I did something last month that I don’t recommend. I counted.
I was lying in bed in our apartment in Saigon at about eleven o’clock on a Tuesday, my wife asleep next to me, my daughter asleep in the next room, and a question dropped into my head the way bad questions do – uninvited and impossible to ignore.
If I disappeared for a week. Not from social media. Not from email. From actual life. Stopped answering my phone. Stopped showing up. Just vanished from the physical world for seven days. How many people would notice?
Not how many people would eventually find out. How many would notice. Unprompted. Without being told. How many people are paying enough attention to the fact of my existence that my absence would register before someone else mentioned it?
I started counting. And I wish I hadn’t.
The number
My wife. Obviously. She’d notice within hours, probably minutes. She’d notice because I wouldn’t be in the kitchen making coffee at 5:30 a.m. and because the apartment would be wrong without me in it. That’s one.
My brothers. Justin and Brendan. We run a company together. They’d notice within a day or two – not because of the personal absence but because of the professional one. Emails unanswered. Slack messages unread. Meetings missed. They’d notice the gap in the workflow before they noticed the gap in the family. I don’t say that with resentment. I say it because it’s true and because the distinction matters. Two and three.
My daughter. She’s too young to understand disappearance but she’d feel it. She’d look for me. She’d reach for the space where I usually am. Four, in the way that only a child can be four – not cognitively but with her whole body.
After that I had to think. And the thinking took longer than it should have.
There’s a friend in Singapore I talk to every couple of weeks. He might notice by day five. Maybe. There’s a colleague in Australia I message most weeks about work. She’d probably flag it by Wednesday. There’s a writer I trade voice notes with sometimes. He’d notice eventually but “eventually” might be ten days, which is past the seven-day window.
The number was smaller than I expected. And it was larger than zero. And somehow that was worse than either extreme. Because zero would have been a crisis – a clear, undeniable signal that something had gone deeply wrong. And a large number would have been reassuring. But this – this small, honest, defensible number – was just the truth. And the truth was that I have built a life with an enormous digital footprint and a surprisingly thin actual presence in other people’s daily reality.
What the count really measures
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying I’m unloved. I’m not saying I have no friends. I’m not saying my life is empty. By most measures my life is remarkably full – a family I love, work that matters to me, a city that still surprises me after years of living in it, a routine that includes meditation and writing and strong Vietnamese coffee and biking through streets that could kill me every morning in the most beautiful way.
What the count measures isn’t love. It’s attention. Ongoing, daily, unprompted attention. The kind where your absence creates a shape someone can feel – not because they need something from you but because you occupy a space in their day that would be noticeably empty without you.
The late neuroscientist John Cacioppo spent decades at the University of Chicago studying loneliness, and one of his most important findings was about the difference between objective isolation and perceived isolation. You can be surrounded by people and feel lonely. You can be mostly alone and feel connected. The variable isn’t how many people are in your life. It’s whether you feel like you matter to the people who are in it.
That’s what the count exposed. Not a shortage of people. A shortage of mattering.
How I got here
I moved from Melbourne to Vietnam at 28. Then between Vietnam and Singapore. Each move was an expansion in some ways – new culture, new language, new version of myself – and a contraction in others. Every relocation resets the friendship clock. You lose the accumulated daily contact that turns acquaintances into friends and friends into people who’d notice you were gone.
The expat life has a specific loneliness architecture. Everyone is temporarily permanent. People cycle through on two-year contracts, three-year assignments. You learn to make friends quickly and hold them loosely because the leaving is built into the arrangement. Nobody says this out loud but everyone knows it. The friendships are real but they exist on a timer, and after a while you stop investing as deeply because the return on investment has a known expiration date.
I also built a career that rewards solitude. Writing is solitary by nature. Running a digital media company means most of my meaningful professional interactions happen through screens. I can go an entire workday communicating with dozens of people without hearing a single human voice. The work gets done. The company runs. The articles get published. And the person producing all of it sits alone in a room in Saigon, surrounded by the sound of motorbikes and the silence of his own making.
None of this was intentional. I didn’t set out to build a life where only a handful of people would notice my absence. It happened through a series of individually reasonable decisions – move abroad, start a business, work remotely, prioritize family time – that collectively produced an outcome I never planned for.
The performing of connection
Here’s the part that stings the most. I have 10 million readers a month. I have social media accounts with followers who feel like they know me. I have an inbox full of messages from strangers telling me that something I wrote changed their perspective or helped them through a difficult time.
And none of them would notice if I disappeared for a week. Not because they don’t care. Because they don’t know me. They know the version of me that exists in articles and posts and carefully considered paragraphs. They know the output. They don’t know the person.
There’s a difference between being known and being recognized. Recognition is wide and shallow – lots of people see you but nobody sees through you. Being known is narrow and deep – a few people who’ve seen the unedited version and stayed anyway. I have more recognition than I ever expected and less of being known than I need.
I think this is increasingly common. Research published in American Psychologist in 2024 found that loneliness among middle-aged Americans is increasing across generations, with levels consistently higher than in any European country studied. Four in ten adults over 45 report being lonely. We’re more connected than any generation in human history and more isolated than most of them.
The connection is real but it’s thin. A mile wide and an inch deep. And when you do the count – the honest, uncomfortable, lying-in-bed-at-eleven-o’clock count – the thinness becomes undeniable.
What I’ve done since the count
I’ve made three changes. None of them are dramatic. All of them are uncomfortable in the specific way that things are uncomfortable when they require you to admit you need something you spent years pretending you didn’t.
First, I started reaching out to people without a reason. Not to discuss work. Not to share an article. Not with any transactional purpose. Just to say “thinking of you” or “how are you actually doing.” The responses have been universally warm and almost always surprised. It turns out most people in their thirties and forties are waiting for someone to reach out first and are too afraid of being a burden to do it themselves.
Second, I started being more honest in existing relationships. When my brother asks how I’m doing on our Monday call, I’ve stopped saying “good, busy” and started saying what’s actually happening. Sometimes that’s “I’m tired and I don’t know why.” Sometimes it’s “I’ve been feeling disconnected lately.” The conversations got shorter in some ways and deeper in every way.
Third, I started showing up physically. I joined a morning cycling group in Saigon. Not for the exercise – I was already biking every day. For the proximity. For the repeated unplanned contact with the same people in a context that doesn’t require anyone to be interesting. Just present. Just there. Just occupying the same physical space at the same time on a regular basis, which is apparently the fundamental ingredient of friendship that you can’t replicate through a screen.
The number now
I did the count again last week. Lying in bed. Same apartment. Same question. If I disappeared for a week, who would notice?
The number went up by two. Maybe three. It’s still small. It’s still the kind of number that would disappoint someone who measures a life by its social radius. But it’s moving in the right direction, and more importantly, the people in the count are there for the right reasons. Not because they need something from me. Because they’ve started paying attention to the fact of me. And I’ve started paying attention to the fact of them.
That’s what loneliness is, when you strip away the psychology and the statistics and the Surgeon General advisories. It’s the gap between how many people would recognize your face and how many people would recognize your absence. For most of us, the first number is big and the second number is small, and we spend our lives pretending that the first number is the one that matters.
It’s not. It was never the one that mattered.
The one that matters is the small one. The honest one. The one you count at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday when nobody’s watching. And the bravest thing you can do with that number isn’t to be ashamed of it. It’s to decide, quietly and without fanfare, to make it one person bigger.
