Well it seems that if you Google the phrase “I am so lonely” one of the top hits will be this message board thread. It seems that 1000s of people have done this and found this site. A few things I noticed while I was there:

• Most people are quite surprised to discover that there are so many other lonely people out there who did the same Google search
• Several of the posts are quite insightful and have helped others in the thread
• Some people post multiple times, some even becoming regulars to the thread — making online acquaintances in the process
• Google is not only sending people to this thread, they are also profiting from it via some highly targeted ads (such as “therapy” and “dating” services)

The thread is a little under a year old and has almost 1400 posts (about 3 posts a day). However, the truly sad thing is that this same board has another topic called “suicide”. This thread only started last December and already has near 2000 posts (close to 10 posts a day). I won’t even talk about the Google ads in this thread.

As a footnote to all of this: there is yet another thread on this same board about the relative merits of the Xbox vs other gaming consoles. This thread (which started in February) has close to 3000 posts now — I’ll let you do the math. I’m not quite sure how to interpret this fact.