Name: “The Minister of Loneliness” | Sarah Kay | TED
Uploaded: 2025-12-31T13:48:02.000Z
Duration: 4 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past perfect

In the country of Japan in the month of October 2020, more people died by suicide than had died from COVID 19 in all of 2020 up to that point.

In response, the Japanese government instituted a new position of a Minister of Loneliness.

The Minister of Loneliness has abolished email.

He is installing tin cans on every windowsill with a piece of string to someone else's window.

Each person, of course, does not need a lot of people to speak to just the one.

But the one must be reliable, must be available when needed.

Every day is a field trip to the Adulthood Museum, and

we don't go home until everyone has been accounted for.

The way you find your buddy is a nationwide game of of Guess who, where you sing the song that is always stuck in your head.

Describe the movie you can't get through without crying the hardest you've ever laughed, the outfit you wish you could pull off, and

the only person who can spot you is the one you are assigned.

The economy has ground to a halt, productivity is entirely impossible.

Sometimes you go to talk into the can on your windowsill and a knot in the string accidentally gives you someone else's conversation, the fading fabric of someone else's loneliness evaporating into the air between buildings.

You are allowed to eavesdrop, but so is everyone else.

The Minister of Loneliness has moved all kindergartens to the ground floor of elderly Assisted living centers.

There are daily story hours, animal shelters across the street.

The Minister of Loneliness has not abolished Valentine's Day, but

has instituted a nationwide bring enough for the class regulation and nobody goes home empty handed.

The Minister of Loneliness has prescribed therapy for everyone.

Daily walks through the many gardens, opportunities for meditation by a brook in the rain, under falling blossoms, or along a snowy riverbank, depending on the season.

He has commissioned musicians and actors and poets to create concerts and radio plays and poetry readings to be pumped across the knotted tin can radio lines.

Every evening when you order dinner for one, the person who delivers it arrives with an appropriate ability and comfort level.

Dance instruction, video, and two hours to spend despair.

Grieving is encouraged and art making is rampant.

But because of the knots, sometimes when you are expecting a visit from a grief counselor, the dance partner food delivery arrives instead.

He is the most popular man in the country.

He has a crush on a middle school teacher across town, and

everyone eavesdrops to hear the way he stumbles when she answers.

Everyone forgets about dying because they can't wait to find out what happens next.

The minister has to start a hotline where people can call in to tell him their thoughts.

The minister is grateful for the advice but is nervous his crush will hear the commotion.

She prefers quiet, but he does not know for sure yet.

He does not know what she is thinking, does not know how she spends her Saturdays, or how she prefers her tea, or whether she likes to walk in the rain.

But he likes wondering when nobody is paying attention, when the window sills are quiet, late at night, awake.

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“The Minister of Loneliness” | Sarah Kay | TED

stick

meditation

therapy

conversation