Are You Lonely?

Loneliness is, according to people who know about these things, an epidemic on par with smoking and obesity. It affects our physical and mental health…and it seems like it’s affecting everyone. Today’s callers are experiencing loneliness in many different ways and for many different reasons, and if you are also feeling lonely…you’re definitely not alone. 

Take a listen, then call someone (anyone!). Make a plan to hang out, and follow through. Let’s find and nurture connections wherever and however we can. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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Um, how are you? Most of us say fine or good, but obviously it’s not always fine, and sometimes it’s not even that good. This is a podcast that gives people the space to be honest about how they really feel.

It’s a place to talk about life, the good, the bad, the awkward, the complicated. I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Thanks For Asking. If you’re lonely, you’re not alone.

That sentence barely makes sense, but we’ll get into it. I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Thanks For Asking, a call-in show about what matters to you. It’s 2025, and we have more ways than ever to connect with other people.

I can DM someone on the other end of the world. Side of the world? Same thing.

You can see what an ex-boyfriend does for a living on LinkedIn, even if you haven’t seen him in 10 years. You can keep in touch with people that you would have naturally lost touch with.

You can keep peering into their digital lives, even if you haven’t seen each other since eighth-grade graduation. We have all of these ways to connect, and we are still very, very lonely. Maybe you have felt that way.

Maybe you feel that way now. I definitely have, and so have today’s callers. And if you feel lonely, if you have felt lonely, it’s not a personal failing on your part.

Humans are built for collective societies, and now we live in suburbs with no sidewalks, or single-family homes with fenced backyards, or we live in a densely populated urban place where you still don’t really get a lot of meaningful human

interaction. We work more than ever, and most of us are barely keeping our heads above water. So it is hard to muster the energy to go out, or meet up, or have someone over, and it’s even harder to schedule because everyone is so busy.

And we are very focused on our individual survival. And of course we are because you’ve seen the world. You live here.

You know it’s not great. You might have limitations that make it hard or make it impossible to consistently engage with or foster relationships. And I’m not saying that our online relationships don’t count.

I have made some of my best friends on the Internet. I actually do feel deeply connected to the world through many of you.

But if these digital relationships were truly a replacement for human connection and interaction, then we wouldn’t be in what many experts are calling and have been calling for quite some time now a loneliness epidemic.

So it does feel strange to say, but if you’re lonely, you’re not alone. A lot of us are in many different ways. And it’s not as simple as, oh, you’re either lonely or you’re not.

There are so many ways to feel loneliness. You can be lonely in a room full of people. And there are way more ways to experience loneliness than what we talked about today.

I actually messed up two of the recordings. So apologies to those callers. We had great talks that you guys would have really loved.

And I didn’t hit the record button, but when I opened up spots to talk about loneliness, they filled faster than any other spot. So I knew that this had to be our second episode. So here we go.

Hi, is this Jen?

It is.

Hi, it’s Nora. I was, I just called you Jen. You’re Jennifer.

No, that’s what everybody calls me.

Okay. That’s perfect. It’s totally normal.

Okay.

I’m glad to hear that because I’m married to a Matthew and people immediately call him Matt and he’s like, okay, fuck.

Right. Right, right.

Okey dokey, okey dokey.

It’s a little weird if somebody immediately goes to Jenny because they haven’t been met since I was about 16, but you know.

Calling a Jennifer Jenny without consent is so inappropriate. It’s so intimate. Jen.

If I called you Jenny, I would have felt odd.

Right. That would be weird. Yeah.

And I have met somebody who I knew socially as a Jennifer, who then was like, you can call me Jenny.

And I was like, I don’t know if I can. You’ve already, you’ve been Jennifered in my mind.

Right.

It’s the Jennifer conundrum.

Yeah. Yeah.

It really is. It really is. I love that name, though.

You know, that’s not a name that you hear very often. I’ve, I mean, really, well, I mean, now, okay.

Growing up, there were a million of us.

Now there, okay, let me start over. You’re not, when’s the last time you saw a child named Jennifer?

That’s very true. I think it’s because there were probably so many of us.

I think so. I think so.

That people stopped for a while. But it was necessary, I think.

Yeah.

So I think there were six in my elementary school and three of us were in one grade. And this whole class was very small.

And this is, and you had to be like, you had to be like, oh, I’m actually Jennifer H. I’m Jennifer, you know.

Mm-hmm, yep.

Man, and now that’s what Norah’s are. Now, Nora’s, Nora’s a new, Nora might be the Jennifer of this generation. I’m projecting a little bit.

I’m exaggerating a little bit. Anyways, we’re talking about loneliness today, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so you and I had had started a conversation about my film industry life.

Yeah.

And the part we did not get to is that I’m not doing that anymore.

So I’m one of those people that woke up one day sick and never got better, which I could never have comprehended what life with a chronic illness meant until I got one. And like my entire life just disappeared in a day. And it’s the craziest thing.

Literally in a day?

Yeah.

I was completely healthy on January 3rd, January 22nd. I worked out for like two hours that day. I was getting in shape.

I was, things were good.

You truly were a new year, new me energy. You said you said it’s January 3rd, I’m going to work out for two hours. Thanks For Asking is a podcast about life, about all kinds of things.

We take listener calls, we read books, we do all kinds of stuff because life is complicated. And so are people. You can get full episodes of Thanks For Asking on my Substack, which is linked in the description.

Well, it was actually February 3rd.

Oh, February.

I had about two to three months in between film projects.

So I was really using that time. And I had some minor oral surgery. And that’s literally the last day I was healthy.

You know, eventually got diagnosed with a chronic illness that you treat symptoms for. There’s no cure. There’s technically no treatment that’s primary label used in terms of medications, which is super fun.

And there’s like no specialists in most of the countries. So yeah, I mean, it’s just the craziest thing. And like my career was gone.

My hobbies were gone.

Within 10 months, I realized that I was going to have to, after having left a 20-year marriage, been on my own, bought my own place for a total of three years at that point, I realized I would have to take in a roommate in my late 40s.

And yeah, it’s just, it’s totally isolating when all you can do is manage your health and for the most part, leaving the house is for medical appointments.

And you have very, very, very, very little energy left for anything social, even if it’s just talking to people on the phone. I mean, there’s days that I can’t even do that. And it’s just been, it’s been really lonely.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can hear that. I’m glad that you felt okay to call today and share that.

Yeah. You know, I think it’s a, I think something that I’ve realized is that, because I realized there was simply no way for me to understand what living with an illness, a chronic illness is like until I developed it.

I think it’s really important that those of us who are dealing with it be willing to share as much as possible.

So that the people that are in our lives or may some day encounter someone dealing with this, can try to have a sense of what we’re dealing with.

Because even my family, my parents try really hard, but they just can’t understand because it’s not something, it’s not an experience they’ve lived.

Tell me about it.

I have friends who try really hard, but it’s just not something where you can put yourself in their shoes until you’re really in it.

Will you put us in your shoes?

Sure. So here’s today so far. Woke up, struggled to get out of bed, because I usually feel really, really awful in the morning, but have to get up because I have three fur babies and they demand food very loudly.

I spent the next three hours trying to get a bowl of cereal eaten in between receiving and making calls to set up some doctor’s appointments, then move some doctor’s appointments, talk to last year’s insurance company that owes me a bunch of money,

talk to this year’s insurance company to try to avoid the same situation so that they don’t end up owing me a bunch of money. I finally got the bowl of cereal eaten by like about 1030.

So it was nice and gooey at that point.

Oh yeah, it was really, that Crunchy Raisin Man was the total most. And then finally sat down, went and made sure there were no emails I needed to deal with, and stopped for a second. And the minute I stopped, all of a sudden I got super nauseous.

It was one of the fun things that happened to me out of the blue. So it’s like, race for the meds, race for the crackers. And that got me to about here.

I have yet to wash my teeth, wash my face, any of that. The rest of the afternoon, I will be really just resting and then getting a shower, which is an adventure in and of itself, because what I have, you are more symptomatic when you’re vertical.

And even more symptomatic when you have your hands over your head for any reason. So most of us are just using shower chairs, which is really fun when you’re not already in your 80s to use a shower chair. So that will be the shower adventure.

And then of course, drying your hair. This time of year, not so bad, because it’s cooler in the summer. I can’t even do it.

Yeah.

And then, you know, gobbling in the Great Tilt Rise, I am supposed to go leave the house for something non-medical tonight.

What are you gonna do?

So I work part-time now at the stage door of one of our performance venues here in town.

And the Dear Evan Hansen Tour is here for two days. The last time it was here, I was actually working in the wardrobe, in the costume department while they were here.

That’s something that I had been trying to do that I recently just had to say my body cannot handle. So I’m actually gonna see this. Now the caveat is that I have to be able to get out of the house.

The front that I’m going with, we tried to go see something back in November.

And throughout the day, I’ve kind of developed, it’s not quite social anxiety, and it’s not quite agoraphobia, but there’s a lot of anxiety now when I’m leaving the house for something that’s a bit of an unknown.

Yeah, I get that.

In my logical brain, this isn’t really an unknown. I work at the center. I know what parking’s like.

I know all the things. But the last time we tried to do this, the first time we tried to do it back in, for a show in November, I had a panic attack and had to say, I can’t go. So, you know, today I’m feeling better, and I’m feeling good about it.

And, you know, I really, really do want to see this show. Because I’ve worked it, and, you know, I know it from backstage, but very different. And I am a musical theater nerd.

So, I’m feeling good about it right now, but it’s a battle. It really is. And there were about five or six other things I needed to do or work on today that will not be happening.

And that’s every day. Every day, the things on the list don’t get done, unless they are truly time-sensitive. And it’s such an exercise in learning to give yourself grace, especially if you’re a type A person like I am.

Learning to just listen to what my body is telling me has been really, really hard. Because I want to get the projects, and I want to do all the things. And I can’t anymore.

And that’s a really hard pill to swallow. I, it really is.

I would have a hard time swallowing that pill too, and I’m actually really good at swallowing pills, physically. I barely know water. I can get anything down.

Oh my God, I’m jealous.

It’s a true blessing.

That’s a blessing in my life. But I think part of the, I mean, to me, one of the things that feels so hard about this too, is that there wasn’t an on-ramp to it. It wasn’t like this gradual thing.

Literally a flip gets flipped.

Yeah.

And it can tell from, we’ve had a couple of interactions over the years and you do have type A energy. You have life of the party energy. You have, she planned the party energy.

Right.

And so I can imagine that when your life changes that much and you don’t even have time to truly reckon with these seismic changes and your identity, that it would be hard for other people too, to try to figure out and learn who you are while you’re

trying to do it. And that does feel so lonely.

Yeah. And I mean, there’s a big part of it is that for me at least, I’ve isolated myself a bit because it just got too hard to try to go do things.

Like I used to do theater and it got so hard going to see things by the theater companies I used to be on stage with. And A, not being on stage. And B, having people ask me how I’m doing.

I hate being asked how I’m doing because I either say I’m fine, which is just a ludicrous lie. Or if I try to be honest, I pretty much usually burst into tears.

Yeah.

So you just, you stop even wanting to put yourself in that situation. And people, meanwhile, it’s not like they’re trying to upset me, but it just does. So I kind of started even avoiding things.

Unless it’s people who have truly got the best understanding of what I’m dealing with that they can’t. And yeah, it’s, and it’s the whole thing.

I mean, it’s still, I’m almost at the three-year anniversary, and the grief is just as strong right now as it was when it all started.

For people who are-

Which I know you can relate to.

Yeah. It’s like you kind of want it to just be like, okay, now can I be done with that feeling now?

Right.

You know? Can I be done with that feeling? And that is grief too.

That is grief. Oh yeah. You know I’ve been saying grief more than just death.

For many years, grief is more than just dying people. There’s a lot to grieve in this world and you will grieve a lot of things in this world if you dare to be a person and have experiences and have things and people that you care about.

And it simply sucks, is what I want to say. And I also think it’s so easy for us to kind of forget that about people that we care about or people that we meet that, like, oh, I might not have the full picture.

And I mean, I’m assuming there are people in your life, Jen, who like they would hear this and be like, I didn’t know Jen was lonely. Why is Jen lonely?

Right, right.

And I’m now thinking about people in my life who maybe I haven’t talked to recently or maybe I haven’t gone deep with them.

Maybe we just haven’t seen socially or anything who I know are in kind of, you know, a long haul situation, a long haul situation.

And not like you need another job because you spent several hours on the phone with insurance companies, which if there is a whole other topic is that health insurance is a scam. And it is. Health insurance is a scam.

How on earth am I paying thousands of dollars a month for the privilege of being told by a random person in a cubicle who has not met me or my doctor that actually, no, I don’t need the thing that I already paid for it. Like, what are you doing?

You already paid for it. What are we doing? Yeah, that’s a rant for a different time.

But to give you another task, like for people who are listening, who are like, oh, God, like, am I contributing to the loneliness of a person I care about? What has been helpful to you? Like, what has lightened the load of this loneliness?

What has made you feel more connected to the world?

So one of the biggest things that’s helped me is finding a community of people who are dealing with the same thing.

I was really lucky in a sense that very, very early on when it was just suspected what I had, a friend of mine said, okay, so my brother’s ex-girlfriend has this thing called POP, which is what I have.

And there was this organization, and I’ll get the name of it. I don’t know why she’s still in touch with this person, but she was.

If you are still friends with your brother’s ex-girlfriend, that says something about that woman. That’s a powerful bond, and I love it.

And if one of my ex-boyfriend’s sisters sees or hears this, I still think about you, and I hope you’re doing well.

Absolutely. Yeah, so she was able to give me the name of the main nonprofit that actually is like the leader even in research in this area, which is another topic for another day.

Since there’s pre-COVID and that’s going to get 4 to 6 million of us in the US, it’s probably doubled since, but, you know, the nonprofit funds more research than the NIH. NIH, if you’re listening.

They are. They’re literally listening. They’re some of our biggest fans, I believe.

Yeah.

But they do a phenomenal job of providing opportunities for people to connect. So they actually have groups on Facebook for every single state, different subgroups, caregivers, teams, outside the US, so many groups that you can connect in.

And then most of those groups have virtual and some have in-person support groups. So pretty early on, I got into one of those support groups.

And it’s just the connecting with people who just get it, that you don’t have to explain it to, is so invaluable. It’s just been, it’s like for that two hours, once a month, the weight gets lifted.

Because you know, you can just talk about stuff without having to backtrack and explain 10 other things first. And you know that everybody who’s on that Zoom understands, is there to listen and support you. That’s been incredibly important.

Yeah.

It’s so important to have people who are willing to listen to you and believe you and not pivot directly into trying to sell you essential oils.

Yes. Very true. I also was able to find a really, really good therapist who has a decent number of chronic illness type patients.

And she has worked with me a lot on learning how to reach out, which is not something I have ever been good at. Learning to ask for help. Learning to say I’m not okay.

That is very much still work in progress.

Yeah.

But I’m getting there. And there are still, it’s a very small group of friends that I have now. But I’ve learned to be better about reaching out when I know I’m not okay.

And I’m just saying, hey, help.

Yeah.

Can you just come over today? Or do you have time to just talk about whatever? Yeah.

And that’s a skill that I really have had to work on and will continue to have to work on. And I hate it for her, but one of those friends actually develops some serious health issues that she’s still dealing with after a year.

And it’s a blessing in disguise that I’ve been able to help her now navigate this whole change in her world. And so many times she said to me, I just, I didn’t really get it. I thought I did, but I didn’t.

And so having those, finding those people who truly can understand it is important. And for me, finding ways to help other people navigate this has been really good for me.

And it uses some of that loneliness, just because I know I’m, even if it’s just a tiny little thing, even if it’s, hey, try this factor, or just whatever it is, it gives me back a sense of being useful, that I’ve really lost, a sense of purpose that

I’ve lost. And that’s helped a lot, too. That’s beautiful.

Well, Jen, thank you for calling us. Yeah, thank you. I hope you get to Dear Evan Hansen tonight.

Please keep us updated. Text the phone line if you make it, or if you don’t, either is fine. But I really hope you make it and be nice to yourself.

Thank you, Nora.

What a gift to, like you mentioned, like being able to help a friend.

And I think sometimes when it’s been really hard for me to ask for help, I’m like, but I feel so good when I help someone else. Like, you know, it feels good to people. It’s like an honor to be able to do that for people.

And at least everything you’re going through feels like there’s a purpose for a moment.

Yeah. Yeah.

We’re purpose-driven creatures. All right, have a day. I’m not going to make you…

It doesn’t have to be a good one. Just go have a day. Thank you for making my day better.

And we’ll talk soon. Bye, Jen.

I appreciate you so much.

Bye.

Bye.

That was a little… That’s a little excerpt from Thanks For Asking. If you want full episodes, audio, and video, you can go to the link in our description.

Special thanks to our supporting producers over on Substack. That’s Melody Swinford, Erin Glan, Amy Gabriel. Gabrielle?

Please let me know. Lauren Hanna, Caroline Moss, Sarah David, Ella… Oh, gosh, Ella.

I think part of your last name is in Cyrillic in this export. I’m gonna have to e-mail you.

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Thank you so much!