Hello Silence My Old Friend: The Quest For Quiet

We are alone. But that doesn’t mean we are on our own.

Following the pandemic of 1918, there was an urge to look for new solutions to what we used every day inside our homes.

From Yoda to Henry David Thoreau, hermits have something to teach us about loneliness.

One is the loneliest number that you can ever do, according to Harry Nilsson’s song One. But two can be just as bad as one.

We wear clothes for ourselves, but also as a statement of who we are to the outside world.

One of the biggest international hits from South Korea in recent years was the K-drama Crash Landing on You.

Our guests in this episode know what it takes to survive on your own, alone.

If you could pick the loneliest music genre of all, what would be some of options: would it be blues or jazz?

Science fiction makes us bold about exploring so we can feel less alone when we imagine a future world where there are infinite diversities, infinite combinations.

Four-year-old Eliana Pauls wrote a story during the pandemic.

Hunger makes us reach for the food that provides us with what we need at that moment.

Imagine waking up one morning to discover you are entirely alone. Everyone else in your home has disappeared.

Single’s Day in China is a day to celebrate being on your own, unattached and alone.

When we put our thoughts and feelings in a letter, it’s an attempt to understand our loneliness.

If you are lucky, you live in the South West of England, one of the country’s nine official regions, where Stonehenge is located. It is the place of origin of Devon cream teas, cheddar cheese, and Cornish pasties.

In times of trauma and stress, people, animals, and even nature somehow find a way of coming together.

The legendary spymaster known only as the Man Without a Face lived a life of concealment.

A dictator behind the Iron Curtain issued a decree so he could grow an army. Instead he created a nation of orphans.

Edvard Munch’s most famous painting, The Scream, began as a walk in nature and is a representation of isolation, disconnection and loneliness.

Superheroes can save us from many things including annihilation, evil, mutant viruses, and mad geniuses.

U Can’t Touch This podcast, but you can hear in this episode the reasons why touch matters.

A German government ad released in the winter of 2020 called on those in their 20s to be a special kind of hero by staying inside and being bored and restless on their couch.

If you’re feeling a little bored these days, you’re not alone. Boredom can keep us trapped in our loneliness.

How far would you go to end loneliness? Would you go to the lengths that Tony Williams, a retired widower, did to try to connect with his community?

We are living in lonely times, but the human conditions make us wonder, are we alone in our loneliness?

Benches are places in public spaces where people can sit by themselves, and 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.

The first multiple blind dates in the world are believed to have taken place in April 1827.

We Don’t Talk About Bruno, the number one hit song, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda for the Disney movie Encanto, is all about a member of the Madrigal family who no one talks about, Bruno.

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.

Imagine forgetting John Lennon. It isn’t hard to do when collective memory fades.

The Saddest Day of the Year will apparently be on Monday, January 16, 2022. It’s called Blue Monday by some, and there’s even a formulation for how the date was decided.

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 on his own.

The key to the song of silence is personal and internal.

Late one night when he couldn’t sleep, John Koenig wrote up a definition that hadn’t existed before. It was the word “Sonder.”

To make a comic book, it takes both people working on their own and getting together.

The act of leaving, wrote Jack Kerouac in the stream of consciousness that would become his book On the Road, is surprisingly easy.

Are there inventions that can end our loneliness?

Once upon a time there was a way to use fairy tales to tell stories about loneliness and the endings weren’t always happy.

Single’s Day in China is a day to celebrate being on your own, unattached and alone.

Animals are mostly social, and they typically congregate together to protect each other, to mate or to gang up on bigger prey.

Literature is a good kind of contagion.

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. Compared to them, our own olfactory receptors are puny.

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.

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.

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.

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 answer to ending loneliness may be AI and if we can wrap information within a personality with a sense of humour, that may be the perfect companion.

If there’s one word that immediately brings the image of someone to your mind, it may very well be: Celebrity.