Alone Together

We are living in lonely times, but the human conditions make us wonder, are we alone in our loneliness? And that answer is clear. Somewhere, someone else is taking off for the unknown, moving to small towns or hitting the road to start a new life.We can understand loneliness when we peer up into the sky or see celebrities doing ordinary things, when we laugh at comedians and still feel sad because we recognize their loneliness. And we may not be hermit crabs or whales in the ocean or rare birds or lone wolves, but the way animals behave tells us something about loneliness and isolation. There’s solace in discovering we all need a shell and we are allowed to grow out of that shell, or we need to be apart from others like lone wolves. We can see it in clouds or in comics, read it in words and feel loneliness in our silence, in remembering and in those times when we can’t sleep or want to talk to someone else sitting on a bench.Those are the lessons in loneliness that come from understanding the way we see ourselves and the world around us as we wrap up with the final episode of this season.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The first multiple blind dates in the world are believed to have taken place in April 1827. The story goes that Thomas Swain, a 52 year old bachelor, had vowed to take the first woman to step ashore the world’s most remote island. Her name was Sarah Jacobs, a widow, and Thomas Swain took her hand as soon as she put her foot on the island. The four other women who had arrived with Sarah Jacobs married the four other bachelors on the island. From those beginnings, the island population at Tristan da Cunha grew exponentially. By 1832, just five years after the five women arrived, Tristan had a population of 34--22 of them children. The solitary outpost which had been a British garrison had become a community.Today, it is still the most isolated island in the world where people live and Tristan da Cunha is located in the middle of the ocean between two continents.  The residents who live there, all 247 of them, understand a type of loneliness like no one else. But their isolation has, for hundreds of years, been a place that others have learned from: how to survive away from anyone else. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sleep is often viewed as something that takes us away from social interactions. We have to give up sleep in order to be social. Sometimes, it’s very tempting to stay home and sleep rather than be with others. But when you think about it, sleep is actually something that connects us to each other. Because without sleep, we lose the motivation to socially interact with others. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Saddest Day of the Year will apparently be on Monday, January 17, 2022. It’s called Blue Monday by some, and there’s even a formulation for how the date was decided. It’s a combination of weather, the due date of our credit card bills from our holiday spending and the failure of our ability to keep our New Year’s resolutions. It’s the cold reality that we failed at budgeting, exercising, finishing our novels or thesis, eating better, and learning a new language.There’s a version of Blue Monday in Denmark--called Bla Mandag and it has nothing to do with sadness. It’s actually a day for spending money and spending time with others. Blue Monday in Denmark happens in the spring when young people go shopping after their confirmation the day before on Sunday. Bla Mandag is when young people get together -- they get the day off school -- to go spend the money they received, head to restaurants, and celebrate. It is blue for the blue skies that emerge after a long cold winter. When we want to escape from loneliness, what we may be seeking is the warmth of another person. And when we’re feeling cold, we crave connections.Temperature can regulate our loneliness and how we warm up or cool down is based on social interactions. Huddle around this episode, where it’s warm and cozy-or cool and refreshing--depending on your needs at this moment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The key to the song of silence is personal and internal.In troubled times, people have endured silence as a way to learn to live in solitude. Silence makes us lonelier, some say, and others say it’s just silence and it’s the only way we can learn to live with being alone.The default thinking is that being alone with only our thoughts swirling in our heads is destructive, negative. A constant cul-de-sac that leads nowhere. But silence allows us to listen to our innermost feelings and silence leads to an understanding of who we are- it helps us when we need it most critically – in stressful situations. Silence has a message for us wanting to understand loneliness. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Late one night when he couldn’t sleep, John Koenig wrote up a definition that hadn’t existed before. It was the word SONDER.It’s the awareness that everyone around you is the main character of their own story and he posted this word on his website for the book he hoped to write one day. That book became The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The word Sonder became the most famous entry in the dictionary and Koenig still gets emails from readers thanking him for giving voice to something they’ve felt their whole life. It surprised him how universal a feeling that came from inside him could be...a feeling that he only felt in glimmers of solitude. How do we give a name to something internal, an emotion? What’s in a name that everyone can recognize but all of us know it in different ways? Is there a better name than just calling it loneliness? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you’re on the road, the world is suddenly rich with possibility. The act of leaving, wrote Jack Kerouac in the stream of consciousness that would become his book On the Road, is surprisingly easy. With this publication in 1956, Kerouac found himself torchbearer of the ‘Beat’ generation.In today’s age, what was once a too-huge world has become smaller and offices can be anywhere, and nowhere at the same time. The Beat generation is long settled and gone. But in their place, a new generation of nomads--digital ones--emerged. And they’ve learned that going on journeys alone is living in one long continuous and often lonely scroll where escaping the rat race can lead you to find many others doing the same thing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Once upon a time there was a way to use fairy tales to tell stories about loneliness and the endings weren’t always happy. Fairy tales are stories that matter to those alone and those wanting an escape. Because they are all about isolation--the hero or the heroine are often cast out on their own. They seek refuge in forests that seem dark and threatening. But in those scary, unwelcoming places, they find the unexpected and the occasional magic. Not everyone has a fairy godmother who appears and waves a wand. But the tale behind these stories is often this: anyone can escape the forest of loneliness.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Animals are mostly social, but a research study found something unusual in an animal that doesn’t normally socialize with others. Terrestrial hermit crabs have a social agenda that’s more self-serving: they get together to kick another crab out of its shell so they can move on up in the world into a larger, more spacious home. Even hermit crabs need others in order to have more room to grow.Believe it or not, there are things we can learn from hermit crabs. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A dog’s nose is an estimated 100 times more sensitive than human noses. Humans have five million sensory receptors in our brain, dogs have 300 million receptors and compared to them, our own olfactory receptors are puny.Human scent is something we all have. The way we smell to ourselves and to others--including dogs and people, can reveal a lot. It can tell us about the kind of food we’re eating, or should be eating, the environment we’re in, whether we slept well last night or if we’re sleepy right now. Our scent can tell us if we’re feeling anxious or uncertain, powerful and confident. Our smell can even tell us if we’re lonely. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brazil’s football team Sports Club Recife has some of the world’s most devoted fans so when the team asked its fans to give their organs after they died by signing organ cards, the response was overwhelming. The Immortal Fans campaign promised die-hard followers of the team that even death won’t stop them from remaining fans, forever. Athletic achievement makes us want to be that good at something and we are in awe of what athletes can do. There’s a connection to athletes--we watch them struggle to come back from defeat and we feel like we are part of it when they stand on top of the field as champions. On the outside, athletes are in top physical shape, but inside, it’s a lonely place for them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The whale known as 52 has captured the attention of celebrities from Leo DiCaprio to BTS, the South Korean boy band who recorded a popular song about what it's like to be the only whale of its kind in the ocean. The lone whale’s song was first detected by a classified underwater surveillance system designed for the Cold War era. It sounded so distinct from any other whale sounds that it sounded mechanical. At first, the speculation was it could be a Russian or Chinese submarine.For 12 years, the sound, coming from the whale, named 52 for the frequency of its song, was tracked. No other whale has ever responded.The songs animals sings tell us something about our own loneliness. In Southeast Asia, people capture wild songbirds to be caged and forced to sing only for humans and for decades, whales were hunted and killed for their oil and meat. But the songs of animals are not meant for us to hear alone. They are sung in order for animals to connect to each other and it's up to us to decide whether we are ready to hear the song of the lonely. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.