Episode 498: Sahil Bloom: How Physical Wealth Unlocks Mental, Financial and Relationship Success

Listen to the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoiyKzb-rp4 Why does waking up at 5AM and working out transform losers into winners? In this Fitness Friday episode on the Habits and Hustle podcast, Sahil Bloom joins me to share how a simple 30-day fitness challenge saved a young man's life and why exercise is the "gateway drug" to success in every area of life. We dive into the science behind walking's 60% boost to creative output and why confidence comes from doing hard things repeatedly. Plus, we share the anti-to-do list hack, the energy calendar method, and why "grazing on low-quality tasks" is killing your productivity. Sahil Bloom is an author, investor and former college baseball player at Stanford dedicated to helping others live more fulfilling lives. He is the author of "The Five Types of Wealth," a framework that goes beyond money to prioritize physical health, relationships, mental wellbeing, and purpose. What we discuss: The inspiring story of a suicidal man who found power through 30 days of gym attendance Walking increases creative output by 60% and improves relationship connection How exercise breeds confidence The anti-to-do list: what NOT to do each day for transformation Energy calendar method: color-coding tasks to optimize your life The loneliness tax of personal transformation and why it's worth paying Thank you to our sponsor: Therasage: Head over to therasage.com http://therasage.com/ and use code Be Bold for 15% off Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com http://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers. Magic Mind: Head over to www http://www/.magicmind.com http://magicmind.com//jen and use code Jen at checkout. Momentous: Shop this link https://www.livemomentous.com/?srsltid=AfmBOorDUIZz3psr1Qsq_n1yE8_6JTq_QUFabOO9lH65HDEXCIoJOPLj and use code Jen for 20% off Manna Vitality: Visit mannavitality.com and use code JENNIFER20 for 20% off your order Prolon: Get 30% off sitewide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their 5-Day Program! Just visit https://prolonlife.com/JENNIFERCOHEN and use code JENNIFERCOHEN to claim your discount and your bonus gift. Find more from Sahil Bloom: Instagram: @sahilbloom https://www.instagram.com/sahilbloom/?hl=en Book: The 5 Types of Wealth https://www.the5typesofwealth.com/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaYQQQimA8PREMOfEDEgrn1PVz7e_Cq5cWSR76TkcBSBYCqWFfAYyyUK41Y_aem_MSCXCNvvW3SnqYmH2CKbHA Find more from Jen: Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen https://www.instagram.com/therealjencohen/ Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hi guys, this is Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

• 0:08Jen Cohen?

  Hey friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle Podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up.

• 0:33Jen Cohen?

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• 1:13Jen Cohen?

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• 2:00Jen Cohen?

  Exercising, I think, is the catalyst and it's like a gateway drug to life, in my opinion.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  We're aligned.

• 2:06Jen Cohen?

  We are, because to me, number one, what it does to your brain, like for me, it's not just a physicality, it's like what you do for your mental health, your focus, all the things. I used to do this treadmill, I don't know if you were here yet, Ed, on treadmills. Like, I issued this podcast on treadmills, sorry, I don't think I said that right. So we had two treadmills here, facing each other, and we would walk and talk.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 2:27Jen Cohen?

  Right? Because I think you get way more creative, like, your ideas are better, your energy is better, you think faster. To me, if you don't, if you don't have that as part of your daily habit and ritual, you are really missing out on so much. Like, energy begets energy. When I don't work out, I'm way more lethargic than if I do, even if I'm super tired.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's scientific evidence to support that, by the way, the walking thing.

• 2:53Jen Cohen?

  Tell me.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Stanford researchers did a study on walkers versus non-walkers and found that people who walked had a 60% increase in their creative output and the quality of their creative output than the non-walkers. Similarly, there was a bunch of research done about people walking together and how much more connected those two people feel after walking together versus sitting still together. So like, having hard conversations, one of the best things you can do, actually, is if you're going to have a hard conversation with someone, do it on a walk. Both people end up feeling better about the way that the conversation went.

• 3:24Jen Cohen?

  That's a really great point. You know, me and my husband, for the first, what, like, six years of our life, being married, or maybe even, maybe, I don't remember, we would go for a walk every night, and we'd walk to dinner because we had a destination, right? And it had to be at least two miles, so we would have that time. And I think it was the best habit that I've ever, ever, kind of brought into our marriage, because that's like the way to connect to people and to connect to your partner, whatever. Otherwise, you just get, you like, get lost in the, in the weeds of life, right?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:54Jen Cohen?

  And so, anything involving exercise, and it's not because I'm like a fitness fanatic or whatever, but I think because it does teach you such foundational skills in life, like, discipline and delayed gratification and all these things. If people can just like get to that in their brain, their lives can just be exponentially better.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's why I mean, physical wealth is one of the pillars.

• 4:15Jen Cohen?

  I know.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  It's a huge catalyst.

• 4:17Jen Cohen?

  Let's talk about it.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  I mean, I um, this is like one of my hot takes on life that there's no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5am and works out. And

• 4:25Jen Cohen?

  Totally true.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  I say that over and over again, and people always get outraged by it every time I say it. And what I'm talking about is that it's not about the workout. It's not about it's it's about what it means. It's about the ability that you create when you go and do that is that you convince yourself that you are someone that can do a hard thing. Because it's very hard to wake up early and work out. It's very hard to convince yourself to do that. And so like the first thing I say when a young person comes to me and they're feeling lost in life, feeling stuck is for 30 straight days, wake up at 5am and work out. And I guarantee you will rewire your brain. You will immediately start identifying as a winner if you can do that because you're doing something hard. You're doing something you don't want to do. You're delaying gratification and you will feel the impact of that action after 30 days. You will look different. You will feel different.

• 5:10Jen Cohen?

  Totally.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  You'll be more confident. You'll carry yourself and that has ripple effects into every other area of your life.

• 5:15Jen Cohen?

  100% you just said the the main word, though, confidence. Because I think it breeds confidence because you see yourself doing a hard thing over and over again. You will become you'll have that self efficacy like I can do hard things. I am confident. I can I can finish this thing. And I think that, like I said earlier, is that that's why like I think people are very myopic and they when they think about what exercise really means. And so when I see that as one of your pillars of your wealth of of physicality, I think it's like the number one pillar. It's like the number one. If I was going to do one through five, that's like the first thing because it it does open up all these other channels.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a catalyst into everything else. I I mean, I tell the story of a young man in the book. Throughout the book, there's all these stories of real people that I've interacted with and and tell their stories. And there's a young man who was on the path to killing himself. And he was given a month free pass to go to a gym and decided like, what the hell, I'm going to use it. And he went one day and felt like shit from going. He was like, all right, I'm going to go another day. And he went the second. And then he went the third day, then he kind of felt a little good. He felt a little sore from some of the workouts. So he went the fourth day and he went for 30 straight days. And at the end of the 30 days, he noticed he was getting dressed for work that day and his belt had gone a notch in from where it was.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  And the way he described it was that in that moment, he recognized that he had power, that he had control over the outcomes in his life. And that was something that he hadn't felt. He had felt completely powerless in his life. That was that feeling of feeling lost, feeling stuck. And the fitness was a catalyst because it proved to him that he actually did have that power to make an action, to create an outcome. And that had ripple effects into every other area of his life. And now today, he's inspiring millions of people. He's creating content. He's doing all of these incredible things. And it all started with this 30 day window and that tiny notch in his belt.

• 7:09Jen Cohen?

  That's amazing. I love that story, actually. And I bet you when you were 30 and you were kind of like recalibrating your life and you gained all that weight is because you weren't working out. And then I bet you one of the first things you did was start working out again.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I was drinking six, seven nights a week. I mean, you would like, I'll, we can put a picture in the show notes or we can put it up. I mean, I looked like a different person in a lot of ways and.

• 7:30Jen Cohen?

  I can't imagine. By the way, he looks like an, if you're just listening, he looks like an Abercrombie Fitch model. And then like he said to me before we started, he was, didn't always look like.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  My, uh, my like awkward childhood years of going to Abercrombie and not fitting into the clothes. I feel very, uh, I feel very vindicated right now.

• 7:48Jen Cohen?

  But you were a baseball player, you were an athlete. You had to have looked okay.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  I was very strong. No, I was very strong, but I was like, uh, I was fajacked, if you know what that means.

• 7:55Jen Cohen?

  Like fat jacked.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, we always used to talk about the football guys at Stanford used to talk about having a shallow water body. Where like they had like big traps and shoulders and chest, but their abs were like disgusting. So you'd stand in shallow water and look really good. Uh, I always, that always cracked me up. That's a pretty good, that's a pretty good term. I like that, the shallow water body. Yeah, you should write that down.

• 8:16Jen Cohen?

  Shallow?

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Water body.

• 8:18Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:19Jen Cohen?

  I am going to write it down.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  It's like sloppy lower, but lower abs, but pretty good up top.

• 8:23Jen Cohen?

  I'm going to use that. And then the other was fat jacked.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:26Jen Cohen?

  Fajacked.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Fajacked. Yeah.

• 8:28Jen Cohen?

  That is so hilarious.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Some good terms.

• 8:30Jen Cohen?

  Oh, my God. I love it.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  I'm just creating value. That's, that's why I'm an author, you know, because I come up with these great, uh, great ideas.

• 8:36Jen Cohen?

  That's so good.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I, um. Fitness was definitely a huge catalyst in my life and refinding, A, like just the simple things of walking every single day. I mean, we, I mentioned, we were, we were really struggling to conceive. And that was, that's something, I don't know, there's probably some listeners out there that have experienced this.

• 8:55Jen Cohen?

  Sure.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  It's something that people don't talk about. You bottle it up and you internalize it because it's, it feels like a stigma. And for women in particular, there's this assumption of fault. And my wife carried that burden. And unfortunately, I was not there to either help or bear that burden myself. And frankly, in hindsight, I would argue that it was probably mostly me. Because I was not in any sort of health or shape or stress levels or all of these things that we now know impact fertility, to be there for her in the way that I needed to. And the most beautiful thing in all of this was, made this big change, sold her house, moved back to the East Coast. Within two weeks of getting home, my wife got pregnant naturally. And

• 9:40Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  It was just this like unbelievable example, whatever you believe in, God, energy, whatever it is. It was this unbelievable example of like, when energy comes into alignment, everything falls into place as it should. And I remember so vividly coming home from the hospital after my son was born, pulling onto our street. And we turned into a driveway and like both of our sets of parents who lived in the area were there like cheering in the driveway. And just that moment, like I will never forget that moment of feeling like we were truly home. Like that feeling of having arrived in that way.

• 10:21Jen Cohen?

  I love that. That's so nice. That's so sweet.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Very lucky.

• 10:26Jen Cohen?

  I love that. Is your wife here in LA with you now or no?

• 10:29Speaker 02

  She's not here with me right now. She's back home with our son.

• 10:31Jen Cohen?

  What's your son's name?

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Roman.

• 10:40Jen Cohen?

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• 11:24Jen Cohen?

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• 12:07Jen Cohen?

  Go to prolonlife.com/jennifercohen and use Jennifer Cohen to claim your discount and bonus. That's prolonlife.com/jennifercohen and use code Jennifer Cohen.

• 12:27Jen Cohen?

  And by the way, I didn't even ask you earlier, but what does your sister do now? I'm curious. She said she's such a rock star. I don't even know what she does.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's still a rock star. She's the CEO of a healthcare technology startup in the Boston area.

• 12:40Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  She was a physics major at Yale and then went to Harvard Business School and now is the CEO. You know, it's, it's interesting. So my relationship.

• 12:47Jen Cohen?

  A real loser. You're right.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  But my relationship with my sister is, I write about it and it's, it's um, one of the most beautiful things in all of this, frankly, has been the metamorphosis of that relationship. Because I spent thirty years of my life resenting my sister and feeling competitive and creating this dynamic with her that was fundamentally one of tension and one where like I, I couldn't get over the fact that she was achieving the things that I was supposed to be and that I resented that. And after my son was born, I so clearly remember this one moment. They came down to see him when he came back from the hospital and she has a son who is eleven months older than mine. It was her first and we were together and we took a picture of the two of us holding our, our little boys.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  And I looked at her and I remember this sensation that after thirty years of living together, it was like I was meeting my sister for the first time because we were for the first time in our lives, like we were in the same stage. We were in the same place in our lives. It was no longer this like competitive, you know, resentment, all these things. We were just in it together.

• 13:54Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  And it was this beautiful reminder to me that sometimes relationships blossom and bloom in a new season of your life when they haven't been in the past.

• 14:07Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  And like that relationship and the way that it has bloomed and the way that it has grown and the joy that I, I find in it and that I hope she finds in it is um, is really an amazing thing. It's like, it is really a reminder that there are people that are going to love you deeply that you have not even met yet.

• 14:25Jen Cohen?

  It's so true. I, that, this is what I think, sorry, this, no, no, no. That this is what I think is interesting about you a little bit because like I said, like at the beginning, like, I don't know where you came from. I just started seeing like some posts, some, like some content. And I'm like, wow, this is really deep. I really like this one. I'm, then I'm going to look at this one. And then, and I think like this is your superpower. I think you're really good at like taking some like human feeling and then like creating content around it. That's very, that resonates with a lot of people because all these things that you talk about, like it like, it touches people in a way that's like, yeah, that's, that's. So true, or like, you know, like, I think that, you know, that 10 year old thing, anyone who's a parent can relate to the fact that that happens.

• 15:03Jen Cohen?

  Or when, or when your parent is aging and you only have X amount of time to see them, especially because my mom, she lives on the East Coast. And like I said, like that, I'm like, oh, wow, you're right. Like she's 80. I probably get to see her four times, maybe if I'm lucky. So when you started to kind of like get out of where you were and then move to the East Coast and get your life back. Did you make it? Did you make a decision like, okay, I'm going to start being a content creator. I'm going to start like building my Instagram. Like where did, how did it go from private equity guy, living here to then write like, obviously I get why you're writing books. Cause you're a thinker and all that. But like, is that how it kind of happened with the book?

• 15:42Speaker 02

  So I, um, I had started writing on Twitter originally about a year before we made the big change in our life.

• 15:48Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  And that was, I was stuck at home, like COVID, you live in California, like I was living in the Bay area, the lockdowns happened. I was stuck at home. I was no longer commuting every single day. I was no longer traveling four days a week. I didn't have a social life because you weren't allowed to see anybody.

• 16:02Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  And so I was like, I need something to do to fill the time. And I'd always loved writing, but never had a public outlet for it. At the time, I started writing these like originally threads on Twitter that were about finance, like about business, about finance, about things I was working on. And people had started sharing them. I'd started kind of growing, you know, 15, 20,000 followers, like from 500. And I was like, oh, this is enjoyable. I'm liking this. But what I realized really early on was I didn't really care about business and finance. I cared about humans, like I cared about life, the things that we talk about now. And so I started sort of like slowly broadening, opening the aperture of what I was talking about.

• 16:40Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  And by May of 2021, when that drink with the friend happened, my Twitter platform had grown to maybe like a hundred thousand followers. And there was like seeds of the fact that there might be businesses you could build around it. Um, like people were coming to me, asking about how to build their platform, startups I'd invested in were asking about like wanting to do more storytelling around their businesses. And so I could see a path where there was something else to do. Other than investing, but frankly, when when we left California and when we were moving back to the East Coast, my initial thought was I'm gonna go work at another investment fund.

• 17:16Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Because that was all I knew. And if and like, I come from a very risk averse family.

• 17:20Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  You know, like my dad's a tenured professor, like as risk averse a track as you can have.

• 17:25Jen Cohen?

  What does he do? But what kind of professor, though?

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Economics and demography.

• 17:28Jen Cohen?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So he was, uh, he's been at Harvard for the last 20, 25 years. He was the chair of the economics department at Columbia before that.

• 17:35Jen Cohen?

  Lots of dummies in your life. I don't know how you even handle it.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Like how the expectations around academic orientation were.

• 17:41Jen Cohen?

  Totally. And you're also your mom's Indian. Is your dad Indian too?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  No, my dad's white. My dad is a white Jewish guy from the Bronx.

• 17:47Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay. So, okay, by the way, that's hilarious. So I was gonna say, because I'm Jewish and the Indian culture and the Jewish culture is so similar in the academics and education.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:56Jen Cohen?

  I'm thinking, but now I'm like, okay, well, at least you only have one Indian. You don't have, maybe you have like a Protestant.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 18:02Jen Cohen?

  But you have a Jew and an Indian.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. It was all, yeah, it all, it all added up. Exactly. Exactly.

• 18:08Jen Cohen?

  Oh, my God. Okay.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  But like, I thought I was just gonna go work at another investment fund.

• 18:12Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  And I had no luck finding a new job on the East Coast. And I was interviewing at places and getting rejected from a bunch of things. And my wife was the one that looked at me and was like, and I said to her, I was like, I think I made a terrible mistake. You know, I left, I had a great job in the Bay area. I loved my, you know, colleagues. I loved the people I worked with and for. I didn't like what I was doing. It wasn't a fit for me, but like, I was able to pay the bills. So like, in some ways, it was good. I think I made a terrible mistake. And she just said to me, can't you just do the thing like you're doing on the weekend right now? Can't you just do that like full time?

• 18:46Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  And I had honestly never thought of it. Like, I just, it never crossed my mind that I could like, build my own ecosystem, do my own thing, be an entrepreneur. And until she said that, it was like this snap in my mind of someone believing in you before you believe in yourself.

• 19:00Jen Cohen?

  Totally. Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  And the power that comes from that. And you know, in hindsight, part of that is like, I started dating my wife when she was 15 years old and I was 16. So she had seen. She probably knew me better than I knew myself in some ways and she had seen the journey and my insecurity and my growth. And she had seen the things I was hiding from the world and she could see, she could really see me. And she saw the energy I was getting from this new thing and knew that like, that was the path. And so while I was trying to do all this calculation and be all like quantitative about how to make the next choice and like doing this like Stanford math around all of it. She just saw like, oh, you're really energized by this thing. I can see your heart being pulled towards it. Why don't you go do that?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  And there's something really beautiful about that, like the idea that you can do all the analysis, pros, cons, whatever, weighing of everything. But at the end of the day, your gut, like your instinct, your energy does not lie about these things.

• 19:55Jen Cohen?

  Absolutely not. And what's interesting, cause you come from that background, but a lot of your like thoughts and ideas are like anti, like even you're like, I want to go, I want to go through some of these. Like one of your things I saw is like the anti to do list, right?

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So the anti to do list is the idea of like avoiding things during the day rather than just thinking about what you need to do.

• 20:16Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  So you have like, you have your to do list. Everyone has theirs. It's probably way too long if I had to guess. And the anti to do list is like, what do I need to not do during this day? And it changes from time to time. Like you have different things that you're trying to avoid. But what I have found is that creating an awareness around the things that I'm trying not to do during the day is just as important as knowing what I want to do.

• 20:37Jen Cohen?

  So good. Yes. I love that.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  So like things on mine would be like, don't complain. That's been a big one for me. Like I just naturally default to like complaining about stupid things. But if you have that in front of you and you're like, okay, I'm not going to complain today. I need to like actually check that off. When you start finding that you're getting pulled that way, you like stop in your tracks. Or, you know, not having my phone out in front of my son has been a big one and a very challenging one for me. But awareness around the things that you're trying to avoid is powerful because people, people think that transformation comes from taking specific actions. It also comes from avoiding specific actions that are holding you back. Like sometimes growth actually comes from not doing the thing that is holding you back, cutting the boat.

• 21:20Jen Cohen?

  It's so true because it's actually this idea, and I agree with that. People think something's wrong, they add something versus take it away. And a lot of times when you like take things away, it actually is much more beneficial.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:33Jen Cohen?

  In a way.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  It's sort of like another way of saying it is like to become who you want to be, you have to unbecome who you previously were. And a lot of that comes from destruction, like you have to destroy the old version of you.

• 21:47Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, deconstruct it.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's a loneliness that comes in that too, that I think often goes unsaid. That like when you are changing, when you are transforming, when you're living a different way, defining your priorities different from your surroundings, there is going to be a period of loneliness in doing that because you are no longer going to be well-suited to your surroundings, your environment. The people that you felt aligned with, all of a sudden start feeling like they're speaking a different language. You almost like cannot communicate because that alignment no longer exists. And you haven't made enough progress to attract the new into your life. You haven't created those new relationships or had that texture with new people. And so there's a period where you feel alone on these journeys.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  And what provided solace to me in all of that was viewing that period of loneliness as a tax, quote unquote, on that personal transformation. Like a necessary thing that you have to pay, a burden that you have to endure in order to get the gold that's on the other side.

• 22:49Jen Cohen?

  I think that's so true and I, you know, I think we do a lot of behaviors and stay in relationships even because we're trying to avoid that loneliness feeling, right? Like we get to, we distract ourselves with whatever we can, be it a bad relationship, too much work, whatever that bad habit or ritual is, just because we don't want to feel lonely. And I think that's exactly what we, I think that's like, that's another thing, that's human nature, right? And I think it's, it takes a lot of strength to like encourage to not do that and be, I guess, self-awareness to do something different. So you can have maybe a better outcome later on.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's also reframing what loneliness means. I think our default setting is to Say that loneliness is like not being around people. But I think the loneliest thing in the world is being around people that don't understand you. Totally true. And don't see you for who you are. Like being, you can be in a crowded room, but if those people don't really know you, that is the loneliest feeling in the world. And the flip side of that is if you were around one person who truly sees you for who you are, you will never feel lonely.