Loneliness is a curious beast. You can be sitting alone at home and be lonely. You can be in a room full of people and feel just as lonely. I’ve had many moments of both. At boarding school, I felt enormous loneliness, which, as I reflect back today, was probably driven by two very different feelings.
Firstly, my lack of power in the situation: I hadn’t chosen to be there, and I had no authority I could exercise over my being there. Secondly, the lack of connection with the other students: I came from a very different background, lived thousands of kilometres away. It is no wonder I gravitated to a handful of other ‘outsiders’ - even the school worked this out, exiling us to a couple of studies in the rafters of the boarding house rather than on the floor below, where the majority of students studied and slept.
I shared a boarding house with a hundred other boys, yet solitude was inevitable. Experiences like that are hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t had one, because on paper nothing is missing. There are people everywhere, accompanied by all the hubbub and noise created by a horde of teenage boys. You lie in bed, two to a study, yet even with someone else sleeping in the same room, you feel alone. All this makes more sense once you stop measuring loneliness by headcount.
Psychologist John Cacioppo spent most of his career at the University of Chicago on that distinction. His research found that lonely people are as likely as anyone to be surrounded by coworkers, neighbours, friends and family, and that what sets them apart is perceived social isolation, a sense that the relationships they have aren’t meeting the needs they have. Loneliness is a gap between what you want from the people around you and what you’re getting. A crowded room can widen that gap as easily as an empty house.
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I know that gap from the inside. In The Silent Drift I wrote:
“Many, like me, have suffered what’s sometimes termed the ‘friendly loneliness’ phenomenon: surrounded by people, especially at work, but disconnected emotionally, just moving through life like an automaton.”
The same thing can happen at a party or a family lunch as easily as at work, which is why counting the people in the room tells you so little.
Solitude is different, and it’s one I enjoy. In Second Look: The Loneliness of the Writer, I described it like this:
“I am someone who enjoys solitude in a space to ponder, ruminate, and write, even if it’s sitting in a cafe with my laptop, as I am now, surrounded by a hubbub of conversation. I am alone, but sitting in intentional solitude to work on this article.”
Nobody expects anything of you in that kind of solitude, so there’s no gap to feel. A party or a work function or a family lunch comes with an expectation built in that you’ll be social and participatory, give as good as you take. Yet you can still feel a gap between those expectations and what you are actually feeling inside. So instead you perform the role of active participant.
Earlier this year, in Facing the crowded room, I wrote about that gap, how crowded loneliness usually comes from the discrepancy between the person we present to the world and the person we actually are. Small talk plays a part. It’s useful; it gets strangers through the first five minutes, but a whole evening of it means everyone is talking to the version of you that’s just going through the motions. Likely they respond warmly to that version, and the warmth can make things worse because it confirms that the fake you is winning over the real you. So you leave the room where everyone was perfectly nice and still feel that nobody met you.
Cacioppo also found that lonely people start to read ordinary social situations as threats. They expect others to be less friendly and less kind, and they brace against that in ways that tend to bring on the very coldness they were worried about. He was clear about where the fault sits, writing in his book Loneliness:
“People who get stuck in loneliness have not done anything wrong. None of us is immune to feelings of isolation, any more than we are immune to feelings of hunger or physical pain.”
He saw loneliness as a signal in the same family as hunger, something that evolved to push us back towards other people, which is a kinder way to read the feeling in that room than as a verdict on whether you’re likeable.
I’ve written before about the power of being present, mostly about attention and the way our phones and our own heads pull us out of the moment. In that piece I admitted:
“All too often, during an interaction with others, whether at work or outside the world, I can find my mind several minutes ahead of the people I am talking to.”
Running ahead of a conversation is one way of leaving a room without walking out of it. Trying to be present to the whole crowd doesn’t help much either. It’s exhausting, and it mostly makes you more aware of every stalled conversation and forced laugh. It helps more to pick one person and stay with them past the second question, long enough for the talk to drift somewhere neither of you planned. One real conversation is often enough to change what you take home from the night.
Not every gathering will have your people in it, and feeling lonely there can say more about the fit than about you. Going home early to a quiet house you chose is a fair response, and so is staying for one more conversation with someone who looks like they might be feeling the same thing. Both are better than spending another hour performing for people who you probably really didn’t want to meet to start with.
DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR
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As I think you know, I have been writing a lot about onlyness -- the pervasive feeling men have that we're the only one going through something. I truly feel it's what starts a lot of men down the path to loneliness. You mention it a bit in this piece. We live so much of our lives in our heads and I thinks that's the engine that connects onlyness to loneliness. Thanks so much for your insight and putting such a clever and insightful name to your Substack that says all of this in two words.