Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection

This book is titled after the signature initiative of the Foundation for Art and Healing, established by Nobel in 2016. Its intent was to further discussions and research about loneliness, which was rapidly becoming a national interest, and to provide solutions. When COVID shut down the activities in 2020, Nobel pressed on with research, realizing that loneliness was on its way to becoming the public-health crisis that it is now. Since society began to open up again, the project has expanded exponentially. In this book, the author, a rare combination of primary care physician, public health practitioner, poet and Harvard faculty member, describes loneliness as an inevitable human condition. The book breaks it down into three types (psychological, societal, and existential or spiritual), lists the major circumstances that cause loneliness, and proposes well-researched activities and programs that have proven to be successful in alleviating loneliness.