Loneliness, Friend or Foe?

Loneliness is much talked about. It is a word that often turns up in the papers, television news and radio, as well as in various articles. Research into the subject is beginning to be funded. Local authorities have started to refer to unwanted loneliness and to design programmes to avoid it. It is finally being accorded some importance – very minor, secondary, and sometimes hardly visible, but importance nonetheless – in public agendas at different levels and across political affiliations.

Personally, however, when we talk about loneliness, I am still not sure whether we all mean the same thing. I am still unclear if we know what it is or whether we are using the appropriate concepts to refer to this reality, even when we agree on the definitions we afford a word that, truth be told, we find terrifying. Could it be that there are different forms of loneliness, and that we will never fully understand it? I would like to ask you to join me in reflecting on your understanding of loneliness, and on the feelings and thoughts the word evokes in you. Do your friends think the same? Your parents? Your children? Do you agree on your understanding of loneliness?

Assuming that there are different forms, what, then, is loneliness? From my perspective, it is important to remember and emphasise that we are social beings from the moment we enter the world, out of our sheer need for survival. We are born completely useless and need to be fed, cared for, kept clean and even burped. We cannot survive without being surrounded by other human beings, no matter how many Romulus and Remus stories we are told. We also need human contact to develop successfully in other ways. So, for a baby's brain to develop properly, an infant needs to be held, to receive affection and to have physical contact with other human beings. Human contact helps reduce the baby’s stress levels and improves immune response. Physical contact also has a strong positive psychological impact and effect on our intelligence.

Without contact with other human beings not only will we fail to survive, but our emotional welfare also depends on the contact being meaningful. We need to be loved, or at least for it to seem that way. We need to matter, to exist, in community. Over and above our survival, our functional development, and our physiological issues, we need other people around us. We need to belong, to be part of a society that recognises our place in it.

The need for human contact lasts a lifetime. I cannot stress enough that we are social beings, which means that loneliness is not our natural state. Finding ourselves alone is circumstantial, but it would be enormously difficult to “exist" alone. Even Heidi's grandfather would come down from the mountain to barter in the village when he was fed up with eating nothing but cheese. But did he feel lonely?

As regards this feared and unknown spectre called loneliness, a friend told me it was necessary and that he could be alone without it causing him too much of a problem. He did not understand why some people found being alone a burden. For him it did not represent a terrible spectre, but, rather, a friend he wanted to embrace. Of course, it was occasional, and he had a choice, as well as the ability to escape it when things started to "feel" unpleasant.

The crucial point is that feeling lonely and being alone (on one’s own) are not synonymous. I would also add that being alone, living alone and finding oneself alone (physically and circumstantially) are quite different. My friend, surrounded by his family (dog included), was talking about the positive experience of solitude that Schopenhauer was alluding to when he said that “dwelling alone was the fate of all great souls”. In addition to this positive solitude (which we seek out), there are other forms of loneliness, such as existential loneliness or what we might call emotional loneliness. Emotional loneliness is unchosen and arises from a feeling of emptiness vis-à-vis our social relationships, either because they do not exist or because they are not sufficiently meaningful. 

Finding oneself alone is a state, but loneliness is a feeling. It is not an emotion, but something more lasting, that has a greater impact on our lives. Emotions barely last a moment. They are an almost instinctive reaction to a particular situation, a complex set of chemical and neuronal responses that affect us briefly and intensely and stir our whole being. A feeling does not involve as intense a somatic reaction as an emotion, but it stays with us for longer. It involves a conscious assessment of our reality (though it may not seem that way) and is more diffuse and longer lasting than an emotion. We could say that an emotion relates to the body, whereas a feeling relates to the mind. 

The feeling of loneliness, or emotional loneliness, can be interpreted more widely, and also includes other emotions – all of them negative – such as despondency, discouragement, hopelessness and rejection. It does not occur alone but is accompanied by unpleasant emotions we would not choose to feel. It has nothing to do with the positive or sought-after solitude we referred to earlier, which differs greatly from satisfying autonomy. I recently read a piece written by Mariela Machelena that said:

"Sometimes individual autonomy is not experienced as satisfying, as a tool for growth, but as a penance, as if punished and relegated to a corner where life is black and white. When this happens, it is because independence is interpreted as loneliness and loneliness is interpreted as abandonment".

The origins of the feeling of loneliness are manifold but we seem to assume that age is one of the triggers. We only have to type "loneliness" into Google to get results like “older people", as if growing older irreversibly condemns us to being alone. It is true that older people may feel lonely to a comparatively greater degree than other age groups. They have lost loved ones and sometimes find themselves in contexts where they are not valued, or do not feel socially integrated. But loneliness is not a feeling unique to older people. We feel lonely when we lack social relationships, when we feel "empty" and do not feel part of a group. Associating loneliness with old age is ageist and very unfair, as much for older people as for those suffering from loneliness who are much younger. 

Regarding the question of whether loneliness is friend or foe, I would say that, as we are social beings, loneliness is a threat. We actually associate it with social failure, and it leads us to believe that we have not succeeded socially, that we do not belong to a social group. We feel unrecognised and that, in a sense, our words and existential meaning (with apologies to the philosophers) do not echo. Ostracism – which is nothing more than condemning a person considered suspicious or guilty of a political crime to social isolation – was a punishment in Ancient Greece. I wonder how, in our society, we have allowed the "punishment" of loneliness to afflict so many people of different ages.