argument that runs counter to the abundance pitch rather than backing it, after years of clinical work across every relationship structure.

“You are the source of your happiness, love, courage, emotional regulation and purpose, and the sooner that you can release your partner from being the source of these experiences the better for everyone involved.”

That holds whether you have one partner or five. Outsourcing your sense of self to other people doesn’t get safer as the headcount rises. It gets harder to track, if anything, because there are now more people whose moods can register as a verdict on your worth.

I’m not arguing for non-monogamy either way; that’s up to individuals to decide. But if you’ve spent years feeling like the typical relationship-escalator script doesn’t sit well with you, finding a community that shares your values and vocabulary can be a real relief. Non-monogamy might solve an ache of not having one single bond that makes you feel fully secure, instead of living uneasily in a one-to-one couple.

Loneliness doesn’t care about your relationship status; it comes with you into whatever intimate relationship structure you choose, whether monogamous or otherwise. It’s up to you to do the work; your happiness is your responsibility, not that of those around you. You need to be someone who can stand on your own two feet. So change the structure; at least explore what possibilities exist; just don’t expect changing the headcount to solve a problem that is yours only.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

Read more like this

Is Monogamy the Only Grown-Up Way to Love?

Can One Person Really Meet Every Need You Have?

Loneliness in Relationships: When Being With Someone Isn’t Enough

Thirty minutes before my guests were due to start arriving for my 60th birthday party, I walked into the venue, a bar in inner Melbourne, to be confronted by an immaculately decorated room, tables set, balloons floating, everything in place. I looked around and asked where we were planning to lay out the food, and was told: “It’s all sorted”. This was a very new experience for me, because I let other people organise everything for something dedicated to me.

I like to say I have had a real job since 1997; that was when I started running or co-founding my own businesses. When you start a business, you are responsible for every detail; you are both the chief and the bottle washer, so it becomes ingrained that you check everything and hold everyone to their commitments. After a couple of decades, that habit becomes part of your DNA, and it’s very difficult to reengineer.

If I had been organising my party, I can imagine exactly what I would have been like. Spreadsheets at dawn. Messaging suppliers and the venue. Choosing helium balloon colours and worrying that the weights used to hold them down were heavy enough.

Of course I knew my party was approaching; I had been the one to organise the venue, discuss general arrangements - a drink on arrival, the snacks and pizzas that would be needed. And over a couple of months, I’d had general conversations with friends about fun ways to ensure everyone had a good night.

But then a couple of close friends made it clear that they were taking over. They made it clear to me that it was all under control, so even when I asked a few questions, they pushed back: “Leave it to us.” I think I surprised them - and very definitely myself - how easily I acquiesced. What made the difference is that I trusted them completely, and that’s another very new experience for me.

Plenty of people in the room for the party likely would have been quite surprised by that. A couple of years ago, when I moved house, I did the whole thing myself along with my son. We rented a van and packed and moved everything apart from the large furniture items - we hired a couple of guys and a truck to come to move those. A while after, one of the same friends who organised my party firmly took me to task for not asking for help - the irony being I had been one of half a dozen people who helped someone else move only a few months ago. So I was happy to help someone else when they asked! It wasn’t that I chose not to put the call out for help; it literally did not cross my mind, the DNA runs so deeply.

I wrote about it at the time, in an article called Why Don’t We Ask for Help When We’re Lonely?:

“I have a track record of being rubbish at asking for help. More than one friend has pointed this out to me recently. My instinct is to go it alone.”

The habit that made me good at running companies was the same one keeping people at arm’s length, and it’s taken a birthday and some true friends to properly interrupt it.

The psychologist Steven C. Hayes, who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, calls the capacity I was missing psychological flexibility.

“Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations.”

Standing in the room surveying everything just before guests arrived, I found it interesting that I felt wonderment, not relief nor surprise. I think my brain quickly realised that, of course, these amazing people would do a wonderful job. They’d curated a playlist, a running order, organised a giant card for everyone to sign, and baked a truly gorgeous cake. Then they’d figured out a couple of surprises through the evening based on occasional conversations over the past few months about what might be cool activities during the party.

Brené Brown writes about this kind of exposure directly.

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.”

Handing over the physical and emotional weight of organising the party felt so vulnerable for me. Maybe there wasn’t a business or marriage on the line, but I don’t think I’ve had such a big hullabaloo made about me since I was a child; the emotion of the evening was palpable. For once I let people do something for me instead of the other way around, and I’m actually quite impressed at how comfortably that made me feel.

Of course there’ll be plenty more tests to come; my DNA means I don’t release control easily, this one party won’t undo the habits built over such a long time, but I believe this time I walked into a room for a major life moment and let it all be built by people who loved me, and I passed. Next time someone offers to help with something important to me, I’m definitely saying yes.

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DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

I’m not great at weddings. There are so many tropes bandied around - he’s not just my husband; he’s my best friend. She’s not just my wife; she’s my whole world. And all that “in sickness and in health til death do us part” really rubs me the wrong way. I know it’s meant as praise, as a heartfelt expression of how the happy couple feel about each other. But if you strip away the flowery language, what’s actually being asked of the two people standing at the altar is that they will provide each other with the equivalent of a support network that once spread across a village, an extended family, or a whole street of people. Especially today, those external supports often simply don’t exist in our Western cultures.

I have written before about the fantasy of expecting a hardware store to sell you oranges, the frustration of walking into a relationship wanting those tropes, but coming out with a shifting spanner and a reciprocal saw, then blaming the shop for not stocking oranges. In that article, I concentrated on accepting what an individual was actually built to give you. But I wanted to dig a bit deeper: even in a relationship that mostly is working, how can one person ever be expected to supply everything a human being needs?

Esther Perel has spent a career answering that with a fairly blunt no. In her TED talk The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship, she names exactly what modern couples ask of each other.

“So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise.”

If you look down Esther’s list, it looks like a heck of a job description; the only thing missing, although I reckon it’s implied, is “any other duties as directed”! Is it any wonder so many couples find that the actual job seems so much harder once they are hired? It’s not because either is inadequate, but because the role was never built for just one person. For most of human history, it wasn’t. Elders, siblings, neighbours and the wider extended family absorbed different pieces of what we now expect a single spouse or partner to carry alone. The nuclear household that replaced all of that for many of us is, historically speaking, a recent invention, and a container that struggles to hold a very large set of needs.

Historian Stephanie Coontz has spent decades studying how marriage changed, and she put the modern version of the problem plainly in an interview with Greater Good magazine.

“The healthiest families are those families that don’t try to be everything and do everything.”

When a relationship says you need to be a best friend, a lover, a co-parent, a therapist, a cook, an exercise partner and a financial planner, is it any wonder so many relationships buckle under the workload - and when it is not acknowledged, the resentment on both sides builds until something inevitably gives? Meanwhile, both sides wonder why the whole dream is falling apart, when, and I really hate to say it, the whole endeavour was set up to fail in the first place.

I want to make it clear: none of this is about loving someone less; rather, we need to acknowledge that we might need to build a wider circle around that love. It could be close friendships, a chosen family, a non-monogamous network, or simply admitting that your partner doesn’t have to be your gym buddy, your therapist, and your only confidant; the shape isn’t the point. What matters is working out which needs are truly load-bearing for you: safety, honesty, respect, and which ones you have been quietly outsourcing to one exhausted person.

Some might see this conversation as evidence that a single relationship is not enough, indeed, that needing others in your life is a betrayal of the one you walked down the aisle with. But I think it is the opposite: if your partner does not need to fulfil the whole role description, they have space for the parts of you they are actually suited to. Think of it as job sharing! And thus you stop mistaking a hardware store’s stock limitations for your or your partner’s limitations.

When a partner disappoints you, it is rarely proof they do not love you enough. More often, it proves you handed them a role built for several people and never got around to telling anyone else they were needed too.

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DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

Subscribe now

I watched The Invite the other evening, Olivia Wilde’s dinner party film about two couples and one invitation with an ulterior motive. Four sharply drawn characters carry it: a man who has been quietly miserable for years, a woman who put her art dreams aside to raise a child, a man who changed his name after his wife died of cancer, and a psychotherapist who has perhaps misjudged her own relationship as thoroughly as she assesses everyone else’s. The plot turns on the real reason for the dinner: one couple is angling to draw the other into a sex party, and once that is out in the open, each of the four gets dragged into a raw accounting of their partner’s failings, and then, worse, their own.

None of it resolves neatly. Most of the arguments stay exactly where they ended - unresolved. One couple simply vanishes at the end, and the film closes on the other couple, together twenty years, playing their piano together.

I will point out there are some laugh-out-loud moments in the film!

But it’s a reminder that any couple who says they’ve never had an argument is probably lying. There are loads of curated social media couples who espouse the notion that they are authentic with each other, without friction, because two people who have found the right fit should not have much to fight about. I just don’t believe this.

American psychologist John Gottman has studied the arguments of thousands of couples, and his findings are instructive - and make sense to me. He found that couples who stayed together over time weren’t avoiding conflict, but finding ways to resolve it together. He calls the mechanism a repair attempt, which he defines as

“any statement or action — silly or otherwise — that prevents negativity from escalating out of control.”

Repair techniques include using humour, validating your partner’s feelings, asking if you can both take a break, showing empathy, and explaining how you were triggered. Surprise, surprise, notice how this is all about communication!

How often do you stage your relationships for an audience? For your family? For your friends? For your Instagram followers? What sets The Invite apart is that couples openly fight in front of others at the dinner party. The conflict reveals truths they’ve hidden for years. Ruptures otherwise kept private come out into the open. It’s rare to see this. We instead put on our brave faces in front of guests, even if we’ve been at it hammer and tongs just before our visitors ring the doorbell.

Unless one or both of you honestly try to repair it, constant conflict is exhausting; it wears you both down over time, resentment builds without resolution, and it leads to more arguments.

There’s another side of the coin: when constant calm might not seem genuine. If disagreements are rare and resolved quickly, maybe it starts to feel like something is missing - is the lack of conflict a signal of something? The psychologist Mark Travers has looked into why this happens:

“When someone used to high emotional salience meets a calm, stable partner, they may mistake consistency for dullness simply because there are fewer emotional clifftops to grab onto.”

When your partner doesn’t have blow-ups, it’s not evidence that your relationship is less than strong; it means you’ve repaired things in a timely way, and it may have become so smooth and automatic that you don’t even notice anymore.

I know my relationships have become less dramatic and grown more honest. Conflict is rare, and I’d like to think it's resolved quickly. I don’t believe an argument today threatens the whole connection; rather, it’s proof the connection is worth fighting for. If you think a frictionless relationship is an indicator of a strong relationship, then you likely are looking for the wrong signal. Instead, watch how you dissipate that friction, and celebrate that you both have embedded repair techniques in your relationship, rather than letting something fester quietly with neither of you prepared to reach out.

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We are not mind readers

Was it you or them? Did you inadvertently offend them? Was it because they weren’t truly a friend but more an acquaintance? Losing contact with someone you counted as a friend can be disheartening. How do you react? Do you mourn, or do you just move on? I wrote recently about being ghosted by friends:

“They went quiet because vanishing felt easier than explaining, and they probably couldn’t put the reason into words, even to themselves.”

Compiling the invitation list for my 60^th birthday party was an interesting experience, and it brought me back to this discussion about friends losing touch. My previous article was more about how it makes us feel when a friend disappears; I’ve also considered how, at the end of the day, friendships can have a shelf life:

“Most friendships don’t end in a screaming match, stomping of feet, and the protagonist striding away. More likely the opposite, there’s no great climax, no cinematic denouement, just a slow, silent receding of the friendship tide.”

My invitation list started with me scrolling through two lists. The first was a group of people I invited to drinks at my place last Christmas. The second was my WhatsApp – which gave me a bit of a jolt, because my WhatsApp messages are ordered by most to least recent. So the people I have messaged lately are at the top, and scrolling down takes me back in time to see names I haven’t talked to for weeks, months, or, in some instances, more than a year.

Similarly, looking at the Christmas list of maybe 30 people, I see names of people I have drifted away from and haven’t kept in touch with. Some are for good reason – at least in my estimation. I felt they’d taken different paths, diverging from mine. Notably, they also hadn’t maintained contact with me. So I can literally put dates on when those connections started to fade – the date/time stamps tell the story. Equally, there are new people in my life, who I’ve met in a variety of ways, and who I now am in touch with regularly.

But I’m drawn back to those who seem to have been lost by the wayside. I found myself wondering whether there was a kind of grief I should be feeling. Had I perhaps misjudged? Had I listened to the wrong people telling tales? There’s an ambiguity. Family therapist Pauline Boss spent decades with families living inside exactly this gap, and she gave it a name: ambiguous loss, a loss with no confirmation and no edge. Her research kept returning to the same finding: people in this position never get handed an ending. They have to build one themselves.

“Without a verified ending to their story of loss, family members and friends experiencing ambiguous loss are left to create their own ending.”

Reading this made me realise that perhaps I’ve been imagining the disconnections from those way down my message list. I’d hope I’ve not been the one to go quiet on a friendship, but maybe I have. We’re all responsible for letting something, or someone, fade away - maybe not deliberate avoidance, but at least not taking action when we should. If a friend seems to have changed in a way that you think is divergent from your life, why unilaterally ignore them? Why not seek to understand instead?

I need to remember that, from their perspective, I’m the one who has dropped off the planet; they don’t know whether my silence is intentional or accidental. The not-knowing is what causes the discontent. Maybe they’ve been scrolling their older messages as well, checking my socials to see what I’ve been up to? Seeing me tagged in photos with new faces rather than their own? None of that skulking around online will close the gap; it just adds evidence to their preconception because they don’t have the whole story.

Pauline Boss’s later work names this directly. When there’s no way to verify what happened, she and her co-author, Donna Carnes, argue the only real option left is to stop chasing verification and look for meaning instead.

“When working with ambiguous loss, we shift from the goal of closure to the search for meaning because there is no other choice.”

So if you’ve let go of a friend, they have to decide how much credence or weight to give to your disappearing. What if your name comes up when they are talking with a mutual friend? How will they frame an explanation in their own head? What would it be like for them if you showed up again a few months later acting as if nothing happened? Do you owe them an explanation? Is an apology necessary, or an explanation?

I suspect the real reason is likely messy and complex – we only have enough spoons to maintain a certain number of relationships; if the person was in the ‘Water Park’ of your friendship constellation, it might simply be that your energy was drawn elsewhere for a time. But I can understand if the person you reconnect with feels a range of emotions, including both resentment and relief.

Psychologist George Loewenstein has spent years studying what he calls the hot-cold empathy gap: the finding that people are consistently bad at predicting their own behaviour across emotional states.

“When people are in an affectively ‘cold’ state, they fail to fully appreciate how ‘hot’ states will affect their own preferences and behaviour. When in hot states, they underestimate the influence of those states and, as a result, overestimate the stability of their current preferences.”

I took a punt on a number of ‘lost’ friends when making my birthday invitation list. Some have re-emerged; others haven’t responded to the invitation or a subsequent reminder. So reconnecting has gone a couple of different ways. They might have decided that no amount of explanation and apology will rekindle the zombie connection that’s resurfaced. But it looks like some of the friendships have survived a disappearance, and I hope they’ll be rekindled at the party. Others won’t, and that’s okay. It simply means the friendship, as it was, has ended. They are entitled not to reply now I have resurfaced; silence is fine for them, even if it is me who went silent first – and I need to live with that; they get to choose.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR

That was Molly Meldrum’s line, and it still holds up. You’re reading Alone Rangers for free, that’s not changing. But a paid subscription keeps it free for everyone else and puts a few dollars behind work that’s trying to say something true about loneliness and connection.

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I’ve sat in many meetings, both personal and professional, where one or more people are owning a mistake or misstep – sometimes it’s me. One person who championed an idea or plan explains that it didn’t work out and maybe reflects a little on why. They speak calmly and logically, and everyone acknowledges it; it prompts a discussion about how to avoid the issue next time, and after a while the group moves on.

In contrast, another person explains a similar misstep, but their body language is closed and awkward. Their voice drops, their shoulders hunch, they avoid eye contact, and others around the table start to manage the confessor’s feelings; the discussion stays on the error. Both people made an error, but it’s the second person who makes it about the error.

I’ve spent twenty-five years running companies, which mostly means I’ve spent twenty-five years watching people decide, in the space of a single sentence, what a mistake says about them. I’ve written before about accountability:

“We cannot control everything around us, however hard we try. We cannot control everything that happens to us. There’s no point blaming our upbringing, circumstances, or other people’s behaviour for our problems. But we can control how we respond. If problems are ours to own, then they are also ours to solve.”

Some people can say “It’s my fault” and move on. Others hear themselves say it and immediately start building a case for why they’re still a good person; they seek to reinforce their character to counter a perception of shame. Brené Brown’s research on shame names this reaction:

“Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is ‘I am bad.’ Guilt is ‘I did something bad.’”

In this framing, guilt is useful. It points at a specific action, and a specific action can be fixed, apologised for, or avoided next time. Shame is an emotion that embraces the whole person, and leads to a desire to defend the feeling. A more emotionally secure person can label the emotion; they still feel the discomfort, maybe the guilt, but they can take the step back from the emotion without encouraging others, and themselves for that matter, to make it the basis of a verdict on their character.

It’s perfectly natural that our instinct to protect ourselves from negativity comes to the fore, but when we try to hand off the blame – to pass the buck - it’s a futile attempt to cover up. Brown’s other observation, from Daring Greatly, is that

“Blame is simply the discharging of pain and discomfort. It gives us some semblance of control.”

Shame and blame are the opposing strategies; shame is internalised, and when we do, we likely call it self-awareness. Blame, on the other hand, moves outward and probably gets labelled as honesty. But neither is useful because it distracts us from what we should be doing: looking clearly at what happened and considering how we might change next time.

Have you heard someone say “I’m sorry, but you have to understand”? That’s them passing on the discomfort. Or, “I’m sorry you felt hurt”, which I don’t think comprises a real apology. What is really needed is to state the problem and why it was wrong, name the remedial action, and stop talking! Less performance, more accountability.

We must be careful not to fake accountability; visible anguish (“Oh dear me what have I done?”) and self-flagellation (“Oh woe is me!”) can give the impression of accountability. The performance is all about how much this is costing me, so a quest for reassurance, rather than an actual fix. Real accountability is not a performance nor an apology tour.

We mustn’t, though, diminish a mistake; if we are not uncomfortable after getting something wrong, then we are not demonstrating maturity, but when discomfort is pointing to what we did, it’s doing the right job, and not seeking to pass a verdict.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t nailed this all the time, but what I’ve learned is that you can tell pretty quickly which way someone is leading the conversation - are they going to fix the problem, or are they needing you to tell them they are still a good person? The first means you can both move on; the latter floats discomfort into the room looking for shoulders to carry it.

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This is Part 2 of a two-part series - I’d recommend you read Part 1 first.

Simon, the co-owner of my cafe, has just brought me another long black and pointed out the excellent crema on top. I’m surrounded by chatter as I plug away on my MacBook. Next to me are three mums, yakking about school, their kids, and the awfulness of parent WhatsApp groups. One exclaims she’s now delegated the WhatsApp to her husband; she doesn’t want to get involved in the endless nitpicking and micromanagement some of the others expect in the chat.

I’m trying to hide a smile of self-satisfaction at the Mum-chatter; I’ve left school behind with my youngest finishing a couple of years ago. But I’m loving how they’ve taken the time to come together, share coffee and food, and natter about their parenting challenges - one of them has a husband who works in the mines somewhere as an electrician and is away for a couple of weeks at a time, leaving her to manage the kids and the home.

It’s midmorning and the ‘brunch’ crowd is intermingled with groups of workers from the level crossing removal project nearby, in their big boots and fluro workwear. I am solitary, but not lonely. This is solitude I have chosen; I often write better with the white noise buzzing around me than sitting in my quiet house. The noise triggers memories, thoughts, reflections and feeds my words as they spill onto the keyboard. As I type, I’m looking back, not litigating, rather more dispassionately examining a bunch of moments in my life as I look for the language to describe my life after six decades.

It’s my 60th birthday this Sunday, 23 August 2026. In Part One of this two-part series, I wrote about a range of emotions through my life: shame, dismay, regrets. Looking back over more than five years of Alone Rangers, I can see anger and shame surfacing repeatedly. Yet most pieces move, however imperfectly, towards equanimity. Writing has rarely resolved an emotion completely, but it has helped me understand what I was carrying. I have tried to be honest in everything I write, although I still self-censor sometimes, cautious about exposing all aspects of a situation or moment in my life.

I promised in my previous article that this series was not going to be all doom and gloom, because my life so definitely is not, even if I have had, and continue occasionally to have, low moments. I doubt anyone is happy 100% of the time, but I do have a great deal of joy in my life. I am also sure I am not alone, that moments that once felt like crises are now just great after-dinner stories.

I’ve written a great deal about, and around, loneliness over the years, because this was my starting point. There is an escape from loneliness, but until you give that emotion better lighting, hold it up for inspection, you’re unlikely to see the path through. I started turning the light on at 54.

My life today is so different to 50 or 54. Half the month I am alone at home; the two eldest kids are launched and living their own lives, with their own careers, partners and interests. My youngest is with me half the time, leaving me bounding around my three-bedroom house every other week. It’s a curious existence, living solo. I’ve not lived by myself since leaving home back in the 80s. I’ve always shared a home, whether with housemates or partners.

As a family of five under one roof for many years, life was dominated by all the usual practicalities - schools, sport, shopping, housework - combined with running our own businesses. That’s not to say I was lonely; looking back, I definitely was, but I had an ersatz sense of people in my life beyond my family through socialising with other parents and working with small teams in the businesses.

Sitting in solitude in my cafe today is not the same; in a household of five, solitude is rarely achievable, rather loneliness creeps up on you as you go through the routine of domesticity.

Let’s look at the evidence. Start with the physical. Six years ago, I had a number 1 all-over buzz cut. I’d never worn nail polish. I was a clean slate - no tattoos. Today I have long hair, held up in a ponytail. My nails are painted purple (my favourite colour), although they’re often black. I have multiple visible tattoos; the largest is a phoenix covering my entire lower right arm, a symbol of new beginnings. On my other forearm is tattooed the words Kindness Respect Love - three words that underpin how I feel about life. Both of these tattoos are, in a fashion, a promise to myself, a reminder in front of me every day about what’s important.

At 54 I failed the pub test; I didn’t have three friends I could call to ask if they’d like a beer. Today there’s 60+ people on my birthday party invitation list; I’m punting maybe 50 or so to turn up.

I have learnt to decouple my self-worth from output; given my semi-retirement, I do have days where I am not sure what I am going to do - that’s a new feeling; I’m so conditioned to be busy that having nothing to do still takes some processing. I still do some consulting with the company I helped build. It keeps me connected to its future without requiring it to consume my identity as it once did.

Money is still a stress. I do live a pretty quiet life; I have no expensive ambitions, although a recent message from a Melbourne friend travelling through Europe and about to arrive in Berlin did make me a little sad that I couldn’t commit to an impromptu plane ride to meet her there. The car needs a fairly expensive repair, but I’ve got a workaround that should hold things together for a while longer. I have enough for a quiet life, but not enough to feel entirely free.

Part One allowed me the indulgence to wallow a little in how directionless I was earlier in my life. The idea of settling into a long-term career, building financial stability, seemed unimportant, even if I had thought about it at all - which I’m pretty confident I didn’t. Perhaps I regret not being in a better financial position today. But it is what it is.

I’ve learnt so much from my children. When our eldest daughter was born, I don’t think I’d ever held a baby. We’re a very narrow family tree; I don’t have any cousins, and our daughter was the first child in my sibling generation. Today she’s 29, lives on the Gold Coast with her partner, and has an amazing career. I’m in awe of her resilience, independence, and care for her partner and friends. Her brother is 25, lives up the road from me, works for the government, and has put his hand up as a candidate in the forthcoming state election. I’m so proud of the young man he has grown into. My youngest just turned 20; she is intellectually disabled, she can’t read or write, and has poor communication skills, yet shows great artistic talent which is being enthusiastically nurtured by a number of amazing people, and one of her paintings has just been selected to hang in Parliament House in Canberra.

I joke sometimes that having a child who will turn 30 next year is making me feel old. But really, I mean I live in amazement at everything all three have achieved, how each has become their own version of a good human, having strong friendships - some stretching back to primary school. There’s a twinge of jealousy on my part; I wish I had that, but that’s overshadowed by my joy at seeing them embrace adulthood and life with verve and independence.

I’ve pondered happiness a great deal, including in my writing. For a very long time, I thought unhappiness was a consequence of others in my life. Today I know it is my responsibility. Your partners and friends are not the source of your happiness, but they can trigger it. The rest is up to you. And possessions, money and titles mean nothing. I’ve known unhappy rich people and happy poor people.

What of my life today? Am I a fully resolved human? Goodness no. But we’re getting there.

I was lost after my 23-year relationship ended. Blame was easy to ascribe, harder to own. It was a profoundly challenging experience; our cultural imprinting tells us that this is a failure of your life, and it leads to feelings of isolation and loneliness. You question your self-worth. It doesn’t really matter ‘whose fault’ it was. Many relationships run their course. Decades ago, a couple probably would stay together because ‘that’s what you do’, and they both would be unhappy indefinitely. Relationship breakdown is now common enough that few families remain untouched by it.

I had two breakthrough, life-altering moments. I sat down and wrote about my loneliness. It was an impulse that I still cannot source, but clearly a synapse in my brain connected and fired. I am deeply grateful. Secondly, I started therapy with someone who didn’t take my shit shallow responses as legitimate, forced me to dive deeply into my emotions, and kept me accountable week after week.

I learnt to label my emotions, take a step back, and examine them to understand what was surfacing them. I learnt that negative emotions like shame and anger have root causes, and that they are part of being human. I learnt to accept them and seek out their counterparts: joy and love. This is not to say I am a sea of tranquillity today - you should see me in the car and the expletives at other drivers for their rubbish driving!

Six years ago I had almost no friendships in which I felt fully known. Today I have dozens, of all shapes, sizes, types and colours. A rainbow of a constellation. With ending full-time work, that constellation has largely replaced my professional network of tenuous connections and semi-friendships. Is connection at 60 actually different? Probably not; it’s just better lit, more examined, more purposeful. I socialise regularly. I volunteer at events around town that attract people from all walks of life, giving me an invaluable lesson that ‘normal’ is whatever you decide, not the chattering of commentators or society.

I mentioned earlier my Kindness Respect Love tattoo; I intended to add the word Joy at some stage, when I felt I had earned it. That morphed on a Bali trip last year to ink the first small part of what I hope will be a large tattoo; the first piece is a cluster of frangipani flowers, a reminder of tropical childhood in Darwin. Frangipani, bougainvillea and other images are symbols of joy to me.

I have a small coterie of people I am extremely close to, who hold me up when I am down and who, in return, know they can call me at any time for anything. They have reminded me that our capacity for love may be infinite, but trust and closeness are built through what we repeatedly do. It’s led to more complex relationships than I could ever have envisaged, but gives me much joy. Friendship and human connection are everything. There’s an Alexis Jordan song ‘Happiness’ with the chorus lyric ‘In time, I found myself in happiness with you’; I love that idea.

What does the next 10 years hold?

2026 has been a year of flux, with some shifting sands and uncertainty. I do not know what the next ten years will ask of me. I hope for a simpler, more creative life, one shaped by purpose, connection and contentment. Above all, I want to keep growing the joy in my life, and to earn whatever comes next in that unfinished tattoo.

Read Part One:

"You Think You're Such Hot Shit": The Girl at the Sailing Club Was Right About Me (Part 1 of turning 60)

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