Dr. Jeremy Nobel
speaker
38 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Jeremy Nobel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The challenge isn't to avoid loneliness, but to see it as a signal. Just like thirst is a signal you need hydration, loneliness is a signal you need human connection.
The signal just gets stronger and it starts taking you into some, what you might call spiraling circles of increased anxiety around connection.
And we know that significant sustained loneliness also increases risk of physical illness too. Increases risk of heart attack, stroke, or death from either by 30%. increases the risk of dying early by 30%.
Absolutely. So loneliness is it's a mood state. It's an emotion just like love. There are different kinds of love. Why shouldn't there be different kinds of loneliness? Right. So there's brotherly love, love of country, romantic love.
I do point to these three types of loneliness you mentioned because I think it's useful not just for academic purposes, but if you understand the type of loneliness you're navigating, then it gives you some insight into what might be useful in that navigation. So let me go through them all really quickly. So first, psychological loneliness.
This is what most people think of when they hear the word lonely. Do I have a friend, a confidant, someone I can tell my troubles to? The second type, societal loneliness, one way I describe that to people is imagine a room filled with people, and you have to go into that room. Is your arrival anticipated, welcome, and safe?
If it's not, you might be reluctant, wondering, what am I doing in that room? And so whether it's race, class, Even disability, if we're systematically excluded, that's a kind of loneliness also. The third, existential or spiritual loneliness, I think is fascinating. It's probably been around quite a long time. How do we fit into the bigger universe, the human narrative, if you will?
Does our life have meaning and purpose, consequence? So this is another kind of disorientation to connection with others that I think can trouble some people. And of course, you could have one, two, three, or all of these types of loneliness all interthreaded.
Yes, we do need a sense that we are visible and matter to someone else. And I think uncertainty around that does invite a kind of spiraling into self-doubt, lack of self-worth, and then it makes it harder to take the risk of trying to connect with other people you're already anticipating. You won't be successful at that.
And so these are the kind of things that I think are troubling many people right now.
I think like many technologies, smartphones can be a source of great benefit to people individually in communities, but also great harm. And as I talk about in the book, one of the worrisome ways social media and smartphones are often used, particularly by younger generations, is a kind of performance platform where we curate what we put on that platform to tell a very
What we think or guess is an attractive story about ourselves to increase numbers, likes, and follows. And so you're not only performing, you're continually being judged by this unseen audience. And you start changing your, say, posting behavior or your social media behavior to try to accelerate the attention you're getting at the external persona level, if you will, your digital persona.
And that often is different from how you truly feel inside. So that can be very lonely making for people as they feel that in order to truly connect, they have to not be who they are.
Now, there's other ways we could use social media if we choose to tolerate the discomfort of authentic disclosure, to find people we share authentic interests with, and then be able to share personal stories and respond in kind. And that's how we build more authentic, more sustainable connections. And we now have technology that can amplify that. Technology in and of itself isn't the problem.
It's how we use it.
Absolutely. So be curious, make things, have conversations. And I find that this is very useful, simple guidance. And, you know, here's an example. Ten years or so ago, I got very curious about why are we so lonely when because of digital connection now we can connect with people around the world in seconds. So I got curious about that, and then I made something.
I made this book, and now we're having a conversation. And in that conversation and conversations like this, I'm continuing to learn about who I am, what I think's going on in the world, what matters, and engage and be less lonely.
Now, that's just one kind of almost funny example because we're in an interview scenario here, but I think in our daily lives, we have all kinds of things we get curious about. And then making things, this is harnessing some of the creative pathways in our brains. We can talk more about how remarkably energizing some of that can be.
And then human connection, to actually interact with authentic people conversations with people about things that matter, I think that is the basis of some very important types of connection.
Well, I think art forms can be a kind of conversation, right? So poetry is one of my art forms. I feel like I'm in a conversation with a reader I'm imagining when I write a poem. I love it when I can read publicly and people respond. But other kinds of creative expression work too. So
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