Even if you’re not chronically lonely, you’ve probably heard about people who are. If, for some reason, you’re interested in gaining some insight into what it’s like to experience some of the thoughts, sensations, and effects that can accompany the day-to-day reality of prolonged isolation, you’re in luck. The following is a reasonably true-to-life scenario constructed largely on the basis of my own experience.
You have no friends. In fact, it’s been years or even decades since you had anyone in your life whom you could reasonably call a friend. If you have any interactions with anyone at all, those interactions are cursory, routine, shallow, impersonal, and by now tedious. You are emotionally malnourished, deprived of the opportunity to give, receive, or share in the intangible yet readily identifiable benefits of connection, community, solidarity, sympathy, companionship, intimacy, or love. Your health has suffered. Even if you have the means to eat well and get sufficient exercise, your heart is under tremendous strain, as you have nothing of a restorative nature that might otherwise counterbalance the immense stress that defines your day-to-day existence. The loneliness has deepened to the extent that, during especially acute stretches lasting from days to weeks, you are unable to sleep, your heart and mind race, and your head throbs. With little or no support, you find it difficult to make much progress on any of your endeavors, whatever they may be. With little or no input from beyond the shrinking boundaries of your own mind, hardly anything good, encouraging, inspiring, heartwarming, cute, or funny ever happens around you. When you falter, no one helps you. When you do something well, no one notices.
How did you end up here? You may have been more or less alone all your life. You probably didn’t have the happiest upbringing. You might have experienced things that made you more suspicious of others the closer they were to you. If you grew up poorer than others in your area, you were probably ostracized at school. There might be something about you that is classified as a disability. There might have been something else about you that others saw as unacceptably different. Connection might have come to seem like a mystery, a secret some people were never to be let in on.
Alternatively, maybe your isolation is a condition that developed gradually. You’ve always had difficulties with certain things, maybe even a lot of things, but your life circumstances weren’t always as dismal as they are now. You had friends at school. You might even have been part of a really good group, enjoying lots of laughs and only trivial conflict. Over time, though, you lost contact with your former friends. This may have happened for any number of reasons. You might have just grown apart or become too busy with other things. There may have been cases in which it was something you or they did. If so, addiction was probably involved, in which case it was messy, leaving you either deeply ashamed or more hesitant to trust.
Prior to becoming isolated, you might once have been in a committed romantic relationship. By the time you were old enough to be in such a relationship, your circle had probably already grown fairly small. Your partner might even have been your only friend. If so, you were dependent on them for just about all of your emotional sustenance. They were probably similarly dependent on you. Shared struggles were a big part of what brought you together to begin with. Before long, you would come to feel implausibly fortunate to have connected with someone who not only understood and accepted, but embraced your perceived flaws. Within the calming shelter of their radiant spirit, you knew true freedom for the first time. With every last bit of feeling your besieged heart could muster, you loved them, and you experienced the exaltation that came from seeing and believing that your love and the imperfect way in which you showed it made them happy. The two of you talked about the future, about being a family, about growing old together. The life you imagined together became your dream, the reason for every effort you made. In the end, though, the relationship didn’t last. Maybe your respective circumstances prevented you from being together. Maybe your partner died. Maybe something went wrong between the two of you. Your former partner may have felt unable to cope with your struggles on top of their own, or perhaps it was you who, in the midst of a crisis of confidence, made the decision to end the relationship, believing that your partner deserved better. If so, you probably gave them a bogus reason at the time, which they probably didn’t buy, leaving them to wonder what was really going on or what they had done wrong. Either way, the self-loathing that flowed naturally from your having abandoned or been abandoned by your partner has contributed significantly to your reluctance to even begin to attempt to get involved with anyone else since.
If you have a job, it’s one that only serves to isolate you further. You might be a security guard or a parking lot attendant. You might be a truck driver. You might even have a job that regularly brings you into contact with other people, but either the setting or your perceived limitations prevent you from developing anything other than superficial relationships there. These days, though, there’s a fair chance that you work remotely on a contract basis, under increasing pressure from big-tech hype and, more saliently, your potential clients’ haste in their race to the bottom. You spend more time looking for work than actually working. You probably don’t make much money, which further dents your hopes of ever attaining any sort of qualification that might enable you to change careers. The pervasive realities of remote work, with its anonymity and non-disclosure agreements, ensure that getting another job is made that much more difficult by your inability to provide references or any sort of proof that you’ve actually been working at all. Your CV isn’t worth the few kilobytes of disk space it occupies. Networking? You have no time or opportunity for anything like that. You figure you’d probably make a poor first impression anyway.
You might live alone and have no voluntary contact with anyone at all. You might have one or more roommates, whom you probably can’t stand. You might live with your parents, your relationship with whom can most optimistically be described as strained. Your situation and suffering sadden, inconvenience, embarrass, or simply don’t register with your family. You do everything you can to help your parents and any other member of your family who needs it, which requires you to expend time and energy that consequently can’t go toward bettering your situation, presuming that’s even possible. The people around you are either unable or unwilling to give you the help you need in order to change your life. You try your best to keep your problems from becoming anyone else’s problem. Even if you’re largely able to do so, your growing dissatisfaction is likely to begin to show at some point. When it does, it mainly serves to highlight the sadness, annoyance, embarrassment, or indifference with which those around you treat the life you only wish you could escape.
You are fixated on things that happened long ago. Being so dissatisfied with your life today, you have two irresistible reasons to think about the past. One is that you want to understand where it all went wrong, so you’re preoccupied with one or more of the past events that have contributed to your present condition: a mistake of yours, something someone did to you, an accident, the breakdown of a relationship. (You tell yourself that there are valuable lessons to be learned by analyzing this history, though you suspect you’re unlikely to ever have much of an opportunity to put them into practice.) The other is that the past is where whatever happiness you actually have experienced resides. The good memories that you have are still nice to think about, but they’re also inevitably accompanied by the acknowledgement that those days are gone. In your mind, the people who feature in those memories become so closely associated with the joy you haven’t felt since they were around that they are transformed into something more like an ideal, one that people you haven’t yet met couldn’t possibly match, and of whose presence you, with all your failings, were never worthy anyway.
If it was available to you, you may at some point have accessed some sort of professional help. If you saw a doctor, you were probably diagnosed with depression, an anxiety disorder, and perhaps another form of mental illness. If you attended therapy or counseling, you might have found some aspects of it to be helpful. You might have learned to recognize some of your own irrational and self-destructive thought patterns, and maybe even to stop them from affecting your decision-making. If you’re especially fortunate, you arrived at the point of believing that you had largely overcome your condition(s). This feeling of accomplishment is soon followed by the realization that less-warped thinking alone won’t change your day-to-day situation. Your assessment that you’ve become capable of being a better friend or partner doesn’t make anyone else want to be your friend or partner, but it does intensify your yearning. Behind you now is only one of the obstacles that have impeded your progress in life. Sometimes, you’re not even sure you’ve actually cleared that one. Alternatively, the treatment you received might not have helped at all. A bad experience with medication or a doctor/counsellor/psychologist might have only made everything worse.
Forming new relationships of any kind is prohibitively difficult. If you have a job and/or are required to care for relatives, you have no time. In your current living situation, which is unlikely to change anytime soon, you have no freedom or privacy. You are completely and irreversibly convinced that no one who isn’t a scammer or predator of some sort would ever wish to associate with you anyway. You think that you’re ugly, that you have a repellent personality, that your biographical information and habits amount to nothing more than exhaustive lists of red flags and dealbreakers. You may have attempted to open up to someone other than a therapist within the last 20 years or so, only to have them respond that you were a boring person, or that your life was boring, or that you shouldn’t complain so much, or that you just needed to lighten up, or that they found your whole existence unbearably depressing. If you’re exposed to social media or corporate journalism, those shrilly pessimistic influences combine with your dearth of positive experiences to dim your view of people in general, further limiting your motivation to make contact.
Expressing yourself has become an exercise in futility. You probably don’t have the means to get anyone to read your writing, look at your art, listen to your music, or play your games in the first place. On the off chance that you somehow attract some sort of audience, the unsympathetic bulk of it finds it easy to pathologize and dismiss your ideas. You see, you only think what you think because you’re lonely, bitter, jealous, mentally ill, a loser, a basement dweller, a self-pitying weakling. If you can remember a time when your life was better, you remember that you did feel differently about things back then. What you’ve experienced since then has changed the way you think and feel about a lot of things, and in a way that raises the ire of others.
Presented with limited options, you seek semblances of human contact in ways that ensure in advance a poor outcome. At some point, you probably tried social media, which almost certainly dragged your self-esteem even lower by constantly confronting you with your own stigmatization and marginalization. Every so often, you get so desperate for someone to acknowledge your existence that you attempt to contact someone you used to know years ago. You might be up-front about why you’re doing it, or you might invent some sort of pretext. Immediately after reaching out, you begin to regret it, as you have just exposed someone who is surely dealing with problems of their own to your misery. In any case, if it’s just an old friend, classmate, or coworker, you probably don’t get a response. They might not even remember you. If you had a partner once, they are, of course, the most natural recipient of this type of cry for help, and your chances of hearing back are greater, but so are your subsequent self-recriminations. If you do get a response, that alone is the greatest thrill you’ve had in quite some time. Your former partner loved you once, so they must be a pretty compassionate person, and they’ll likely have some kind words to offer. In the time that has passed, though, your former partner has almost certainly moved on. They will inform you of this, dealing your dreams of reuniting a blow that is no less painful for its predictability. You were hoping that their life had gotten better in the time since the two of you were together. If it turns out that it hasn’t, you think it’s your fault. If it has, it’s nice for you to hear, but you can’t deny that you still wish they were with you instead. In this desperate, self-interested longing, you’ve found another reason to hate yourself. Why can’t you just be happy for the person you claim to love? If you crack and tell them how you still feel, you are confronted with the most potent possible evidence of how far you’ve fallen and what a nightmare you’ve made of your life: Where your love was once a source of happiness for the person who matters most to you, it now saddens, disturbs, or annoys them.
Speaking of love, the fact that you’ve been single for so long is cause for concern among the people who are aware of your existence. If you’re a woman, you’re probably subjected to the usual guilt-tripping over your not being married and/or having kids. If you’re a man, you imagine that your family, coworkers, neighbors, etc., suspect you of being some sort of pervert. You probably aren’t one, but even then, whatever pathetic, “vanilla” desires you do harbor are accompanied by shame, for you know that if they were ever to become known to anyone, they’d be met with revulsion.
In your explorations of the past, you may have uncovered evidence that what became of you wasn’t entirely your fault, that there were other contributing factors. By now, you might have been able to forgive yourself partially for the actions that led to the breakdown of one or more of your past relationships. You probably also became proportionately angry at the conditions and social forces that warped you to the point of becoming liable to do those things. The anger can easily seep into whatever shallow interactions you have with others, resulting in your further alienation. You wish desperately that you could do something, but you know that your rage is destined to remain impotent. What are you going to do? Shoot a CEO? A politician maybe? An intriguing idea, but you know it wouldn’t accomplish anything. Your disconnection and that which so many others are enduring is exactly what makes you unable to make any substantial difference.
As time goes by, you find yourself deriving less and less pleasure from the things you once appreciated. On an intellectual level, you can still spot the good in those things, maybe more than ever given what you’ve learned over the years. However, your in-the-moment appreciation of beauty and goodness is hollow and lacking. When you see a pretty flower, you think mainly of someone you used to know who would have delighted in it. When you hear good music, you miss listening together with someone who shared some of your tastes. When you hear a funny joke, you’d rather you were hearing someone else’s laugh. When you cook, you can’t help but wish you were doing it for someone else. If there was ever someone with whom you were particularly close, virtually everything has come to remind you of them and all that you’ve gone without for all this time as a result of their absence. Things that are reputed to provide some sort of escape have no such effect upon you. As it turns out, you can still ruminate on your present reality while you watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, regret the choices that have left you languishing in solitude while you listen to Beethoven’s ninth symphony, and rue your powerlessness while you play GTA Online. Reading has become especially troublesome. Your eyes pass over the print, but your mind is elsewhere. It’s in the same place as always.
You are well aware that as empty and unfulfilling as your life may be, there are others who have it much worse. You’re told that this is supposed to make you feel better, or at least less bad. It doesn’t. On the contrary, the more you know about the suffering that others are forced to endure, the more your own sorrows are compounded. You might deal with this by trying to limit your exposure to it. Or, you might once again have cause to curse your lack of the time, resources, or connections that might otherwise enable you to do something that would be of some value to someone. In relation to the world’s problems, you are simply taking up space that might otherwise be put to better use.
You’ve long since grown tired of your life as it is. You have, of course, thought about killing yourself, but there’s something that’s kept you from going that route. It might be that you still see a glimmer of hope and think that, if only a certain thing that you can imagine might happen actually were to happen within a certain period of time, it would give you a window to do something that might result in a welcome change. It might be that as long as you and your former partner are both still alive, then technically, there’s still a chance you could get back together. It might be that you don’t want to put anyone through the shock of discovering your stricken corpse, or foist upon anyone the obligation to search for you should you go missing. You carry on with the awareness that you may reach the point at which your desperation outstrips your hope and/or your consideration for others. Then again, maybe your health will give out first. That might be the best possible outcome.