Alone Together is a curious exploration of loneliness through time, history, art, science and culture.

It’s a big topic and a universal one. What can loneliness teach us about being alone and how does being alone bring us together? Tune in to discover elements of loneliness that are illuminating, some that are simply fascinating and stories that will make you understand how alone we are together. 

SEASON TWO IS HERE.
NEXT EPISODE DROPS IN

Days
Hours
Minutes
Seconds

Listen Now

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Previous slide
Next slide
Previous slide
Next slide

SEASON TWO

Park Your Loneliness: Benches Are Made For Two

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.

More »

No Restaurants, Lawyers or…Loneliness: Life on the Remotest Island

What’s it like to live in the most isolated inhabited island in the world? Tristan da Cunha is located in the middle of the ocean between two continents. The residents who live there, all 247 of them, understand a type of loneliness like no one else. But their isolation has, for hundreds of years, been a place that others have learned from: how to survive away from anyone else.

More »

Why We Don’t Talk About Bruno: Choosing Family Estrangement

We Don’t Talk About Bruno, the #1 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. 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.

More »

Hit the Hay: Rested & Ready to Relate

When we can’t sleep, it’s a sign that we feel we’re in a strange world that can harm us and we need to stay alert and vigilant. We want others to stay away, keep their distance. Sleeplessness feeds on loneliness and loneliness fuels sleeplessness.

More »

We Need More Cowbells: How Nostalgia Keeps Us in the Present

Nostalgia allows us to bring to mind past relationships and experiences.It’s a substitute and what sometimes people refer to as a social snack. It’s not the real meal but it can help us get through times when we’re by ourselves – alone. The direct way that nostalgia counters loneliness is it can motivate us to want to connect with people so when you’re feeling lonely, perhaps you go through old photo albums and it makes you want to reach out to someone you haven’t talked to in years.

More »

The Loneliest Wolf: Lessons Learned From Leaving The Pack

In the animal kingdom, there are lone wolves – animals who, for reasons, break off from their families, their relatives and even their own offspring in order to form a new family of one. For lone wolves, it’s better to go it alone, than as part of the pack. Humans are no different.

More »

Hello Silence My Old Friend: The Quest For Quiet

We live in an age of sound and we’re bombarded with noise, from text messages, from Tik Tok, from traffic, from voices always heard around us, through thin walls, constant activities. It is unnerving to feel silence — the absence of all the noise around us. But silence is necessary – it’s positive–because it’s a recognition of all the thoughts that are going on within us when we are alone.

More »

Square Peg: When Words for Loneliness Don’t Fit

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 that he hoped to write one day. That book became The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The word Sonder became the most famous entry. What’s in a name that everyone can recognize but all of us know it in different ways. Is there a better name than just calling it “loneliness?”

More »

Colour Me Lonely: Connecting through Comics

Comic book artists need long periods of time in solitude when they aren’t interrupted to create. And in those periods of isolation, their lived experiences and the way they see the world takes form in pencil, then colour. They draw characters and give them form and personality visually giving a shape to loneliness that neatly fits into a square frame and speaks directly to their audience of one.

More »

The Unbearable Lightness of Leaving: Digital Nomads

What was once a too-huge world has become smaller these days, and offices can be anywhere, and nowhere at the same time. The Beat generation as written about in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is long settled and gone. But in their place, a new generation of nomads-digital ones-emerged.

More »

Happily Ever After: Escaping The Forest of Loneliness

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.

More »

Common Scents: The Whiff of Loneliness

Smell can tell us so much about our place in the world and the world around us.Our memories are linked to smells and scent can increase our loneliness when we are missing people and places and feeling alone.

More »

Talking To Goal Posts: The Loneliest Athletes

Sports fans have a connection to athletes–we watch them struggle to come back from injury and defeat and we feel like we are part, even as spectators, when they accomplish their goals and stand on top of the field as champions. On the outside, athletes are in top physical shape, but inside, mentally, it’s a lonely place for them.

More »

Is Green Acres The Place to be? Life in a Small Town

The Emmy award-winning comedy Schitt’s Creek, created by Dan Levy, depicted what life is like in a small town for the Rose family. Eighty episodes later, they get their happy ending.
Some leave Schitt’s Creek to move to New York or California, and some stay on in the town. But what was found in each of the characters was the knowledge that when everyone knows who you are in a small town, you’re never alone.

More »

Swan Songs: The Lonely Call of Nature

The songs animals sing tell us something about our own loneliness. In Southeast Asia, people capture wild songbirds to be caged and forced to sing only for humans and for decades, whales were hunted and killed for their oil and meat. But the songs of animals are not meant for us to hear alone. They are sung in order for animals to connect to each other and it’s up to us to decide whether we are ready to hear the song of the lonely.

More »

Fame: It’s Lonely At The Top

Celebrities serve a purpose in the lives of the rest of us, the unknowns. We sometimes glorify their successes and we, at times, glorify their failures. They’re not just like us. What celebrities prove to us is that even fame, and the adoration of millions, is no guarantee that we aren’t alone.

More »

SEASON ONE

Feeling Less Lonely: Challenging Stereotypes about Loneliness

This season, we explored what it means to be alone, the art it helped create, the stories it led writers to tell, the songs that emerged from loneliness and the pain it caused and ultimately the new paths it leads to. Loneliness can lead to inspiration and the stories we heard inspired us and made us think differently about what it means to be alone and how it can bring us together.

More »

Alone But Never Lonely: What We Can Learn From Hermits

For centuries, in religious and in secular life, there are people who chose to remove themselves from society. They’re hermits and they have lessons to share about how solitude can lead those of us feeling like we have no purpose towards a new direction in how to be alone.

More »

Crash Landing on Loneliness: The Hermit Kingdom

Crash Landing on You was one of the biggest international hits coming from South Korea last year. Millions of viewers were captivated by the story of two lonely people, one from the South, the other from the North whose relationship is a lesson on how to navigate the geopolitics of isolation.

More »

Science Friction: Are We Alone In The Universe?

Science fiction fuels our hopes that we aren’t alone in the universe. From Star Trek to Star Wars, Blade Runner and Minority Report to A Saucer of Loneliness, race relations, alien life, outer space and loneliness are explored.

More »

Frome: The Town That Cured Loneliness

You’ve really hit the jackpot if in the county of Somerset, you are a resident of Frome, a town built on the eastern edge of Mendip Hills. Population in Frome: 28,000. The number of lonely? Perhaps zero.

More »

Peg Fong  Host

Peg Fong is a journalist and a former newspaper reporter at The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. She was a reporter and producer for the CBC in Vancouver and is currently the Vancouver correspondent for The Economist Magazine. She teaches journalism and business at Langara College and Kwantlen Polytechnic University. 

Peg Fong  Host

Peg Fong is a journalist and a former newspaper reporter at The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. She was a reporter and producer for the CBC in Vancouver and is currently the Vancouver correspondent for The Economist Magazine. She teaches journalism and business at Langara College and Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Tweet us on Facegram