Claire Nicholls

So basically, the four things are that death, that we know that we're going to die, we have an awareness of death.

And then there's freedom, that means that we're free, but we're responsible for our choices.

The third one is meaninglessness, that the life is kind of meaningless, but we have to create our own meaning.

And I've written about those three with my other three books.

But the fourth one is about isolation and that nobody but us can finally experience our world.

And, you know, and even when we're together with someone, we're sort of still alone and because we die alone and everything.

So, and then, of course, at the same time, you know, according to a lot of discourse, you know, that there's where that loneliness is a sort of public health crisis as a modern lifestyle problem.

And, you know, whether there's a loneliness epidemic or not, I'm not sure.

But, you know, even in the US, the Surgeon General declares loneliness, you know, a public health crisis comparable to smoking and obesity.

So it's pretty, I guess there's also like there's loneliness, solitude, isolation and aloneness.

They're not all the same thing.

So loneliness is intrinsic to human consciousness.

But yeah, and every character in this novel experiences it in some form or another.

Yeah, it's pretty funny.

I sort of have the curse of being prescient, but by only about 30 seconds.

So for my last novel, Here Goes Nothing, I wrote about a

pandemic, but I wrote about that in like 2019.

But by the time I'd finished the book, we were already out of the pandemic.

And in the same way, I kind of wrote about a lot of this AI stuff.

In sort of when I started the novel in 2022, so it was sort of about a year before ChatGPT came out.