The Sound of Loneliness

The Intimacy of Voice and the Quiet Beauty of Listening We’re All Longing For

I recently sat on a bus for about 20 hours, traveling from Hoi An to Saigon, Vietnam. We departed as the sun was setting, and with the darkness stretching endlessly ahead, time lost its shape. In that liminal space, between dozing off, reading, and staring out the window, I spoke to a few people on the phone and caught up on voice messages.

One of my New Year’s intentions has been to talk more on the phone—or ever, really. I belong to the generation that still remembers the phone as a device for voice, unentangled from the internet. I remember knowing my friends’ house numbers by heart and the polite awkwardness of asking their parents if they were home. But over time, phone calls became rare, replaced first by texts, then by voice notes, and eventually by a silence disguised as likes, shares, double-taps, and two blue ticks.

We often talk about how technology has shaped the way we communicate, but not enough about how it has shaped our voices. A 2018 study from the University of Essex found that voice-based communication, even when brief, fosters stronger social bonds than text-based interactions. The human voice carries a warmth, a cadence, and a depth of emotion that written words often struggle to convey. Another one found that when you speak to a loved one on the phone, your brain releases oxytocin which makes you feel more relaxed. However, when you text the same loved one, your brain doesn’t release this hormone.

Perhaps this is why hearing a loved one’s voice can feel like an anchor, tethering us back to something real, something that reminds us that we are not alone.

I recently spoke with a psychotherapist with more than 30 years of experience who told me that I wouldn’t believe how many people don’t have someone to share their most inner feelings and thoughts with outside of the therapy room. Of course, that’s partly why therapy exists in the first place—a safe space for us to express ourselves—but the growing numbers of loneliness, mental health issues, and suicides speak to something larger.

At our core, we all need at least one person who listens—not just to our words, but to us.

And yet, we hesitate to share. We hesitate to call, fearing it might be an intrusion, that it might require too much of us. But maybe the opposite is true. Maybe, we are all waiting to be called, to be heard, and listened to—and to be invited to listen?

Photo by Roman Suslov on Unsplash

Today, we text, we post, we broadcast out into the ether, hoping that something will echo back. Oh! A little heart reaction ❤️, a like, a comment, maybe! The dopamine hits well and often, keeping us closer to our phones as they promise to give us what we need, only to do so in an intentionally un-complete way, so that we return back, to post and share a little more.

Psychiatrist Anna Lembke, in her book Dopamine Nation, describes how our brains have become finely attuned to the immediate rewards of digital interaction, trapping us in a cycle of seeking quick hits of validation. We are caught in a pleasure-pain balance, where the more we seek these small bursts of online connection, the more we deplete our ability to find deep, sustained fulfillment.

The question remains, in a time of loneliness and alienation, how do we counter the loss of language and voice? As our communication has become not only more convenient and word-poor, it’s also leaving too much space for everything that wants to be expressed and is never heard or listened to. Is it just me or does it feel like sometimes that we’re all screaming at the top of our lungs without anyone turning their attention to us because we all have our Airpods in? What an irony.

Are you really listening?

Listening, really listening, is exhausting. We have to pay attention, fully, not only to the words but to non-verbal cues—the pauses, the sighs, the intonation, the way someone expresses something—the subtext, the non-explicit.

Active listening, a term first coined by psychologist Carl Rogers in 1951, encompasses a skill that we might want to give more space for in building our relational intelligence. It’s listening in silence, without words, listening to understand rather than to respond, and ideally—withholding judgment and advice. In Nonviolent Communication, founded by Marshall Rosenberg, we learn to listen for feelings and needs. That’s advanced stuff. For now, we can begin to simply listen a bit more deeply in the next conversation we’re in—or the next time we listen to a voice message.

Composer Pauline Oliveros has been teaching the practice of deep listening since the 1970s, exploring the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. Her practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, and interactive performance, as well as listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination, and dreams.

There are also initiatives like Sidewalk Talk and the Generous Listening initiative, both of which are here to counter the experience of isolation and loneliness that many people face. These initiatives recognize the deep human need to be heard and understood, offering spaces where people can practice listening—truly listening—to one another without judgment.

At the Strother School of Radical Attention in New York, one of the practices is to listen collectively to a piece of music four times, with different prompts. Each time, you pay attention to something different—perhaps something you hadn’t noticed before. You listen differently. You listen with a bit more care.

The ambivalence of voice notes

I know, I know—many people have a love-hate relationship with voice notes, and I’m no exception. But mostly, I love them. I exchange them regularly with some of my friends, especially when we’re not in the same place or time zone. There’s something about their asynchronous nature, the lack of time limits (yes, personal podcast is not a reference without reason), and the fact that you have to listen without interjecting.

The internet is full of TikToks and memes joking about the randomness of voice notes—their potential inefficiency, their tendency to spiral into stream-of-consciousness monologues where the speaker goes off on tangents or comments on things happening around them in real-time. And yes, that’s all true. I do it often myself. But somehow, isn’t that precisely what makes voice notes feel so intimate, so personal? Isn’t that what ultimately brings us closer to the person speaking?

Of course, I agree that voice notes aren’t the ideal medium for scheduling a meeting or discussing a work-related matter with a deadline. But when it comes to sharing our lives, thoughts, and emotions, isn’t that supposed to be messy? Shouldn’t it be non-streamlined, unfiltered, and in the moment? Apparently, by hearing someone’s voice, we get paralinguistic cues that can’t come via text.

The asynchronicity of voice notes also creates space for a different kind of response—one that isn’t bound by immediacy or urgency the way text messages often are. There’s a mutual understanding that replies don’t have to be instant, that they can unfold in their own time.

Most of all, in an era where so much of our communication has been condensed—reduced to half-movements of our thumbs, double taps for a like, quick-fire gifs and memes—we seem to both long for and need to relearn the art of long-windedness. The inefficiency of real conversation, the meandering, the pauses, the space to simply share—there’s a beauty in that, one we shouldn’t lose.

Call me, maybe?

Do you still make phone calls? If so, with whom, and how do you feel afterward?

I’ve fallen back in love with them—just phone, no video. There’s something about hearing someone’s voice in real-time, about hanging out over the phone, where even the “empty” moments are full of shared silence. While on a call, you move around, existing in an in-between space with the other person. And even though you can’t see them, you still imagine them—where they are, what they might be doing, the background noises filling their world.

In an era of Zoom fatigue and constant video calls, phone calls feel like a relief. There’s less pressure to see yourself, to be “on” all the time. And yet, even without video, the brain sees the person anyway.

Photo by Nalau Nobel on Unsplash

The intimacy of voice

There’s something powerful about simply hearing someone’s voice—even when we don’t understand the words or language. As I spend time in Vietnam, immersed in a language I don’t know, I find myself paying closer attention to the sound of voices. And perhaps because I’ve always loved eavesdropping on conversations, I notice how this habit now comes with its own limitations.

During a workshop with a management team, a voice coach and sopranist once told us that there is a voice that comes straight from the heart—a voice in which you cannot argue, scream, or fight. We then tried to find that heart voice within ourselves, and to our surprise, it was true.

Finding your voice may sound like a cliché, but beneath it lies a deeper truth: our voices are uniquely ours. Learning to love the sound of our voice, to play with it as a means of expression, is an understated yet powerful way of making ourselves understood—as a way to connect more intentionally.

Over the past months, I’ve been collecting voice notes for the beginning of The Oneliness Voices, a project I’ve been meaning to bring into the world for a while. One of the quiet beauties of audio is how it feels both anonymous and deeply personal—less intrusive, yet profoundly intimate and real.

I invited people to send in their voice notes in response to questions I had posed, to quite literally give voice to the shared experience of loneliness and our longing for deeper, more meaningful connection. While the messages themselves carry weight, the greatest joy for me was simply listening—for the first time, and then over and over again as I edited the first two volumes.

If you’d like, listen for yourself.

And maybe, leave a voice note?

Or share with someone you’ve been meaning to call for a while?

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Thank you for listening! As always, feel free to share and comment.💛

The Oneliness Project is rooted in the belief that loneliness is both a personal and societal experience, we explore what it means to foster care, build meaningful relationships, and nurture a sense of interconnectedness—oneliness.

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