DailyJim: So many of the solutions to loneliness seem to be creating more loneliness

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Monday, July 7th, 2025. And today I want to talk to you about how so many of the solutions to loneliness seem to be creating more loneliness.

Now, this talk is inspired by a New York Times op-ed that I read today by Samantha Rose Hill, talking about technology. Tech companies have created a loneliness doom loop, she calls it. And in the essay, she talks about how these AI bots are trying to come in and cure loneliness and how Sam Altman of OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, I'll still call it. Talk about these different solutions to loneliness by using AI. But if you go back to even when I started working on Iphilio in 2012, 13, 14, Zuckerberg talked a lot about Facebook as being the cure for social connection.

And one thing I tried to do very hard with Iphilio was to not just improve the quantity of communication, but the quality of communication, or more so not just to improve the quantity of connection, but to improve the quality of connection, to improve the feeling of connection.

And I, like Samantha, worry that a lot of the tools that we have to try to reduce loneliness or increase connection actually increase loneliness. Because I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of loneliness that so many of us believe, that we seem to think loneliness is about having friends. We seem to think loneliness is about going out and just hanging out with people more often, more, again, social interaction. But I think what we miss is that loneliness is more about the depth of interaction. And not only the depth of interaction with other people, but the depth of interaction with ourselves and how deeply we connect with ourselves.

And to connect with ourselves, in my experience, has been about digging into the sadness, the anger, the thoughts, the perspectives, the beliefs, the patterns, the habits, etc., etc., to really be there with ourselves.

And more than anything, to see the goodness in ourselves. And to learn how to resolve the conflicts with ourselves, to not have to know everything, to not judge ourselves. Again, I think a lot of judgment comes from assuming we have evil intent or malicious intent. But to think that we have good intentions, that can alleviate so much of what I think we call the loneliness. And I don't know if these tools are really good at it. I fought against the other journaling, the journaling and mood tracking tools that existed back in the day, because I don't think they really went into the depths necessary. I think a lot of times they were just about the quantifying of the moods that one felt and looking at graphs and not really about going into the depths. It was about trying to feel happy or be happier in life, But that doesn't necessarily reduce loneliness. If connection is about going into the depths, it's not just happiness there. There's sadness, there's anger, there's shame, there's envy. There's a lot of things that a lot of society might say are bad and one should not feel. But there's so much information in those. And more than anything, there's so much relationship in those. And Samantha touched on this a bit in her essay about how if we have an AI bot that just is happy and just says whatever we want to say, then we don't have the disappointment. We don't have the apologies. We don't have the forgiveness. We don't have the awkwardness that often comes in interacting with other humans and again, interacting with ourselves. And.

I've been talking about this stuff for years. I remember, I don't know, it was 2013, 14, I went to a conference by Ashoka. I went to another conference that was by Stanford's C-Care, Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. And one of them was talking about compassion, the other one was talking about empathy, and I emphasized both times, self-compassion, self-empathy. Because so often we think of it as something for other people and we forget that it has to start with ourselves. And I think it's similar with this loneliness. I think, yes, I don't think the tools in themselves are inherently bad or will inherently lead us to loneliness. I think it's often how they're designed by people who may not understand what's causing the loneliness. So for example, I think there could be an AI bot that will help people dive deeper into what they're feeling and connect and be more loving and forgiving of themselves.

But I think a lot of the AI bots right now maybe don't do that so well. I've read a few different articles about how some AI bots have been pushing people towards suicide. And I don't think it would be a far stretch to think that it could push them towards homicide or drug abuse. And so...

Again, I think those are actually other tools that maybe try to save us from loneliness and only drive us deeper into it. Alcohol can save us from loneliness, maybe, but often it just makes things a lot worse. Same thing with other drugs.

I'm just reflecting on that a lot because I think it's a huge problem. I mean, I am recording to you from Kenya right now, and today is Sabah Sabah, which is one of their holidays commemorating protests that happened in the 90s to get a constitution.

And there's a lot of, you could say civil unrest, I'd just say emotional unrest. A lot of helplessness, a lot of loneliness, a lot of fear, a lot of conflicts that people don't know how to resolve and feel a bit overwhelmed. Or maybe really overwhelmed. And this is not just happening in Nairobi. It's happening in the U.S. It's happening in Europe. It's happening in the Middle East. It's happening in Asia. It's happening in so many different parts of the world. And I think the demand for connection is very strong. And I worry that sometimes when the demand is super high, people will come in with solutions that seem very sexy and seem like they'll work, but they also just make the problem worse. So, you know, if people are feeling really lonely, you can sell them on cults, you can sell them on gangs, you can sell them on, um, what else? You can sell them on extremist terrorist organizations, You can sell them on drugs. You can sell them on gambling. There's so many things we could sell people on when they're feeling incredibly lonely or when we are feeling incredibly lonely.

What if we really focused on having solutions that worked? Now you can say, oh, who do you think you are? You have solutions that work. I don't know. I think I've done pretty well at this. And I think while I haven't scaled them to a high level yet, I think the interactions I've had one-on-one with people, the interactions I've had in small groups.

Across multiple countries and continents and nationalities and genders and economic classes and languages and all things like this, show to me that I'm hitting on something that I think works, that I'm able to help people go to a depth and resolve conflicts that they never thought they could resolve and to resolve them very quickly and to get back to feeling love, to feel even more connected to themselves and to other people. And I'm trying to scale that now with this podcast, Jim Kleiber Show, and also with Emotional Combat with Jim Kleiber, another podcast that I just started. And I'm going to be doing the implicit, the explicit, explicit training, both to help us get better at these, these skills, their skills. And, um, I don't know if these tools that are out there will teach us a lot of these skills, but I believe, uh. These podcasts, these mechanisms, uh, the different drills, the conversations, the, the perspectives might help you as I've seen them help me and so many people. So if you're interested, please check it out. Um, Jim, the Jim Clyburn show and also emotional combat with Jim Clyburn. You can find it on podcast players. You can find it on YouTube. Yeah. So, all right, y'all it's a Monday. So I will talk to you tomorrow. Who knows what I'll talk about. It could be, uh, it could be politics, could be technology, could be relationships, relationships could be, um, the economy could be things like this, but somehow it all tie back into emotions and our relationships to ourselves and other people. All right. Take care of y'all. Bye.