Don Martin on Why We’re Never Meant to Go Through Life Alone | EP 695

What if loneliness isn’t a personal failure, but a biological signal that you’re built for connection? In this powerful Thanksgiving Day episode of Passion Struck, John R. Miles sits down with author, researcher, and longtime podcaster Don Martin, whose upcoming book, Where Did Everybody Go? unpacks one of the most misunderstood challenges of modern life: the loneliness crisis. This conversation continues our acclaimed series The Irreplaceables, exploring the human qualities no machine can ever replicate. Today, Don illuminates why true healing also requires returning to each other. Airing this episode on Thanksgiving is intentional. It’s a day framed around togetherness, but for millions of people, it is one of the loneliest days of the year. Whether you’re surrounded by family, on your own, grieving, working, or simply navigating the quiet, this conversation offers science, compassion, and practical hope. Don dismantles the myths we’ve been taught about loneliness, reveals the societal structures that have quietly unraveled our sense of belonging, and shows us how connection can be rebuilt.. If you’ve ever felt invisible, disconnected, overwhelmed by the state of the world, or unsure how to create stronger relationships in your community, this episode is a grounding companion. Get the full episode show notes here: https://passionstruck.com/the-loneliness-crisis/Listen, Watch, and Go DeeperAll episode links—including my books You Matter, Luma, and Passion Struck, The Ignited Life Substack, YouTube channels, and Start Mattering apparel—are gathered here:https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesDownload the companion workbook: The Connected Life ToolkitAvailable now at TheIgnitedLife.netIncludes reflection prompts, community-building practices, and science-backed tools for strengthening meaningful relationships. In this episode, you will learn:Why loneliness is not an emotion but a biological survival signalThe real reason half of Americans report feeling lonely (and why it’s not screens)Why kids and teens are the loneliest demographic in the U. S. How the decline of malls, walkable neighborhoods, and third places quietly rewired societyWhy feeling lonely in a crowd is normal and what your brain is trying to tell youHow marginalized communities uniquely experience and overcome disconnectionWhy storytelling is a powerful tool for belonging and social changePractical steps you can take to rebuild connectionSupport the MovementEveryone deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Show it. Wear it. Live it.https://StartMattering.com***This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Passion Struck, its subsidiaries, or any entities they represent. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Connect with John Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/Book John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Keynotes, books, podcast, and resources: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesChildren’s Book — You Matter, Luma:

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  A lot of times we engage with deep, dark topics, loneliness, death, religion, politics, all of those kinds of things and come away just feeling really depressed and hopeless. And who am I? I'm just one person. I don't matter. And I think, bringing it back to something that you all talk about, I think giving people a sense of purpose and a sense that this information isn't too much for you. You can learn it. You can learn a new thing. You can embrace a new thing. You can talk about the big scary stuff in life and your opinion on it, your involvement in it, even just your willingness to learn about it matters because you matter.

• 0:40John R. Miles?

  Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter.

• 1:29John R. Miles?

  Welcome back, friends, to Passion Struck. This is episode 695, and today's episode is unlike any other I've ever released, and intentionally so. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome to this extraordinary community. And if you're one of the many who return for every episode, thank you. Your loyalty is the heartbeat of this global movement. As always, if this show has ever inspired you, here are two simple ways that you can help it grow. Share this episode with someone who will find it meaningful, and leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's truly the most powerful way to help new listeners discover these conversations. We are currently in the midst Of our month-long series, The Irreplaceables,

• 2:13John R. Miles?

  an exploration of the qualities that make us undeniably, unforgettably, human. Earlier this week, in episode 694, we were live at the Oxford Exchange in Tampa, Florida, with the extraordinary Jane Marie Chen, who reminded us that healing begins when we stop performing for the world and start returning to ourselves. And today, on Thanksgiving Day, we turn to a piece of our humanity that has never mattered more: our deep, innate need for connection. You might wonder why I chose to air an episode about loneliness on a day dedicated to gratitude, gathering, and togetherness.

• 2:53John R. Miles?

  Here's the truth: Thanksgiving is often painted as warmth, family, and togetherness. But for millions of people, it's one of the loneliest days of the year. Some are physically alone, some feel invisible in their own families, some are grieving someone who isn't there, and others are surrounded by people, yet feel emotionally miles away. Loneliness does not wait for a convenient season. Loneliness finds the quiet spaces in all of us, including the ones that look full from the outside. That's exactly why I chose to air this episode today. My guest is Don Martin, author of the phenomenal new book, Where Did Everybody Go? And in this conversation, Don dismantles the myths we've been told about loneliness

• 3:38John R. Miles?

  and what truly creates belonging. Together, we explore why half of American adults say they're lonely, and why loneliness is not a personal failing. We go into how the collapse of malls, walkable neighborhoods, and third places quietly rewired our social fabric. We discuss why kids and teens, not older adults, are the loneliest groups in society. We unpack why social media isn't the villain we've made it out to be, and what the science actually says about rebuilding connection in our neighborhoods, our relationships, and our own lives. This episode is a grounding reminder that being human is not about never feeling lonely, it's about never facing loneliness alone.

• 4:20John R. Miles?

  So whether today finds you surrounded by family, traveling, working, grieving, celebrating, or simply being, this episode is for you. Before we dive in, remember, you can find companion tools and frameworks for every episode at theignitedlife.net, my free Substack where I help you apply these insights from these conversations to your life. Now let's step into this powerful Thanksgiving Day conversation with Don Martin. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:57John R. Miles?

  I am so excited today to welcome Don Martin to Passion Struck. Hey, Don, how are you today?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Hi, John. Thanks so much for having me.

• 5:05John R. Miles?

  I love that you're here today. I love it when I have fellow podcasters on the show. And you've been doing yours for a little bit longer than I have. What originally got you started?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh. Well, I started way back before podcasts were anything, when it was just a hobby that weirdos did in their basements back when it was like, oh, that guy has a podcast, when it was a weird thing. I remember the first time I started my, the first iteration of my podcast back in 2009. But I remember realizing that like podcasts had changed in pop culture and like society at large, because like seven, eight years in, I've been doing it a while, I saw a commercial for some kind of prescription medication, because we have those here in the US, commercials for prescription medications. And I remember, I'm a busy attorney, I'm a busy doctor, I'm a busy mom, those kinds of things. And it was like, I'm a busy

• 5:55Speaker 01

  podcast producer. I need Genomex or whatever. And I was like, that's a job now? What? When did this become a job? Yeah, I've been doing it so long that it went from a weird hobby to now celebrities do it for quick cash.

• 6:12John R. Miles?

  Yeah, I remember about four years ago, I got that question that I hate. What do you do? And just to keep it simple, I said, I'm a professional podcaster. And the person just looked at me like, you can actually make money doing that?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, and that's what's crazy is that the line between you could be one of a really successful podcast and long running. And it's like, still, it's well, this is grocery money. And it's just wild like how fast and how different it changes. So, yeah.

• 6:41John R. Miles?

  Absolutely. Well, you are an author, if I have it correctly, of five different books.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, my fifth book comes out in November 2025. Where did everybody go?

• 6:53John R. Miles?

  Yeah. And that's the one I really wanted to talk about today because you're really going into the loneliness crisis that has really become pervasive. And I want to start here because in 2020, as I understand it during the lockdown, you yourself experienced a loneliness that felt impossible to ignore. Could you take us back to that moment and describe what shifted for you?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Sure. At length in the book, the summary version is, and I was somebody that thought I wasn't a lonely person, that I had friends and I had coworkers and I had a job and I had trips I told myself I would take. And I had plans. I had a life. I had a sphere of people and community, or at least I thought. And then the world shut down and I realized, oh, all of those little connections are a lot more tenuous than I thought they were. It wasn't that the pandemic, it wasn't that lockdown created loneliness for me. It's that it highlighted how fragile those community bonds were already,

• 8:00Speaker 01

  that how fragile they were and how fragile they'd become over the years. And I think a lot of people started reassessing a lot of the big questions in life during lockdown, during that pandemic. And one of the ones that I started really deep diving into was the idea of loneliness and what loneliness is and what its evolutionary purpose is in our lives and in our society. Because obviously, if you've seen an Inside Out movie, you know that emotions themselves were evolved for a purpose, right? They're all here to do something. So what's loneliness's purpose? And I found out it has one, and it's wild. It's trying to keep us alive, which is not what a lot of people think.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  It's like when you dig into anger, or anxiety, or aggression, it's, oh, these are survival mechanisms. They're doing it weird. It's doing it in a way that I don't entirely love, but it is trying to keep me alive. And loneliness, similarly, but it's not just an emotion like joy, or anger, or sadness. It's more like a biological imperative, something like hunger or thirst. If hunger tells us that we need to eat, and thirst tells us that we need to drink, loneliness tells us to seek other people, because we've learned over all of the time in human evolution that we survive better in groups. We survive better when we are in community with one another. And I, that was a big aha moment for me over the last few years, as I dove into loneliness.

• 9:25John R. Miles?

  Today, I'm wearing, for those who can't see it, a shirt that says, "I Matter", which is part of our clothing line at Start Mattering. But I always felt, at its core, loneliness is often the absence of feeling like you mattered to someone or something. How does this idea resonate with your findings on the topic?

• 9:44Speaker 01

  So loneliness, the kind of the functional definition that sociologists, researchers have been using since around the 1980s, is that loneliness is basically the disparity between the amount of social connection that you want and the amount of social connection that you are getting. So a lot of people will give like silver bullet advice for loneliness. And the reason that doesn't work is because loneliness, even though it is a metric, you can measure it. That measurement is different for pretty much everybody. The subjective standard for what you need to fill your cup up, so to speak, and what I need to fill my cup up, and how we fill our cup up are different. Everybody needs social connection, but how much of it and what kind differs from people?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  But yeah, it's not an absence necessarily. It is the feeling of the distance between the amount of connection that you want and the amount that you're getting.

• 10:38John R. Miles?

  Yeah, what's interesting to me is I had Julian Hunt Lundstedt from Brigham Young University on the show, who's been studying this for a very long time. And she made the comment to me that you can be surrounded by people and still feel completely lonely.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Which is That's a sentiment that was shared with me by one of the researchers that I spoke to out of the University of Arizona. He was a guy named Dr. Matthias Mel, talked about how he posed the question to me. He said, are you alone when you're at a concert? Are you alone when you're at a coffee shop? And his answer was yes, because you're not actually engaged in conversation in those situations, in those settings. You are not in that place forming new or maintaining existing community bonds. You might be doing other things to help your mental health. It might be fun. It might be good for you to go hear music that you like, or enjoy a beverage that you that you enjoy. But that's not the same

• 11:39Speaker 01

  thing as creating or maintaining social bonds. Yeah, you can absolutely be lonely in a crowd. In fact, whenever there was a team, like I said, the team that I spoke to out of the University of Arizona, did some really interesting pioneering research. They were some of the first people to be able to compare loneliness to an objective standard, which is time spent alone. And they measure that, or they qualify time spent alone as basically time when you are not in conversation with other people. And they were able to do that using some pretty interesting tech, using 20 years of data, which is pretty fascinating.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  But what they were finding is that not only can way too much time alone be predicate for loneliness, but also not enough, like too much time with other people could also make you feel lonely. Because again, it's that lost in the crowd feeling. You're not actually there. You're just one among many. You're not actually there forming community bonds.

• 12:45John R. Miles?

  Yeah. And as you were interviewing these researchers, was there a particular interview besides the one you just mentioned, or historical insight that fundamentally changed how you think about it?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Oh gosh, I think that when we talk about loneliness, anytime I tell somebody that I'm writing a book about loneliness, the two things that they immediately say are, oh, well, are you going to talk about screens? You're going to talk, everybody's on a screen and they're shutting down all the malls and that's why everybody's lonely. We don't have any malls anymore and everybody's on a screen. And I think that you're talking about historically, you're talking about was there any point of data in history that kind of woke you up to it? Going back and studying kind of the history of both third places and also going back and studying and really diving into how we have blamed technology for loneliness over the

• 13:41Speaker 01

  last century and a half or so was really fascinating because we just keep doing it. When it comes to TVs, we always say kids are on screens, but that's to absolve ourselves of the truth that we're the ones giving them the screens. And also, we don't really know what to do with our kids. We took them out of the workforce, which is a good thing. We don't want kids in mines. We don't want kids putting their little fingers in machinery. And we made school compulsory, which is great. We want kids learning, but we also took them out of society and we haven't really found a way to put them back in it yet. Like, we don't keep them in mixed spaces with adults. And so, when you poll adults, when you poll kids, kids feel lonely and they are the most lonely of any age group.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  It's wild. And that's always true. Whatever the current youngest generation is, they're the loneliest people. Why? Because we don't have a place for them in society. We want them to be over there. We want them to be out of the way. We want children to be seen and not heard. And we don't bridge them into society, so they feel like they don't have a place. The other thing is, talking about screens, we blame screens, we blame the iPhone, we blame the iPad, we blame that for loneliness, we blame that for disconnection, but we've done that with everything. In fact, we've been doing it for a really long time. I went all the way back. We even blamed loneliness on the written word. Because if we were relying on the written word, then we wouldn't be using our memories to communicate with one another, and that was going to create disconnection.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  So we've done it with the written word, we did it with the telegraph. We also blamed disease on the telegraph, much in the same way that we blamed fight COVID on 5G. We blamed loneliness on air conditioning, we blamed loneliness on central heating, we blamed loneliness on bedrooms, just the fact that people have their own room is a reason for loneliness. Going back and kind of debunking that throughout the book, throughout the research, that it's not screens and it's not, like, these things are not causal. They can be corollary, they can be parallel, they can be symptoms, but they're not causal. And I think that was really fascinating.

• 15:47John R. Miles?

  Yeah, for me, it's hard to believe, but the CDC in the US reports that nearly 42% of high school students report feeling persistently sad or hopeless. When I think of it, it's just not a statistic, that's millions of kids who are carrying invisible weight. How much of that correlation do you think ties into this loneliness?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  These are the same thing. Yes, absolutely. You're hitting the nail on the head, absolutely. Young people, like I said, whatever the, whoever the youngest people are in society at the time, are pretty much always the loneliest people, and they're always left out of loneliness conversations. When we talk about loneliness, we talk about loneliness with the elderly. We talk about it as though it's an inevitability of our lives, as though we're going to, we get our driver's licenses, we get our right to drink, we get our right to a hotel room, we get our right to own a car, we buy a house, we get married, we have kids, and then eventually everybody dies and moves away and we become lonely, and that's an inevitability. But the thing is, we start our lives lonely, because we do not have places to welcome kids into society.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  We don't have good models for how to introduce them to others. And in fact, in the last 25 years, especially here in the United States, ever since 9/11/2001, we've had, we've had a, from a top-down systemic issue where we are teaching kids fear, fear of the other, fear of strangers, fear of the unknown, and we are teaching that to one another. We have generation over generation. Generation, not just not knowing how to model connection with other people, but modeling that the idea of a stranger, the idea of somebody that you don't know is inherently dangerous, is inherently something to be afraid of. And that fear, that lack of connection, that is all living together. But yeah, 100% when you're talking about millions and millions of kids and

• 17:33Speaker 01

  CDC data and all of that. Yes, absolutely. This is all the same conversation.

• 17:38John R. Miles?

  Yeah. How pervasive do you think this is outside the US? I think it's, we hear about it more in the US because that's where we live. But do you think this is pervasive across all of society? Or do you think it's more in the Western countries?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Oh, no, it's everywhere. It's just other countries outside of the US have taken it a little bit more seriously than we have. The Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic in 2023, but Britain has had a, an organization devoted to understanding and combating loneliness for many years. So is Japan. So have many countries around the world. The US is actually late to the conversation and treating it as the mental and physical health crisis that it is, because it is actually a health crisis. In fact, what's wild is that loneliness is exacerbates early death, early mortality from all causes. If you are lonely, you are much more likely to die from

• 18:36Speaker 01

  all causes. It's killing us sooner. It's not only a mental health issue, but it's a physical health issue and it impacts everything from like bad knees to IBS to cardiovascular failure and all points in between. It's wild how like big loneliness gets and how quickly it gets that way. But yeah, it's everywhere. It's an everyone problem. It's like I said, it's something that's baked into our DNA to feel lonely. And the US is actually late to the conversation and treating it like the crisis that it is.

• 19:07John R. Miles?

  I hope you're finding this Thanksgiving conversation with Don Martin meaningful. Part of what Don and I discuss is how loneliness often begins long before adulthood, how so many kids today feel invisible, unseen, or disconnected, even in busy, loving homes. That's one of the reasons I wrote my upcoming children's book, You Matter Luma, to help every child Feel noticed, valued, and emotionally safe. It's a story that reminds children and adults that being seen isn't something you earn, it's something you deserve. If you want to help a child in your life feel a little more connected, visit youmatterluma.com or preorder the book on Barnes & Noble. Now, a quick break from our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 20:01John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now, back to my Thanksgiving Day conversation with Don Martin.

• 20:10John R. Miles?

  Yeah, I think something that you just said there is important for listeners to understand, and that is loneliness is kind of like a biological signal. It's like hunger or thirst instead of a character flaw that people have. And I think that reframing is really important.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. That was a big early aha moment for me was that we evolved loneliness for a purpose, and it's trying to keep us alive. It's trying to keep us connected to other people. The problem is, especially in the modern day, we view other people as a source of fear. We are afraid of people, especially if they are not like us. If they are the racial other, the sexual other, we're dealing with the immigrant other. If they are somebody who is not like us, if they, if we do not initially view them as part of our in-group, if they are part of our out-group, we are taught not only to fear them, but to stay away from them. Stranger equals danger. But that fear that we have been seeping into all the crevices of society, especially

• 21:08Speaker 01

  here in the US, is only keeping us more disconnected and only exacerbating the loneliness crisis. And, which is bad, because it's literally, it's not good for our mental and physical health. Like I said, loneliness is trying to keep us alive by connecting us with others. And the more that we fight that, we fight that to our detriment.

• 21:26John R. Miles?

  One of the areas I'm trying to spend more time on is the decline of young men in society and understanding their role and playing the role that they have for really millennia. And there's a lot of talk about a male loneliness epidemic. And based on your research, is that framing accurate?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  In fact, the male loneliness crisis is a myth. It is made up by dating podcasters, mostly like those alpha bro male dominated podcasters. It's bad dating advice from incel folks on that side of the potty over from a decade ago. That's been repackaged as a loneliness epidemic. In fact, the data tells us pretty consistently that men and women experience almost exactly the same amount of loneliness. How they go about creating and fostering connection are different, mostly because of how men and women are treated differently in society. Women are allowed to be emotional. Men are not allowed to be emotional. So women will talk, men will act. That's, there's a lot of other stuff in there and I go into it farther in the book.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  But a guy is a cisgender heterosexual man is much more likely to, to create or foster connection with you by saying, oh, you're going out of town? Yeah, I'll watch your dog or, oh, you need some help fixing that? I'll help fix that for you. That is a way of creating and fostering connection. As far as actually experiencing loneliness, though, and the detrimental effects of loneliness, men and women are, I think the most recent Pew Research data tells us that they are one point different. And the preponderance of the data over the last decades, sometimes women are up a little bit, sometimes men are up a little bit. And it all comes out in the wash. Gender isn't really impacted by loneliness. It's loneliness is an everyone problem. The idea that this is being, that this is something specific to men, it literally is

• 23:19Speaker 01

  rooted in telling young, specifically cisgender heterosexual white men, that the reason that you can't get a date is because the world is actually conspiring against you, is everybody's conspiring against you. There's no place for you in society, even though you run everything. There's no place for you and women don't want you and yada, yada, yada. That's a myth.

• 23:40John R. Miles?

  Well, I, I just want to ask your opinion, though. Why do you think so many young men feel adrift? And, uh, you know, what I really look at is across the world, you have now 130 million young men dropping out of high school. The balance of who's graduating from college is completely flipping from what used to be male dominated to now female dominated. I, even when I go to church, I'm hearing. You know, the ministers talk about that the male is not fulfilling the role that they used to in the household of being that strong person who's holding their family together. So there's absolutely something here that's going on.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Well, yes, you are correct. There is something going on with men and pretty much every researcher agrees that's true. It's not loneliness, though. There is, however, something going on with men, but it's something going on with a lot of parts of society. There's this Christo fascist, extremely right wing kind of takeover of a lot of places that has to do with white supremacy and telling men that they are the most important. But you brought up a lot of different kinds of points. So talking about education, who is graduating from college? Well, not a lot. College in and of itself is a luxury for a lot of people. A lot of people can't afford to go to school anymore. A lot of people are embracing trade

• 25:05Speaker 01

  schools instead. We are seeing other alternatives for formal education, for advanced education, and for what that degree looks like after the fact. That doesn't necessarily have much to do with loneliness. That has to do with a lot of other factors like finance and government and just what jobs are available. Like, a lot of times, we put a lot of weight on unemployment reports, but we don't put as much spotlight on, like, we say, oh, only 5% of the population is unemployed, and yay, that's a win. But we aren't actually deep diving into, okay, so the people that are employed, what does that employment mean? Is everybody working a full-time job? No. In fact, quite a large percent of the population

• 25:49Speaker 01

  are working multiple part-time jobs or multiple jobs without benefits or something like that. So there's a bigger, more nuanced conversation there. As far as pastors saying that men aren't fulfilling a role, that starts getting into religion, and that starts getting outside of the scope of social science and more into the scope of What any one religion at any one time says that a person's role in society is or should be, we do know, just bringing it back to data real quick, we do know that everybody is getting married later in life for a lot of reasons. It's very expensive to buy a house. It's very expensive to plan, generally speaking. The average age to get married when you were my parents' age or my grandparents'

• 26:34Speaker 01

  age was maybe in your late teens, early twenties. And now it's in your late twenties, early thirties. And that number's only gonna either peter out or go up because everything is incredibly expensive. And people are also prioritizing other things. People are realizing that you don't have to be married to live a fulfilling life anymore. People have more agency than they used to. People have more job prospects than they used to. People have more freedom than they used to. We are seeing that a lot of people don't have to enter marriage for security. They can enter marriage because they want to. And that's meaning that people can get married later in life, they can have kids later in life, and they can do that whenever they feel safe and secure, which for a lot of people and a lot of intersections of society is a lot later in life because there's a

• 27:18Speaker 01

  lot less security, just generally speaking.

• 27:20John R. Miles?

  Now, you mentioned malls earlier in the discussion. And there's a fascinating line between the death of the American mall and the erosion of social bonds that I think a lot of people probably don't think about. What do malls and their decline reveal about loneliness in America?

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Well, I actually am really fascinated at how much time we've spent blaming malls for the erosion of community bonds. So the idea of the place of the American mall inside of the loneliness discussion is that it's basically an accessible, what's called, third place for a lot of people. In a lot of communities, if you didn't have anything else, you had the mall. And the mall is where you could go, and you could hang out, and you could gather, and you could meet up with your friends, and you could go, yada, yada. And Sociologists, researchers in the area have always had a contentious feeling about the American Mall as a third place because they really exploded in popularity in the 1980s.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Mall culture really exploded in the 1980s and 1990s, but we saw a shift in the early 2000s, somewhere around like 2006, I want to say, which actually, funny enough, we also saw a decline in church attendance at the same time. Church attendance, mall attendance, pretty much all kinds of attendance at existing American institutions, we just stopped going to them after a while. For lots of reasons, somewhat different reasons, but we just stopped going to established institutional places. But to take it back to the American Mall, there is a question as to whether or not the American Mall has ever actually been a third place. If you look at, if you look at the original eight qualifiers for a third place, which comes to us from the book The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, if you

• 29:08Speaker 01

  look at the original eight qualifiers for a third place by Ray Oldenburg, the American Mall isn't and never was a third place. It's not a casual place for people in the community to go to. It's, people say that there's no financial barrier for entry, but it is a place of commerce. Like you can't just, you can technically go and not spend money, but it's literally just a whole bunch of stores and restaurants inside of a building. You aren't necessarily going there to meet new strangers. You might be there to meet up with friends, but the purpose of the third place is to try to kind of get to know the community. New people or regulars and strangers alike, regulars and newbies alike are supposed

• 29:51Speaker 01

  to mix and create conversation, create community, build and foster, maintain community bonds, discuss the stuff going on in the community. It's supposed to be a very casual kind of vibe. It's supposed to be a home away from home. And the American Mall just simply isn't that and never was. Some folks disagree because for a lot of people, it is a place to go and we don't have a lot of places to go, especially because of what's called the suburbanization of America, which is something that Robert Putnam talked about in his book Bowling Alone, which is a seminal work that came out around the year 2000. It started off as an article in 1995. It came

• 30:32Speaker 01

  out around the year 2000, his big book, where he also talked about loneliness, but more about disconnection and about how stuff like bowling leagues, stuff like, just places to meet up are disappearing from society and what, if anything, is replacing them. So when it comes to the American mall and it comes to loneliness, you have to start saying, okay, Oldenburg and a lot of people like to create like a platonic ideal out of the neighborhood bar. When you talk about a third place, a lot of people will talk about the TV show Cheers. Do you remember the TV show Cheers? It's about your neighborhood bar, right? It's a place where everybody knows your name. Absolutely. Yeah, they're always glad you came. And that's where you went after work. That's where

• 31:17Speaker 01

  you went on the weekends. That's where your friends were. And anybody from the Harvard and Oxford educated irritated psychologist Dr. Fraser Crane is sitting next to a Midwestern corn-fed himbo in the form of Woody Harrelson. And then there's the out of work accountant. And then all of different stripes, the hierarchy that exists outside of that place doesn't really exist inside of the bar, right? When we talk about third places, people uplift Cheers or the neighborhood bar or something very like it as a platonic ideal of the third place. Ray Oldenburg did that in The Great Good Place, and he really idealized the idea of the neighborhood

• 31:57Speaker 01

  bar. The problem is neighborhood meetup spaces, generally speaking, are disappearing from society as we continue to prioritize homes over mixed-use spaces. So as more and more land is developed into residential neighborhoods, you'll notice it's seas of houses, maybe some sidewalks, connected to other seas of houses, maybe connected to estuaries of roads off into a highway somewhere, and then commerce and the neighborhood bar is actually 20 miles away. Because the alternative would be if you lived in a residential neighborhood, finding out that three doors down, the old Johnson place is getting turned into a neighborhood

• 32:39Speaker 01

  bar, which I think would freak people out in 2025, where it's like a bar serving alcohol where kids could see, like people had this idea that living anywhere near any form of commerce is going to bring in drugs and alcohol and crime and the unhoused and people not like me, and that's a terrible idea. And I want to live in a sea of houses. But the thing is, we also know that those make people very bored and unfulfilled and increased loneliness. All of this is in conversation with what is a third place? What is a third place in the modern day? What do we do to create third places at all? When it comes to the American mall and our

• 33:23Speaker 01

  idealizing of it as a third place, we've already entered into a negotiation of what is a third place? What are we willing to call a third place? No, it doesn't meet all eight. But basically, we are entering into a negotiation where we have decided which version of capitalistic enterprise fits with our version of nostalgia. And in all of that conversation is where do we like to be and where do we like to hang out? The mall, like I said, isn't and never really was intended to be a third place. It was intended to be a main street. It was intended to be a marketplace. It was intended to be a whole bunch of stores inside of a building, which it is. There are some interesting updates to

• 34:05Speaker 01

  that where we have seen some malls that are risk of dying off because they've been dying for a while now become mixed use spaces, but they're becoming mixed use residential spaces where some of the unused shops are being turned into apartments. And that's an interesting kind of way to reclaim those spaces. But we are also seeing other people find unique ways to create third places and also reframe our understanding of what a third place is at all. A lot of people who live in big cities, they think that they have access to a lot more third places, simply because they have a lot more amenities around them, a lot more stuff to do around them. But stuff to do is also not necessarily a third place. There's

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Some really interesting information that came out of the American Community Life Survey telling us that anybody, that people who live in urban areas, yeah, they have more stuff around them. But when they go hang out at that stuff, the people who live in more urban areas, more densely populated areas, aren't talking to people in those coffee shops or restaurants or bars or whatever. They're going and hanging out either with themselves or with their friends. So they're not meeting new people. They're still partitioning themselves off from strangers. Whereas people in more ex-urban or rural areas might have fewer amenities, but they are much more likely to talk to strangers. When it comes to malls, when it comes to third places, when it comes to all of those conversations, it's a big,

• 35:32Speaker 01

  messy conversation about which version of capitalism do you apply, which version of nostalgia to, and was any of it ever actually a third place? Especially because we've been kicking kids out of them for the last 20 years or so.

• 35:48John R. Miles?

  One of the best conversions I saw of a mall was when I was an executive at Lowe's. In Wilkes-Barre, North Carolina, they took the town mall and converted it into the corporate headquarters for a period of time. And then they moved from there to northern suburbs of Charlotte into buildings that had five or six layers and they put all the senior executives on one floor, isolated. And I loved the mall. One, it had this feel that people would say, yeah, I'm where the old JCPenney used to be, or I'm in the old Sears Automotive, or I'm in the old juice place, or the old ice cream store. But because of

• 36:30John R. Miles?

  the way that they're designed to have the whole cafeteria ecosystem around the center of the mall, it made the senior leadership very accessible to the rest of the company. And you'd see them walking around. And it just made it so that they would stop by cubicles and talk to people a lot more. And then when we moved to the Charlotte location, they started to isolate more to that top floor. And so you were summoned up there. Had their own chef and I just sought to start to create over time a real difference in the accessibility

• 37:08John R. Miles?

  to the senior executives and who was able to to be around them that really had a profound shift. To me, it was a really interesting dynamic of

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Oh, I think they're really interesting. All of the different ones that I've seen that have been converted into these like residential mixed use spaces. I'm just like, man, especially here in the Chicago area, like I'm just imagining like waking up and it's a blizzard outside, but I don't have to go anywhere because I could just go downstairs to eat or go downstairs to the bookstore or go downstairs to the movie theater and just spend my whole day inside. There's a lot of positives to it. And also it gives people like accessible housing in much more densely populated areas that they might not otherwise have been able to afford. So it's a really cool thing. It's really cool evolution of the mall. And I know that there's a mall near me that's nearing extinction that they're considering turning into a water park, at least part of it turning into a water park.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  And I'm like, well, I don't know about that in the middle of winter here in the Chicagoland area. But it's interesting to see what the next evolution for the American mall might be because they've been struggling to stay afloat in a lot of places.

• 38:17John R. Miles?

  Yeah, well, I wanted to have a different shift in the conversation and talk about minority communities because I think it's important, particularly LGBTQ and people of color. And it seems that they experience loneliness different. What did you find in the data that mainstream conversations are missing?

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Again, just like talking about young people, usually when we talk about loneliness, we talk about it in big broad strokes data, which typically centers the cisgender heterosexual white experience. However, to no one's surprise, whenever you start intersecting that data with any kind of marginality. So if you're a person of color, if you're disabled, if you're a queer person, you experience much greater loneliness. It turns out if you are ostracized from society already.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  That that disconnection is just greater. It's just bigger and worse. However, what's fascinating about looking at marginalized communities and loneliness is how marginalized and oppressed communities have risen to create community where they otherwise would not have had any. So I'll just talk about the queer community experience. If you have young children listening, I'm going to mention a couple of things and you're warned. Queer people have historically created community in some rather interesting places. If you know the singer Bette Midler, she actually has a nickname called Bath House Betty, and that's because she used to sing in bathhouses in New York.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  And I'm not going to go into much more detail about that, but it will tell you that for a good period of time, queer folks created community in and around spaces where basically nobody else wanted them and they were allowed to exist. So bars, bathhouses, other places that kind of existed on the edges of legality. And it's in those spaces, it's out of those spaces that like, community was formed. Basically, if you've ever seen that cartoon where there's a whole bunch of people and they're in a little box and they're like, well, you can't be in here. And so this other person goes and creates their own little box. It's that. Marginalized and oppressed communities are actually brilliant at meeting the needs

• 40:35Speaker 01

  of their own community and creating community spaces, which is why they are so hesitant at times to welcome outsiders into their spaces. But if you experience an intersection of marginality, you are typically just inherently more lonely than other people because you are already experiencing being ostracized from society at large.

• 40:59John R. Miles?

  And Don, your podcast, Head on Fire, celebrates curiosity and challenges conventional wisdom. How do you feel hosting that show has changed the way, since 2009, of the way you see yourself in the world? I know for me, it does, just from the variety of guests that I get to interview, like yourself.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, focused on talking to people in overlooked or misunderstood fields. I really formed a huge appreciation just for expertise and for what expertise means. Like, I've talked to a mycologist about how studying fungus on fruits greatly impacts the American diet and pesticides and all of that. I've talked to a woman who studies sound, like ocean sounds, and what we are learning about the memory of the planet and also how it's made her a better cellist. I talked to Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize, senior art critic for New York Magazine, just like about the value of opinion and the democratization of criticism and what that means and whose

• 42:04Speaker 01

  opinion matters. And I've just really formed a deep appreciation for what it means to be an expert. And I just think it's really cool that people have these like deep wells of knowledge. And what I've learned about it is that there is so much out there that I don't know and that excites me because I get to spend the rest of my life learning.

• 42:24John R. Miles?

  I love that answer. Why do you think people are so hungry for that type of content right now?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh. Well, one, I think people are interested in lives that aren't like theirs.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  But two, I also think right now we are just hungry for expertise. We're just hungry for people that like are just genuinely interested in making the world a better place and doing that through good research and good faith interrogation and willingness to admit that you don't know something and intellectual curiosity to go find it out. And I think people are really hungry to see folks in positions of leadership or positions of authority, one, admit when they don't know something, and two, model just what what being an expert means. It doesn't mean that you know everything. It means you know how to learn and it means how to maybe teach that to other people. And I think people are just so hungry for people who are just trying to make the world

• 43:20Speaker 01

  a better place in their one little weird niche area.

• 43:26John R. Miles?

  Yeah, and one of the things that as I was researching, you seem to cut across everything is that you use storytelling to cut through the noise. And it's allowed you to build followings of hundreds of thousand on social platforms and other things. Why do you think this storytelling is so important to cover often misunderstood topics or overlooked topics?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  I talk about big stuff. My research, my books, my platform is used to talk about systemic problems, homophobia, transphobia, racism, bigotry, immigration, yada. My work has talked about all the stuff that you're not supposed to talk about at dinner, right? Religion, death, loneliness, big conversations that are like, we're not supposed to talk about that. We're supposed to talk about the weather and whether or not your car is working or something. But I talk about those things and I think that storytelling allows me an avenue of permission to talk about these things with my audience because nobody ever feels talked down to and nobody ever feels bored. But also, we don't ever skimp on the research either.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  You're going to come away from my social media content, you're going to come away from my books, you're going to come away from whatever it is that I'm creating. Hopefully, that's the goal of not only being informed, but you're going to laugh along the way. You're going to realize that even though, you know, the night is dark and full of terrors, you can learn about it in a way that feels uplifting and hopeful. A lot of times, we engage with deep, dark topics, loneliness, death, religion, politics, all of those kinds of things and come away just feeling really depressed and hopeless. And who am I? I'm one person. I don't matter. And I think, bringing it back to something that you all talk about, I think giving people

• 45:13Speaker 01

  a sense of purpose and a sense that this information isn't too much for you. You can learn it. You can learn a new thing. You can embrace a new thing. You can talk about the big scary stuff in life and your opinion on it, your involvement in it, your even just your willingness to learn about it matters because you matter. You as a cog in a machine, you as one of 380 something million people, you as one of 7 billion people, you still matter and you can make an impact because real impact isn't necessarily made at the national or international level is most often made and felt most deeply at the

• 45:54Speaker 01

  community level, at your street level, in your home. And I think that storytelling and invite is an invitation into a bigger conversation that other people that that you might otherwise think you don't really, it's too big, it's too scary, it's too much. I don't even want to broach it because I just don't, my anxiety can't handle it. My mental health can't handle it. But if if we start off by talking about animal crossing, if I'm a little self-deprecating, if I invite you into the conversation and reframe things in a way that feels accessible, approachable and uplifting, not only can you learn, but you can learn how you matter inside of all of it.

• 46:33John R. Miles?

  I love that answer. Well, Don, minutes before I started talking to you today, I was texting with a friend of mine who was the former chief astronaut of NASA and

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 46:46John R. Miles?

  I want to ask you a fun question. So

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 46:49John R. Miles?

  You are transported into becoming an Artemis astronaut and you are put on the first mission to Mars and told that you, as one of the first astronauts, have a role in deciding what this new planet is going to be like for the future. If you could redesign one element of modern life on Mars to help us feel less alone, what would you change first?

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I actually, I'm gonna steal an answer from one of the people that I interviewed. And it was a woman named Sherry, who spent decades as a city planner. And I asked her a similar question. I said, okay, so you have a magic wand and you can change one thing about society. What would you change? And she's, okay, so if it's not mixed use spaces, if it's just like something magical, I would move the garage behind the house. And I was like, what do you mean? She was like, we aren't entering or exiting our homes from our front doors anymore. And in my experience as a city planner, people self-reported feeling lonelier in places where the garage is in front of the door.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Because we are entering and exiting our homes through our garage. We are entering and exiting our homes through our cars. So that even that little bit of time that we spend going in and out of our front door, waving at our neighbors, seeing how lives are being lived next to us, across from us. We're not getting that anymore. We haven't gotten that in a really long time. So I think some level of putting people in proximity to one another and encouraging one another to literally just spend time with each other. Going in and out of your front door, more mixed use spaces, communities that are actual communities and not just isolated islands of big boxy houses. I think that starts at the street level. That starts at creating connection with the people on your street.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna steal that and I'm gonna say that.

• 48:46John R. Miles?

  Well, I guess the house I just bought fits that description because...

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Mine does too. In fact, so I interviewed her last year. We bought a house this year and I am not kidding you, that was a factor. That was a factor when I was deciding which neighborhood I wanted to live in. That was a factor when I was deciding which house I wanted to buy, that the garage is behind the house. And I'm trying to make it an effort of going in and out my front door, of sitting on my front porch, of getting to know my neighbors, waving at folks across the street. And just living here the last couple of months, I've already felt a little bit safer, which is a big deal to say right now. As a queer person married to a queer Mexican immigrant just outside Chicago,

• 49:31Speaker 01

  where the president is sending ICE all the time, just the idea that I am in a community that... At least knows who I am and at least on the surface seems to care and check in and wave every now and then. It just creates a sense of safety. It creates a sense of belonging and it's that sticky stuff that connects you to community. And yeah, I did the same thing. I bought my house with that in mind.

• 49:55John R. Miles?

  I have a funny story for you. First house I ever bought was in La Mesa, California. We lived in this very blue collar neighborhood, but every single house had exactly as we're describing. You would walk up and the garage would be right next to your front door. And I will tell you, I have never been in a neighborhood that had so much neighborhood connection as that one. And all my neighbors were electricians and plumbers and this and that. And we would hang out on the street corners and have big neighborhood get togethers. And I remember the first time my parents visited, and my dad is now 87, he said to me, why did you

• 50:36John R. Miles?

  buy a house with the garage door facing the street? He goes, I have always hated that. And we always buy houses where it's on the side or behind. And so the houses after that I was buying were moving away from that just because of that comment that my father made. But this one, obviously, we decided to go back to our roots. And now we have almost daily conversations with our neighbors who are out in their front yards too. And it's really made for people walking their dogs or something else.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, people know my dog's name. People ask about him. It's a much different experience. I grew up in an extremely rural area for the last, better part of the last decade. My husband and I lived on a horse ranch. Me getting to be in community, in neighborhood, in a neighborhood with neighbors is a new experience. And I just, it's just, it's been a wild transformation in my own life and in my own happiness and own sense of belonging. That's what I would use my little magic wand or spaceship or something to do. Stick us in more community with one another.

• 51:40John R. Miles?

  So Don, throughout today, we've been talking about your new book, Where Did Everybody Go: The Loneliness Crisis Unpacked. For people who want to learn more about you, where are the best places for them to go?

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Well, I've made it very easy for people. So you can find everything by Don Martin at BuyDonMartin.com, B-Y-D-O-N-M-A-R-T-I-N. There's links to all of my books. There's links to my podcast. You can find my podcast, Head on Fire, wherever you get your podcasts. And I'm all over social media. Once again, made it really easy for you, at BuyDonMartin, B-Y-D-O-N-M-A-R-T-I-N. So TikTok, Instagram, Threads, pretty much anywhere. I'm also on YouTube, though I don't do a lot with it, but I'm accepting cross-post interviews and social media content and stuff. But yep, I'm all over there.

• 52:25John R. Miles?

  Probably a smart thing, because I struggle so much with understanding their algorithm.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  That YouTube comment section gets real bad, real quick and scary.

• 52:36John R. Miles?

  Don, thank you so much for joining us today on Passion Struck. And congratulations on the release of this latest book.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Thanks, John, so much. Thanks for having me.

• 52:44John R. Miles?

  That's a wrap on today's timely, deeply human conversation with Don Martin. I hope it helped you feel a little more connected to yourself, to your people, and to the world we're all navigating together. Here are a few reminders to carry with you. First, loneliness is not a flaw. It's a biological signal that we're wired for relationship. Second, disconnection is rarely personal. It's structural, cultural, and far more common than we admit. And the antidote to loneliness isn't more people. It's more meaningful people. If this episode resonated with you, please take 60 seconds to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify. It's the single most powerful way to help new listeners discover these conversations. Want to go deeper? Join me at theignitedlife.net for weekly insights,

• 53:29John R. Miles?

  behind-the-scenes notes, as well as workbooks. Subscribe to the Passion Struck and Passion Struck Clips YouTube channels for full episode shorts and bonus content. And visit startmattering.com to wear your purpose and remind yourself and others that you matter. On Friday, instead of my typical solo episode, we continue the irreplaceables with a conversation that dives into a different force that isolates us. Not loneliness this time, but vengeance. My guest is James Camel Jr., Yale lecturer and psychiatrist. And author of the groundbreaking new book, The Science of Revenge. James has spent decades studying why the human brain craves retaliation, how grievance becomes addiction, and why forgiveness, far from weakness,

• 54:12John R. Miles?

  is actually a neurobiological recovery. In our conversation, we explore why revenge activates the same neural pathways as drugs and gambling, and how each of us can interrupt the revenge loop before it destroys our peace, purpose, and relationships.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  There's this science story that shows that revenge-seeking actually activates the same pleasure and reward circuitry as addiction, and that your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. And that's a huge discovery, just happened over the last 20 years. And it's of momentous importance because revenge has been shown in multiple forms of data, public health data, the CDC's National Violent Death Reporting System, and the FBI's National Crime Reports, and also behavioral studies around the world, that revenge is the primary root motivation for almost all forms of human violence and intentionally inflicted suffering.

• 55:08John R. Miles?

  Until then, remember, to matter is to be seen, to be seen is to be known, and every revolution begins with one intentional act of paying deeper attention. I'm John Miles, and you've been passion struck.