It’s Sunday and I’m back in your inbox (and happy to be here).
I’ve just wrapped up facilitating a couple foundational training intensives, and I’m always struck by how much I need the touchstone of our quarterly deep dives.
Training together never fails to show me something within me that needs a little tune-up…and this time was no exception.
So I’m back in my life and my routine, and I wanted to continue the conversation with you.
Last week in issue 001, The Connection Fix: Part 1 "The Connection Crisis", I shared what I see happening in the world, and the approach I developed to address it.
I was really touched by your response to that issue. Thank you for taking the time to send in your replies, and for being real and vulnerable.
It’s meaningful to me to be in conversation with you.
So on the heels of last week’s overview, I wanted to take a deeper look this week into what I call The Connection Crisis…
There’s a quiet crisis unfolding right now.
Not the kind that dominates headlines.
Not the kind that’s easy to point to or debate.
But most of us can feel it.
We feel lonely.
Not just alone — deeply lonely.
We feel disconnected from our partners.
Disconnected from our families.
Disconnected from our friends.
And more than anything, disconnected from ourselves.
This is what I mean when I talk about The Connection Crisis.
And it’s important to say this clearly from the beginning:
This isn’t a personal failure.
It isn’t because we’re weak.
And it isn’t because something is inherently wrong with us.
It’s the result of two powerful forces colliding at the same time — forces most of us were never trained to recognize, let alone navigate.
We don’t experience this crisis as a theory.
We experience it as:
That question doesn’t usually arrive dramatically.
It arrives slowly — through exhaustion, disillusionment, and emotional wear.
And when we zoom out, we can see signs of relationship fracture everywhere.
Divorce remains a significant feature of modern relational life. The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) reports that around 40-42% of first marriages will end in divorce.
And here’s an important nuance that often gets missed.
While divorce rates in the U.S. have declined somewhat over the last decade, marriage rates haven’t risen to offset that shift.
What that tells us is something subtle but important:
This isn’t just about relationships ending more often.
It’s about fewer people entering — or staying engaged in — committed relational structures in the first place.
In other words, the story isn’t simply “divorce.”
The deeper story is relational withdrawal.
And withdrawal doesn’t happen because people don’t care.
It happens when connection feels hard to sustain — when we don’t know how to stay present, regulate ourselves, or repair when things get uncomfortable.
This isn’t about blame.
It’s about capacity.
Most of us were never taught how to stay connected when things get hard.
We weren’t taught how to regulate ourselves under pressure.
We weren’t taught how to repair after rupture.
So relationships don’t just end — they erode.
And that erosion is one of the clearest signals that the Connection Crisis isn’t theoretical.
It’s relational.
It’s emotional.
It’s lived.
The first force is what I call the Defect Dilemma.
Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the message that if our life isn’t working — if our relationships are hard, if we feel anxious, depressed, reactive, or stuck — it must be because something is wrong with us.
This isn’t just a cultural perception — it’s reflected in the data.
A 2024 FAIR Health analysis of billions of U.S. health insurance claims found that the share of patients receiving mental health diagnoses increased by nearly 40% between 2019 and 2023, with anxiety and depressive disorders among the most frequently diagnosed categories.
More people being diagnosed can reflect reduced stigma and improved access to care — which are meaningful developments. But it also means that many of us are increasingly encouraged to locate our inner experience in external labels.
So we go searching.
We analyze ourselves.
We label ourselves.
We study our past like it holds “the answer.”
And without realizing it, we start relating to ourselves like a problem that needs to be fixed.
Instead of asking:
“What skill do we need to learn?”
We ask:
“What’s wrong with me?”
That one question quietly reshapes our relationship with ourselves.
Because once we see ourselves primarily through the lens of diagnosis or disorder, something essential erodes: self-trust.
We stop listening to our internal signals.
We start outsourcing authority — to labels, explanations, test results, and external interpretation.
We may gain insight.
But we don’t necessarily gain capacity.
And insight without capacity doesn’t create connection — it often creates more distance.
That’s the Defect Dilemma.
At the same time, we’re facing another reality:
a widespread loss of connection.
Loneliness has been formally identified as a public health issue.
In a 2023 advisory, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy reported that roughly half of U.S. adults experience loneliness, and emphasized that loneliness is associated with serious health risks — including cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature mortality.
But loneliness isn’t just about being alone.
It’s about not feeling seen.
Not feeling known.
Not feeling met.
And here’s what makes this especially destabilizing:
When we lose connection with others, we often lose connection with ourselves too.
We numb.
We distract.
We overfunction.
We shut down.
And when we’re disconnected internally, relationships become harder — not because we don’t care, but because we don’t know how to stay present when things get uncomfortable.
This is where relationship fracture shows up most clearly.
Not as failure — but as overload.
Two nervous systems without regulation skills can’t hold connection for long.
And when repair isn’t available, rupture becomes the default.
So relationships end.
Families fragment.
People withdraw.
And then the Defect Dilemma returns:
Why can’t I make this work?
Why do my relationships always feel so hard?
These two forces begin reinforcing each other — quietly, steadily, over time.
That loop is the heart of the Connection Crisis.
When we feel both alone and broken, we don’t stay still.
We reach.
Not because we’re weak — because we’re human.
And that reaching tends to take one of two forms.
One path is state management through the screen.
We scroll.
We consume.
We distract.
We “research ourselves.”
We ask technology (usually in the form of some type of AI, like ChatGPT) to interpret what we’re feeling, why we’re feeling it, and what to do about it.
It feels helpful because there’s no friction.
No vulnerability.
No risk of rejection.
But this isn’t about screen addiction.
It’s about proportion.
Adults in the U.S. now spend roughly seven hours per day interacting with screens — across phones, computers, tablets, and televisions. That’s nearly half of our waking lives.
Staggering.
When that much time is spent responding to external stimulus, something subtle but important happens.
Hours that were once spent in embodied presence — with ourselves, with each other, with the internal signals that regulate emotion — are now spent being directed, prompted, and interpreted from the outside.
And over time, that shapes how we relate.
We don’t learn how to stay with ourselves.
We learn how to ask something else to interpret us.
We don’t strengthen inner authority.
We quietly outsource it.
The cost isn’t immediate — it’s cumulative.
The other path is state management through substance.
Pharmaceuticals.
Alcohol.
And increasingly, plant medicine.
In 2023, CDC data showed that 11.4% of U.S. adults reported taking prescription medication for depression, and the percentage of adults receiving any mental health treatment increased from 19.2% (2019) to 23.9% (2023).
Again — this isn’t “good” or “bad.”
It’s a signal.
A signal that many of us are trying to manage something internal at scale.
And then there’s the newer wave: psychedelics and plant medicine.
NIH-supported data show that past-year hallucinogen use reached 9% among adults ages 19–30 and 4% among adults ages 35–50 in 2023. Other analyses estimate that lifetime psilocybin use among U.S. adults increased from roughly 10% in 2019 to over 12% by 2023.
This is why I call it the Plant Medicine Panacea phenomenon.
Not because the medicine is “bad.”
But because many of us are treating it like a permanent answer.
This will fix me.
This will heal everything.
And when something becomes a panacea, it stops being a tool.
It becomes dependency without skill.
At its core, this crisis isn’t about technology.
It isn’t about substances.
And it isn’t about psychology.
It’s about lost relationship with self.
When we don’t know how to:
…we will look outside ourselves for relief.
That’s not a character flaw.
That’s a training gap.
And it’s a gap we can close.
This issue isn’t here to solve everything.
It’s here to name the problem accurately — without blaming us for being in it.
In the next issue of The Connection Fix, we’ll explore:
But for now, I want to leave you with this:
If we feel lonely, lost, disconnected, or broken — it doesn’t mean we are.
It means we’re living inside The Connection Crisis.
And once something is named clearly, it can finally be addressed.
I so appreciated reading your responses to my overview in last week’s Issue 001, and if you’re willing to share, I’d love to learn which one of these feels most present in your life right now?
It can be as simple as this – send me an email, and just type the word ‘Defect’ or the word ‘Disconnect’.
Or if you’re really feeling it, you can tell me all about it. Whatever is on your mind. What does it look like for you in real life? What have you done? How have you tried to solve it? And how did that go?
The most meaningful thing to me is hearing from you and understanding where you are.
Thanks again for sharing some time with me. Have a great rest of your day and I’ll look forward to connecting next week.
Joey
P.S. I’m also offering this The Connection Fix in video format. So if you’re more of a watcher than a reader, you can check out Episode 001 here.