The Question Lonely Jeff Asked
It was the fall of 2011.
Jeff Ragsdale, a 39-year-old man living in New York, was struggling with profound loneliness after breaking up with his girlfriend.
One day, he wrote a simple message on a piece of yellow paper and posted copies of it throughout Manhattan:
“If anyone wants to talk about anything, call me. - Jeff, one lonely guy.”
How many people do you think called Jeff?
Amazingly, some 70,000 people are said to have reached out to him. Some confessed that they, too, were lonely. Others simply offered warm words of encouragement, telling him to hang in there.
The story appears in Professor Seo Eun-kook’s The Origins of Happiness.
Perhaps this is not merely the story of one lonely man. Perhaps it is, in some way, the story of all of us living today.
In an age of AI and social media, we are connected to more people than ever before, yet the number of people with whom we can truly share what is in our hearts seems to be shrinking.
Our circles have grown wider, but our relationships have grown shallower.
We communicate more, yet understand one another less.
All around us are people who smile while their hearts quietly weep, and families who live under the same roof yet have somehow stopped talking to one another.
So today, perhaps we can be the first to reach out with a few simple words that make loneliness a little easier to bear:
“How was your day?”
“I called because I missed you.”
“I’m so grateful to have you in my life.”
- From Dawn Light Notes by Ki Jun Kwon
Reflection of the Day
★ “The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.”
— Mother Teresa ★
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