‘To belong is not about simply being present, but to feel connected, accepted, and grounded in a space.’
Have you ever felt the need to connect? Not just to people, but to a place where you feel you truly belong? A quiet longing to be part of a group, a community, or even a small circle where you are accepted as you are. Just like a petal that fits naturally within a flower, humans seek spaces where they want to feel held, seen, understood, and ultimately safe. Beyond survival, humans search for belongingness, emotional safety, and spaces where their thoughts and feelings can be expressed without any fear of judgment.
And, stepping into a safe space is like entering a warm room after being outside in the cold for too long. Safe Space – A space where one feels emotionally safe to vent out their emotions, thoughts and feelings.
A potential safe space, ‘Arise and Shine Youth Centre’ – A youth oriented not for profit organization with the head quarter in Lalitpur, and established with the aim to create a space where community youths could hang around, make friends, receive guidance for their future, and be safe from negative peer influence leading to substance abuse and things that would result in negative impact in their life.
While reviewing existing literature, it was found that studies of loneliness were done mostly in older age groups as compared to youths – showing a gap in studies targeting youths. But the subjective experiences living in Nepalese society and raw observations does suggest that youths are equally vulnerable to feeling lonely and being impacted by it. Reasons could be brain drain, friends leave for abroad; those who are left behind feeling isolated. Almost everybody is on social media, but are we as “social” as we try to portray ourself? Our constant digital presence mightn’t really mean we have genuine connections. Hiding the hectic monotonous life over the blanket of curated posts, wrapping isolation in the illusion of affiliation. As per a survey done among more than 55,000 people across the globe exploring the issue of loneliness, 40% of respondents aged between 16 and 24 years old said they experience loneliness often or very often (Barreto et al., 2021).
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs says that we humans have needs that tend to increment with each accomplishment (Mcleod, 2025). After the fulfillment of basic requirements for survival: Food, shelter, security – The needs shift to relationship building, self – esteem, and self-actualization.
Engaging with the programmatic efforts that Arise and Shine Youth center have been doing, observing the youths at the Centre, we were curious to know the status of the youths; Do they feel a sense of belongingness in the youth center? What is their loneliness scale? Were they able to make friends? Could place like ‘Arise and shine’ become a safe space?
With these curiosities, we did a preliminary study.
Firstly, we conducted a survey using an assessment tool on 27 participants that measures Emotional and Social Loneliness -De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale(DJGLS) 11 item version, and based on the highest attendance at the center; selected 5 youths from the survey and took an in-depth interview.
‘DJGLS’ is reliable and valid to screen not only loneliness as a whole but also its social and emotional component (Rodriguez et al., 2023).
Based on responses from 27 participants, the findings reflect a diverse emotional landscape rather than a single shared experience. Loneliness both emotional and social was present at moderate levels for most participants, but the noticeable differences between individuals suggest deeper personal, relational, and contextual factors at play.
Individual differences could be because of the difference in personality- as an individual with neuroticism personality is reported to experience loneliness the most (Shrestha et al., 2024).
From the participants, 5 individuals who came to the Youth center frequently were selected to explore more into the phenomenon, by conducting an in-depth interview using semi-structured questionnaire. After 1.5hr interview with each of the youths the themes that were extracted from the youths based on the conversation were; Networking Space, Support System, Safe Place, Place where I finally made friends, Leisure space, Positive Mirror.
The interviews revealed these themes as respondents expressed (Summary of each individual interviews); ‘I am very selective in making friends. As I have limited things that I am interested in, I have only a handful of friends. And, I have been coming here because of the likeminded people I have found here,’;
‘I feel stuck somewhere, and the level of boredom that is surfacing has been troublesome. Here, at least I have few people whom I can interact with easily,’;
‘As I ponder upon my school days, I see it as one of the loneliest days of my life. Till class 10, I had no friends. But, when I started coming here and made some of my real friends, I can say that the circle I was in had a problem. I think that I have developed social skills, and understand people far better than I used to,’;
‘I discovered that I like singing after I came here. I had limited places to go, and I started coming to YC (Youth center) since it was near my home. There used to be older brothers who used to jam on guitar. I liked the company, and the environment of YC.’;
‘When I came here to Kathmandu, I had a difficult time adjusting to the place. The language was one of the major barriers, since I don’t speak Nepali properly. Here, I had a negative peer in my locality who used to smoke, and encouraged me to be part of it. That was the time one of my friends invited me to the YC. For 1 year I used to come, play basketball but didn’t converse with anyone. Slowly, I started opening up, and as I see now, this place has been a positive mirror for me.’
The narratives shared by the youths of Arise and Shine Youth Center revealed that the space did emerge as a place that planted the seeds of connection. Whether by finding like-minded peers, discovering activities of interest or simply existing in a space without pressure. While the youth center does function as a meaningful space, this preliminary study suggests that place like Arise and Shine Youth Centre positively contributes to reducing loneliness and enhancing social connectedness, but questions surrounding the depth of belongingness remains unanswered.
Prajal Deoju, Masters in Counselling Psychology (Student)
Shubhashi Karki, M.A, Psychology (Student)
The opinions expressed in this article are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of this news portal.
