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Good morning. Loneliness ranks alongside childhood obesity and mental wellbeing as the great public health challenges of our time. A recent survey found a third of the population often feel lonely. The problem transcends age and class. There's a great paradox at the heart of our culture. We're a people who like to find solutions. We celebrate those who discover new cures, break athletic records, speed up communication. That's because we believe the fundamental human problem is limitation - our bodies are subject to decay, constraint, and death. A century ago, we saw virtue in coming to terms with such limitations. Today, limitations have come to seem unnecessary - even absurd. Human contingency is no longer something we learn to live with: it's something we expect to conquer. But here's the question. What if it turned out that the fundamental human predicament wasn't limitation and mortality after all? What if it turned out the fundamental human problem was isolation? Most people are anxious about death, particularly what if anything might come after. But consider this. If we were to exist beyond death, and that existence were to involve being alone forever, that wouldn't be heaven. Heaven isn't simply about continued being: what matters is being with. A heaven that was simply about overcoming mortality wouldn't be worth having, because it would mean we were alone forever. That's a description of hell. The most common conception of God is as an agent by which human beings overcome their limitations, a being who bestows health, happiness, eternal life. But see how that fits the notion of God into a wider cultural quest to overcome limitation. If God is conformed to a different agenda, we could imagine God as principally concerned to overcome isolation. If you see the central quest of life as overcoming limitation and mortality, success will lie in the next gadget, and always be just out of reach. But here's the paradox. The more we emphasise overcoming limitation, the more we end up increasing isolation. The quicker we can speak to Australia, the slower we are to learn our neighbour's name. Making ourselves self-sufficient renders us isolated. What we strive for - independence - may turn out to be another name for loneliness. But if you decide the real human problem is isolation, you begin to suspect, in all this quest to overcome limitation, we've missed what matters most. The greatest gift we could possibly want is the one we've already been given - each other. Maybe this is what the epidemic of loneliness is telling us: all this time, as a whole society, we've been searching for the wrong thing.