The only cure for loneliness

The art and paradox of being always alone, and never alone

"The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player."

- Naval

“If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself.”

  - Paulo Coelho

Ten years ago Robin Williams took his own life aged 63, and I still miss him. His loss still feels profound and ever-present, similar for me to losing my childhood friend, Jason, who tragically passed around the same time.

Williams was perhaps the most universally loved and funniest man on the planet. His movies and actions brought joy to millions.

And yet, he was deeply lonely and unhappy.

He once said, “I used to think the worst thing in life is to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.”

Perhaps we still love and remember him because he captured the paradox at the heart of the human condition: a day of solitude can be tragically lonely or deliciously alone, depending on how we frame it. 

In this essay, I want to explore the deep history behind this paradox of solitude and suggest a way to live more comfortably with it. Because when we accept that two things are equally true—that we are always alone and never alone—then we have the foundations to embrace aloneness, which is the best antidote to loneliness.

But first, let’s acknowledge the genuine trauma of loneliness if we allow it to set in. Loneliness is an unspoken form of suffering; without help, it can become a hole too deep to climb out of. The lonely usually also feel ashamed that they suffer, but by definition, they have nobody to share it with. For people whose lives are filled with the busy noise of family and friends, it can be impossible to understand and, therefore, support the lonely. 

I once heard loneliness is like holding in a joke because you have no one to share it with.

But being alone does not necessarily cause loneliness, and the more we learn about the colorful history of solitude, the greater our ability to frame it positively.

Starting with the lens of early societies, it has always been important for humans to fit in and be part of the tribe. Sitting too far outside the group in early societies would have meant not enjoying the spoils of the hunt, so in a way, we are all descendants of those who chose to join the tribe and eat together at the fire.

To reinforce this importance, most early societies enforced a liminal period of solitude on younger members, especially adolescent boys, as an initiation ritual to mark their transition to adulthood. Young aboriginal men, for instance, were sent out into the desert alone to fend for themselves for up to half a year. This fostered a fearful respect for loneliness but also a useful tolerance for aloneness.

What does this deep history mean for us today? It might explain why we feel anxious when we aren’t invited to sit by the fire with the rest of the tribe. But it might also remind us that we are no longer so dependent on the safety of the tribe, so our primitive feelings of anxiety when alone are no longer so helpful to us. 

It might also remind us that, at times in our lives, we must deliberately step away from the comfort of the tribe to learn to become more robust and independent. Aloneness won’t kill us and will certainly make us stronger. We grow alone.

For much of Western civilization, solitude was celebrated, and many Christian saints became famous for the long periods they spent alone. Jesus wandered for forty days and nights in the wilderness, and a strong tradition of silence and solitude was cultivated in the monasteries and nunneries of Europe.

Arriving in the New World, we also fostered a reverence for the noble solitude of the frontier, as echoed in one of the most quoted passages in American literature:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

This passage left a great impression on me as a teenager, as it has for generations of young individualists as if it were a tribal calling to walk out alone into the world, a call from a tribal council that no longer existed but probably still should. Shortly after reading this in my teens, I left home before finishing school and spent over a year wandering across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. I can’t say for sure that Thoreau inspired me to walk out alone, but I wouldn’t have been the first!

In the late twentieth century, things became more complicated. Our traditional communities started to fall apart. As Robert Putnam argued poignantly in ‘Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community’:

The dominant theme is simple: For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago, silently, without warning, that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.

These confusing rip-tides have surged into this new century. We have continued to move into cities and suburbs, where paradoxically, we can more easily be ignored utterly in a crowd. 

Loneliness was already accelerating in society, and then the smartphone arrived. Our media and screens have fractured into personal echo chambers, kicking away one of the last few legs that still gave us community, the ‘watercooler’ TV events that everyone watched together and then discussed the next day at school or work.

Social media has enabled us to stay connected to everyone we know and love, no matter how often or far we move around. However, it can also painfully remind us that we are missing out on a group that we didn’t even know we wanted to be part of.

Ever since smartphones were launched, levels of reported loneliness, anxiety, and depression have all spiked and continue to rise. Beyond parody, in desperation, the British government even created a Ministry for Loneliness. 

Looking back at where we came from - at our tribal, religious, and pioneering roots - it feels like we have forgotten how to embrace the power of aloneness. But understanding this can help us regain control and frame aloneness in more positive ways. 

For instance, the idea I like the most is slowly increasing the quality of our human interactions while decreasing their quantity.

When we’re young, we feel the need to accumulate large groups of friends and roam around town, having more loose interactions. Perhaps more is better because we’re still searching for a partner, meaning, or voice.

As we age, we have less of a need for so many interactions. We know who we are and what will make us happy, and we can usually happily exist in just a few interactions a day or perhaps even a week. At the same time, we crave deeper connections—to connect more authentically and openly with fewer people.

At the heart of aloneness, less is more. A single meaningful connection, combined with a routine of comfortable and simple solitude, is all we might need to make sure that we frame our lives positively as ‘aloneness’ instead of ‘loneliness.’ 

Sadly, Robin Williams never quite found the solace of aloneness. For the best-loved, and funniest man in the world, there was always a joke he had no one to share with.

J. E. Chadwick