Full disclaimer, this post was written during the summer of 2026 without any help of LLMs. Any sass, grammar mistakes, typos, are my very own ^^

As online living, social media, and AI technology continue to invade our lives, loneliness and disconnection seem to be creeping and gaining grounds. This is most unfortunate because much of our happiness as human beings stems from the shared smiles, from the pleasure of helping others, from sharing a meal with family or friends, or from the quiet moments of doing absolutely nothing (il dolce far niente) with our significant other (or watching LOTR extended version for the 20th time – IFKYK). Those moments are just not happening if we live our life more and more on Facebook (yes I am of that era ^^), Instagram or TikTok (I don’t even know how this works…). By spending so much of our time online, are we forgetting how social interactions and connections work?

In the universe in which I spend most of my time, the academia bubble, I believe that connections are ESSENTIAL. To learn from one another, to improve our work by collaborating, to share the joys and challenges of having no idea what is coming next, to have interesting opportunities, and to face the numerous “no thank you” that we receive, and receive, and receive again… This list could be much longer… Since I became a prof in 2020 (almost 7 years now! but it still feels like yesterday…), I have seen several people in academia struggle with mental health, but I know it is not a phenomenon restricted to our domain. It is widespread and gaining ground, and fast. And my own path has not always been easy (gray hairs are gaining on me ^^), yet my human connections, family, friends, colleagues, have always provided help, support, relief, happiness, in many different instances (professional and personal) of my life.

In the last 15 years I moved around several times across cities and continents. Mostly for my studies and jobs, each time settling in a new place, each time getting opportunities to create new connections yet also going through a lot of loneliness, at least at the beginning of each new move. Through all these experiences, I developed this ability to connect quickly to others, a resilience of sort. In school, at work, in my hobbies, while rock climbing, playing soccer or boardgames, training in CrossFit gyms, going to a concert, watching a hockey game on TV. It took a hand shake, a smile that touches the eyes, a laugh, a quick chat, a bit of curiosity, and I could always find something that would connect me to a new person.

In academia, and just in life in general, how we treat each other is much more important than we realize. It speaks volumes about our character, about our values, about our capacity to listen to others and find a way to create this interpersonal link through a shared interest, experience, value, or challenge. And as we age, opportunities to create these new connections, new friendships usually become more scarce. More importantly, isolation is a hallmark of cognitive decline, often seen in elders and in patients suffering from depression.

Learning to navigate social interactions to foster inter-human connections is not always easy (LOL). We are each our own special snowflake ^^ with different tolerances thresholds and needs, which means we need to be patient, and learn how to live with one another and communicate. Failure to compromise, to perform introspection on our own behaviour, to identify toxicity in ourselves and in our peers’ comments and attitudes is a promise for unhappiness and loneliness. Unfortunately, even with the best intentions as a PI I have met difficult challenges and found that I cannot save everyone from themselves. There are some human skills such as emotional intelligence that fall beyond the scope of academic mentoring and if a colleague or student is pathologically toxic or has mental health issues that require professional support, there is little we can do if the person is not willing to help themselves. Being an eternal empath, I have learned am still learning this the hard way bringing myself close to exhaustion.

To this day, my best and more fruitful scientific collaborations stem from long-standing connections with former students and colleagues, some of which I am now lucky enough to call my friends, locally or across the world, with whom I maintain active communication but also of whom I take care. It is impressive to see how many academic connections turn sour because of strong egos, of miscommunication, of hiring committees or political “House of cards” power trips. But I have had the joy as well of seeing some of these connections bloom to long lasting friendships which are most important to face the challenges of academia. In the bigger scheme of things, there are much more important things than who got a prize, who got hired, who was right. There is so much suffering and sadness in fostering negativity in our professional environment, but the only thing we can control is our own behaviour. So in this quest of making and keeping academia a positive environment, we need to start with ourselves, our behaviour, our connections, with our colleagues, with our students. We need to focus on and foster connections that are positive and constructive. To stop spending 80% of our time on the few problematic individuals and 20% on all the positive ones… yet easier said than done? I need to keep reading this post…

The key to these positive connections I believe is gratitude and kindness.

I will finish this post by thanking my family, my friends, my colleagues, and my students for being so fun to work with. You are making a hell of a difference on a daily basis, from afar or right in the office next door!

Thank you!