Honestly, the number of lonely people is probably far greater than you can imagine. I remember reading a statistic from a local male suicide prevention group that said a third of all men have no close friends either nearby or at all. Include people with friends that are still feeling lonely, and obviously other genders, and you’re easily looking at most people being lonely.

Many of my close friends moved away for work, and I’ll be doing the same soon. Most of them don’t even know that I have a child now, let alone regularly speak. It’s quite sad really, and it only seems to get worse when you get older.

I had a brilliant idea for a app during college. It connected self-identified lonely nerds with other self-identified lonely nerds. Like “Oh you like anime, here is this other guy, and here are five events you can attend together.” I was hoping for that Zuckerberg money if this app was a hit.

I ran it through a test trial with a dozen pairings of them in my college campus to see if it had value.

And yeah, a lot of the feedback was that the other person was kind of annoying/intolerable. Which was funny when both of them said that about each other.