Welcome to Alone Rangers: I Realised at 54 I'd Been Lonely My Whole Life
Who I am, why I write about loneliness and connection, and what you'll find here.
In January 2021, at 54 years old, I wrote the first Alone Rangers article and admitted something I’d never said out loud: I’d been lonely my whole life. Somewhere along the line, I didn’t make any friends. I had no ongoing friendships from school or university, and despite knowing hundreds of people through work, there was nobody I could call out of the blue and suggest we meet up for a beer.
Some of that has roots in an intercontinental childhood. On Christmas Eve 1975, aged nine, I boarded a Qantas jumbo at Heathrow with my mother and siblings, bound for Darwin. By the time my schooling finished, I’d been a pupil at seven schools across two countries, including boarding school in the English Midlands while my family lived in the tropics. Friendships made at one school dissolved the moment I changed schools. In England I was the Australian curiosity, in Darwin the pommy kid, and fifty years on people still ask where my accent is from.
Add a 23-year relationship that produced three wonderful children and then ended, and decades spent building businesses, and you get someone who became very good at figuring out life’s challenges independently - the alone ranger. My loneliness became a habit, so deeply entrenched I’d stopped noticing it was there.
Writing that first article changed things in ways I didn’t expect. Dozens of strangers left comments, and so many of them said some version of “this could be me” that the comments section started to feel like a confession booth. One person simply wrote, “I’ll be your friend!”
It turned out I wasn’t uniquely broken after all. There’s a whole invisible tribe of us who somehow missed the handbook on how to keep friendships going past childhood, and we’d all been carrying it, assuming we were the only ones.
In the five years since, I’ve measured my progress against what I call the pub test: could I pick up the phone today and call three friends out of the blue to suggest a beer? When I first asked myself that question, I failed it spectacularly.
The rebuild has been slow and sometimes awkward. I started volunteering with events that attract a broad and diverse range of people, connecting me to new tribes. I deliberately cultivated an inner circle of new friends, who I adore.
Today there are people I can call at short notice to suggest dinner, a movie, or a drink, which would have seemed impossible when I wrote that first piece. I haven’t solved loneliness, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claims they have, but I guess I’ve learned to live alongside it differently.
So that’s what Alone Rangers is. I write about loneliness, connection, and the emotional complexities of modern life, particularly through the lens of men’s midlife experiences. However, this space is for anyone who has ever questioned what it means to belong. I write about friendship and why it’s so hard to make as an adult, about relationships in all their forms, about mental health and the quiet work of being a good human.
Please don’t think I am an expert - I’m not a psychologist or counsellor. But I do have lived experience, and have spent considerable time on self-reflection and reading, once I worked up the courage to look my loneliness in the eye. I tell stories from my life, not because I have the answers but because I know how powerful it is to see yourself in someone else’s experience.
New articles arrive twice a week, and subscribing is free, although becoming a paid subscriber is very, very welcome. A good place to start is the piece that began it all, I’m 54 Years Old and Been Lonely My Whole Life, or the Ten Qualities of a Good Human series.
Being an alone ranger doesn’t mean being isolated. It means being comfortable with solitude while remaining open to connection. If any of this sounds like your life, you’re in the right place.