TAIU
Back to conversations

Tool 34 · Develop yourself

Am I under-connected, or under-known?

A guided 18 to 22 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. This exercise does not diagnose anything, does not treat solitude as a symptom and does not end with a suggestion that you join something.

A man in his late twenties in profile in the kitchen of a shared flat in Sheffield on a Sunday, closed bedroom doors along the hallway

Is what is missing company, or being known?

They look alike from the inside. But nothing about the answer is the same.

You can be surrounded by people and entirely unknown to all of them.

What you'll look at

  1. 01Recent contact
  2. 02What you want
  3. 03How long
  4. 04What you have tried

A note from Mark

Mark Eve, founder of TAIU

The most common mistake with this one is arithmetic. People count the humans around them, find the number respectable and conclude they have no right to feel what they are feeling. The number was never the point.

What I would look at instead is whether anybody currently knows what is going on with you. Not the headline. The actual thing. Plenty of people are surrounded and entirely unknown. That is a specific gap with a specific remedy. The remedy is not more invitations.

I would also be careful about time alone. A lot of people are perfectly content on their own. They have simply been persuaded that this is a problem. It is not.

Read my full view ↓

And if the answer comes out as not lonely, take it. There is no prize for finding something wrong.

What you'll get

This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.

  1. 01

    What you have

  2. 02

    What you want

  3. 03

    The shape of the gap

  4. 04

    What it does not mean

  5. +

    Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.

See everything included ↓
  • 01What you came here with
  • 02What you actually have
  • 03What you actually want
  • 04Where the gap is
  • 05What kind of gap it is
  • 06How long it has been like this
  • 07What you have tried
  • 08The rival reading
  • 09What deserves protecting
  • 10The credible alternative
  • 11What this does not mean
  • 12What remains unresolved
  • 13Where this goes next

When you finish

Bring it back to your tree.

Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.

This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.

The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.

  • Session
  • Date
  • The part of life this belongs to
  • What we found
  • The alternative we tested
  • What deserves protecting
  • What should change, if anything
  • Next actions
  • What to notice or find out
  • What remains unresolved
Open My Tree

What now?

  1. 01 · Save it

    What connection you actually have.

  2. 02 · Test it

    Tell one person something current rather than something safe.

See more ↓

What I would do

  1. 01

    Separate being alone from being lonely before anything else.

  2. 02

    Ask what is missing rather than how much of it is missing.

  3. 03

    Date it. A gap that opened after a move is a different object.

  4. 04

    Take seriously the possibility that the answer is one relationship, not more people.

  5. 05

    Allow not lonely as a real conclusion.

Test it

  1. 01

    Is the missing thing company, or being known?

  2. 02

    Would more invitations actually change anything?

  3. 03

    When did you last say something true out loud to somebody?

The alternative

The expected conclusion is that you need more people. Frequently the evidence says otherwise. You may not need more people at all: you may need one relationship in which you can be more known, which is a much smaller and much harder thing. You may genuinely enjoy a great deal of solitude and be judging it against somebody else's idea of a healthy social life. Or the feeling may belong to a transition rather than to your life, in which case the right response is time and one or two specific relationships, not a strategy.

Think about this

  • Who you have actually spoken to properly this week.
  • What you would want more of, in specific terms.
  • When this started, and what else changed then.
  • Whether the feeling is about people, or about being known.
  • What you have already tried, and what happened.

Take this to Ask Mark

You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.

This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.

Take this to Ask Mark →

Go a little further

LEARN · 24 HOURS

Samaritans

Samaritans

Here because some of these subjects reach further than a written exercise should.

Find out more ↗
Was this useful?

READ · BOOK

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

John Cacioppo

Cacioppo treats loneliness as a signal rather than a defect, in the way hunger is a signal. That reframing changes what you do about it.

Read more ↗
Was this useful?

READ · BOOK

Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation

Robert Weiss

Weiss separated social loneliness, having too few people, from emotional loneliness, having nobody who knows you. It is the distinction most people are missing.

Read more ↗
Was this useful?
See all resources →

Recommended by the TAIU community

What helped you?

If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.

We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.

Finished the exercise?

What did this uncover?

Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.

A woman in her late twenties clearing cups at the end of a coffee morning in a rural Scottish village hall

Next tool

Who is actually in my life

If you want the map before the feeling

Continue →Rebuilding a circle →

Further thinking

  • Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation

    Robert Weiss

  • Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

    John Cacioppo

  • Socioemotional Selectivity Theory

    Laura Carstensen

See the thinking ↓

Book

Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation

Robert Weiss

Weiss separated social loneliness, having too few people, from emotional loneliness, having nobody who knows you. It is the distinction most people are missing.

Book

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

John Cacioppo

Cacioppo treats loneliness as a signal rather than a defect, in the way hunger is a signal. That reframing changes what you do about it.

Article

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory

Laura Carstensen

Why the relationships and goals we prioritise change as our sense of time changes. The finding worth having is that this tracks how much time a person believes is left rather than how old they are, which is why a shortened horizon at thirty produces the same narrowing as one at seventy.

Book

Together

Vivek Murthy

Loneliness isn't always about physically being alone. People can be surrounded by colleagues, family or social activity and still lack relationships in which they feel genuinely known.