Loneliness is awful – so every day I try to strike up a conversation with a stranger | Adrian Chiles

I like to have conversations like, you know, face to face, in person. Or just on the phone will do. Weird, I know. I guess analog chatter is dying out, because the rise of AI means we'll have to get used to talking to computers. Already, many of the face-to-face conversations we have were initiated through them. For example, I had a young male colleague, a handsome and self-confident rascal. Even though, as far as I can tell, he was having remarkable success with his Tinder encounter, he lamented the march of technology. He said he would often approach a woman at a bar, only to be told she was waiting on a Tinder date. "It's game over," he said sadly. Tellingly, in recounting this, it strikes me that approaching someone uninvited to talk to them can now feel riskier than meeting a stranger you found on the internet.

Whether you're in a relationship or not, the skill of starting conversations is at least as important – and empowering – as the art of conversation itself. The conversation is the easy part. It's no use, of course, if you're interested in others, in which case you'll usually please yourself and others by asking them about themselves. If you're more interested in yourself than anyone else, it can also be simple - just talk about your own brilliance and overlook any yawning or glazing, or move on to your next victim. All of this is well explained in Dale Carnegie's famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. "Show concern for others" being his key point. I read it as a teenager and it made a huge impression on me - so much so that I gave it to a close friend of mine to read. His review was exactly this: "It's fine if you're interested in other people, but I'm not really." So that was it.

I wish Mr. Carnegie had written another book called How to Start Conversations. I thought I struggled with it but got better. In fact, the opposite was true - if I had ever had the talent, I had lost it. If you've been on TV a lot, you tend to get recognition. Inexplicably, I guess, it seems to motivate people to talk to you. It's a great conversation starter, but it's always the other person who starts. This came to mind a few years ago when the Croatian Davis Cup tennis team beat Great Britain at Wimbledon. I was invited to the band's celebration party at a pub in this part of London. The Croatian friend who had invited me couldn't come, so I didn't know anyone there. But, whatever, I thought: I'm just going to make friends and influence people with great enthusiasm.

I walked in, looking around in waiting to be conversation. Nothing happened. Nobody recognized me, so nobody felt the need to talk to me. OK, so I should start a conversation. I opened my mouth to talk to someone, but nothing came out. I had completely forgotten how to do it. I really didn't know what to say.

After half an hour of hanging around trying to sound less mortified than me, I decided to leave. At that point, a physio who had worked in London for a while recognized me, said hello, introduced me to someone else, and everything was fine. But I never forgot that awful feeling of being alone in a crowd. So every day I try to strike up a conversation with a stranger, hoping they don't walk away in alarm. And I hope I'm still as open as possible to any conversation anyone sees fit to strike up with me.

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and columnist for The Guardian