Published on

April 20, 2026

What is Loneliness, really?

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s still singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

— “Bluebird” by Charles Bukowski

Boy Meets D&D

I’ve struggled for a long time to make friends. Growing up, I remembered being the person who had to walk behind the group because there was no room on the sidewalk. The one who couldn’t join any of the games that had formed at recess. The one who had nobody to sit down with at each lunch period. Everybody seemed to be part of a puzzle, and I felt like I wasn’t even part of the same set.

It really wasn’t until high school that I would begin making real friends. There was another nerdy kid who I had in a few of my classes. He dressed eccentrically, like he was from a different time period. And he introduced this little game to me called “Dungeons and Dragons”. A make-believe game? Really?

That was the year that the fifth edition of D&D was released. He walked me through making my first character, a tiefling bard (I know, stereotypical), and I went through my first one-shot. It was magical. It was freeing. But most importantly, it felt like something that could be mine.

Our little one-shot turned into a long-running campaign, which turned into a larger group campaign. I ended up meeting many new friends who had the same obsession for rolling dice and making really dramatic speeches. This ritual of ours took us through several campaigns and throughout high school.

D&D had become the missing puzzle piece that helped me fit in. I did end up being part of a different set. I just couldn’t see it.

In this modern world, and especially amongst my generation, it seems like we are becoming more and more atomized. A lot of us feel like puzzle pieces that have been mixed into the wrong pile. It’s not just a feeling, but it’s a fact. Roughly 32% of Americans report loneliness, with the highest rates in young adults aged 18 to 34 at 43.3%. Honestly, that number is probably underreporting a large portion of my generation who have checked out, completely severed from the ties of society.

Ironically, D&D has had this stereotype of being a hobby for social rejects. Theatre kids, geeks, nerds, and losers. However, as the world becomes increasingly lonely, we have all become social rejects in a way. TTRPGs may provide a model for us to bring people together.

Naming the BBEG

To have a productive conversation, one must properly name the villain. Just like how D&D demons hide their true names to maintain their power, loneliness will become less powerful when we understand what it actually is.

The clinical definition is a bit counterintuitive. Loneliness is “the subjective feeling of being isolated”, and that comes from a gap between desired and actual levels of social connection. So, having too few connections, insufficient social support, or low-quality interactions can make you feel lonely. That last point is important. It’s how you can be a kid at a busy playground, and still sit alone at the swings. More isn’t always the answer.

Social isolation is a specific concept within loneliness, defined as a lack of roles, relationships, or contacts with others. This is that “lost puzzle piece” feeling. You can be socially isolated without feeling lonely, and you can feel deeply lonely inside a full social life. It’s your relationship to your relationships that makes it feel lonely.

The Biological Machinery

Loneliness isn’t just a feeling. It has a real, physical origin.

A lone wolf is at risk of being preyed upon by other predators. When we no longer have a “pack”, our threat-detection systems are activated. Our brains scan for danger. Social rejection feels bad because it triggers the same neural pathways as physical pain, and activates the fear response in our brains (the amygdala)

This hypervigilance amplifies feelings of vulnerability, while also increasing our desires to be connected. This diminishes the quality of our sleep and increases our risk of mortality. The health impacts of loneliness when we perceive a lack of meaningful relationships are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness shortens lives.

The social impact is nothing to dismiss either. Lonely people become less socially capable over time, as the brain keeps on perceiving all new relationships as dangerous and scary. This becomes a negative feedback loop. The low self-esteem and negativity make new relationships harder. When those relationships don’t work out, it reinforces the “truth” that relationships are scary.

The lonelier somebody gets, the harder it becomes to do the things that would fix it.

Who actually feels the loneliest? There are two peaks. The first one is with older populations who have often had their communities eroded over time as they age. The second peak is young adults. The second trend is new and has only been growing in the last few decades.

Rolling Alone

When I moved to Los Angeles, the move was daunting. I didn’t know anybody outside of my work, and I wanted to be plugged in somewhere. The problem made itself very clear. Where do you go? I tried Meetup events. I went to parties. Even to bars. Local places like churches. It all felt exhausting. There was nobody my age. Nobody I could really relate to. Everybody had their own established groups. I was a lone puzzle piece all over again.

Robert Putnam's seminal work, Bowling Alone, documented what happened. Since the 1970s, the civic infrastructure where friendships used to form by accident has quietly disappeared: volunteering, churches, bowling leagues, the "third places" that weren't work or home. Americans aged 15 to 24 now spend 70% less time attending or hosting parties than they did in 2003. Things are much worse than when Putnam wrote his book. With that infrastructure gone, friendships aren't formed by default anymore. They have to be built intentionally, painfully, and scarcely.

The Zero Calorie Solution

Gen Z and Millennials are trying to fight this trend through the power of technology. But digital interactions are like the zero-calorie version of soda. It doesn’t actually quench your thirst.

Digital interactions on social media give us a sense of control. A perfectly manicured profile, responses you can edit, and you don’t have to meet face to face. Control kills vulnerability, and relationships require vulnerability. This is compounded by the fact that the brain-rotting aspects of social media pervert our view of the outside world. You don’t have to meet other people when you can make your own echo chambers. And when real-world relationships don’t match our perfectly walled-off digital gardens, we retreat to our online havens.

In the last few years, multiple apps like MeetUp, Timeleft, 222, and other relationship apps have sprung up. It’s taken the younger generation by storm. These apps are similar, but vary in their approach. MeetUp hosts groups that have recurring events. Timeleft creates curated experiences with strangers across cities, and 222 brings together people for a dinner every week. The apps are great at getting people in the same room. But proximity isn’t a replacement for deep friendships. Fundamentally, none of these apps actually creates deep relationships. They solve the scarcity of people problem, but they get you in the same room once and give you no reason to come back with the same group, which is the only thing that actually turns strangers into friends.

How to Level Up a Friendship

What the apps mixed up was that modern life does not have a “scarcity of people” problem. With the internet and our global interconnectedness, we know several magnitudes more people than our ancestors did. And yet, they made more meaningful relationships than some of us do. What was their secret formula? The research is clear. Three things consistently appear.

Repeated contact. Physical closeness and frequency of contact are the baseline. People are more likely to form friendships with those who live nearby, especially if they have frequent accidental contact with them. This mechanism increases attraction in both parties because of the familiarity. With the advent of remote work, car culture, and the atomization of social life, all of these accidental meetings slowly get eroded. We don’t run into friends at the store anymore.

Progressive Self Disclosure. As friends get deeper with each other, individuals shift from discussing fewer and shallower topics to discussing deeper, more personal, and more thought-provoking concepts. The Fast Friends Procedure (Aron et al., 1997) showed how even a single structured 1-hour conversation could create genuine closeness between strangers. One group of strangers even got married after they met through the study.

Vulnerability. A friendship without vulnerability will always feel hollow. We build walls over time to hide who we really are. Really healthy relationships are those that allow us to bring down those walls, and that vulnerability needs to be mutual.

The problem is that modern life makes it difficult for these factors to exist. A 222 dinner provides proximity, but no personal disclosure. A work happy hour provides contact, but work norms prevent one from being vulnerable. Most adult interactions are shallow and lack the mechanisms that make relationships work.

Belonging is not about getting invited. It is being understood. And that understanding requires structure.

Unfortunately, many of us were never taught how to build it.

Never Split the Party

Looking back at high school, the people I formed the deepest bonds with were all part of my same D&D group. Hanging out after school, at a local cafe, and rolling dice was immensely fun. I didn’t realize that it was helping us build a bond at the time.

Turns out, the research agrees that D&D is great for you. Frequency of play was negatively associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety. TTRPG-mediated interventions had the potential to reduce gaming disorder symptoms, lower social anxiety, and reduce loneliness, according to a Royal Society study in 2025. Players end up developing lifelong bonds through the development of rapid, strong relationships with other players.

It’s why you hear about groups who are still playing with each other, even those who started with the D&D red box.

So, why does it work?

Let’s review the last chapter for the mechanisms behind bond formation.

The campaign format itself builds contact frequency in a way that modern life doesn’t provide. When the scheduling BBEG is defeated, players get access to the same people, same time, week after week. It’s a spiritual successor to the bowling league, a recurring ritual. This repeated contact with a fixed group is what D&D is based on, and what provides that structure for friendship.

Here’s what makes D&D different from so many other social activities. Characters act as a mirror for the player’s deeper values, fears, emotions, and being. It breaks down barriers because you “you don't have to be yourself straight away.” By creating what researchers call a “therapeutic allibi”, TTRPGs provide a unique way for players to work through personal issues, while keeping it at an arms reach of their true self. By the time that character has worked through all of their issues, the player already has. PCs provide a safe place for self-disclosure.

Finally, D&D is great at providing a crucial aspect missing from many young adults’ lives: vulnerability. For adults who have been burned socially (which is a lot), players can be vulnerable with each other without social risk. Because the dragons aren’t real, players can experiment. They can be more assertive, try new jokes, become leaders, and experience vulnerability without fearing real-world rejection. Mistakes are just simply bad rolls and choices in the story, not real life.

[D&D] allows you to experience things in a way that is different from the way you would experience them if they happened to you. There's a sort of psychological distance between you and whatever you're engaging in.

— William Nation, John Hopkins Psychologist

A lonely person’s brain sees all social relationships as dangerous. But, by providing a safe environment, where vulnerability doesn’t have the same catastrophic perception, a lonely person can begin to feel less lonely.

Knowing Your Role(playing) in the Story

The contact, the disclosure, the vulnerability. Those explain the mechanics of why D&D works. But they don't explain why it feels like something is at stake. That comes from something deeper. At the heart of loneliness is an implicit statement. “Who I am does not matter to others”. Your identity is that of somebody who can’t relate to others.

At the core of roleplaying’s psychological impact is assuming a new role. RPGs are unique in that you can choose an identity for yourself. Unlike other hobbies, you are not passively observing characters, but embodying them. This allows players to experiment with new roles and allows them to break free of their perceptions of self. Visualization is an important mental tool that turns the impossible into the possible.

Characters are blank canvases where players have the freedom to customize their characters to reflect themselves. A bit of a writer exists in every book. The same goes for RPGs. And, these characters have real agency in shaping the outcomes of the story, develop as characters, and make choices that have real consequences. It’s no wonder that people treat character death so personally. On some degree, it was deeply personal. It was like a part of them died.

This connects to one of the most important findings about loneliness. Meaning in life was found to be one of the most important predictors of loneliness, comparable to health status and social connectedness. If you don’t believe that you have a purpose to be here, if you don’t believe that your presence (or absence) would affect the world, it’s really easy to feel alone.

By giving players a role in a story that matters, within a group that shares the stakes, meaning begins to form. D&D gives you a role that matters, not just to the table, but to the players surrounding you. It builds the same meaning that replaces the one that loneliness erodes.

Not all Parties are the Same.

Now, I wish I could end this article on something as simple as just play more D&D. It’s not that simple. If anything, playing at the wrong table can make you feel like you’re the wrong puzzle piece all over again. Although this time, it’s a game that genuinely means so much to you. D&D provides the backbone for bonding. But those conditions only activate, when the table is compatible. When they want to stay together. Not all tables produce the mechanisms for fixed and recurring proximity, escalating disclosure, or shared vulnerability.

A player who needs deep emotional roleplay sitting at a table of combat tacticians aren’t being bulled. They are invisible. Their needs aren’t acknowledged by the group. Presence without inclusion, and contact without recognition, week after weeks produces agony. The pain of being present but not belonging is dreadful. No matter how people are left out, their response is swift and powerful, and that social agony feels the same neurologically as actual pain.

And that is where the real danger lies. A group technically solves physical loneliness. But, if they don’t share your actual play preferences, you can feel atomized again. It’ll be hard to become intimate, because the table dynamics don’t create the conditions for it. When everybody else is having fun but you, it feels lonely. Then, your brain updates, confirming your worst fears. You don’t just think “I need a better table”. You dread that “I’m not someone people want to play with.”

Loneliness is about the quality of relationships, not quantity. Poor quality relationships are like junk food. Yes, you could potentially quiet your hunger a bit with it, but should you really be stuffing your body with food that doesn’t have the nutrients you need?

I thought I was the wrong player for a long time. I thought my tables collapsed because of what I did. It turns out, I was just playing in the wrong campaign.

That matters more than it sounds. Loneliness convinces you that you’re the problem. That the gap between you and others is permanent. D&D, at the right table, is one of the few places where that story gets interrupted. Because the right group of people, showing up week after week to build something together, makes it impossible to keep believing you don't belong.

The puzzle piece was never broken. It was just in the wrong pile.

— Astro