I heard many familiar stories about substance use and addiction, stories about depression and anxiety. But what I didn’t expect was that behind so many of their stories were threads of loneliness. And people wouldn’t say to me, “I’m lonely,” but they would say things like this: “I feel like I have to shoulder all of these burdens by myself”; “I feel if I disappear tomorrow, no one would even notice.” And I heard this time and time again. It was like a lightbulb went off. And I saw in the research that loneliness was far more common than I had thought, affecting 22% of adults in America. And it was deeply consequential.
It’s a subject he writes about in his new book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World...
