I absolutely love “You’re the Best” from the first album. The first lines really struck me: “All I know is / when you hold me / I still feel lonely / lonely when you hold me.” Can you explain them a bit?

I wrote that song when I was at a point in a relationship that I often get to in relationships: I’m there. I am finally with the person I wanted to be with. And then he falls asleep and I realize I’m still alone. As much as I try and want to be bonded with this person, the dominant feeling that I feel at all times is a loneliness. It just doesn’t go away. And I think that resonated for a lot of people. Relationships doesn’t make that go away. You can be more lonely in a relationship sometimes than you would be on your own.

We had brunch with Kelly Zutrau from the band Wet—and talked about almost everything

“Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.”

—Johann Hari, Lost Connections

“The last word of philosophy is loneliness.”

—Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation: On Pessimism

“Does not all creativity ask for a certain encounter with our loneliness, and does not the fear of this encounter severely limit our possible self expression?”

—Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out

“Starving myself testified to the intensity of my loneliness, my self-loathing, my simultaneous distance from the world and my hopeless proximity, a sense of being—at once—too much and not enough.”

—Leslie Jamison, The Quickening A story of two births

“My loneliness was a full-time job.”

— Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.”

—Jean Rhys

Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs. I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.

—Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

“Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.”

— Sylvia Plath

Feelings of loneliness can arise even more sharply when we feel like we are failing at attempts to connect or feel like other people don’t understand us. Both depression and loneliness feed on a cycle of negative thoughts in which we see events and social interactions in a negative light. Chronic loneliness puts the brain into a “self-preservation mode” that makes it easier for us to feel threatened and withdraw from others.

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No matter what our minds tell us when we’re in a depressed state, we’re never as alone as we think we are. Once we do the courageous thing and reach out, we will find a way to connect again.

Why is Life so Boring?