Don Martin

But yeah, it's not an absence necessarily.

It is the feeling of the distance between the amount of connection that you want and the amount that you're getting.

Literally, that's a sentiment that was shared with me by one of the researchers that I spoke to out of the University of Arizona.

It was a guy named Dr. Matthias Mell talked about how he posed the question to me.

He said, are you alone when you're at a concert?

Are you alone when you're at a coffee shop?

And his answer was yes, because you're not actually engaged

in conversation in those situations, in those settings.

You are not in that place forming new or maintaining existing community bonds.

You might be doing other things to help your mental health.

It might be fun.

It might be good for you to go hear music that you like or enjoy a beverage that you enjoy, but that's not the same thing as creating or maintaining social bonds.

Yeah, you can absolutely be lonely in a crowd.

In fact,

Whenever there was a team, like I said, the team that I spoke to out of the University of Arizona did some really interesting pioneering research.

They were some of the first people to be able to compare loneliness to an objective standard, which is time spent alone.

And they...

measure that or they qualify time spent alone as basically time when you are not in conversation with other people.

And they were able to do that using some pretty interesting tech using 20 years of data, which is pretty fascinating.

But what they were finding is that