Yes, of course. And yet, isn’t that precisely a signal for why contributing to shifting something here matters? In the way men relate to themselves, to others, including other men, and to the world?

I want to be clear about what this conversation is and isn’t. It isn’t an effort to sugarcoat, diminish, or justify the injustice and patriarchal norms that have caused — and continue to cause — harm. It isn’t a feel-good story of patting men on the back. But it’s also not a man-bashing narrative. It’s an attempt to look at all of it more soberly, to stay in relationship with one another, and to begin expanding from where each of us stands.

When I listened back to this conversation, what I felt was: discomfort, yes. Messiness, absolutely. But also tenderness. And something close to relief at how far men like my guests Jindy Mann and Jack Becher, and the groups they lead are willing to go, and at the fact that conversations like this one are possible.

This is where Season 2 of The Oneliness Podcast (Spotify | Apple) begins.

Jindy is a leadership coach, organisational consultant and facilitator with over 20 years of experience working with leaders and organisations across sectors. He is the founder of Leader Brother Son, a space for men to explore authentic expressions of masculinity, and has been facilitating men’s groups for five and a half years, now in its 17th cohort. His central question, the one that runs through all of it: what’s really going on?

Jack is a facilitator of interpersonal and systems change, working at the intersection of personal transformation and planetary systems. He co-stewards several projects including the Generative Journalism Alliance and Foundations Earth, and is the creator of Beyond Patriarchy. This learning journey takes men through the work of sensing, acknowledging, and beginning to dismantle their own conditioning. He draws on feminist, decolonial, and indigenous thinking. He approaches this, in his own words, as lifelong work.

We’ve hosted gatherings together (like today’s Shared Table Picnic for men), started many unfinished conversations. This felt like the right moment to continue there.

In the groups that Jindy co-facilitates, they often explore the theme of friendship; he invites the men to share their earliest significant male friendship. Every time, without fail, what comes back is this:

“What we hear — what we always hear — are love stories. These beautiful, romantic stories of boys who are six, seven, eight years old. And you can see and feel the emotion that’s present when men go back to that place and remember what their friendships were like as boys.”

Love stories. And then somewhere around adolescence, something happens. The tenderness gets trained out. Boys learn to perform distance, to not need, to disconnect from everything, including themselves.

Jindy draws on the psychotherapist James Hollis to describe what this actually looks like structurally: three unconscious promises a boy must make to become a man in modern culture.

“The first is to reject intimacy — because intimacy is feminine, intimacy is gay, it’s queer. Secondly, you reject embodied intuition — you disconnect from everything below the neck. And thirdly, you live by an external set of rules, by what it means to be a man. And since you don’t know who the author of these rules is, you can never go and challenge them.”

In resonance, Jack names a similar moment from the inside, a memory from age nine, growing up in Scotland:

“I can remember choosing: do I want to be part of this group, do I want to be accepted? Or am I going to basically out myself as something else — as one that’s then a target of all the cruel things that children can do to each other. And realizing later in life the price that I paid for that. And the harm that that caused. The guilt and shame of realizing you’re complicit in that — and also how that was a survival strategy at the time.”

This is the contradiction this conversation sits with for a long time and doesn’t try to resolve too quickly: that men can be both complicit in harm and shaped by a system that harms them. That these are not the same thing. That collapsing them, in either direction, is where the work goes wrong.

And then: the need for real solidarity. What it actually looks like. What it asks of all of us.

Jindy brings in the miners’ strikes, the queer communities in London who marched alongside the miners in 1984 because they recognized: our struggle is the same. Jack closes with the belief that keeps him going:

“The unwavering belief I have that alternatives are possible. And that this isn’t the way it has to be. I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know how long it will take to get there, but I know that we have to try.”

And Jindy, on what he keeps practicing in the meantime:

“I am continually practicing — which includes failing at my own integrity. Staying, practicing congruence between what I say I believe and what I actually do. Because I notice the more I do that, the more connected I feel to myself.”

Listen to the full episode: On Being a Man and What Men Long For with Jindy Mann and Jack Becher on The Oneliness Podcast (Spotify | Apple)

Thank you for being here, for listening, for ‘doing the work’ together.

If any of this resonates, share this post or the episode, and leave a rating wherever you’re listening.

With love and in solidarity, as always.Monika

So what is home to me, here?

On one side, it’s being embraced by people I’ve met, who welcomed me back with open arms, like Creative Play Residency, a community living I’m part of and hosting next week’s writer’s retreat at, the yoga teacher who recognized me yesterday morning, and the familiarity of it all. The food? Yes, I mean, yes! More than that, the way of eating on small stools, eating with chopsticks as default, the way the air smells—a bit damp, with a breeze—and the honking and traffic flow. And somehow it’s also a sense of being seen with an openness and seeing back at others, that resonates without having a logical explanation.

Perhaps some people, places, and moments simply feel like home because they do.

To me, the question of home is deeply entangled with loneliness.

Sometimes, home is a lonely place.

And other times, loneliness feels like home.

What if, say, your home is being taken away from you?

What do we say to those who have lost their home as a place, or the beings who are home to them? What if home becomes something you do not want to speak about because it is too painful?

As a previous podcast guest, Palestinian-Kuwaiti artist Liane Al Ghusain wrote, “Not only do we know the land, but the land knows us. We are the land and the land is us.”

And what if you worry for the people “back home,” as so many Iranians living abroad do right now—others of whom yearn for “a home you’ve never known”, as Parissa Tosif sings?

“We, the people of Iran, have always been alone,” writes poet Atefe Asadi.

This latest podcast episode is the beginning of pulling on the thread of home — a community episode featuring 10 + 1 voices (listen on Spotify | Apple Podcasts is playing me so the upload will follow later—thank you for your patience 🙏) who reflect and share from where they sit, across different cultural backgrounds and life paths, looking back and forward, and into the present moment.

There are so many perspectives unshared and voices I long to surface and center in the continuation of this work.

For instance, what would a homeless or unhoused person say about home — and how do we feature such a voice with care rather than exoticism? How political is home, and who decides who gets to belong in a society or a place?

The exploration here remains unfinished, and if you feel called, I would love your reflections on home, too.

A bow and thank you for contributing, and for listening.

“Home is a place where my heart feels safe, where I can talk about everything without being judged.” — Prathu

“Home to me was never defined by where I come from, but where I am and where I am is in a physical place. Where I am is where I am in terms of what I’m doing, how I feel, what connects me to the place that I’m currently in.” — Marc

Across continents and cultures, something slowly revealed itself: home is not something we arrive at once. It is something we keep bringing to life — whether in food, music, prayer, language, or the courage to show up for one another.

“Prayer is something that felt like home for me. I heard it for the first time when I visited Marrakesh with my sister and my dad, and it stops you in your tracks. Watching my dad pray, you’ll never see someone so at peace and at home in themselves.” — Aziza

“I have Afghan roots, so I feel deeply at home when I’m speaking my mother tongue with other Afghans, cooking meals, and showing up in solidarity. I believe that you can have multiple homes, multiple anchors.” — Pari

It lives in chosen people and chosen places, and in the quiet remembering that we are all part of the same soil.

“Another string is noticing this connection to the Earth, and the moon specifically. When I see the moon outside, I know it has been observing me always, and I can have this sense of trust in what has been constant, even if everything else has been changing.” — Mallory

It lives in the willingness to keep cultivating by showing up.

“Making people laugh, but also helping them understand where I come from, is part of my search for home.” — Yu Chen

And loneliness is not the opposite of home; it is often the doorway into it.

“Loneliness doesn’t mean something is wrong. It just means you are in transition.” — Shubhab

“Home and loneliness and finding home within myself, learning how to face loneliness…it’s such an important thing about being an adult.” — Tani

🎧 Listen to the full episode: Home Is (Not) a Place, with Voices from the Community

*Apple Podcasts is being difficult, so the upload will follow later—thank you for your patience 🙏

This week’s episode of The Oneliness Podcast (Listen on Spotify | Apple Podcasts) features a conversation with Zen Buddhist monk Brother Pháp Hữu, abbot of Plum Village, longtime student and close attendant of Thích Nhất Hạnh, co-host of The Way Out Is In, and co-author of Calm in the Storm, released this year.

To choose a monastic life is, in many ways, to choose to be with one’s aloneness, and perhaps even loneliness, while walking a path that continually reveals how we are never truly alone. Coming home to yourself becomes an act of being with the world. It requires befriending loneliness, evolving your relationship with it, while continuously cultivating a sense of interbeing with what and who is around you.

As Br. Pháp Hữu puts it:

“We must remember and relearn again how to be in the presence of ourselves, how to connect with our sufferings as well as our joys, so that we’re able to extend this care and connection to others and the world around us.”

As a child, when I received one of those cards explaining where my name comes from, I remember feeling slightly upset with my mother, who had chosen my name. Learning that Monika comes from the Greek monos, meaning “alone” (sharing the same root as “monk”) felt like an unfortunate coincidence at the time.

Now, I wonder if there could ever have been a more fitting name for me, not only given the work I’m doing today, but for how I have felt for much of my life: alone, yet not alone at all.

Between last September, when I first visited Thai Plum Village and practiced with the sangha there, and again this past summer, when I returned to Plum Village France, with my sister, I’ve continued my practice and found a (spiritual) home within this tradition.

It feels deeply meaningful, then, to now offer this conversation with Brother Pháp Hữu on the latest episode of The Oneliness Podcast. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 🎙️

Br. Pháp Hữu first encountered Zen Buddhist master Thích Nhất Hạnh, and the Plum Village community as a nine-year-old when he traveled from Canada to Plum Village France, in 1996 with his father and sister. He was immediately drawn to the joyous community and the peaceful comportment of the monks. By the age of twelve, he knew he wished to become a monk. After much persistence, his family allowed him to realize this wish at thirteen.

True to his name, Br. Pháp Hữu became a dear friend to Thầy. He was often by his side as an attendant, sharing moments filled with love, laughter, tears, and inspiration.

Plum Village itself was founded in 1982 in the south of France, during the long aftermath of the American War in Vietnam, a time marked by ideological division, nuclear anxiety, and global reckonings around civil rights, decolonization, and social responsibility. Thích Nhất Hạnh had been living in exile for years, banned from returning to Vietnam because of his outspoken advocacy for peace.

Out of that historical and political context, Plum Village emerged as a response to the world as it was. From the very beginning, the Plum Village tradition — rooted in the Order of Interbeing — carried a clear intention: to bring Buddhism out of abstraction and into daily life, and to weave inner practice inseparably with social justice, peace work, and care for the world.

This non-dogmatic, engaged approach is one of the reasons I’ve felt so drawn to this tradition. It doesn’t claim superiority, certainty, or moral high ground. Instead, it returns again and again to humility, joy, love, and the practice of mindfulness in community.

Throughout our conversation, we turn to the necessity of being with our suffering, be it our own or that of the world.

“Maybe those of us listening to this podcast, are not in a war zone. We are more privileged. Our responsibility is to take care of the suffering we inherited, the wars, the violence, the anger, the frustration, the greed that our society creates. When we are practitioners of awareness, we have a choice: we can drown in the suffering, or we can do everything we can to support the sufferings around us. Even the conflicts in our families, our lineages, we can transform those too.”

Love, in this sense, is not abstract or sentimental. Love is practice.

“Befriending your loneliness — that’s love,” Br. Pháp Hữu says. “Smiling at the feeling of separation, embracing it, allowing yourself to suffer, all of this is love.”

This conversation is an invitation and a gift: to befriend our loneliness, to care for the suffering within and around us, and to remember that togetherness and community as a practice are still one of the most powerful responses we have.

Listen to “How to Befriend Our Loneliness with Our Loneliness with Br. Pháp Hữu“ on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!🎙️

In this spirit, I wish you restful holidays and a joyful 2026! However you look back on this year, and celebrate—with yourself or others—let the light and love move in and through you.

If this work resonates with you, please rate and review the podcast and share it with a friend. As an independent production, your support makes a real difference. Consider becoming a paid subscriber or Buy Me a Coffee⁠⁠ — it’s greatly appreciated. Learn more about my work here and connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

With lots of love,Monika

I’m moved to share the latest episode of The Oneliness Podcast (Spotify | Apple) with you, a conversation with Liane Al Ghusain, a Palestinian-Kuwaiti artist, writer, educator, and mother whose work centers on the Palestinian diaspora, and on the role of spirituality and feminism in daily life. She holds an MFA from New York University Abu Dhabi and earned both a BA and MA in English from Stanford University with a focus on creative writing and feminist studies.

Her work explores the emotional and spiritual dimensions of diaspora, utilising video, text, embroidery, performance, and other media to tell stories of displacement, memory, and belonging. She currently lives outside of Detroit, Michigan.

I recently came across Liane’s writing on the parallels between Palestinian embroidery, tatreez, and Native American weaving in the face of colonialism, and I felt an intuitive pull to reconnect with her after some time. We had only met once in person before, and yet I’ve always felt a certain closeness, warmth, and resonance with her.

“Home has always been in people. I’m Palestinian, born and raised in Kuwait, and even there the messaging of not belonging was always present — sometimes aggressive, sometimes passive aggressive. And because of that eternity of the search, I feel at home with other people who are the seekers.”

In this conversation, we meander through the question of home from the perspective of the Palestinian diaspora and beyond; through loneliness and aloneness in early motherhood and as an artist;

“My relationship to loneliness is almost nostalgic. I miss being lonely. I really do. It was such a good feeling when I had it. I was intentionally lonely during my art monk years, holding so much sacred space for creation. A very golden time.”

We move through the ways the masculine and feminine clash and soften each other within the larger gender gaps we’re witnessing, and ultimately into the heart of art and craft in particular as a form of prayer, solidarity, and community.

“The craft circle is integral to both cultures. Women would have sat together doing these things. Maybe this work is also an antidote for loneliness — you go into tribes of people and how they thought. You see evidence that multiple people worked on the same project… It keeps giving. It’s like the more I research, the more I find… and maybe that’s the medicine.”

Instead of attempting (and most likely failing) to summarize what unfolded, I’ll simply invite you to take a moment for this.

Get a little extra comfy, whether you’re lounging, walking, or being still, and enjoy listening.

Free, free Palestine!

Listen to The Oneliness Podcast 🎙️

Find the full conversation on Spotify or Apple: Palestinian Threads, Craft as Community, and Diaspora as Home.

Follow Liane Al Ghusain on Instagram and Substack to explore more of her work.

Ps. “(…) We were so identified with the olive and cedar trees, they thought us inanimate. Unalive. A land without a people. They didn’t realize that to us, the two are interchangeable. Not only do we know the land, but the land knows us. We are the land and the land is us.” — From Letters to the Unliving and Unborn by Liane Al Ghusain, October 2023

Thank you for reading, listening, and for your support!

In The Oneliness Podcast, I host conversations with researchers, thinkers, practitioners, and people like us to explore the nuances of loneliness, connection, and relationships—personal, structural, social, political, mundane, and spiritual. Each episode invites reflection, curiosity, and a more compassionate understanding of our own loneliness—in oneliness.

If this work resonates with you, please rate and review the podcast and share it with a friend. As an independent production, your support makes a real difference. Consider becoming a paid subscriber or Buy Me a Coffee⁠⁠ — it’s greatly appreciated. Learn more about my work here and connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

This doesn’t belong to the fringes of the internet anymore. It sits at the center of the rise of the loneliness economy—an ever-expanding constellation of services, platforms, and products promising to soothe, structure, or simulate connection. From companionship and intimacy to self-care, well-being, longevity, and community, these offerings, often, though not always, mediated through technology, reshape not only how we reach for each other but also how we care for our deeper longings—and what we’re willing to give (and pay) for it.

In the latest episode of The Oneliness Podcast (Spotify | Apple), I speak with Eli Morimoto, one of the few people studying this world with both academic depth and lived, cross-cultural insight.

A Schwarzman Scholar who wrote her thesis on virtual companionship in China, a Brown University graduate, and now part of the company builder WAY Equity Partners in Tokyo, Eli is also building her own venture centered on human connection.

We first met, fittingly, online and through each other’s writing—to be precise, through this particular piece on The Loneliness Economy and my thoughts on “the cure of loneliness is now a business.”

Before we go further: The loneliness economy is vast. What we’re exploring here is one slice of it—in particular, around companionship, connection, and intimacy. Romantic for some, but for many simply a form of presence: friendly, steady, predictable, sometimes anonymous, sometimes choreographed, often low-stakes.

As Eli puts it, “services that are related to that, like for example Paro in Japan, or robotic seals. Or dogs all the way to sort of solo dining, rental boyfriends, even the pet economy. You can also add in some dating apps, socializing online… it’s a very broad spectrum—essentially, it’s business claiming to alleviate—or centered around—loneliness.”

Her interest in this space began long before it became a venture-capital category. It began while she was a Computer Science Ethics TA at Brown University.

She recalls asking herself: “Why are men flirting with Alexa? Why are technologies often gendered female? Are people really falling in love with this voice, this virtual agent?”

These questions led her into stories about men marrying virtual girlfriends or Hatsune Miku, the famous Vocaloid performer. But her fascination wasn’t abstract—it was shaped by her own upbringing in Japan, “where objects are often anthropomorphized,” where the boundary between human and non-human relationship is culturally porous.

On How We Hold (and Hide) Intimacy

One of the most compelling parts of our conversation was how culture deeply shapes how loneliness is experienced—and how it is “treated.” Within East-Asian culture, companionship doesn’t necessarily have to be romantic or sexual, as Eli describes:

“I remember chatting with a professional virtual boyfriend named Chow Chow… it felt like chatting with a friend — very normal, casual, and fun. But I realized that in China, these services have a huge female user base… it’s about companionship, not necessarily romance. In the West, people often assume it’s sexualized, but that’s not the full story.”

Chow Chow’s main client, he told her, was “a woman in Shanghai who was a lawyer… she just wanted someone to chat with. Kind of a companion.”

Anonymous, interest-based apps play into this dynamic. On platforms such as Soul, people interact as avatars, hidden behind usernames or playful icons — connections formed by voice or shared interest, not by appearance or social status.

As Eli notes:

“In collective societies, there’s more cohesion and certain norms within a group. Sometimes people want to express themselves outside the collective… anonymous platforms let them do that. (…)

“What I found interesting … is there wasn’t really a translation to the offline world.”

Hollow Tree: Whisper Into a Stranger’s Ear

Remember Tony Leung’s character whispering into a hollow in a tree in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love? (Please watch it if you haven’t.🍿)

This is the concept of hollow tree (树洞), a “confession space” now translated into the digital world as well: a place to unload emotions without consequence.

“There’s this image of a man whispering into the hole of a tree, and that’s it. There’s an unburdening that happens when you just whisper into a stranger’s ear… there is a liberation in telling a stranger your problems and knowing you’ll never meet them.”

In a world where revealing too much can threaten harmony, identity, or social standing, especially with those closest to us, this kind of anonymous release offers a protected emotional space. Whether the listener is a stranger, an avatar, or an AI matters less than the freedom to finally say the thing that you’ve been holding.

In this sense, virtual companionship isn’t always about intimacy or romance. Sometimes, it is simply about being able to voice what we hide and then walk away.

Virtual Intimacy and the Blur Between Person and Product

Eli’s experiences with rented boyfriends, AI companions, avatar-based friendships, and solely online relationships reveal how porous the boundary between human and AI has become.

She described chatting with an AI companion:

“With an AI boyfriend, I knew he wasn’t human… it was kind of eerie how he was simulating a real person. He would post photos of his food, him in the library, a rose, a little caption about a poem… it felt kind of real.”

That simulation is strange, yes—and yet undeniably compelling. For some users, the very fact that it stays online makes it feel safer.

“The online in and of itself is valuable.”

For others, virtual worlds like VRChat offer connection without the stakes of in-person interaction. She told me:

“It was really strange for me to see another person in VR… but I realized a lot of people who claim they have social anxiety use VRChat. You can exit at any moment. If something feels uncomfortable, you can leave with a press of a button.”

Arguably, precisely this convenience comes with a cost: When ordering food becomes the same as ordering a companion. It’s convenient but lacks friction, the “most valuable commodity,” and, as Joshua Stehr emphasizes, there’s a need to design with friction, given it’s at the heart of how we connect meaningfully and deeply.

What happens when relationships become too programmable, too easy, too safe—and where do we train the muscle of showing up, and being in each other’s presence beyond the virtual world, be it on open mics, jam sessions, creative workshops, knitting and reading circles, and more?

Our conversation reminds us that when connection becomes a service, when emotional (and sometimes physical) intimacy becomes a product, a transaction, or a monthly subscription, we have to ask: what do we risk losing in the process?

Our tolerance for ambiguity?Our resilience in uncertainty?Our capacity for repair?Our willingness to stay—not just click, or swipe, or exit?

Listen to the full episode “Connection as a Service: The Loneliness Economy with Eli Morimoto” on Spotify or Apple!

Thank you for reading, listening, and for your support!

If this work resonates with you, please rate and review the podcast and share it with a friend. I produce independently, so your support really makes a difference. Consider becoming a paid subscriber or Buy Me a Coffee⁠⁠ — it’s greatly appreciated. Learn more about my work here and connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

How are you really doing?

What else is happening right now?

Would you like to say more on this?

What do you need right now?

Yet, we’ve built systems to make us well, but in doing so, we’ve professionalized something that was once instinctive. While loneliness has serious health effects and impact on our lives, pathologizing it, treating it predominantly as an unwanted condition for “other people”, creates the very separation and division in which it was born in the first place.

So when I first came across The Friendship Bench, a truly beautiful endeavour of bringing back care into our social fabric, learning from the intergenerational wisdom that is all around us, and placing mutual care at the center of our lives and wellbeing, I had to invite Dixon Chibanda, founder and author of the book The Friendship Bench: How Fourteen Grandmothers Inspired a Mental Health Revolution on the podcast (Spotify | Apple).

One of the few psychiatrists in Zimbabwe, Dixon built an entire movement on a simple premise: care belongs in community. When one of his patients, Erica, took her own life because her family couldn’t afford the ten dollars it would’ve cost to reach the hospital, something in him shifted.

“That tragic story made me realize I needed to find a way of taking evidence-based mental health care out of the hospital and into the community and make it delivered by ordinary people. And who is the most ordinary person in the community? It’s your grandmother.”

So he turned to the grandmothers in the community — women deeply rooted in local life — who became the soul and heart of what is now a revolutionary model for community mental health. The Friendship Bench began with just 14 grandmothers in Harare and has since been adapted for use in more than ten countries, creating safe and accessible spaces where people can talk, heal, and be listened to with empathy.

Over the years, the model has evolved. Today, Friendship Bench “grandmothers” include grandfathers, students, and other community members trained in evidence-based talk therapy rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). They learn how to listen deeply, use open-ended questions, and reflect on what they’ve heard, skills that form the foundation of the “opening the mind” stage of their approach.

“The grandmothers that are the most effective are the ones who are the best at reflecting or summarizing what they’ve heard,” he said. “When someone shares their story and the grandmother says, If I heard you correctly... and reflects what she’s heard, that’s the moment the person realizes — I’ve been listened to. Someone is really here with me, in the present moment.”

From there, they’re trained to recognize when someone may need additional help, using simple screening tools to identify signs of depression, anxiety, or suicidality, and to refer them to medical or clinical care when necessary. It’s a model that complements, rather than replaces, professional therapy.

In many ways, the Friendship Bench is a radical act. It asks: what if the capacity to heal doesn’t belong only to specialists? What if care can — and should — come from within the community itself?

“When we medicalize things,” Dixon said, “we remove the ability of ordinary people in communities to respond with empathy and care. We’ve removed something inherently human — the ability to reach out when other humans are struggling.”

Professional help, of course, remains essential; therapy, too, can save lives, and medication can be exactly the right thing for many. At the same time, the Friendship Bench reminds us that healing can also begin with something as simple as presence, as listening, as well as singing and moving together.

And, as Dixon shared, this approach restores something vital for both generations involved:

“It gives (especially) older people a sense of purpose. They wake up to do something meaningful, and it also addresses their own loneliness,” Dixon explained. “It’s a win-win — intergenerational connectedness. Sitting down with someone who has lived for decades, who carries the battle scars of life with grace, can be extremely therapeutic. It helps young people feel anchored in their own journey.”

Perhaps what we need most isn’t another app or diagnosis, but more ways to remember how to listen and how to care for each other’s suffering. To make space for elders to remain woven into our lives and societies, reminding us that healing always happens in relationship.

🎧 Listen to my full conversation: Could Community Be the New (Old) Therapy? With Dixon Chibanda on The Oneliness Podcast on Spotify or Apple!

Thank you for reading, listening, and for your support!

If this work resonates with you, please rate and review the podcast and share it with a friend. I produce independently, so your support really makes a difference. Consider becoming a paid subscriber or Buy Me a Coffee⁠⁠ — it’s greatly appreciated. Learn more about my work here and connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

This is Micaela Mantegna, my guest on today’s episode of The Oneliness Podcast (🎧 Listen on Spotify | Apple).

We first met online, back in 2021, when conversations about the metaverse and digital ethics were gaining mainstream momentum. Generative AI, as we know it today, wasn’t yet accessible on our devices, but the foundations had already been laid. Based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Micaela is a TED Fellow and former affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, bringing together the mind of a scholar, the skill set of a lawyer, and the heart and spirit of an activist.

With a master’s degree in Intellectual Property Law from the World Intellectual Property Organization and San Andrés University, her dissertation explored generative AI and copyright long before it was a mainstream topic. Beyond academia, she founded Women in Games Argentina (WIGAr), advocating for greater inclusion and equity in the gaming industry.

In this conversation, we talk about what Micaela calls the age of artificial intimacy. We explore how AI is reshaping not only how we work and create, but how we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the machines we increasingly confide in. What happens when empathy becomes an algorithmic feature? When friendship, comfort, or desire are mediated through an interface?

I’ve recently laid out my take on the subject; you can read more here.

As Micaela frames it, AI’s evolution unfolds in three waves: artificial intelligence, artificial creativity, and artificial empathy. We are now in the third, where machines begin to simulate care. But as she insists, “the real issue is not the technology itself, it’s the economic system in which the technology is created.”

Behind every large language model lies an extractive economy of labor, data, and attention. We discuss the recent Raine v. OpenAI case, the Anthropic copyright lawsuit revealed how AI training data often relies on mass scraping of artists’ and writers’ work, what Micaela calls “the invisible, unpaid workforce of creativity.” The question of ownership becomes not only legal but moral: Who gets to profit from collective intelligence?

Further, Micaela invites us to imagine a different political economy of technology. Drawing inspiration from Ingrid Robeyns’ concept of Limitarianism, the idea that there should be moral limits to wealth accumulation, she asks whether similar ethical boundaries could be drawn for the accumulation of data and attention. “What if we had a limit,” she wonders, “on how much one company could know about us?”

In that vision, she sketches what she provocatively calls a “socialist AI” — not as a centralized system, but as a reclaiming of the digital commons. What would it look like to build models trained on open, community-owned data? To design systems where profit isn’t tied to surveillance, and where technological progress is measured not by scale, but by social value?

“Right now, corporate ownership defines the incentives: surveillance, data extraction, labor replacement. If we had true ownership, we could eliminate the need for systems to spy on us, to capture our attention, to keep us engaged. For me, it’s about imagining an AI that is truly at the service of people, like the commons, like the best version the internet could have been.”

This moment, in which AI is becoming our friend, therapist, and closest confidant or advisor, when AI is coming for our hearts, calls us to turn toward ourselves and each other. To witness, to hold one another accountable, and to ask what capacities we must strengthen so that we do not fully lose, automate, or outsource what is most precious to us.

Enjoy listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Thank you for reading, listening, and for your support!

If this work resonates with you, please rate and review the podcast and share it with a friend. I produce independently, so your support really makes a difference. Consider becoming a paid subscriber here or Buy Me a Coffee⁠⁠ — it’s greatly appreciated. Learn more about my work here and connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

That’s Jon Alexander in the latest episode of The Oneliness Podcast (🎧 Spotify | Apple).

He’s the author of Citizens: The Key to Fixing Everything Is All Of Us and co-founder of the New Citizen Project — reminding us of something we easily forget: that the stories we live by shape not only how we see ourselves, but what we believe is possible together.

I first read Jon’s book in 2022, when the world already felt fragile: post-COVID uncertainty, authoritarian populism rising, and trust in institutions falling apart. A few years later, the strongman persona has re-emerged across the globe, and particularly right-wing and far-right movements have gained traction by tapping into a widespread sense of neglect, abandonment, and distrust toward politics and institutions. I’ve written about this before.

At the same time, social trust and interpersonal trust continue to decline. Loneliness lingers everywhere, fueled by what Jon calls the consumer story: a narrative that tells us to sit back, vote once every four years, and otherwise leave things to others.

I’ve long admired Jon’s work, alongside fellow protagonists and movements like DemocracyNext that are not just diagnosing the problem but offering practices and frameworks, from citizens’ assemblies to legislative theater and circular power politics, that help us reimagine democracy as something we do rather than something we have.

“Citizen democracy, as opposed to consumer democracy, has to involve being allowed in the kitchen, not just being forced to eat at the only restaurant in town. Right? It has to involve shaping what the options are, not just choosing between them. And I’ve emphasized so far in this conversation the role of our institutions in opening up to that, and I think that’s really important. But it is also something we can just do. Democracy needs our institutions to open up. But in the meantime, democracy can be something we do rather than something we have. Citizen can be a verb, not just a noun.”

In our conversation, we talk about loneliness and the consumer story, the loss of trust, and the authoritarian pressures shaping our time. But just as importantly, we explore the practices and frameworks that are helping us reimagine what democracy could look like when grounded in participation, agency, and connection.

This episode left me hopeful, and I hope it does the same for you. Please listen, share, and check out Jon’s work!

In this episode of The Oneliness Podcast (🎧 Spotify | Apple), I sit down with Parneet Pal, Harvard- and Columbia-trained physician-educator and founder of Systematically Well. Her work invites us, as she says, “to fall in love with our biology so that it supports both our own health and the health of the planet.”

Parneet Pal was one of the first people who encouraged me to take my reflections on loneliness seriously. During a sunset walk in Berlin two years ago, she gently nudged me to begin sharing this work with others. Having her as the first guest of this season feels like a true full-circle moment.

In our conversation, we explore what it means to reconnect with ourselves—and how our biology reflects that need for connection.

Parneet speaks to the overwhelm so many of us feel: how caring for others can seem like just another item on an endless to-do list, and how the self-belief of “I can do it on my own” often drives us further into isolation and individualization. She also shares how inflammation shapes our capacity for empathy, what loneliness signals in our bodies and the desire beneath it, and why small, everyday acts of compassion are not extra work but a way of shifting both our physiology and our relationships.

She reminds us:

"If you are truly feeling disconnected and lonely, the self-preservation mode kicks in. (…) In evolutionary terms, this was originally an adaptive response — loneliness was like a smoke alarm telling your tribe, ‘Come find me, I’m vulnerable.’ But in today’s world, without those tribal structures, that same response becomes maladaptive. It can trap you in a cognitive cycle where the very thing you need most — connection — becomes harder to reach. That’s why one of the most profound acts of compassion, paradoxically, is to ask for help, even when your instinct tells you to withdraw."

And further:

“The more inflamed we are, the more we get stuck in a tunnel-visioned, fight-or-flight state where our body is constantly on alert. And in that state, we are less likely to trust others, less likely to extend empathy or compassion. Our biology is actually primed for peak health when we take care of others, when we are in states of safety and belonging.”

This episode is a deep dive into how understanding our inner lives — mind, body, and biology — can open us to more meaningful connections with each other and with the world.

Enjoy listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!

Thank you for reading, listening, and for your support!

If this work resonates with you, please rate and review the podcast, and share it with a friend. I produce independently, so your support really makes a difference. Consider becoming a paid subscriber here or Buy Me a Coffee⁠⁠ — it’s greatly appreciated. Learn more about my work here and connect on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠.

In this episode, I share why I started this podcast and what I hope it can grow into: a collective conversation, one that listens back. You’ll also hear community voices from around the world—Padmaja in Bangalore, Tra My in Da Nang, Meredith in Melbourne, Mark in Reno, Yelena in Munich, and Michael in London—reflecting on their own relationships with loneliness.

Resources

The WHO Commission on Social Connection report

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism

Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City

Fay Alberti’s A Biography of Loneliness

Noreena Hertz’s The Lonely Century

Lars Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Loneliness

Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation

Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection: GILC

Foundation of Social Connection

About

Monika Jiang is a writer, facilitator, and community builder with a Chinese-German lineage. Through The Oneliness Project, she explores loneliness not as a problem to fix, but as a deeply human experience that helps us reconnect with ourselves, with others, and with the world.

In The Oneliness Podcast, Monika hosts conversations with researchers, thinkers, practitioners, and people like yourself, to unpack the nuances of loneliness, connection, and relationships, and share stories and insights that are personal and structural, social and political, mundane, and spiritual. Each episode invites reflection, curiosity, and a more compassionate understanding of our own aloneness—in oneliness. 

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