If we remembered that loneliness once meant oneliness, how might we begin to reimagine how we love, work, and share a world?
Monika Jiang is a writer, speaker, and experience designer, previously Head of Curation and Community at House of Beautiful Business, featured in Fast Company, and on global stages from TEDx to Accor Asia Leadership Conference to Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Modern loneliness is not only what you think it is.
It lies beneath our constant overwhelm, stress, anxiety, depression, rising burnout rates and declining friendship rates. Inside our workplaces and organizations, hidden in workaholism and disengagement, and the myth of self-reliant leadership. In our relentless self-optimization culture and influencer syndrome, AI relationships, and the attachment economy. Within the design of our cities and in the abandoned countryside. There’s political loneliness, in the longing for a shared reality that no longer exists, in polarization, in the populisms that organize that longing into fear. And ecological and spiritual loneliness, in climate fatigue and anxiety, in new-age spirituality filling the space that shared ritual left behind, in the longing to believe in something greater than ourselves.
Once you are willing to see it, loneliness is everywhere. We built our world from the fear of it.
Oneliness is a response to it.
A naming of the simple and profound truth that we have always been alone and in relationship, that we deeply interdependent, and that loneliness is personal and universal, structural and political and systemic, all at once.
To remember and reimagine our fundamental relational nature, and to live from it as a principle and a philosophy.
In how we gather. In how we work. In how we lead. In how we organize our world.
That is what this work is about.
Read essays and listen to podcast conversations on oneliness with researchers, practitioners, and changemakers.
How people are resonating
"It has been enormously helpful for me and the well-being of my relationships! I have also found that learning about loneliness from you has really eased and normalized my own moments of loneliness - thank you friend! So thankful for your beautiful and impactful work!"
— Jenna A.
“I have read your insightful content for a while now, and I am extremely impressed with your forensic-like literary skills. Your gentle manner and clear empathy for your subject matter are truly impressive. You have a very interesting take on the subject, and a voice like yours needs to be heard at the highest levels.”
— Jeremy W.
"What a beautifully reframed lens on loneliness, one that doesn't pathologize or isolate, but invites connection, reflection, and cultural healing. Your talk feels like a deep exhale in a world that often rushes to "fix" what might first need to be felt. I was especially moved by your invitation to listen to loneliness rather than silence it. I enjoyed some of your live sessions, and it echoed something I've long sensed: that solitude, in its truest form, can be a doorway, not a dead end. 🔥❤️"
— Borja L.
Want to work together? Here are three ways.
Bring Oneliness to You
Keynotes · Workshops · Moderation
Talks on loneliness as a structural, ecological, and political condition
Workshops that go beneath the surface: on friendship, masculinity, loneliness at work, community
Moderation and hosting that creates genuine presence
For organizations, conferences, festivals, and leadership teams
Design with Oneliness
Curation · Experience Design
Experience design for community-driven gatherings, conferences, cultural events (online or IRL)
Conversation and gathering architecture that turns people toward each other
Curatorial thinking for programmes that hold together as a coherent inquiry
Immersive formats for organizers, institutions, and organizations ready to go beyond the standard format
One on Oneliness
Facilitation and Public Speaking Coaching
Learn how I create intimacy, depth, and play across cultures, contexts, and groups and bring it into yours
For anyone starting or deepening a hosting practice: event series, men's circles, community gatherings, facilitated conversations
Public speaking coaching for those who want to deliver their message with presence and find their true voice
Selected Partners
The work finds its place wherever people gather, in boardrooms and festival tents, civic forums and leadership retreats, cultural institutions and community spaces.