TED Talks Daily - TED Talks Daily Book Club: You are not alone in your loneliness | Jonny Sun (re-release)

Episode Date: October 26, 2025

Being open and vulnerable with your loneliness, sadness and fear can help you find comfort and feel less alone, says writer and artist Jonny Sun. In an honest talk filled with his signature illustrations, Sun shares how telling stories about feeling like an outsider helped him tap into an unexpected community and find a tiny sliver of light in the darkness.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Happy Sunday. Today we have one final talk worth thinking about while reading TEDx speaker Oliver Berkman's book, Meditations for Mortals, four weeks to embrace your limitations and make time for what counts. We're reading it because we're in the midst of our first ever virtual read-along in the lead-up to our TED Talks Daily Live Book Club conversation happening Tuesday, November 4th. Throughout his book, Oliver Bergman asks us to sit with ourselves, which is work that can definitely make us feel lonely. It made us think of a beautiful talk from 2019 from screenwriter, author, and artist Johnny's son, who alongside his signature

illustrations tells us, we aren't actually alone even in our loneliness. He shares how he learned that being open and vulnerable in these moments and exploring the sadness and fear that he felt once actually led him to a sense of comfort. As Oliver shares in his book, there's profound beauty that can come from embracing vulnerability and our fears and all of life's imperfections. You can follow me on Instagram at Elise Hu,

that's E-L-I-S-E-W-O, or find me on Ted's Instagram where I'll be sharing more thoughts like these leading up to the event on November 4th. If you're intrigued and want to join us, please head to TED.com slash join to sign up and RSVP. But for now, here's Johnny's gorgeous talk. Hello.

I'd like to introduce you to someone. This is Jomni. That's Johnny, but spelled accidentally with an M in case you were wondering, because we're not all perfect. Jomni is an alien. who has been sent to Earth with a mission to study humans. Jomni is feeling lost and alone and far from home,

and I think we've all felt this way. Or at least I have. I wrote this story about this alien at a moment in my life when I was feeling particularly alien. I just moved to Cambridge and started my doctoral program at MIT, and I was feeling intimidated and isolated and very much like I didn't belong. But I had a lifeline of sorts.

See, I was writing jokes for years and years and sharing them on social media, and I found that I was turning to doing this more and more. Now, for many people, the internet can feel like a lonely place. It can feel like a big, endless, expansive void, where you can constantly call out to it, but no one's ever listening. But I actually found a comfort in speaking out to the void. I found in sharing my feelings with the void,

Eventually, the void started to speak back. And it turns out that the void isn't this endless, lonely expanse at all, but instead it's full of all sorts of other people, also staring out into it and also wanting to be heard. Now, there have been many bad things that have come from social media. I'm not trying to dispute that at all. To be online at any given point is to feel so much sadness and anger and violence.

It can feel like the end of the world. Yet at the same time, I'm conflicted because I can't deny the fact that so many of the people, of my closest friends are people that I had met originally online. And I think that's partly because there's this confessional nature to social media. It can feel like you're writing in this personal, intimate diary that's completely private, yet at the same time, you want everyone in the world to read it. And I think part of that, I think the joy of that is that we get to experience things from perspectives, from people who are completely different from ourselves.

And sometimes that's a nice thing. For example, when I first joined Twitter, I found that so many of the people that I was following were talking about mental health and going to therapy in ways that had none of the stigma that they often do when we talk about these issues in person. Through them, the conversation around mental health was normalized, and they helped me realize that going to therapy was something that would help me as well.

Now, for many people, it sounds like a scary idea to be talking about all these topics so publicly and so openly on the internet. I feel like a lot of people think that it is a big, scary thing to be online if you're not already perfectly and fully formed. But I think the internet can be actually a great place to not know. And I think we can treat that with excitement because to me there's something important

about sharing your imperfections and your insecurities and your vulnerabilities with other people. Now when someone shares that they feel sad or afraid or alone, for example, it actually makes me feel less alone, not by getting rid of any of my loneliness, but by showing me that I am not alone in feeling lonely. And as a writer and as an artist,

I care very much about making this comfort of being vulnerable a communal thing, something that we can share with each other. I'm excited about externalizing the internal, about taking those invisible personal feelings that I don't have words for, holding them to the light, putting words to them,

and then sharing them with other people in the hopes that it might help them find words to find their feelings as well. Now, I know that sounds like a big thing, but ultimately I'm interested in putting all these things into small, approachable packages. Because when we can hide them into these smaller pieces, I think they're easier to approach.

I think they're more fun. I think they can more easily help us see our shared humanness. Sometimes that takes the form of a short story. Sometimes that takes the form of a cute book of illustrations, for example. And sometimes that takes the form of a silly, joke that I'll throw on the internet. For example, a few months ago, I posted this app idea for a dog walking service where a dog shows up at your door and you have to get out of the house and go for a walk. If there are app developers in the audience, please sign me after the

talk. Or I'd like to share every time I feel anxious about sending an email. When I sign my email's best, it's short for I am trying my best, which is short for, please don't hate me, I promise I'm trying my best, or my answer to the classic icebreaker, if I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, I would. I am very lonely. And I find that when I post things like these online, the reaction is very similar. People come together to share a laugh, to share in that feeling, and then to disperse just as quickly. But, yes, leaving me once again alone. But I think sometimes these little gatherings can be quite meaningful.

For example, when I graduated from architecture school and I moved to Cambridge, I posted this question. How many people in your life have you already had your last conversation with? And I was thinking about my own friends who had moved away to different cities and different countries even and how hard it would be for me to keep in touch with them. But other people started replying and sharing their own experiences. Somebody talked about a family member they had a falling out with.

someone talked about a loved one who had passed away quickly and unexpectedly. Someone else talked about their friends from school who had moved away as well. But then something really nice started happening. Instead of just replying to me, people started replying to each other. And they started to talk to each other and share their own experiences and comfort each other and encourage each other to reach out to that friend that they haven't spoken to in a while or that family member that they had a falling out with. And eventually, we got this little tiny micro-community.

It felt like this support group formed of all sorts of people coming together. And I think every time we post online, every time we do this, there's a chance that these little micro-communities can form. And sometimes through the muck of the internet, you get to find a kindred spirit. Sometimes that's in the reading the replies

and the comment sections and finding a reply that is particularly kind or insightful or funny. Sometimes that's in going to follow someone and seeing that they already follow you back. And sometimes that's in looking at someone that you know in real life and seeing the things that you write and the things that they write and realizing that you share so many of the same interests as they do

and that brings them closer together to you. Sometimes if you're lucky, you get to meet another alien. But I am worried, too, because as we all know, the internet, for the most part, doesn't feel like this. We all know that, for the most part, the internet feels like a place where we misunderstand each other,

where we come into conflict with each other, where there's all sorts of confusion and screaming and yelling and shouting. And it feels like there's too much of everything. It feels like chaos. And I don't know how to square away the bad parts with the good, because as we know and as we've seen, the bad parts can really, really hurt us.

It feels to me that the platforms that we use to inhabit these online spaces have been designed either ignorantly or willfully to allow for harassment and abuse, to propagate misinformation, to enable hatred and hate speech and the violence that comes from it, and it feels like none of our current platforms

are doing enough to address and to fix that. But still, and maybe probably unfortunately, I'm still drawn to these online spaces, as many others are, because sometimes it just feels like that's where all the people are. And I feel silly and stupid sometimes for valuing these small moments of human connection in times like these.

But I've always operated under this idea that these little moments of humanness are not superfluous. They're not retreats from the world at all, but instead they're the reasons why we come to these spaces. They are important and vital, and they affirm and they give us life. And they are these tiny temporary sanctuaries

that show us that we are not as alone as we think we are. And so one night, when I was feeling particularly sad and hopeless about the world, I shouted out to the void, to the lonely darkness. I said, at this point, logging onto social media feels like holding someone's hand at the end of the world. And this time, instead of the void responding, it was people who showed up.

who started replying to me and then who started talking to each other, and slowly this little, tiny community formed. Everybody came together to hold hands. And in these dangerous and unsure times, in the midst of it all, I think the thing that we have to hold on to is other people. And I know that is a small thing made up of small moments, but I think it is one tiny, tiny sliver of light

in all the darkness. Thank you. Thank you. That was Johnny's son at TED 2019. His talk was originally published in June 2019. And for those of you who are interested in joining us for our last live book club conversation of the year, it's on November 4th with Oliver Berkman.

Visit TED.com slash join to sign up an RSVP. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonzaka Sangmar Nivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisi Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balareso.

I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Thank you.