Loneliness: Why We Need Each Other

Why you can be surrounded by people and still feel alone

Episode 105 · January 8, 2026

Unity, division and society

The Truth Hurts · Episode 105 · audio in Hebrew

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The conversation

You have people around you, maybe even a lot of them, and something inside still feels empty. That isn't a contradiction. According to Gili, loneliness isn't a question of how many people are around you. It's a sense of disconnection and a lack of emotional intimacy, and it can exist in the middle of a crowd. The way she sees it, the price of it isn't only emotional. She cites studies that compare the damage to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and that even show an effect on how our genes express themselves. It also explains something that may have happened to you in the past: why meeting one particular person felt like your whole head was spinning, when what was actually happening was a flood of dopamine your body was starving for.

The truth

  • Gili says that Britain, Japan and other countries have officially declared loneliness a health crisis and appointed a minister to handle the issue.

  • Loneliness isn't the absence of people. It's a sense of disconnection and a lack of emotional intimacy, and it can exist even when there are plenty of people around us.

  • Our thoughts and our feelings genuinely affect how our genes express themselves. Genetics is far more of a choice than we used to think.

  • The way she sees it, personal, meaningful connection is what stabilizes dopamine in the brain, and interaction on social media simply doesn't do that job.

  • Someone who is lonely and short on dopamine tends to fall into what looks like an obsession with another person, when in fact it's a dependence on the chemical spike that meeting them produces.

Questions and answers

Are there countries that have officially declared loneliness a national problem?

Britain was the first to appoint a minister for loneliness, in 2018, and Japan followed in 2021, after a wave of young people shutting themselves away. The episode also mentions that Australia, Canada and the European Union have set official policy on the issue, and that in the United States loneliness has been defined as a public health crisis.

Why, when I'm lonely, am I also tired all the time and getting sick more often?

As it's described in the episode, there are studies that compare the damage done by loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The episode also says that people with close friends are healthier, physically and emotionally, and that they live longer, and it counts loneliness among the causes of early death.

Why do I get so dependent on people I only know online, as if I can't manage without it?

In the episode Gili describes steady, personal social connection as what stabilizes dopamine production in the brain. When lonely people who are short on dopamine meet someone who makes them feel seen and understood, their brain fills with dopamine all at once, and they think they're obsessed with that person, when in fact they're hooked on the dopamine spike itself.

What's the actual difference between being alone and feeling lonely?

In that part of the episode, being alone isn't necessarily sad. Usually it's exactly the time you need in order to develop and to grow. Loneliness, by contrast, is described there as not really a lack of people, but a lack of real presence with yourself and a lack of inner intimacy.

You feel alone even though there are plenty of people around. Where do you actually start dealing with that?

It starts with an inner question: what am I missing from other people, and am I giving myself what I expect to get from them. Gili also stresses letting yourself be vulnerable and sharing the vulnerable parts with the right people, building habits for the body and for the mind, and actually going out to meet people through courses and classes.

Gili's original episode description

Loneliness is one of the worst things in our experience as human beings. It's a phenomenon that keeps growing in the Western world, and it has many faces: cases of social exclusion, parental alienation, a rise in the number of suicides, a rise in the number of people falling seriously ill, a rise in depression and in anxiety. And the root of all of these, in the simplest terms, comes down to one thing: friendship.

People who have close friends are healthier physically and emotionally, and they also live longer! You heard that right. One of the factors that affect early death is loneliness. There are already studies comparing the damage of loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day! A lack of communication, a lack of human touch, a lack of intimacy matter far more than you think. A person needs to be seen and to be loved. That plays an enormous part in our health, and not only our emotional health, our physical health too. Our social ties matter more than our genes. There are studies today showing that the way we live affects our genetics. This isn't a spiritual theory, it's biology.

People who have close friends cope better in stressful situations. Loneliness, on the other hand, leads to addictions, from drugs to obsessions, and it's more common than you think. The reason is that we live in a reality where the main social interaction people get, and sometimes the only one, is online. But interactions on social networks aren't enough to keep a person emotionally stable. Steady, personal, meaningful connection is what regulates the production of dopamine in the brain. Lonely people who have no meaningful social ties are short on dopamine.

The human brain treats meaningful social interaction as a matter of survival. When you're alone most of the time, your subconscious believes you have no security, no resources and no support, and that your survival is therefore in danger. The way we live today is light years away from the way human beings were originally meant to live, and that's why we have this evolutionary phenomenon of lonely people. It's the conditioning of modern social structures that encourage isolation in the name of individualism and make a dopamine addiction easy to fall into. A society of people who don't know how to create meaningful connections with others, at exactly the moment when that's the thing it needs most.