We hear a great deal these days about a loneliness epidemic, that people feel more disconnected from others than ever before. This happens even though the world has never been more urbanized. If you think of how people in your own family lived five or six generations ago, it likely included some direct ancestors who would see no more than a few people every week.

Now people are all around us — and even more than that, we deal with them constantly via technology, while driving in cars, in our work and in restaurants. People are everywhere. But we pass them without anyone making a lasting impression.

This section of “Yi Yi” demonstrates how this kind of disconnection can even affect people in what we would normally consider a close-knit family. It begins with Ting-Ting. She is walking up to her apartment building and sees Lily’s boyfriend. She gently pats her hair, preening a bit, probably because she finds him attractive.

She tries to start a conversation, asking what he and Lily did the other day and whether she is home yet. But he doesn’t say a word, he just pulls an envelope from his bag and asks if she could deliver it to Lily.

When Ting-Ting gets off the elevator on her floor, Lily is there, making out with another young man. We don’t see a reaction from Ting-Ting to this image, the young man slips into the elevator, and we then see Ting-Ting give the envelope to Lily. She says that she knows what it is, thanks Ting-Ting for it, and goes into her apartment.

Ting-Ting wants desperately to be this girl’s friends, to be in on her innermost thoughts and secrets, but she has become little more than a courier.

Inside the apartment, we hear the nurse reading the newspaper to the grandmother. The first story is some espionage tale. The second is one of Edward Yang’s inside jokes — details of the city of Taipei’s lawsuit over the long-delayed subway system being installed by a French company. His previous movie “Mahjong” made this widespread Taipei displeasure with the project part of the background chatter. All of it reminds me of the City of Chicago continuing anger over the sale of our parking meters (and revenue) to a German company in the 2000s. Perhaps Mayor Daley should have screened Edward Yang films before entering into the contract.

Next up in the Jian household, we have dinner. Min-Min is not there, NJ has instead prepared the meal. The nurse is sitting down to dinner with the children. NJ asks Yang-Yang why he’s not eat — has he gone to McDonald’s again? It’s funny to hear him scold Yang-Yang for this habit when he was the one who took him to McDonald’s during the wedding reception.

Because she always seems to know, on at least surface level, what’s going on with everyone, Ting-Ting responds that her brother is upset because girls are teasing him at school again, which is half of the story, at least. Yang-Yang confirms this with the smallest nod humanly possible.

After dinner, the doorbell rings. Min-Min’s coworker who previously spoke to her about religion is at the door with a guru. NJ invites them in and we hear from the guru that Min-Min is doing very well at the temple. This is how we find out that after her revealing scene, she left the house to go on a religious retreat.

While NJ has this conversation, Yang-Yang is up to something. He’s taken a bath, but has brought a packet of balloons into the tub with him … he’s creating water balloons, but is having some trouble getting them filled properly.

Back to NJ, the guru requests that NJ join his wife at the temple. He politely turns this down, saying that it would annoy the god to hear his petty requests and he hasn’t come across a large enough problem in his life for him to handle. This, by the way, seems like a sizable dodge of his growing Sherry problem.

Yang-Yang is now running around the apartment in a towel — the nurse crying out to him “don’t run around the house naked” — and enters the kitchen, trying to find something. He eventually comes across a blue funnel.

Min-Min’s coworker, meanwhile, gently tells NJ that the real reason why she is there with the guru is that workers at the retreat work purely on a volunteer basis. NJ takes this as a request for money, asks if a check is ok, then goes to the desk to make one out.

Finally, we see Yang-Yang back in the tub, now using the funnel to finish his water balloon project. We see numerous small ones floating in the water, a sign that he’s having at least some success.

All of these little disconnected vignettes are funny in isolation, but taken together they create a mosaic of a family where no one is fully aware of what any of the others are doing. None of the children ask what their mother is up to … nor do they question why NJ seems to be walking around in a daze, distracted. Yang-Yang’s plan for revenge is being hatched without oversight … and poor Ting-Ting is left passing messages in silence, not part of drama she secretly wishes to be enmeshed in.

And all of this is happening while the family matriarch silently sits in a coma on her bed, unaware that her illness has send everyone in the family off on a private quest.