--- title: Patton Oswalt on Being Alone During the Holidays description: Patton Oswalt says if you're feeling lonely during the holidays, know that there is peace in spending the holidays alone. canonical: https://time.com/5041067/patton-oswalt-wife-death-holidays/ author: Patton Oswalt article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-11-30T05:00:44.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:43:19.840Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Patton Oswalt: How to Conquer Loneliness During the Holidays og:description: The comedian writes that there is peace and grace in spending the holidays alone og:url: https://time.com/5041067/patton-oswalt-wife-death-holidays/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt71c8eea60c66dad6/6988f329db29875d8925de79/patton-oswalt-grief-holiday-loneliness-wife-death.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2405 og:image:height: 1353 og:image:alt: Patton Oswalt holiday grief og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Patton Oswalt: How to Conquer Loneliness During the Holidays twitter:description: The comedian writes that there is peace and grace in spending the holidays alone twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt71c8eea60c66dad6/6988f329db29875d8925de79/patton-oswalt-grief-holiday-loneliness-wife-death.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Patton Oswalt: How to Conquer Loneliness During the Holidays > Sponsored content. 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: Intentional Communities Help Connect People [Watch (HLS stream): Intentional Communities Help Connect People](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/W2XdvuPG.m3u8) (4:15)  _Published 2017-11-03. “Intentional communities” are a growing trend in an increasingly lonely country._  by [Patton Oswalt](https://time.com/author/patton-oswalt/)  ## Patton Oswalt Nov 30, 2017 5:00 AM UTC  Patton Oswalt attends the premiere of "Baby Driver" in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, 2017. Patton Oswalt attends the premiere of "Baby Driver" in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, 2017. Robyn Beck—AFP/Getty Images  by [Patton Oswalt](https://time.com/author/patton-oswalt/)  ## Patton Oswalt Nov 30, 2017 5:00 AM UTC _The holidays are supposed to be a season of joy and cheer, but for some of us, they can be the hardest time of the year. TIME partnered with OptionB.Org, Sheryl Sandberg’s initiative, to commission essays from influential people who have struggled themselves about what has helped them during difficult holiday seasons in the past. In these pieces, as well as at_ [_optionb.org/holidays_](https://optionb.org/holidays) _and #OptionBThere, you’ll find actions big and small that you can take to help yourself and others find moments of joy._ Ugh, you’re alone on the holidays. Every single cliché about solitude in winter pounces on you. You’re jumped. You’re pummeled into a gang of one that nobody else wants to join. The sun takes its sweet time heaving itself into the sky every morning, and then scuttles away too quickly right after 5 pm. Trees are bare and skeletal against a doomy, concrete sky. Life and motion and love all seem zombified. You see happy families scurrying through the snow, clutching presents, laughing. Places to go. People to be with. You’ve got no one. And unlike other people who were maybe always alone, or never had someone special to scrub away a few layers of winter gloom, you _did_ have someone. Someone you’d bend reality to have with you now. But they’re gone, faded into the grey planet you’re trapped on. It’s a world that now has a bitter flavor of mocking for all of its Thanksgiving/Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa trimmings. Is there any escape from this lonely planet? Can you build a spaceship and point it toward a world with a brighter sun, with more hopeful air to breathe? You can’t. No one escapes the Lonely Planet. So let me offer a radical solution. _Invade the Lonely Planet._ Be a hostile alien visitor. If the planet you’re trapped on seems sustained by despair and silence, then infect it with your unique, un-killable strain of joy and sound. I am not telling you to fake happiness, or rivet a death-grin to your face as you go about your days. If anything, I’m giving you permission to drill your heels even deeper into the swamp of sadness you’re in. And with those heels dug in, and still with the weight of despair on your shoulders and the ocean of poisonous grief in your stomach, send joy and sound out into the Lonely Planet. Invade. Infect. Conquer. There is peace and grace in spending the holidays alone. Take it from the veteran of many a Christmas Day in a half-abandoned Los Angeles. Go see an early matinee and sip coffee from the only sandwich place open on the block. Pretend you’re the survivor of a weird plague that’s wiped out the population yet still leaves TV stations broadcasting, fast food joints cooking you delicious food and empty buses crawling up abandoned streets. When you look at a holiday spent alone at the right angle, it becomes a sun-lit _film noir_ wonderland. If you fully inhabit and allow the beauty of a half-empty city or town to reset your depression, I promise you it will change the sadness around you. It will change the people around you. People’s loneliness isn’t alleviated by tit-for-tat joy. That’s too easy. It’s other people being alive and present which spawns true joy, and makes the dead air particles shimmer and vibrate and warm the world. So go out and invade, in any way you can. If you have kids, make them part of your crew, let them join your mission. Be alive and aware and in motion on the Lonely Planet. It won’t stay lonely for long. ### For more essays about finding happiness during the holidays, read: * [**Kesha**, on her mantra for confronting mental illness in the season of giving.](http://time.com/5041017/kesha-self-care-holidays/) * [**Katie Couric**, on how grief teaches you to have empathy for those celebrating beside you.](http://time.com/5040988/katie-couric-husband-holidays/) * [**Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly**, on how tragedy can strengthen resolutions.](http://time.com/5041049/gabby-giffords-husband-after-shooting/) * [**Robin Roberts**, on changing traditions in sickness and grief.](http://time.com/5041031/robin-roberts-cancer-holidays/) * [**OptionB.Org’s** collection of personal stories and advice.](https://optionb.org/holidays)  ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Thousands of years ago, we evolved to actually depend on social connection. In our early prehistoric days, if you had more social connections, you were more likely to be able to rely on others to protect yourselves from predators. The social connection became protective in a way. This became baked into our nervous system. So much so that, these days, in our current if we are feeling socially disconnected that place us in a physiologic stress state. Loneliness Is associated with a reduction in life span that's as severe as a reduction in life span that you see with smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's more severe than the reduction of life span associated with obesity. when I first went into medicine. I didn't think I'd be thinking about or talking about loneliness. But I quickly realized the most common pathology or illness that I was seeing Was in fact, not diabetes or heart disease. It was, in fact, loneliness. Sometimes it was the result of chronic illness. Sometimes it was the result of other stressors in their life like discrimination or violence. Sometimes it was just being away geographically from the people that they had grown up and known and trusted We have people who have thousands of friends on Facebook, thousands of connections on LinkedIn, thousands of follows on Twitter. They live in densely populated cities. They live in high rise buildings that have hundreds of other residents, yet they feel profoundly alone. [ MUSIC ] Mobility is a huge factor now. Families don't stay together because people change jobs and change cities with a frequency that was unheard of 40, 50, 60 years ago. So Millennials are no longer in their families of origin. [ MUSIC ] Most of them are living on their own and it can be fairly lonely. [ MUSIC ] As a reaction to this loneliness, the United States is seeing a trend of co- housing developments catering to all ages. TIME. [ MUSIC ] These ideas like Co- housing, really build in to our daily lives more of the connections that have withered away [ MUSIC ] I struggled a little bit when I first arrived here, just because it was my first time Living totally by myself, paying my rent, getting my groceries, cleaning my own room. And kind of coping with that loneliness has really been facilitated through this co- space. What we were trying to do was create a neighborhood in a building. The units all have a kitchenette, private bathroom, and queen beds. We balance that in a very tiny 200 square foot unit with 6, 000 square foot of shared space. We, as humans, build off of each others' emotions. Someone's angry and yelling at you next to you, that changes your emotional state. And vice versa. When you walk into a room that has a high energy, has people thinking creatively, it's contagious and it gets in your state of mind and changes your emotional level. Addressing loneliness is a collective responsibility, there's no single law or regulation that we can put in place that's gonna address loneliness [ music ] It's the decisions we make in our day to day lives that impact whether or not we and the people around us are lonely. If you are feeling lonely, recognize that you are likely not the only one. Create some sacred space without your phone. It impacts our ability to be fully present, to have deeper conversations, and to truly listen. At the end of the day, when you look at the data behind loneliness, you listen to this. Stories of people who are struggling. You're left with one inescapable conclusion. 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