You have to be in it together—and “it” can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.

A one-way relationship can’t cure loneliness. Only two-way (or more) relationships can do that.

Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.”

Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else.

“When work is enriching, life is fuller, and that spills over into the things you do outside work,” he said to me. But “when it’s deadening,” you feel “shattered at the end of the day, just shattered.”

To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you.

To end loneliness, you need to have a sense of “mutual aid and protection,” John figured out, with at least one other person, and ideally many more.

So every human instinct is honed not for life on your own, but for life like this, in a tribe. Humans need tribes12 as much as bees need a hive.

“You can get real in-depth and intellectual with all that stuff, but when it comes down to it—doing anything, and not having a purpose behind it, and then feeling like you don’t have any other option except to continue: it’s terrible. At least for me, it turns into—well, what’s the point?”