I know loneliness deeply.
Yet I believe this work chose me first — I could not not do it. I have always been drawn to what lies beneath the surface: the shunned and tabooed parts of ourselves and our collective societies, and why the world works the way it does — and how to change it.
Having grown up with the reminder of the sacrifices, trauma, and losses my family went through for me to live peacefully and with opportunities I considered normal put me in touch with the responsibility of such privilege and power. It drew me toward bringing things from the darkness to the light, toward speaking up and raising my voice for the voices of others. To make the unseen visible, and through that, elevate the kinds of feelings, experiences, and issues that rarely find their way to the center of attention.
I long for depth and paradox in a world of oversimplification. I have been, and still am, decolonizing my own Westernized thinking, built on the linear, finite, and replicable logic of modernity. My thinking and practice have shifted accordingly: toward Thich Nhat Hanh, bell hooks, Vanessa Andreotti, Laozi’s Dao De Jing, Byung-Chul Han, Bayo Akomolafe, Han Kang, Jason Hickel, and others.
I’ve participated in creative residencies and fellowships, completed a certification with the Humanize Dyad Foundation program for emotional capacity-building and mindfulness, I’ve attended Zen Buddhist meditation retreats, am practicing with a sangha online, have tested and tried different forms of community and co-living across Greece, Hoi An, and Madrid, and sometimes pull a tarot card or two to connect with the wisdom of mysticism.
In learning, and loving to learn, I invite others to see together, to listen deeply, and to move closer to understanding ourselves and each other.
With The Oneliness Project, I have been building a body of work around these questions, through writing, speaking, and gathering.
“So what is the cure to loneliness?”
I don't have one single answer. Nor do I think it‘s the question that actually matters.
I reject solutionism and am deliberately not offering another Western epistemological project that packages the complexity of being human into something scalable and solvable. Instead, I’m inviting you into a way of seeing and being that also informs the systems we want to shift, through the lens of Oneliness.
My first book is in progress.
Previously, I held the position of Head of Curation and Community at House of Beautiful Business, where I helped grow a global community of 50,000 members and curate programs and festivals across the world — working with brands like Google, Salesforce, Porsche's forward 31, Otto Group, and others.
Before that, I worked across corporate marketing and digital agencies — including a chapter as program and communications manager at Thought For Food Foundation, running the TFF Challenge and academy in Rio de Janeiro, and helping to build the first year of purpose-driven consulting agency Soulworx, including the storytelling platform “Humans of New Work,” where I wrote my master's thesis on the future of work more than ten years ago now.
For getting in touch with me, email is the best way: hello@monikajiang.org.
“We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.”
Thích Nhất Hạnh