Don Martin

Yes, absolutely.

You're hitting the nail on the head.

Absolutely.

Young people, like I said, whoever the youngest people are in society at the time are pretty much always the loneliest people.

And they're always left out of loneliness conversations.

When we talk about loneliness, we talk about loneliness with the elderly.

We talk about it as though it's an inevitability of our lives, as though we're going to, we get our driver's licenses, we get our right to drink, we get our right to a hotel room, we get our right to

own a car, we buy a house, we get married, we have kids, and then eventually everybody dies and moves away and we become lonely.

And that's an inevitability.

But the thing is, we start our lives lonely because we do not have places to welcome kids into society.

We don't have good models for how to introduce them to others.

And in fact, in the last 25 years, especially here in the United States, ever since 9-11, 2001, we've had from a top-down

systemic issue where we are teaching kids fear, fear of the other, fear of strangers, fear of the unknown.

And we are teaching that to one another.

We have generation over generation, not just not knowing how to model connection with other people, but modeling that the idea of a stranger, the idea of somebody that you don't know is inherently dangerous, is inherently something to be afraid of.

And that fear, that lack of connection, that is all living together.

But yeah, 100%, when you're talking about millions and millions of kids and CDC data and all of that, yes, absolutely.

This is all the same conversation.

Oh no, it's everywhere.

It's just other countries outside of the US have taken it a little bit more seriously than we have.