Wanting To Be Alone But Feeling Lonely – Loved, yet alone You may have the unconditional love of family and friends and still feel deeply lonely. Can philosophy explain why?
Caitlin Creasy is an associate professor of philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino. She is the author of The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche (2020).
Wanting To Be Alone But Feeling Lonely
Although one of the loneliest moments of my life happened more than 15 years ago, I still remember its uniquely painful sting. I had just returned home from a semester studying abroad in Italy. During my stay in Florence, my Italian had reached the point where I was dreaming in the language. I also developed intellectual interests—not interests—in Italian Futurism, Dada, and Russian absurdism
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Derived from a love affair with a professor teaching a course on these topics – as well as the love sonnets of Dante and Petrarch (possibly also related to this love). I left my semester abroad as many students are likely to: changed not only intellectually, but emotionally as well. My picture of the world was complex, my experience of that world richer, more delicate.
After that semester, I returned home to a small working-class town in New Jersey. The appropriate home was my boyfriend’s parents’ home, which was in the foreclosure process but not yet taken over by the bank. Both parents had moved away, and they graciously allowed me to stay with my boyfriend, his sister, and her boyfriend during college breaks. During the holidays from school, I spent most of my time with my de facto roommate and a few dear childhood friends.
When I came back from Italy, I wanted to share a lot with them. I wanted to talk to my boyfriend about how aesthetically interesting but intellectually dull I found Italian futurism. I wanted to talk to my closest friends about how much these Italian love sonnets moved me, how Bob Dylan had captured their power so wonderfully. (‘And every one of these words came true/And glowed like a burning coal/Leaving from every page/As it was written in my soul…’) In addition to the specifics of his intellectual and emotional life. Feeling a strong need to share the parts that had become so central to my self-understanding, I also experienced a dramatically increased need to engage intellectually, as well as all aspects of my emotional life. In the depths and the vastness – for my whole being, for this new being – praise. When I returned home, I found myself not only unable to engage with others in ways that would meet my newly developed needs, but also unable to recognize who I had become after I left. I have gone And I felt deeply, painfully alone.
This experience is not uncommon for students studying abroad. Even when one has caring relationships and a support network, one often experiences ‘reverse culture shock’ – what psychologist Kevin Gao calls the return to one’s home culture after living in a different culture. Described as a process of readjustment, re-culturing, and re-acclimatization. for a significant period of time’ – and feelings of isolation are characteristic of those affected by the process.
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But there are many other familiar life experiences that provoke feelings of loneliness, even if the people going through those experiences have loved friends and family: the student who feels lonely after the first year of transitioning to college; And comes to friends. A teenager who returns home to her loving but repressed parents after a sexual awakening at summer camp. A first-generation woman of color in graduate school who cares but is forever in ‘between’ worlds, is misunderstood and not fully understood by members of her department or by her family and friends back home. have seen. The travel nurse who returns home to colleagues and friends after a particularly meaningful (or perhaps particularly psychologically taxing) work assignment. A man who goes through a difficult breakup with a long-term, live-in partner. The woman who is the first in her group of friends to become a parent. The list goes on.
Nor does it take a life-changing event to trigger feelings of loneliness. As time goes on, it’s often the case that friends and family who used to understand us well eventually fail to understand us the way they once did, really fail.
Us as they used to do. This, too, will lead to feelings of loneliness – although loneliness can creep in more slowly, more covertly. Loneliness, it seems, is an existential threat, to which humans are always at risk – and not just when they are alone.
(2022), philosopher Kiran Setia describes loneliness as ‘the pain of social disconnection’. There, he discusses the importance of addressing the nature of loneliness – both why it hurts and whether ‘that pain tells us how to live’ – especially given the contemporary prevalence of loneliness. He rightly notes that loneliness is not just a matter of being completely isolated from others, as a person can be alone even in a room full of people. Furthermore, he notes that, since the negative psychological and physical effects of loneliness ‘seem to depend on the subjective experience of loneliness’, to effectively combat loneliness we need to identify the origins of this subjective experience. Is.
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Setia suggests that we are ‘social animals with social needs’ which include the need to be loved and to have our basic worth recognized. When we fail to meet these basic needs, such as when we are separated from our friends, we suffer from loneliness. Without the presence of friends to reassure us that we matter, we experience a painful ‘sense of hollowness, a hole inside us that was once filled and no longer is’. This is loneliness in its most basic form. (Setiya uses the term ‘friends’ broadly to include immediate family and romantic partners, and I follow his usage here.)
Imagine a woman who lands a job that requires traveling long distances to an area where she knows no one. Even if there are many new neighbors and colleagues to greet her upon her arrival, Setia claims she will experience feelings of loneliness, as she still has close, loving relationships with these people. There are no relationships. In other words, she will experience feelings of loneliness because she does not yet have friends whose love for her reflects her core worth as she has, friends who see that she matters. Is. Only when she makes real friends will she feel her unconditional worth recognized. Only then will his basic social needs be loved and recognized. Once she feels that she really matters to someone, Setia believes, her loneliness will disappear.
(1951), for example, Hannah Arendt also described loneliness as a feeling that results when one’s human dignity or unconditional worth is recognized as a person and is lost. fails to affirm, a realization that results in it being ‘one of the basic human needs. condition’, fails to fulfill.
These accounts provide a good deal about the right to solitude. But they also miss something. On these views, loving friendship allows us to avoid loneliness because a loving friend provides the recognition we need as social beings. Without loving friendship, or when we are separated from our friends, we are unable to secure this identity. So we become lonely. But note that the feature asserted by the friend here – my unconditional value – is entirely impersonal. The property the friend recognizes and affirms in me is the same property she recognizes and affirms in her other friendships. Otherwise, the recognition that supposedly alleviates loneliness in Setia’s view is the friend’s recognition of an impersonal, abstract feature of his own self, a quality he shares with every other human being: his being human. Unconditional value. (The recognition given by a loving friend is that I ‘[problem] … just like everyone else.’)
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Just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can also feel lonely in a room full of friends.
Because my dignity or value as a person is disconnected from any particular characteristic of me, however, my friend can recognize and affirm that value without acknowledging my particular needs, particular values, etc. If Setia is calling it right, that friend can reduce my loneliness without adding to my individuality.
Or can they? Accounts that link loneliness to a failure of basic identity (and the end of loneliness to love and recognition of one’s dignity) may be correct about the origins of some forms of loneliness. But it seems to me that this is far from the whole picture, and such accounts fail to explain the variety of familiar situations in which loneliness arises.
When I came home from my study abroad semester, I returned to a network of strong, loving friendships. I was daily surrounded by a steadfast group of people who constantly recognized and affirmed my unconditional worth as a person, putting up with my obnoxious pretensions (so it must be).
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