The Gazelle Alone Is Someone's Dinner

By Jason Stonehouse

I recently sat down to interview two guys about loneliness and walked away feeling like they'd been reading my mail.

Jeff Gailey and Phil Smith wrote a book called The Way Back to One Another, and I brought them on the podcast expecting a nice conversation about community. What I got instead was two hours of quiet conviction. The kind where you're nodding along, asking good follow-up questions, doing your best interviewer voice, and the whole time a little alarm is going off in the back of your head saying, yeah, that's you too.

Here's the term that started it. Relational bankruptcy. Not loneliness in the dramatic, no-friends-at-all sense. The slower kind. The kind where you've got people around you, a full calendar, a group text that pings occasionally, and you still feel like you're running on empty relationally and you can't quite say why.

Jeff and Phil didn't come to this from a place of personal crisis. They came to it from travel. Every time they visited communities in developing countries, they came home saying some version of "I wish I had that." Not because their own lives were empty. Because they'd seen something fuller than what most of us have settled for. And when they went digging into the data, they found out it's not just a feeling. Over half of Americans say they feel lonely at least once a week. Leaders included. Maybe leaders especially.

We Love a Hero, We Just Don't Love Needing One

Part of the problem, they'd argue, is baked into how we're built as a country. We celebrate the individual. The self-made business owner. The greatest player of all time, never the greatest team. Independence Day is one of our biggest holidays, and it's not an accident that "independence" is the thing we're throwing the party for.

Jeff told a story on the podcast that I haven't been able to shake. Early in a new leadership role, he sat down with his boss and a room full of executives to lay out a vision. It went well. Everybody left the room feeling good about it. Everybody except his boss, who stayed behind holding a yellow sticky note covered in little marks.

"Do you know what this is?" his boss asked. Jeff had no idea.

"This is every time you said I or me when you should have said we or us."

Then the line that landed harder: if Jeff thought he was going to pull off that vision alone, he might as well give up right now, because it wasn't happening.

I don't have a yellow sticky note anywhere in my life, but I've got a mental drawer full of moments just like it. Times I said "I've got this" when what I actually meant was "I don't want to ask for help and look like I don't have this."

The Real Reason Leaders Isolate

Here's the part that got uncomfortably specific for me. Phil said the biggest driver of relational bankruptcy for leaders isn't hurt. It's fear of being known.

Not fear that people will find out something scandalous. Fear that people will find out something ordinary. That you don't have all the answers. That you're figuring it out one meeting at a time same as everybody else. The higher you climb, the more pressure there is to protect the version of you that has it together, and the more hidden the actual you gets in the process.

Phil also mentioned a safari guide who pointed at a lone gazelle out on the savanna and told his group, "That's not a gazelle. That's dinner." Because a gazelle by itself, cut off from the herd, is exactly what a predator is looking for.

I think about that a lot now. Not because I'm worried about lions. Because I've spent seasons of ministry convinced that needing people was a weakness I had to manage instead of a design feature I was ignoring.

Community Isn't Something You Find. It's Something Somebody Has to Start.

Here's where the conversation got practical, and where I think most of us get stuck. We treat community like weather. Something that either shows up or it doesn't, and we just have to hope for a good season.

Jeff and Phil's answer was more direct. Somebody has to go first. If you're waiting for community to happen to you, you'll wait a long time, because everybody else is waiting too.

Phil told a story about the Masters a couple years back. Rory McIlroy chasing his fourth major, and Phil's phone buzzes with a group text. Somebody's car battery died and they're stranded. Ten people on that thread. Phil's first instinct was to let one of the other nine handle it. His second thought was that building real community means occasionally being inconvenienced on purpose. He grabbed his keys.

That's not a dramatic story. That's the whole point. Nobody builds a friendship on one grand gesture. They build it on a string of small, mildly annoying yeses.

Stop Treating Relationships Like a Networking Strategy

This might be the line from the interview I keep coming back to. Jeff said we have to actually believe relationship is the goal, not a means to some other goal.

That sounds obvious until you notice how much of your relational life runs on a hidden transaction. I'm intentional with this person because it might lead somewhere. I invest in that friendship because it's good for the team, good for the deal, good for my reputation as someone who's "great with people." The second the benefit disappears, so does the relationship, because it was never actually about the person.

Jeff has thirteen oak trees in his yard. He used to see them as a picture of strength and independence, each one standing on its own, weathering decades by sheer stubbornness. Then he learned what's happening underground. Those trees are connected through a massive fungal network, trading nutrients back and forth, keeping each other alive in ways you'd never guess by looking at the trunk. The strongest tree in the yard is still, quietly, completely dependent on the others.

I don't think that's a coincidence. I think that's the design.

Where to Actually Start

None of this requires you to overhaul your calendar this week. Jeff and Phil were both clear on that. Small steps, not a life renovation.

Get better at conversation. Ask a real question and then another one. Move past the weather and the weekend recap into something with actual weight.

Pick a person and put time on the calendar before you feel like it. Chemistry usually comes after commitment, not before. Two friends in their book didn't start with a spark. They started by scheduling time together for weeks on end, and the connection grew out of the repetition.

And when the inconvenient text comes through, the dead battery, the last minute favor, consider answering it. That's not a distraction from building community. That's what building it actually looks like.

I'll leave you with the same thing I told my listeners after this interview. Life is a process, so don't do it alone. I mean that a little more than I did before I recorded this conversation.

If you want to hear the full interview with Jeff and Phil, it's up on the podcast in two parts. And if you want to grab their book, The Way Back to One Another, it's available wherever books are sold.