If we remembered that loneliness once meant oneliness, how might we begin to reimagine how we love, work, and share a world, especially as AI is shifting it all?
Monika Jiang is a writer, speaker, and experience designer developing Oneliness, a philosophical lens on loneliness and how we want to live together. Previously Head of Curation and Community at House of Beautiful Business.
Featured in Fast Company and on global stages from TEDxPotsdam to Cannes Lions.
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, 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: remembering and reimagining from our fundamental relational nature—being alone and in relationship—and to live from it as a principle and a philosophy.
In how we love. In how we live. In how we work. In how we share our world.
How to Work with Me
Want to bring Oneliness to your stage, project, or practice? Let’s make it happen.
Oneliness on Stage
Talks · Workshops · Hosting
You have an event, a conference, a gathering, or a summit, and are looking for a speaker, a workshop host, or a moderator. Here’s what I bring.
Keynotes on loneliness as a structural, ecological, and spiritual condition, and on Oneliness as a different premise for how we organize our lives and institutions
Workshops that move between the intellectual and the embodied, designed for your context and people.
Moderating and hosting conferences, events, and panels exploring human flourishing, AI and connection, loneliness and social cohesion, and the future of human work and culture.
Oneliness as Practice
Project-based Collaborations
You have a community, a program, a content strategy, or an experience that you want to do better. I work alongside you—project-based or embedded—to help make it happen.
Build and sustain communities that remain alive and actually hold together over time
Curate and design programs and experiences people remember, with Oneliness as a guide for intimacy, depth, play, and awe.
Develop the content and communications strategy that reaches and moves people from introspection and reflection towards action and change.
One on Oneliness
Working Together 1:1
You are an (aspiring) speaker, thought leader, facilitator, community builder, writer—someone building something that matters and who could use an honest thinking partner along the way.
Finding and sharpening your personal brand and positioning
Building your community and/or event formats
Improving your public speaking skills and developing a signature keynote
Sharpening your communications and content strategy
Guidance for career changers who feel called to start a project of their own
Beautiful Business
Professionnel
Hotels & Resorts
Institute
UC Berkeley
Society Forum
Berlin
Zeal
Residency Hoi An
Bombarda
Read essays and listen to podcast conversations on oneliness with researchers, practitioners, and changemakers.
What people say
"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 loneliness, in its truest form, can be a doorway, not a dead end. 🔥❤️"
— Borja L.