Loneliness as a Sign of Depth

It’s an embarrassing confession, but for a certain group among us, it’s fair to say that a great deal of our lives is spent asking essentially the same question, week after week, always with the same blend of frustration, despair and puzzlement: Why am I so lonely?

Why, in other words, do I so often find myself at odds in social groups, why can’t I more easily connect with people, why do I not have more friends worthy of the name?

It’s tempting to jump to the darkest conclusion: because I am awful, because there is something wrong with me, because I deserve to be hated.

But the real answer is likely to be far less punitive and in its way far more logical: we, the isolated members of the tribe, are lonely for a very firm and forgivable reason: because we are interested in introspection, and they – the others — for all their intelligence and wit and strength of mind, are not.

They may have many hobbies and passions and lots to say about a host of things, but they are simply not interested in looking deeply inside themselves. It is not their idea of fun to go into their childhoods, to trace the links between their emotions and their actions or to lie for a long time in a bath or a bed processing events in their interior lives. Introspection is not their thing. They haven’t told us this in so many words — and they never will; they don’t even realise it perhaps. We simply have to surmise that this is the case on the basis of external evidence: that we never feel we have much to say to them, even though – objectively – there might be so much to share. 

It’s the lack of introspection that explains why conversation with them so often gets stuck in odd places: discussing the price of train tickets or the best way to prepare muffins or what so-and-so from university (whom we never really knew or liked) is now doing. It explains why, when we try to nudge the conversation onto something more intimate and vulnerable, we seem somehow never to manage and end up in yet more rounds of discussion about the sports results or the new political scandal.

They aren’t necessarily cold, but it can certainly seem that way because they aren’t interested in communicating what is really going on in their hearts. Sometimes we can be surprised when, out of the blue, they tell us that they consider us to be a close friend. 

We should accept that most of our acquaintances – however much they might in theory want to be friendly – do not want to do so at the cost of looking inside their own minds.

And we for our part are lonely because we are operating with a notion of intimacy that is far less common than we torture ourselves by imagining. We will be blessed if we meet just one or two people in a lifetime who want to play as we do. The rest of the time, we shouldn’t compound our problems by feeling lonely that we’re lonely. It’s painful but utterly understandable; our favourite pastime, however noble it might be, is a very unusual one indeed.