We’re All So Lonely
By Tina Winterlik aka Zipolita
Read Part 1: Morning Reflections in a Fractured World → https://tinawinterlik.blogspot.com/2025/07/morning-reflections-in-fractured-world.html
I pick up my phone in the morning because I’m lonely.
Not just bored.
Not just curious.
Not addicted to apps.
But lonely.
People don’t want to say it, but I will:
I’m couchsurfing.
I don’t have a cozy house where I can walk outside, sip coffee on a porch, pick a few berries, maybe pull some weeds or flowers.
I have a friend — and I’m grateful — but he sleeps late, and he’s got his own rhythm, his own electric bike, his own life.
I can’t even keep up on a ride. I’m just too slow.
Everything feels too slow.
What I really need is to get back to Mexico.
To that slower rhythm that doesn’t make you feel like a failure for resting.
But even that dream is clouded now — the violence, the uncertainty, the grief of watching a place I love change under pressure.
I used to talk about it to my amigo in Zipolite.
I told him how rents were rising.
How Airbnb was pushing people out.
I could feel it — the tourism creep, the change, the fracture.
And he told me to be quiet —
"People will get mad," he said.
And maybe they will.
But how can we stay quiet, when so many of us are being displaced in silence?
We live in a world where the only way to feel seen is through a screen.
Where community is something we read about, not live in.
Where slow mornings are a privilege, not a right.
Where speaking up about gentrification makes you the villain.
Even in places where people are being priced out of the homes they’ve lived in for generations.
Loneliness is not just emotional.
It’s structural.
It’s tied to housing.
To poverty.
To phones replacing people.
To routines that don’t align.
To lives drifting apart in a tide of speed and pressure.
And even now —
I’m blessed.
I’m safe.
I have coffee.
I’m writing.
But I feel it.
That hollow ache of wanting to belong.
To not just observe the world, but live in it.
We need to speak.
Even when they say, “Be quiet.”
Even when it makes people uncomfortable.
Because the truth is — we’re all so lonely.
And silence won’t fix that.
Posted by Zipolita
www.tinawinterlik.blogspot.com
Instagram: @zipolita
YouTube: @zipolita
