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Loved, yet lonely

You might have the unconditional love of family and
friends and yet feel deep loneliness. Can philosophy
explain why?

Paris, 1951. Photo by Elliot Erwitt/Magnum

Kaitlyn Creasy is an
associate professor
of philosophy at
California State
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
University, San just arrived back home from a study abroad
Bernardino. She is semester in Italy. During my stay in Florence,
the author of The
my Italian had advanced to the point where I
Problem of Affective
was dreaming in the language. I had also
Nihilism in
developed intellectual interests in Italian
Nietzsche (2020).
futurism, Dada, and Russian absurdism –
 interests not entirely deriving from a crush on
Edited by Pam
the professor who taught a course on those
Weintraub
topics – as well as the love sonnets of Dante and
3,200 words 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
Listen that world richer, more nuanced.
here 22:22
After that semester, I returned home to a small
Brought to you by
Curio, an Aeon partner working-class town in New Jersey. Home proper
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was my boyfriend’s parents’ home, which was in
Essays here
the process of foreclosure but not yet taken by
the bank. Both parents had left to live elsewhere,
SYNDICATE THIS and they graciously allowed me to stay there
ESSAY
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
16 Comments childhood friends.

When I returned from Italy, there was so much I

wanted to share with them. I wanted to talk to
Email Save my boyfriend about how aesthetically
interesting but intellectually dull I found Italian
Post Share 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.

This 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 as they used to before. This, 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’.
There, 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.
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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’. This 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.

Setiya is not alone in connecting feelings of

loneliness to a lack of basic recognition. In The
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.

These 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. The 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. (The
recognition given by the loving friend is that I
‘[matter] … just like everyone else.’)

Just as one can feel lonely

in a room full of
strangers, one can feel
lonely in a room full of
friends
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, 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.

This 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
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.

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.
 Tose with a strong need
for their uniqueness to be
recognised may be more
disposed to loneliness
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. These
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. The 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. Those 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
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. Through 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 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.

Biography and memoir 9 November

2023
Love and friendship

Values and beliefs

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