Cure or Endure Loneliness?

Notifications, updates, lights and sounds, everyone and everything competing for our attention. So little time to think by ourselves that we just wish to be left alone. Sometimes. To then feel lonely.

The WHO declared loneliness an epidemic. This resonates so much with so many that it seems to have taken over all media since December. Loneliness is the curse of a generation. It is up there with tobacco, alcohol and diesel engines, leading to dementia, strokes. We live in a lonely world, lonelier, the loneliest.

Solutions have been proposed, commissions set, studies planned, statement of intents made: we just have to solve social isolation. Sounds and reads logical. It also stirs memories of elderly people dying alone and forgotten in their flat. More people, more contacts, more friends, … less loneliness?

Can you cure, treat, cancel loneliness?

The pictures, the speeches, the initiatives, the tone sounds very much like we would need to live in “simpler times”, in the Village where everyone knows and cares for everyone else. Not that it ever existed anywhere. At what level of connection would we have to go to erase our uneasiness, restlessness at being alone. Social media gives us a good real-time experience.

Look at me looking happy! Look at me depressed! Look at me. Please.

Loneliness makes us feel uncomfortable. Sad. Terrible sometimes. It can become crippling. So loneliness is indeed bad for our health. It is worth studying its mechanisms. How often do we feel lonely? What do we miss when we feel lonely? How do we even feel it? How to avoid it? Just consider the efforts made by just any society to define, foster, manage sexual/reproductive/emotional partnerships? Loneliness is failure of the group as much as possibly the individual. Being a loner anywhere is weird, if not suspicious.

It is easy to define what loneliness looks like: loneliness is 1.

And the reflex is to make the opposite of loneliness 2.

And yet, on an overpopulated planet, in an information noosphere, an instantaneously interconnected world, we still feel lonely. It cannot be a simple question of quantity then. The solution is not “get out of your room and meet more people”. It seems to me that we feel lonely when we feel our true self is not acknowledged. This is why we all feel loneliness at some point. Loneliness has many aspects, material, psychological, cultural, economic,… different intensities.

So, where to go from here?

Let’s first review the data, look at existing concepts and solutions out there, assess why they are not working and then propose a new way forward.

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How lonely are we? How often?

Loneliness is on-trend. There can be little doubt about that. 

But what does the data tell us? Sure, we all feel alone sometimes, but a priority? For the WHO to launch yet another commission end 2023, with no less than 11 new positions, it must be something. The data they used, the “solid research” to quote is that 25% of older people and 5 to 15% of teenagers feel lonely. Put like that, it does not seem either or. 

Let’s scope the issue. 

A factual gauge is that the amounts spent on mental health are massive and continue to increase. The global mental health market size is estimated above 400 billion USD today. Mental health is an on-trend topic indeed. Even Harry reinvented himself as a mental health coach. 

But actual data on loneliness is rather hard to come by, apart from “we all feel lonely sometimes”. Indeed, “feeling lonely” is as much a fact (I am alone) as it is a feeling (I feel alone). Hence, gauging it could be tricky. Fundamental research recommends to identify the exact type of loneliness experienced before setting out to measure it. And, as any scientific measurement, you must be able to repeat it. Finally, concluding that there is an epidemic, an emergency or actually a topic, requires some type of time series to be able to say: there is more now, or there was less last century. 

We seem to lack both: the dataset we have on loneliness is not yet robust enough. 

We have a continuously refined stable standard scientific measurement, established by UCLA, a set of psychological questionnaires and methods. The idea is to establish a loneliness index. You can take the test yourself and see “how lonely” you are relatively to others. I score a consistent 65 out of 80. Yay me. 

The origin of the WHO data, and of the alarm raised initially, originates with the US Surgeon General Report. In that research proxies are used, such as social engagement, frequency and number of interactions, etc… Questions and statements are not nearly as neutral as they should be for us to be confident about their significance (cf. HHS p16): “only 16% of the Americans reported that they felt very attached to their local community”. Which one? 

An alternative could be to combine this with classical questionnaires (cue: do you feel lonely?), and we have a picture of roughly 25% of the population feeling lonely, according to Gallup. But then again, with that method, IPSOS found 61% of loneliness in the US across all generations. Even more confusing, 49% of the population of the same data does not feel lonely. At All.

Let’s take the Gallup data. At any given time, if 25% of the people is feeling lonely, we still don’t have a picture of the duration of that feeling. Is it that 1 person out of 4 feels lonely now, or does 25% feel lonely the whole time? The videos set up by the WHO seem to lean towards the second possibility, but then, everyone feels lonely at some point. 

Very logically, loneliness is a core topic for those thriving on it: social connectors. No surprise that, to be a part in the fight against the “loneliness epidemic” – a rather melodramatic way to put it if you ask me – META (formerly known as Facebook) started a program to measure and address social connections. Same as the new WHO commission. Great minds think alike. Their finding is that 72% of the people feel connected. Right, not what we were looking for as a loneliness “epidemic” then. The positive point is that this data should allow us to set up time series and check factually on the development of the feeling.  

From the factual research, the one thing we know for sure is that loneliness exists and that it is diffuse. And that looking at loneliness only through the lens of the quantity, frequency of contacts (connections) is an expedient proxy, but a proxy. 

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How do psychology and philosophy frame loneliness?

Loneliness is about feeling bad being alone. The tempting solution is to solve the bad feeling by not being alone. 

In today’s world, how to be alone? We can travel within a day to the other side of the globe. We have instant communications, quasi-ubiquitous access to the internet through smartphones, yet loneliness still exists. It even seems to spread. No wonder that loneliness is such a debate. 

It seems that we tried to fix loneliness since we started thinking. Both psychology and philosophy deal with it, but both observe, frame loneliness in their own way, with rather common roots of course: “it’s all in your head” vs “it is part of the human experience”.

Yet, it seems that neither truly succeeded in curing or making loneliness more bearable for us.

Maybe a new approach could help. 

Magazine psychology: “Make friends” 

Begin where it generally all starts nowadays: Google. Just google loneliness and you get pages after pages of “solutions”. 

The solutions proposed are generally what you would expect. To not feel alone, be less alone: get more friends, do sports, find people to share a hobby with… 

An example of this approach is the following list of solutions of US News

Some recommendations actually go to the extent to reframe the problem by urging “Make more friends to disarm the alarm bells”. Being alone is weird. 

Sure.

Many solutions and yet this clearly does not work, as we saw in the figures quoted before. You can feel very lonely with a lot of people around, as much as you may wish to be alone without feeling lonely. 

So, not being less alone does not solve loneliness.

The theory of loneliness in psychology 

Psychology reckons that loneliness is specific to each individual, triggered by situations, circumstances entirely dependent on the individual. Which makes of course finding a standard “cure” or treatment rather complex, if possible at all. 

And yet, maybe because it is more expedient, the solutions proposed by psychology are generally a version of the magazine ones. Loneliness is basically some kind of animalistic need to belong to the tribe. For example, in the National Library of Medicine, the recommended solutions are to “enhance social skills, provide social support, increase opportunities for social interaction, and address maladaptive social cognition”. 

As we already saw in the data above, it is unlikely that these will structurally solve loneliness.

Loneliness resonates with all of us. So much so that it creates stubborn urban myths. “Christmas is the loneliest period of the year” is so easy to believe. And so wrong: suicide rates are depressingly stable through the year. Or the saddest day of the year, Blue Monday: clever, plausible. Unfounded. These myths continue to resonate because they rely in our deepest feelings. 

We learn from psychology that loneliness is not only isolation – although isolation can trigger it. Loneliness is not only the feeling of unworthiness. It is not only rejection. It is a personal mix of feelings of … unicity? 

So then, the following question arises: is loneliness the feeling to be unique in our situation? 

Are we lonely because we feel unique?

“It’s all in your head”

Feeling unique is something we all experienced in our life. In the first few years after being born, the world seems to revolve around us. We sometimes feel alone, and want attention. As we grow up, our senses develop, our thinking evolves, we improve the understanding of our environment, until we are forced to realise that we are, that our circumstances, our world, is actually not unique. 

This is where we add a new feeling: from being alone to feeling lonely.

Psychology claims that realising that you are not unique is just a stage in life. Same goes with feeling lonely: you are not unique, there are many others in the same situation. So the solution is obvious: find these others and you are not alone therefore you do not feel lonely anymore. 

In reality though, I may not be unique, but I do feel unique. And that in itself creates loneliness. 

Psychology largely brushes this duality aside as a stage of any child mental development. A stage to be overcome. Another childhood trauma maybe, but more of a rite of passage, just one of these things we have to go through. Like puberty. 

Are we lonely because we feel unique?

We come to realise we are not unique, yet we still feel we are. And, how more lonely can you be than to you feel unique? Think Superman. 

And yet, that initial realisation, call it maybe that initial trauma, does not fully explain by itself the universal sense of loneliness, but the fact that loneliness seems to each of us personal. There are many like us feeling lonely, but my loneliness, crafted by my senses in my personal blend, makes me feel unique in itself. 

After all, from the very first grasp of the wider world around us, our acceptance of others, our understanding of the existence of others, is actually a limitation to ourselves, to our ego-centric world. Remember your first day at the kindergarten: there are not only others like you and your parents, they are really many others, taller, shorter, different. And our own little inner voice can only then be our own refuge.

So, new friends, new social hobbies, empathy, even wisdom if you want, seem little more than “it’s all in your head, get over it”. According to psychology, you must get out of your own head, it is not good for you. 

While all the while, we feel that the only reliable self is our deeper inner voice with this egocentric understanding of the world. What happens when you feel absolutely excruciating pain? You collapse in yourself, deaf and blind to the outside world. You mentally curl up. Your identity shrinks to an inner safe space. This unique character. Your self-consciousness.

And that unique egocentric “you” may not be alone, but may feel very lonely. 

We feel too unique.

What is missing then in this theory of psychology?

What is missing is for your true deep self to be seen and accepted in the wider world. Not as some psychological phase to leave behind. 

We miss being satisfyingly acknowledged. 

Philosophy tells us loneliness is an integral part of the human condition, or to make more friends

Loneliness is a universal human issue. 

So much so, that most philosophical schools, if they deal with loneliness at all, just make it an unavoidable fact of life, best dealt with by adapting how we engage with others.

Alienation has been the leading theme

Late XXth century, philosophy (led by the Existentialists) made alienation, the feeling of being estranged, isolated, from the world, a central theme. No-one went further into the darkness looking for an answer. Dealing with the aftermath of the Second World War, they made loneliness, the feeling of being alone, their centre point of study. Alienation, a feeling of inadequacy between me and the world around us, is at the heart of it.  

The essence of the philosophy revolves around inadequate recognition. One of the most quoted axioms is L’enfer, c’est les autres…. In an approximate translation: Hell is the [judgement of] others. In this, they actually echo centuries of philosophical schools: the core of loneliness is the lack of recognition of the individual in the environment he/she sees as relevant. 

We can be alone in a crowd, alone in our thinking, and in the case of Existentialists, alone within society, rounding up the argument with the latest social, psychological approaches. 

“Go and make more friends”

The classical solution to loneliness has been set since the Stoics. Whether in Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, loneliness is essentially the price for not making meaningful social, human contacts. If we do not make the effort to cultivate social relationships in the wider sense of the word, then we end up feeling lonely. Basically, the reward you get from making friends is not being alone.

That means that overcoming loneliness is both a question of quantity of relationships, but also and primarily of their quality, their meaningfulness. That seems like an awfully risky coping mechanism as we know the difficulty in creating these exact meaningful relationships: any newspaper has an agony aunt, any radio a psychology late night show. This can only be a balancing act between how lonely we feel and how much we must give to create this meaningful relationship. 

The modern thought-process: recognition and collective empathy

If we follow both these schools of thought, loneliness leading to alienation and the need to engage with society to overcome it, it is only natural that the only practical way to achieve this satisfactorily is to lower the barriers to acceptance, making it easier to meet the others.

We are currently living in the third stage of the following philosophical discussion: 

This is how empathy currently prevails as a solution. 

We see a live example of these underlying ideas in the WHO report: Loneliness is social isolation => To be less lonely, we need to feel positively accepted, that is, recognised ==> The condition for this to work is collective empathy.

This process and these ideas are far from new. They started under the porches of the Agora in Athens. And yet, ours is the very same society that thinks of itself as the loneliest. We still feel utterly lonely. Possibly more and more so.

We can be recognised and still feel lonely 

How many musicians, artists are depressed to the point of suicide despite fame, glory and money? According to psychology itself, depression is the ultimate outcome of loneliness. So, positive recognition (“you are awesome”) seems like one of these false good ideas.

Recognition does not work as such: we can receive the greatest rewards, the biggest trophies and still feel utterly lonely.

Similarly, on the other end of the spectrum, we may feel alone when we are criticised, when we fail, but not lonely. Actually, failure may make us wish to be even more alone, to claw down into the earth. But we certainly do not feel lonely then. 

Empathy is a way to signal “you are not alone”, but does not address loneliness

Empathy is another of these ideas that looks obvious to treat loneliness. But how does an insincere pat on the back work for you? Yes, it feels like I am not alone, but not that we share some common human experience. 

Someone is out there telling me “I understand, I know”, which is nice, but does not necessarily solve my loneliness.

How does the egocentric unique me sees empathy? “No you do not understand, you are not me. It is not recognition, it is not a validation, it is just pity.” 

A common building block in all of these suggestions: Acknowledgement

Across all of the suggested solutions, from making meaningful social engagements to empathy, there is a common element, a building block maybe: I wish to feel seen, I wish to be acknowledged. 

I, the true me, need to feel that there is out there someone, something that is trying to reach out to me. 

It does not need to be positive or negative, I do not even need to see a person or have a pat on the back. That would be a plus, but it is not the basic necessity. 

The bare bones necessity is simply acknowledgement.

Take a rock concert. The crowd is all round us. We may enjoy it thoroughly as being part of a mass, a tribe, a herd. But even then, they are some moment where we can mentally sidestep the show, look around, and feel isolated in the crowd. Until the singer pays the crowd a compliment, and everyone in the crowd feels individually elated as the best fan ever. In how many concerts did you see that happen? How many concerts did make you feel less lonely because of that specific mechanic? Did it not go beyond only feeling less alone?

You felt acknowledged. Not even as a fully-fledged, complex, multidimensional individual. I think we just need to get a “proof” that I exist in the world.

At the core of loneliness is the relation between an inner core, the inner me and a wider environment through a spark, acknowledgement. Not more than a flashing grin. Loneliness is a systemic killer, like some cancers: it will come back again and again. It will pop up in each and in every environment we move into, society, friends, family, partner. 

Loneliness comes back every time we feel that what is acknowledged, is actually not me. 

Acknowledgement is at the same time so basic and so elusive that defining it precisely is best done, not through logics or deduction, but through verifiable evidence. Empirically.

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Why is it Acknowledgement?

We can only manage our loneliness if we understand its root cause. Psychology and philosophy suggested to reach out and create a padding of meaningful connections: we should try and make as many good contacts as possible. But neither quantity nor quality contacts guarantees that we don’t feel lonely.

For me, we experience loneliness when we miss acknowledgement. 

Let’s verify this hypothesis in our daily experience. 

Acknowledgement is not quantity of contacts, connections, communication

Your smartphone is a living proof of it. 
You really have to make an effort today to escape any form of contact, interaction, connection to the world. You have dedicated apps that make sure that any of your friends, family, followers know precisely where you are and allow you to drop a quick note. A passing fad on Facebook was to share your flight plans. Internet is virtually available anywhere to anyone in the world. 

The Meta/Gallup study set out to draw a picture of the State of Social connections. Even in the worst cases, such as in DRC, only 18% felt not connected at all. The following worst performers were at 10% and below. Overall, only 6% of the global population, according to this study, does not feel connected at all. 

All the connections in the world.

Still, 24% feels lonely.  

Loneliness is neither only a matter of quality of connection

Two empirical experiences.

Acknowledgement can be as minimal as a nod to a stranger. Visit a random retirement home. Lots of people around with little less to do than talk to each other. Now, don’t talk. Just nod or smile to a resident you do not know. One on one, the resident will tell you how lonely they feel. And that, for a moment, they felt less lonely. That person temporarily does not feel lonely anymore because you acknowledged her/him. I have experienced this several time.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum. Engage in a deep philosophical discussion for a few hours. Despite the deep connect, does it make you feel less lonely? At least, not until you ingest the conversation. 

Not quantity, not quality. Just a nod, an acknowledgement.  

Our biggest frustration with dating apps is also the best proof of our need for acknowledgement 

Speak of loneliness and the first thing to pop up in mind is: “find the one partner”. Dating apps make a roaring trade. Finding the Ken to the Barbie, or vice versa, or any combination thereof is a favourite human past time. Regardless of generation, we date today online. For more than 45% of any age group dating apps are the go-to way to meet people. 

There exists an app dedicated to anything specific: from religious beliefs, social profiles up to, naturally, but far from exclusively, sexual preferences. Anything we may be looking for. 

What does it also say? What do we all fear when looking for someone?

Ghosting.

And what is ghosting except the abrupt, unexplained, breach of contact. De-acknowledgement 

Social media possibly accelerates the feeling of loneliness 

Social media should be the silver bullet to loneliness as it offers potentially both quantity and quality. It even removes the necessity of physical proximity. Social media however does not guarantee acknowledgement, it is probably the exact opposite. 

We take to social media for validation. Whereas what we really crave is acknowledgement. We crave deep, true, accurate acknowledgement of who we really are. Not a cardboard cut-out nature morte/still life posted version of ourself. 

We still feel lonely online, as we put on our character suit, our persona, for the audience to clap. 

How then does acknowledgement work within our different settings? How does loneliness work out practically.

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Grades of acknowledgement, shades of loneliness

We cannot shed or ignore loneliness. We have to satisfy our need for acknowledgement. Loneliness is always ready to pop up again, like a systemic cancer. And quite probably when we are at our lowest energy, at our most vulnerable. 

So we need to be ready to face it. 

Loneliness has many different facets. So does acknowledgement. 

We feel lonely for many reasons: physical, emotional, intellectual loneliness. Many types, but also different degrees. They all share the same taste, from the most intellectually rarefied to the most basic. Loneliness can be dispelled for a moment by a wink, as described earlier.

Each type of loneliness means a different type of acknowledgement.  

Combine this to our personal priorities of needs, our own ways of processing input, and you can see how complex it is to satisfy acknowledgement, how easier it is to feel lonely. At the core of it, it is that complex knot of expectations that reaches out to feel acknowledgement. 

Me and my friends: acknowledgement by the group 

You choose your friends,… there goes the axiom. 

It should be easy then to craft a circle of supportive friends. 

Psychology Today, the WHO, US News, our parents and kindergarten teachers, all tell us that this is the basic answer to loneliness: “go out and make some friends!”. 

Either we are all socially inept, poor in character judgement, or unaware of our needs, but the simple fact that loneliness has gone unabated since ever tells us enough.

Circles of friends naturally evolve over time, and so does the acknowledgement we receive. Groups of friends form through shared happenstance, common experience, shared interests, beliefs or activities. That is the initial point of contact, the initial glue holding the group together. This original event also defines the type and level of acknowledgement the members of the group expect. 

This is how circles of friends can both slowly freeze and mutate over-time. They freeze into archaeological layers of ritual acknowledgement. They slowly mutate as experience, time, settles on them. 

So, do we ever feel lonely within our chosen circles of friends? Yes, because acknowledgment is not their primary function. The primary function of the group is either shared interests, mutual support, but with a value of acknowledgement that is fixed in time – for good or bad. 

Me and my family

Families are the byword for personality safe space. History, cultures, religion, social dogma have painted a protective, defensive, welcoming picture of the family. It can be a positive picture, supportive, fostering the individual. It can also be an oppressive hierarchy, a social and ideological formatting. 

Either way, on the loneliness spectrum, family should be the opposite of loneliness. 

Yet, you certainly can feel very lonely within a family. 

Loneliness within a family is not a question of how many family members (quantity), nor what your family stands for (quality). Like friends, it is a stratified, time stamped group. Families tend to have their own classes of settings and roles, which tend to set over time: parents/children, poor thing/success, funny/sad… 

Counter-intuitively maybe, families tend to assign you with a spot in the family picture. Regardless of what you actually are, what you become, what or who you want to be, you are first and foremost for that group the personal construct the group build around you. The reasoning goes: who else can know you best? When the real answer can only be: I know myself best, of course.

What is ever acknowledged by the family is you in the group’s mind’s eye. 

The feeling of being less lonely when in a family seems, to me, to stem more from comfort of the familiar than acknowledgement. The word familiar speaks itself volumes in this context.

There is no escaping that acknowledgement within the family of this latest version of me can only happen through a conscious, sustained, straining and difficult process of continuous re-acknowledgement. Of all group members. 

“Coming out” is a good example of the trauma to be experienced both by the family and individual as the established roles and acknowledgement are suddenly scrambled. Basically, “Things will never be the same again” is the main fear. 

To avoid these tiresome re-assessments, a coping mechanism is to accept the slow decay of family interactions into scripted, time frozen, roles. This social theatre slowly replaces the material reality of the family members.

The core of the family remains the transactional value of the “love” shared, given or expected, not necessarily acknowledgement. It is a “social working unit”, a “comfort zone”. 

A rational social defence mechanism, not a defence against loneliness. 

Acknowledgement by the One

We do choose our partners. 

Or at least we like to think we do. If there is one environment in which we should not feel lonely, it is that one. Me and my partner.

We humans have been and will always be obsessed with relationships. Any creature given a reproductive instinct actually does too, ours is maybe more intellectualised. Logically, all foundational myths must include a couple of sorts. In the bible, Adam himself did not really feel lonely, but God thought he should not be alone (Genesis 2:18: “It is not good for man to be alone”). 

Is loneliness nothing more than an aversion of being alone. A religious, moral, social, sexual imperative to not be alone? 

This is exactly how many anti-loneliness programs read. This is certainly the line we are fed.

We had arranged marriages, we had culturally defined courting rules, we now have dating apps algorithms. All of it just seems to have created even more loneliness.

In our search for the optimal partner, we are given more and more opportunities, but do we meet more and more people to end up quitting them more and more? We commit less and less to one, as we do not just want a partner, we want to find “the One”. Once we will have hopped from every eligible human being to every other eligible human being, once we will have tried all the combinations of genders, shapes, experiences and traumas, then what? 

We still feel lonely. 

Why then? 

We say we commit to a partner, we marry for financial security, and immediately after, for companionship. Not being alone. Not ending alone. 

And we divorce because we did not find the companionship we hoped for: incompatibility is the main reason for divorce… Let’s say this differently: we divorce because we have the feeling of not being seen. Or to be seen as a role, a character, a persona. Why do we hunt for new partners? Read the Sun’s agony aunt: “I felt un-appreciated”. Sure, sex remains the smoking gun of infidelity, but it is a transactional value against … acknowledgement and less loneliness. 

It should be easy to design a counter to loneliness with a partner: a partnership success rests on acknowledgement of the partner. Physical, sexual, intellectual, emotional, …? Cultural, social, religious, … All of it, weaved, rolled up and served as fits. 

Without that holistic approach, you don’t have a partnership, you have a limited liability couple. 

A “working” couple is pretty much a continuous balancing act of mutual acknowledgement, a constant effort.

Acknowledgement of myself by myself

And what about myself? 

The last rabbit hole that we need to go down is the most difficult: me and myself. Self-acknowledgement. It sounds slightly absurd to think that we could feel alone with ourselves. 

Pascal, the French philosopher, said that we needed solitude to hear God. Instead of that, we go outside and mingle with people to distract ourselves from a sorrowful life. But is engaging in a mental dialog with God, praying, nothing more than a search for self-acknowledgement? That voice you hear may simply be yourself talking to yourself. Or not, if you chose to believe. 

One of the theories about split personality disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder is that it could be an extreme way to create aspects better able to fit into society. Split your personality into as many fully fledged characters/entities as you need, to cover all aspects of yourself. It is a socio-cognitive disorder, but it is also a coping mechanism to deal with a social order we reject/don’t accept/feel rejected by.  

We can go down within our own mind, lose our sense of personality: we lose self-acknowledgement at our peril.

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Do not ignore loneliness, prepare for it

We can feel lonely within many settings, and have to expect that it will hit us in many different circumstances. We may feel lonely sometimes, often, or never. Our options are to fight off this mental erosion, or prepare in case of a sudden crisis. If it does hit us, it is likely to pile on and hit us at our lowest. 

Loneliness may be a health risk, but it certainly is a feeling dangerous enough to lead to suicide. At its worst, loneliness stops life in its tracks. Thinking about it, it seems very much like the very antithesis of the life we were sold since birth. 

Hence, loneliness should not be ignored, but prepared for.

The strategy could be to endure it, but the risk then is for our dams to suddenly break down. As much as a society as individuals, if we believe in mental health, we cannot bet on it.

We have developed many coping strategies, some of which have stood the test of time, but do they work? 

Relying on the public eye is a two-edged sword

It may seem obvious to seek acknowledgement by a large audience. 

It may not be the first target of politicians, charities and NGOs, but publicly contributing to the community in whatever capacity would seem like a go-to way. And certainly, despite the mandatory denials, “it is all about the team”, “I do it for the children”, there is at least a side-serving of ego stroking.  

But they come with a double-edged dependency on recognition. Who or, better, what gets acknowledged is in the hands of the audience, not the individual. A seminal example of the duality of public recognition would be Mother Teresa in the eyes of both her critics as well as her apologists.

It can be of great service to get recognised, but it can also leave you even more alone, so seeking acknowledgment with the a large audience cannot be your baseline safe place. 

Friends and family remain a transactional acknowledgement

Have more friends! Tighten the bonds to your family! Not only logical recommendations, but, like an audience, it comes at a price. Basically, it is not assured that you will actually get the acknowledgement you need, as what you receive from it is based on what is given in. Bonds are dependent on a given value; experience, cosiness, comfort, safe place… but, based on its individuality, the persona acknowledged, like in any public circumstance, may not be enough. 

For friends and family to deliver as a means to reduce loneliness, you must make a conscious effort to get acknowledged for what you are, lest your connection slowly erodes into playing a role. Roleplay, not acknowledgement. 

Some groups and families accept it and put in the effort. Most don’t, as the effort needs to be sustained over a lifetime.

Partnership is the best solution, but time-stamped and the most difficult to find and maintain

Having a “soulmate”, a partner, is the best, the most fulfilling solution to loneliness. Maybe unsurprisingly. But it is not the most actionable recommendation. 

It is difficult to find a partner for the reasons we already mentioned. And it is maybe as difficult to maintain this relationship to the satisfaction of both parties. As any agony aunt will tell you, the feeling of loneliness within a relationship is crippling as it shatters all your core needs.

And assuming you succeed in both, this solution is time-stamped as it dies with your partner. 

But having in your life this constant acknowledgment, this impression that you could face loneliness together is intrinsically the best guarantee. Whether by design, purpose or underlying animal instincts. 

Avoiding loneliness through partnership is the one solution that, more than any other, does not rely on quantity of connections, but absolute quality. 

Fighting loneliness alone is risky, can be destructive, but is the only absolute failsafe

In the fight against loneliness, in the fight for acknowledgement, we are vying for the attention of the world, of the audience, of friends, family and partner. There is however no silver bullet to get it. There is no guarantee, and all audience-based solutions come with a potential price to pay. 

Time honoured solutions against loneliness have been to lose ourselves in social relationships, partying, or numbing our senses through drugs, alcohol or other senses-dulling media. Many highs, DMT in particular, are advertised as letting us connect with a deeper reality, a universal connection where our individual human gets in contact with the deeper collective.

How to feel lonely then, when we are part of a greater meaning? 

But, whether drugs, alcohol, sex, or social engagement for that matter, these are all placebos when it comes to loneliness. And all the more addictive as they temporarily blur the material reality, only for us to have to increase the dose to feel that same feeling again. Slowly, as with everything, only more and more of these placebos will work to get us out of the “social down”. 

The only assured way to fight back loneliness is to realise that its origin is only down to a lack of acknowledgement. It is not a disease, not a curse, not a failure on our part. 

Loneliness is just a need that is temporarily not filled. 

Once this is clear, the solution is clear to work on. 

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Loneliness cannot be cured. It cannot be treated. It certainly should not be ignored.

But it can be managed, and endured. 

It is not the frequency, the quantity of social connections that help us cope better with it. Neither is it the quality of these external anchors, as the Stoics think. Simpler than that, we need a satisfying modicum of acknowledgement of who we really are. 

Loneliness is to a large extent invisibility. But because invisibility can also be a defence mechanism, tackling loneliness can only be a complex and delicate task. It is also never-ending as we will have to be forever on alert with our surroundings to be acknowledged properly. 

Pushing back loneliness is not just about understanding others more, but understanding more about ourselves. 

And ultimately, you can just hate life right back for being designed like this. 

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