We’re all searching for meaning, and a great part of meaning is to be meaningful to others.

It is in our nature to desire connection with others. It is programmed, innate, and its fruition is a matter of great importance to our psychology. Loneliness is, in many ways, a lethal companion. In this day and age it would seem that we are more enabled than ever, with technology having made the world small, to connect with others and fulfill our social inclinations. Yet there is an epidemic of loneliness in the very places that are so crammed together by technology and population. Cities are filled with lonely people. How is this? How have we lost our ability to make friends, to connect, to simply be meaningful to others? The causes are many and unique to each person. But maybe we are simply looking in the wrong place.

One thing I have found useful is to do things that I enjoy doing. Fencing, writing, volunteering, and community initiatives among them, I find that in these things I have built some of the strongest and most significant relationships I have ever had in my life. And the thing is, I did not go looking for them. I did not volunteer with the selfish aim of shoring up connections to the ruins of my social life. I did not do these things to “meet people” but for the sake of doing them, for the mission they each entailed. And yet in that something magical happened–or at least I like to call it that. I met people who thought similar, people whose ideas and motivations I could identify with, and in doing a mutual task with them it was easy to build a relationship. Others were very different from me–an even better thing–and working together on something, like helping the homeless at a shelter, fostered bonds of understanding and appreciation. I met amazing people when I wasn’t trying to, while trying to look for the right people had me running in circles.

Looking back, it is quite interesting how we can find what we want by NOT looking for it. Merely by accident. By chance.

But this is not an accident.

You do not need to believe in the laws of attraction and whatever else it is to acknowledge that you can connect better with people who do similar things as you do–who do the things you love. In the end, it can be summed up as a simple rule of life:

You find the people you love by doing the things you love.