A life of solitude was imposed on millions of us during the pandemic due to the coronavirus. Being alone is a life chosen deliberately by some; others are just alone, not by choice. We can end up unexpectedly alone and for many, the twists and turns of life, brought us to where we are. Experts and researchers around the world share their insights about what we know about loneliness, we find meaning of it from songs, art, books, films, history and pop culture. We isolate the lessons of loneliness from people like you and people like me who have unique...
Latest episodes
-
5 min
Announcement: The Podcast is Now Available in Spanish
Hello podcast listeners!I'm Peg Fong, writer and creator of "Alone Together."We are continuing our journey exploring loneliness...in Spanish: "Juntos en soledad."Listen to this new…
-
36 min
Looking Back: The Lessons of Loneliness
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 unkn…
-
29 min
Park Your Loneliness: Benches Are Made For Two
Benches are places in public spaces where people can sit by themselves. They are special because they’re not just a place to sit, they’re spots available to anyone and that availab…
-
26 min
No Restaurants, Lawyers or... Loneliness: Life on the Remotest Island
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 wo…
-
28 min
Why We Don't Talk About Bruno: Choosing Family Estrangement
We Don’t Talk About Bruno, the number 1 hit song, written by Lin-Manual Miranda for the Disney movie Encanto, is all about a member of the Madrigal family who no one talks about, B…
-
30 min
Hit the Hay: Rested & Ready to Relate
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…
-
30 min
We Need More Cowbells: How Nostalgia Keeps Us in the Present
Imagine forgetting John Lennon.It isn’t hard to do when collective memory fades. We remember things because they have meaning for us and we forget things because other things becom…
-
28 min
Turn Up the Heat: How Temperature Affects Relationships
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 com…
-
29 min
The Loneliest Wolf: Lessons Learned From Leaving the Pack
A lone wolf named Takaya was spotted living on an island by himself and stayed there in isolation for eight years. Despite all the odds, on an island where there was no natural foo…
-
28 min
Hello Silence My Old Friend: The Quest For Quiet
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, a…
-
25 min
ENCORE: Home Alone: Lessons Learned from Courageous Abandoned Children
Imagine waking up one morning to discover you are entirely alone. Everyone else in your home has disappeared.You look out the window and the streets are empty. No cars on the road,…
-
26 min
Square Peg: When Words for Loneliness Don't Fit
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…
-
27 min
Colour me Lonely: Connecting through Comics
To make a comic book, it takes people working on their own and getting together. Many professional comic artists today work on bigger projects that involve multiple talents-- write…
-
27 min
The Unbearable Lightness of Leaving: Digital Nomads
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,…
-
29 min
Telescopes and Turkeys: The Loneliest Inventions
Are there inventions that can end our loneliness? Through the centuries, inventors have found new ways to innovate and design devices that are meant to advance our lives. But somet…
-
27 min
Happily Ever After: Escaping The Forest of Loneliness
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 th…
-
28 min
ENCORE: Too Many & Not Enough: Loneliness in China
How did you mark November 11th this year? If you were in Canada you may have spent a moment of silence remembering the men and women who fought in wars to protect our freedoms. But…
-
27 min
Break Out of Your Shell: Big Lessons From Tiny Hermit Crabs
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…
-
26 min
Turning the Page on Loneliness: How Reading Can Bring us Together
Literature is a good kind of contagion. Reading the imagined scenario, the fictional character dealing with the same things we are, helps us process as a community even if we don’t…
-
28 min
Common Scents: The Whiff of Loneliness
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 the…