Loved, yet lonely

You might have the unconditional love of family

and friends and yet feel deep loneliness. Can
philosophy explain why?

by Kaitlyn Creasy

Kaitlyn 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).

Edited by Pam Weintraub

A lthough one of the loneliest moments of my life happened more than 15 years
ago, I still remember its uniquely painful sting. I had just arrived back home from
a study abroad semester in Italy. During my stay in Florence, my Italian had
advanced to the point where I was dreaming in the language. I had also developed
intellectual interests in Italian futurism, Dada, and Russian absurdism – interests
not entirely deriving from a crush on the professor who taught a course on those
topics – as well as the love sonnets of Dante and Petrarch (conceivably also
related to that crush). I left my semester abroad feeling as many students likely
do: transformed not only intellectually but emotionally. My picture of the world
was complicated, my very experience of that world richer, more nuanced.

After that semester, I returned home to a small working-class town in New Jersey.
Home proper was my boyfriend’s parents’ home, which was in the process of
foreclosure but not yet taken by the bank. Both parents had left to live elsewhere,
and they graciously allowed me to stay there with my boyfriend, his sister and her
boyfriend during college breaks. While on break from school, I spent most of my
time with these de facto roommates and a handful of my dearest childhood
friends.

When I returned from Italy, there was so much I wanted to share with them. I
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 wanted to talk to my boyfriend about how aesthetically interesting but
intellectually dull I found Italian futurism; I wanted to communicate to my closest
friends how deeply those Italian love sonnets moved me, how Bob Dylan so
wonderfully captured their power. (‘And every one of them words rang true/and
glowed like burning coal/Pouring off of every page/like it was written in my soul
…’) In addition to a strongly felt need to share specific parts of my intellectual and
emotional lives that had become so central to my self-understanding, I also
experienced a dramatically increased need to engage intellectually, as well as an
acute need for my emotional life in all its depth and richness – for my whole
being, this new being – to be appreciated. When I returned home, I felt not only
unable to engage with others in ways that met my newly developed needs, but
also unrecognised for who I had become since I left. And I felt deeply, painfully
lonely.

#is experience is not uncommon for study-abroad students. Even when one has
a caring and supportive network of relationships, one will often experience
‘reverse culture shock’ – what the psychologist Kevin Gaw describes as a ‘process
of readjusting, reacculturating, and reassimilating into one’s own home culture
after living in a different culture for a significant period of time’ – and feelings of
loneliness are characteristic for individuals in the throes of this process.

But there are many other familiar life experiences that provoke feelings of
loneliness, even if the individuals undergoing those experiences have loving
friends and family: the student who comes home to his family and friends after a
transformative first year at college; the adolescent who returns home to her loving
but repressed parents after a sexual awakening at summer camp; the first-
generation woman of colour in graduate school who feels cared for but also
perpetually ‘in-between’ worlds, misunderstood and not fully seen either by her
department members or her family and friends back home; the travel nurse who
returns home to her partner and friends after an especially meaningful (or
perhaps especially psychologically taxing) work assignment; the 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 transformative life event to provoke feelings of loneliness. As

time passes, it often happens that friends and family who used to understand us
quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did, failing to really see us
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 as they used to before. #is, too, will tend to lead to feelings of loneliness –
though the loneliness may creep in more gradually, more surreptitiously.
Loneliness, it seems, is an existential hazard, something to which human beings
are always vulnerable – and not just when they are alone.

In his recent book Life Is Hard (2022), the philosopher Kieran Setiya characterises
loneliness as the ‘pain of social disconnection’. #ere, he argues for the
importance of attending to the nature of loneliness – both why it hurts and what
‘that pain tell[s] us about how to live’ – especially given the contemporary
prevalence of loneliness. He rightly notes that loneliness is not just a matter of
being isolated from others entirely, since one can be lonely even in a room full of
people. Additionally, he notes that, since the negative psychological and
physiological effects of loneliness ‘seem to depend on the subjective experience of
being lonely’, effectively combatting loneliness requires us to identify the origin of
this subjective experience.

S etiya’s proposal is that we are ‘social animals with social needs’ that crucially
include needs to be loved and to have our basic worth recognised. When we fail to
have these basic needs met, as we do when we are apart from our friends, we
suffer loneliness. Without the presence of friends to assure us that we matter, we
experience the painful ‘sensation of hollowness, of a hole in oneself that used to
be filled and now is not’. #is is loneliness in its most elemental form. (Setiya uses
the term ‘friends’ broadly, to include close family and romantic partners, and I
follow his usage here.)

Imagine a woman who lands a job requiring a long-distance move to an area

where she knows no one. Even if there are plenty of new neighbours and
colleagues to greet her upon her arrival, Setiya’s claim is that she will tend to
experience feelings of loneliness, since she does not yet have close, loving
relationships with these people. In other words, she will tend to experience
feelings of loneliness because she does not yet have friends whose love of her
reflects back to her the basic value as a person that she has, friends who let her
see that she matters. Only when she makes genuine friendships will she feel her
unconditional value is acknowledged; only then will her basic social needs to be
loved and recognised be met. Once she feels she truly matters to someone, in
Setiya’s view, her loneliness will abate.
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 Setiya is not alone in connecting feelings of loneliness to a lack of basic
recognition. In !e Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), for example, Hannah Arendt
also defines loneliness as a feeling that results when one’s human dignity or
unconditional worth as a person fails to be recognised and affirmed, a feeling that
results when this, one of the ‘basic requirements of the human condition’, fails to
be met.

#ese accounts get a good deal about loneliness right. But they miss something as
well. On these views, loving friendships allow us to avoid loneliness because the
loving friend provides a form of recognition we require as social beings. Without
loving friendships, or when we are apart from our friends, we are unable to secure
this recognition. So we become lonely. But notice that the feature affirmed by the
friend here – my unconditional value – is radically depersonalised. #e property
the friend recognises and affirms in me is the same property she recognises and
affirms in her other friendships. Otherwise put, the recognition that allegedly
mitigates loneliness in Setiya’s view is the friend’s recognition of an impersonal,
abstract feature of oneself, a quality one shares with every other human being: her
unconditional worth as a human being. (#e recognition given by the loving
friend is that I ‘[matter] … just like everyone else.’)

Since my dignity or worth is disconnected from any particular feature of myself as

an individual, however, my friend can recognise and affirm that worth without
acknowledging or engaging my particular needs, specific values and so on. If
Setiya is calling it right, then that friend can assuage my loneliness without
engaging my individuality.

Or can they? Accounts that tie loneliness to a failure of basic recognition (and the
alleviation of loneliness to love and acknowledgement of one’s dignity) may be
right about the origin of certain forms of loneliness. But it seems to me that this is
far from the whole picture, and that accounts like these fail to explain a wide
variety of familiar circumstances in which loneliness arises.

When I came home from my study-abroad semester, I returned to a network of

robust, loving friendships. I was surrounded daily by a steadfast group of people
who persistently acknowledged and affirmed my unconditional value as a person,
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 putting up with my obnoxious pretension (so it must have seemed) and accepting
me even though I was alien in crucial ways to the friend they knew before. Yet I
still suffered loneliness. In fact, while I had more close friendships than ever
before – and was as close with friends and family members as I had ever been – I
was lonelier than ever. And this is also true of the familiar scenarios from above:
the first-year college student, the new parent, the travel nurse, and so on. All these
scenarios are ripe for painful feelings of loneliness even though the individuals
undergoing such experiences have a loving network of friends, family and
colleagues who support them and recognise their unconditional value.

So, there must be more to loneliness than Setiya’s account (and others like it) let
on. Of course, if an individual’s worth goes unrecognised, she will feel awfully
lonely. But just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel
lonely in a room full of friends. What plagues accounts that tie loneliness to an
absence of basic recognition is that they fail to do justice to loneliness as a feeling
that pops up not only when one lacks sufficiently loving, affirmative relationships,
but also when one perceives that the relationships she has (including and perhaps
especially loving relationships) lack sufficient quality (for example, lacking depth
or a desired feeling of connection). And an individual will perceive such
relationships as lacking sufficient quality when her friends and family are not
meeting the specific needs she has, or recognising and affirming her as the
particular individual that she is.

We see this especially in the midst or aftermath of transitional and

transformational life events, when greater-than-usual shifts occur. As the result of
going through such experiences, we often develop new values, core needs and
centrally motivating desires, losing other values, needs and desires in the process.
In other words, after undergoing a particularly transformative experience, we
become different people in key respects than we were before. If after such a
personal transformation, our friends are unable to meet our newly developed core
needs or recognise and affirm our new values and central desires – perhaps in
large part because they cannot, because they do not (yet) recognise or understand
who we have become – we will suffer loneliness.

#is is what happened to me after Italy. By the time I got back, I had developed
new core needs – as one example, the need for a certain level and kind of
intellectual engagement – which were unmet when I returned home. What’s
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 more, I did not think it particularly fair to expect my friends to meet these needs.
After all, they did not possess the conceptual frameworks for discussing Russian
absurdism or 13th-century Italian love sonnets; these just weren’t things they had
spent time thinking about. And I didn’t blame them; expecting them to develop
or care about developing such a conceptual framework seemed to me ridiculous.
Even so, without a shared framework, I felt unable to meet my need for
intellectual engagement and communicate to my friends the fullness of my inner
life, which was overtaken by quite specific aesthetic values, values that shaped
how I saw the world. As a result, I felt lonely.

I n addition to developing new needs, I understood myself as having changed in

other fundamental respects. While I knew my friends loved me and affirmed my
unconditional value, I did not feel upon my return home that they were able to see
and affirm my individuality. I was radically changed; in fact, I felt in certain
respects totally unrecognisable even to those who knew me best. After Italy, I
inhabited a different, more nuanced perspective on the world; beauty, creativity
and intellectual growth had become core values of mine; I had become a serious
lover of poetry; I understood myself as a burgeoning philosopher. At the time, my
closest friends were not able to see and affirm these parts of me, parts of me with
which even relative strangers in my college courses were acquainted (though, of
course, those acquaintances neither knew me nor were equipped to meet other of
my needs which my friends had long met). When I returned home, I no longer felt
truly seen by my friends.

One need not spend a semester abroad to experience this. For example, a nurse
who initially chose her profession as a means to professional and financial
stability might, after an especially meaningful experience with a patient, find
herself newly and centrally motivated by a desire to make a difference in her
patients’ lives. Along with the landscape of her desires, her core values may have
changed: perhaps she develops a new core value of alleviating suffering whenever
possible. And she may find certain features of her job – those that do not involve
the alleviation of suffering, or involve the limited alleviation of suffering – not as
fulfilling as they once were. In other words, she may have developed a new need
for a certain form of meaningful difference-making – a need that, if not met,
leaves her feeling flat and deeply dissatisfied.
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 Changes like these – changes to what truly moves you, to what makes you feel
deeply fulfilled – are profound ones. To be changed in these respects is to be
utterly changed. Even if you have loving friendships, if your friends are unable to
recognise and affirm these new features of you, you may fail to feel seen, fail to feel
valued as who you really are. At that point, loneliness will ensue. Interestingly –
and especially troublesome for Setiya’s account – feelings of loneliness will tend
to be especially salient and painful when the people unable to meet these needs
are those who already love us and affirm our unconditional value.

So, even with loving friends, if we perceive ourselves as unable to be seen and
affirmed as the particular people we are, or if certain of our core needs go unmet,
we will feel lonely. Setiya is surely right that loneliness will result in the absence of
love and recognition. But it can also result from the inability – and sometimes,
failure – of those with whom we have loving relationships to share or affirm our
values, to endorse desires that we understand as central to our lives, and to satisfy
our needs.

Another way to put it is that our social needs go far beyond the impersonal
recognition of our unconditional worth as human beings. #ese needs can be as
widespread as a need for reciprocal emotional attachment or as restricted as a
need for a certain level of intellectual engagement or creative exchange. But even
when the need in question is a restricted or uncommon one, if it is a deep need
that requires another person to meet yet goes unmet, we will feel lonely. #e fact
that we suffer loneliness even when these quite specific needs are unmet shows
that understanding and treating this feeling requires attending not just to
whether my worth is affirmed, but to whether I am recognised and affirmed in my
particularity and whether my particular, even idiosyncratic social needs are met
by those around me.

What’s more, since different people have different needs, the conditions that
produce loneliness will vary. #ose with a strong need for their uniqueness to be
recognised may be more disposed to loneliness. Others with weaker needs for
recognition or reciprocal emotional attachment may experience a good deal of
social isolation without feeling lonely at all. Some people might alleviate
loneliness by cultivating a wide circle of not-especially-close friends, each of
whom meets a different need or appreciates a different side of them. Yet others
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 might persist in their loneliness without deep and intimate friendships in which
they feel more fully seen and appreciated in their complexity, in the fullness of
their being.

Yet, as ever-changing beings with friends and loved ones who are also ever-
changing, we are always susceptible to loneliness and the pain of situations in
which our needs are unmet. Most of us can recall a friend who once met certain of
our core social needs, but who eventually – gradually, perhaps even imperceptibly
– ultimately failed to do so. If such needs are not met by others in one’s life, this
situation will lead one to feel profoundly, heartbreakingly lonely.

In cases like these, new relationships can offer true succour and light. For
example, a lonely new parent might have childless friends who are clueless to the
needs and values she develops through the hugely complicated transition to
parenthood; as a result, she might cultivate relationships with other new parents
or caretakers, people who share her newly developed values and better
understand the joys, pains and ambivalences of having a child. To the extent that
these new relationships enable her needs to be met and allow her to feel
genuinely seen, they will help to alleviate her loneliness. #rough seeking
relationships with others who might share one’s interests or be better situated to
meet one’s specific needs, then, one can attempt to face one’s loneliness head on.

But you don’t need to shed old relationships to cultivate the new. When old
friends to whom we remain committed fail to meet our new needs, it’s helpful to
ask how to salvage the situation, saving the relationship. In some instances, we
might choose to adopt a passive strategy, acknowledging the ebb and flow of
relationships and the natural lag time between the development of needs and
others’ abilities to meet them. You could ‘wait it out’. But given that it is much
more difficult to have your needs met if you don’t articulate them, an active
strategy seems more promising. To position your friend to better meet your
needs, you might attempt to communicate those needs and articulate ways in
which you don’t feel seen.

Of course, such a strategy will be successful only if the unmet needs provoking
one’s loneliness are needs one can identify and articulate. But we will so often –
perhaps always – have needs, desires and values of which we are unaware or that
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 we cannot articulate, even to ourselves. We are, to some extent, always opaque to
ourselves. Given this opacity, some degree of loneliness may be an inevitable part
of the human condition. What’s more, if we can’t even grasp or articulate the
needs provoking our loneliness, then adopting a more passive strategy may be the
only option one has. In cases like this, the only way to recognise your unmet
needs or desires is to notice that your loneliness has started to lift once those
needs and desires begin to be met by another.

aeon.co 9 November 2023

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