Hello podcast listeners! I'm Peg Fong, writer and creator of "Alone Together." We are continuing our journey exploring loneliness...in Spanish: "Juntos en soledad." Listen to this new adaptation presented by business professor and producer Guillermo Serrano (@guilloserrano). "Juntos en soledad" – listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast app. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We are living in lonely times, but the human conditions make us wonder, are we alone in our loneliness?  And that answer is clear.  Somewhere, someone else is taking off for the unknown, moving to small towns or hitting the road to start a new life. We can understand loneliness when we peer up into the sky or see celebrities doing ordinary things, when we laugh at comedians and still feel sad because we recognize their loneliness.  And we may not be hermit crabs or whales in the ocean or rare...

Benches are places in public spaces where people can sit by themselves. They are special because they’re not just a place to sit,  they’re spots available to anyone and that availability turns benches into opportunities for connections. Benches are bridges between those eager to chat, and those wanting to just listen.  When we sit on a bench, we’re indicating we’re part of a world that maybe we feel too lonely or afraid to fully participate in. Benches give us an opportunity to be engaged in...

The first multiple blind dates in the world are believed to have taken place in April 1827. The story goes that Thomas Swain, a 52 year old bachelor, had vowed to take the first woman to step ashore the world’s most remote island. Her name was Sarah Jacobs, a widow, and Thomas Swain took her hand as soon as she put her foot on the island. The four other women who had arrived with Sarah Jacobs married the four other bachelors on the island.  From those beginnings, the island population at...

We Don’t Talk About Bruno, the number 1 hit song, written by Lin-Manual Miranda for the Disney movie Encanto, is all about a member of the Madrigal family who no one talks about, Bruno.  Encanto is a movie about family, but it’s also about trauma and how families connect, separate and become estranged. For a Disney movie, there are some very heavy themes, including war and violence and ruptures within what family members expect from each other and what they can’t accept.  We all have been...

Sleep is often viewed as something that takes us away from social interactions. We have to give up sleep in order to be social. Sometimes, it’s very tempting to stay home and sleep rather than be with others.  But when you think about it, sleep is actually something that connects us to each other.  Because without sleep, we lose the motivation to socially interact with others. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Imagine forgetting John Lennon. It isn’t hard to do when collective memory fades.  We remember things because they have meaning for us and we forget things because other things become more important. Seeing people and hearing songs that aren’t part of our day-to-day conversation brings with it a sense of nostalgia, a longing for the past, and a remembrance of what had been. And in that longing and in those memories, we form a connection to what had been things or people who once mattered to...

The Saddest Day of the Year will apparently be on Monday, January 17, 2022. It’s called Blue Monday by some, and there’s even a formulation for how the date was decided. It’s a combination of weather, the due date of our credit card bills from our holiday spending and the failure of our ability to keep our New Year’s resolutions. It’s the cold reality that we failed at budgeting, exercising, finishing our novels or thesis, eating better, and learning a new language. There’s a version of Blue...

A lone wolf named Takaya was spotted living on an island by himself and stayed there in isolation for eight years. Despite all the odds, on an island where there was no natural food source, Takaya survived. A lone wolf doesn’t fit in with the pack. A lone wolf is a strong and powerful wolf who wants to go off on their own and seek their own territory and let others stay in the family pack.  Takaya lived on his own and there are lessons we can learn from lone wolves. There are some people--and...

The key to the song of silence is personal and internal. In troubled times, people have endured silence as a way to learn to live in solitude.  Silence makes us lonelier, some say, and others say it’s just silence and it’s the only way we can learn to live with being alone. The default thinking is that being alone with only our thoughts swirling in our heads is destructive, negative. A constant cul-de-sac that leads nowhere. But silence allows us to listen to our innermost feelings and...

Imagine waking up one morning to discover you are entirely alone. Everyone else in your home has disappeared. You look out the window and the streets are empty. No cars on the road, no planes overhead. Shops are abandoned. Schools are deserted. Buildings completely vacant. No phone reception. No internet connection. No electricity. No television or radio. It is silent and eerie. Lonely. You are alone on an island with no one else and there's no way out. Now imagine if all this was...

Late one night when he couldn’t sleep, John Koenig wrote up a definition that hadn’t existed before. It was the word SONDER. It’s the awareness that everyone around you is the main character of their own story and he posted this word on his website for the book he hoped to write one day. That book became The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.  The word Sonder became the most famous entry in the dictionary and Koenig still gets emails from readers thanking him for giving voice to something they’ve...

To make a comic book, it takes people working on their own and getting together.  Many professional comic artists today work on bigger projects that involve multiple talents-- writers, colourists, and letterers. All specialists who contribute separately to make a comic book. But many artists work on their own comic, their own creation and character, making something that has meaning to them, alone. Despite working on their own in dispersed locations, the individual comic book artists and...

When you’re on the road, the world is suddenly rich with possibility.  The act of leaving, wrote Jack Kerouac in the stream of consciousness that would become his book On the Road, is surprisingly easy.  With this publication in 1956, Kerouac found himself torchbearer of the ‘Beat’ generation. In today’s age, what was once a too-huge world has become smaller and offices can be anywhere, and nowhere at the same time.  The Beat generation is long settled and gone.  But in their place, a new...

Are there inventions that can end our loneliness?  Through the centuries, inventors have found new ways to innovate and design devices that are meant to advance our lives. But sometimes these inventions, in moving us forward actually end up making us feel more alone.   From the telescope to the ostrich pillow, Playboy centrefolds and interactive posters that kiss you back, these are our picks for some of the loneliest inventions. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Once upon a time there was a way to use fairy tales to tell stories about loneliness and the endings weren’t always happy.  Fairy tales are stories that matter to those alone and those wanting an escape. Because they are all about isolation--the hero or the heroine are often cast out on their own.  They seek refuge in forests that seem dark and threatening. But in those scary, unwelcoming places, they find the unexpected and the occasional magic. Not everyone has a fairy godmother who appears...

How did you mark November 11th this year? If you were in Canada you may have spent a moment of silence remembering the men and women who fought in wars to protect our freedoms. But if you are listening from other places in the world, in Asia, November 11th may mean something else for you… Singles' Day. It’s a day that is supposed to be for celebrating those who are alone. A one. We look at how Singles' Day, which began in China, is the result of the one child policy, the mandate turned the...

Animals are mostly social, but a research study found something unusual in an animal that doesn’t normally socialize with others.  Terrestrial hermit crabs have a social agenda that’s more self-serving: they get together to kick another crab out of its shell so they can move on up in the world into a larger, more spacious home. Even hermit crabs need others in order to have more room to grow. Believe it or not, there are things we can learn from hermit crabs.   See acast.com/privacy for...

Literature is a good kind of contagion. Reading the imagined scenario, the fictional character dealing with the same things we are, helps us process as a community even if we don’t know each other, we can read the same stories. We are in the company of others when we read and a single story can represent millions of other tales, infecting millions of readers at once. It’s not a solitary act--to hole up with a book. It’s an exercise, in human interaction and in faith in yourself that you are...

A dog’s nose is an estimated 100 times more sensitive than human noses. Humans have five million sensory receptors in our brain, dogs have 300 million receptors and compared to them, our own olfactory receptors are puny. Human scent is something we all have. The way we smell to ourselves and to others--including dogs and people, can reveal a lot. It can tell us about the kind of food we’re eating, or should be eating, the environment we’re in, whether we slept well last night or if we’re...

The loneliest movie characters are recognizable right away on screen. Male characters will talk to themselves in a mirror or work the night shift or drive a taxi. They may be pursued by shadowy figures and don’t know why. Or the life they thought they had turns out to be fake. Lonely movie characters are often stranded in a foreign place, in outer space or on an island. But one of the biggest clues of whether a character is lonely or not is an inside joke, at least from the perspective of the...

Brazil’s football team Sports Club Recife has some of the world’s most devoted fans so when the team asked its fans to give their organs after they died by signing organ cards, the response was overwhelming. The Immortal Fans campaign promised die-hard followers of the team that even death won’t stop them from remaining fans, forever. Athletic achievement makes us want to be that good at something and we are in awe of what athletes can do. There’s a connection to athletes--we watch them...

We are all new arrivals someplace and we all know the loneliness of what it’s like to be from somewhere else and have to find our community.  In TV series from Green Acres to Schitt’s Creek, that discovery of life away from big cities is played for laughs as newcomers discover who they really are in strange new places.  In Willmar, Minnesota, people had to intentionally find ways to be together. Isolation and quarantines changed how residents connected. What used to happen pre-pandemic in...

The whale known as 52 has captured the attention of celebrities from Leo DiCaprio to BTS, the South Korean boy band who recorded a popular song about what it's like to be the only whale of its kind in the ocean.  The lone whale’s song was first detected by a classified underwater surveillance system designed for the Cold War era. It sounded so distinct from any other whale sounds that it sounded mechanical. At first, the speculation was it could be a Russian or Chinese submarine. For 12...