Don Martin

They're all here to do something.

So what's loneliness's purpose?

And I found out it has one and it's wild.

It's trying to keep us alive, which is not what a lot of people think.

It's like when you dig into anger or anxiety or aggression, it's, oh, these are survival mechanisms.

They're doing it weird.

It's doing it in a way that I don't entirely love, but it is trying to keep me alive.

And loneliness similarly, but it's not just an emotion like,

joy or anger or sadness.

It's more like a biological imperative, something like hunger or thirst.

If hunger tells us that we need to eat and thirst tells us that we need to drink, loneliness tells us to seek other people because we've learned over all of the time in human evolution that we survive better in groups.

We survive better when we are in community with one another.

And that was a big aha moment for me over the last few years as I dove into loneliness.

So loneliness, the kind of the functional definition that sociologists, researchers have been using since around the 1980s, is that loneliness is basically the disparity between the amount of social connection that you want and the amount of social connection that you are getting.

So a lot of people will give like silver bullet advice for loneliness.

And the reason that doesn't work is because loneliness is...

Even though it is a metric, you can measure it.

That measurement is different for pretty much everybody.

The subjective standard for what you need to fill your cup up, so to speak, and what I need to fill my cup up and how we fill our cup up are different.

Everybody needs social connection, but how much of it and what kind differs from people.