I used to think loneliness meant having nobody around you. Displacement taught me otherwise.

I remember the day I arrived in Egypt. It was winter, and we arrived during the daytime. My family was with me, the streets were crowded, and life continued around us. Yet something was missing—the familiar places, relationships, routines, and small details that once made life feel like home.

I was safe, but I didn’t always feel that I belonged.

That experience made me ask a medical question as well as a personal one: What exactly is loneliness, and what happens when it continues for too long?

Understanding the Terms: Isolation vs. Loneliness

Some people confuse loneliness with social isolation and vice versa, so let’s start by clarifying this matter.

Social connection refers to how people relate to and interact with others. Social connection is the umbrella term that includes many concepts, such as loneliness, social isolation, and many others.

• Social isolation: According to the WHO, this is the objective state of having few roles, relationships, and social interactions with others.

• Loneliness: This is a negative, subjective emotional state resulting from a discrepancy between one’s desired and actual experience of connection.

Therefore, a person may have little contact without feeling lonely or may be surrounded by people and still feel emotionally disconnected.

What Displacement Really Does

Social health is an important pillar of our health, just like mental and physical health, but unfortunately, it is underrecognized.

Displacement doesn’t just move people from one place to another. It can also separate them from their routine activities, relationships, memories, and sense of identity that once made life feel familiar.

After leaving Sudan, I began to understand that home isn’t necessarily a building or a city. Home can be the people who know your story, the streets you recognize, the habits that structure your day, and the feeling that you belong without needing to explain yourself.

When these things disappear suddenly, loneliness may appear even when family members are nearby and the streets around you are crowded.

Displacement can also affect the way a person sees themselves:

• A student may no longer feel connected to university life.

• A professional may lose their role.

• A person who once felt independent may suddenly depend on others.

For me, loneliness wasn’t only about missing people. It was also about missing familiarity, stability, purpose, and the version of myself that existed before the war changed everything.

What Medicine Says About Loneliness

Loneliness is very common, and it is especially common among adolescents and young adults. The WHO’s report estimates that approximately one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness. It affects every region and age group.

What people don’t know about loneliness is that it isn’t just a personality flaw or a mental illness—it is a biological survival mechanism.

Just as we feel hunger when we need calories and thirst when we need something to drink, we also feel lonely when we face life events. This is classified by the WHO as transient loneliness. It is a temporary response to life events, such as leaving home or the end of a relationship.

Loneliness has been described as “double-edged.” Transient, short-term loneliness is adaptive and helpful, while longer-term, chronic loneliness is maladaptive and is associated with a range of serious health and other consequences.

Why It Feels So Painful: The Stress Response

When you feel lonely, your brain activates the sympathetic nervous system—the fight-or-flight response.

• It floods your body with cortisol, the stress hormone.

• It increases systemic inflammation to prepare your body for physical trauma, since a person who is alone may be more likely to get hurt.

• It puts your brain into a state of hypervigilance, making you sleep more lightly and perceive threats more acutely.

Your body isn’t trying to make you sad; it is screaming at you to find your people because it thinks you are in danger.

The Loneliness Matrix

Why is this happening on such a massive scale? There are three core causes:

1. Biological Causes: The Evolutionary Alarm Bell

The biological causes stem from a mismatch between our ancient brains and modern life.

Historically, humans needed each other to physically survive by gathering food and building shelter. Today, modern capitalism allows us to buy the things we need to survive through apps, entirely bypassing human cooperation. Our biology senses this lack of mutual reliance and triggers an alarm.

There is also a loss of shared physiological synchrony. True biological bonding requires neurochemical tracking through eye contact, shared laughter, and physical touch, which release oxytocin and lower cortisol. When these physical cues are absent, the body assumes it is stranded.

2. Technological Causes: Synthetic Intimacy

Technology doesn’t just fail to connect us; it actively replaces the structural “friction” required for deep bonds.

Take the “Agreeable Bot” phenomenon. The rise of frictionless AI companions provides immediate, temporary relief from loneliness. However, longitudinal studies show that they act as a psychological bandage that erodes our tolerance for the messy, unpredictable disagreements of real human relationships.

There is also algorithmic isolation, in which social media feeds substitute active community engagement with passive, voyeuristic consumption. We watch other people live rather than living with them.

3. Structural and Environmental Causes: The Atomized Society

Consider the remote-work isolation trap. Data confirm that remote-capable roles have drastically accelerated societal distress.

Workplaces used to provide mandatory, passive social friction through watercooler chats and shared lunches. Removing this—especially for remote workers who live alone—takes away a major pillar of daily human contact.

Additionally, modern culture glorifies hyper-individualism as a virtue. Seeking help, relying heavily on a neighbor, or admitting a need for community is often subtly stigmatized as weakness, forcing individuals into isolated self-sufficiency.

How to Solve This Dilemma: The Architecture of Shared Friction

To address this, we need a unique perspective based on three shifts:

Shift From “Socializing” to “Shared Friction”

Modern technology tries to make connection “frictionless” through swiping, texting, and AI bots. However, true biological bonding requires friction—the unpredictable, messy, and unpolished realities of face-to-face human behavior.

The solution: We must intentionally seek out environments with high social friction. This means choosing activities where you cannot curate your image, control the speed of interaction, or easily opt out when things become slightly awkward.

Move From “Independence” to “Micro-Dependence”

Hyper-individualism has taught us that needing help is a weakness. However, biology tells us that mutual reliance is what keeps the evolutionary alarm clock from ringing.

The solution: Create structured micro-dependence. This means intentionally creating small vulnerabilities in which you must rely on others and they must rely on you.

Examples: Starting a neighborhood tool-sharing group, coordinating a rotating carpool, or cooking a large weekly meal in which everyone is responsible for bringing exactly one raw ingredient.

Reclaim the “Low-Stakes” Third Place

We often think we need deep, soul-baring intimacy to cure loneliness. In reality, sociological data show that casual, low-stakes interactions with acquaintances—the barista, the mail carrier, or a regular at the gym—can be incredibly powerful in lowering stress hormones.

The solution: Become a regular somewhere physical. Choose one local coffee shop, park, or library, and go at the same time every week. You don’t need to have deep conversations; you simply need to become a recognizable presence in a physical place.

A Lesson From the Road

Lastly, I would like to end with a valuable lesson that displacement has taught me.

Social connection isn’t limited to face-to-face contact; online communication can also help when we are separated.

We should always be grateful, enjoy the moment, and remember that life isn’t only about places or people—it is about the ties that connect us.

My name is Mujtaba Elamin, a recent medical graduate from Omdurman Islamic University in Sudan. This is my first post here, and I want to begin by sharing the journey that shaped the person I am today.

My love for medicine did not begin recently. It started during high school, when lessons about the human body fascinated me.

Cells, organs, and systems all working together to keep us alive felt almost mysterious to me. The more I learned, the more I wanted to understand. Medicine slowly became more than a subject I enjoyed—it became the future I imagined for myself.

At the beginning of 2019, I entered Omdurman Islamic University as a medical student.

That was the beginning of a journey filled with study, sacrifice, uncertainty, resilience, and adaptation.

The first years passed relatively smoothly. Most of our courses focused on foundational medical sciences, and I enjoyed the process of building my knowledge.

During that period, I was also working part-time as a content creator. I built a football YouTube channel with around 45,000 subscribers and a TikTok account with approximately 91,000 followers.

My goal was not simply to become popular. I wanted to earn enough money to apply for scholarships and explore opportunities to continue part of my medical education abroad. At the time, I was particularly interested in studying in Turkey.

Unfortunately, both accounts were eventually banned because of copyright infringement. The opportunity disappeared, but my ambition did not.

Then, on April 15, 2023, everything changed.

War broke out in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces.

It disrupted almost every part of life. Families were displaced, homes and businesses were destroyed, healthcare services were interrupted, and millions of people were forced to search for safety inside and outside the country.

My family and I were among those who had to move.

Eventually, we left Sudan for Egypt.

During that period, I carried questions that I could not answer:

Would I ever return to university?

Would I complete my medical degree?

Was the dream I had worked toward for years about to disappear?

I felt lost. I had no clear vision of what would happen next. Watching my country suffer while fearing for my own future was one of the most difficult experiences of my life.

But then, in the middle of that uncertainty, a small light appeared.

With enormous effort from our university, batch leaders, lecturers, students, and families, we were able to resume our studies.

It was not easy. Continuing medical education during war required sacrifice from everyone involved. We studied while dealing with displacement, instability, emotional exhaustion, and uncertainty about the future.

Still, we continued.

By the end of 2024, I had completed my third year of medical school. In 2025, I began my fourth year and continued the clinical phase of my education outside Sudan alongside many of my colleagues.

I then continued through my fifth and final academic year.

On April 21, 2026, after completing my five-year medical program through a journey I could never have predicted, I graduated from medical school.

I remember looking at myself and asking:

“Mujtaba, are you really a medical graduate now?”

The answer was finally yes.

The joy of that moment was difficult to describe. It was not only the happiness of receiving a degree. It was the realization that the war had delayed and transformed my journey, but it had not defeated me.

Since the war began, I have become a different person.

I have learned that strength does not always mean feeling fearless. Sometimes, strength means continuing while you are uncertain, exhausted, and afraid.

I now look toward the future with greater ambition and gratitude.

My next goal is to complete my medical internship and prepare myself for residency and further career opportunities. I hope to contribute to the healthcare system in Sudan and serve the people of the country that raised me.

At the same time, I am building my skills as a freelance email marketer and copywriter. Freelancing is helping me work toward financial stability so I can support my internship journey, invest in my medical career, and continue pursuing larger dreams.

I am someone who genuinely loves learning—whether it is medicine, research, marketing, writing, technology, or a completely new skill.

Through this Substack, I hope to write about medicine, personal growth, life during uncertainty, freelancing, learning, ambition, and the experience of rebuilding a future after war changed everything.

This is not the end of my journey.

It is only the beginning.

Thank you for reading my first post. I would be happy to hear your story too:

Has life ever forced you to take a different road toward the same dream?