Have you ever wondered why people struggle to admit that they sometimes feel lonely? Society treats loneliness as a taboo, something we should hide rather than discuss openly, especially when we have people around us. But is loneliness really the core problem?
What do we mean when we talk about loneliness? Does loneliness mean having nobody around us, or can we feel lonely even when we surround ourselves with people?
Many of us are caught up in the demands of everyday life. Some of us follow extremely strict routines filled with meetings, work, studies, activities, conversations, and social interactions. Others feel lost and gradually withdraw from human contact. Sometimes, past experiences push them away from others. Sometimes, people distance themselves because others have hurt them. And sometimes, they simply struggle to figure out their next step.
Yet both groups can experience loneliness.
You can be surrounded by people and still feel like you have nobody.
This distinction matters because loneliness does not simply mean having nobody around. We can fill a room with people and still feel profoundly disconnected. Researchers also distinguish loneliness from social isolation: social isolation describes a lack of social contact, while loneliness reflects the gap between the connections we have and the connections we want.
And the consequences extend beyond our emotions. In 2010, researchers analysed 148 studies involving more than 300,000 participants and found that people with stronger social relationships had substantially better survival rates. They concluded that social relationships influenced survival at a level comparable to several established risk factors.
In 2015, another major meta-analysis found that loneliness, social isolation, and living alone each correlated with an increased risk of death. These findings suggest that loneliness deserves far more attention than the simple statement “I feel alone” might lead us to believe.
But perhaps the more interesting question is this: what are we actually missing?
Sometimes, Loneliness Is What We Cannot Express
Sometimes, when we are surrounded by people and have so much activity in our lives, yet still feel like we have nobody, it is because there are things inside of us that we never get to express around the people we are with.
Maybe these people are not at the same level of consciousness that we are. Or they do not have the same interests. Maybe they do not see the world in the same way. Or maybe we are simply the type of person who does not speak up about what we think because we are afraid of how it will be received.
Sometimes, the core issue of loneliness is a choice, a choice that we made either consciously or unconsciously to simply not vibe with the people we have around us.
But sometimes the problem is not the people around us.
Sometimes the problem is us.
The Fear of Not Being Understood
Because we do not know how to express what we feel. We do not know how to express what we think. And we assume, before we have even tried, that the person in front of us simply will not understand.
“I know they don’t get me.”
How many times have you heard somebody say that?
“I know they don’t get me. That’s why I don’t speak.”
But have you actually tried?
Have you actually taken the step?
There is something fascinating about this because meaningful relationships are not built only by being physically present around one another. They are also built through what we reveal, what we share, what we allow another person to understand about our inner world. If I never show you what is inside me, how can I expect you to understand me?
The Paradox of Communication in the Digital Age
And this becomes even more interesting when we look at the way we communicate today.
We live in an age where we can speak to someone at any moment. We can send a message in seconds, call someone across the world, video-call someone from our bedroom, post something and receive dozens of reactions. And yet, having access to communication has never guaranteed that we feel understood.
The COVID-19 pandemic made this contradiction impossible to ignore. During 2020 and 2021, billions of people experienced physical distancing and isolation on a scale that modern generations had rarely experienced. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 34 studies involving more than 215,000 participants found that loneliness did increase during the pandemic compared with pre-pandemic levels, although the overall effect was relatively small and varied considerably between studies.
And what makes that period so interesting is that we did not suddenly lose all forms of communication. We had phones, video calls, social media, messages, technology that allowed us to remain in contact with people even when we could not physically be together.
Yet for many people, something still felt missing.
Communication Is Not the Same as Connection
Maybe that is because communication and connection are not the same thing.
We can communicate constantly and still not feel known.
Or we can exchange hundreds of messages and never say what we are actually feeling.
Or even sit in a group chat all day and still feel like nobody knows us.
And perhaps this is why loneliness has become such a strange problem of our time. We have more ways to reach people than ever before, but true connection is not about how many people can contact you. It is about how many people you feel you can genuinely connect with.
We’ve Been Taught to Expect Others to Just Know
Unfortunately, the society we live in today, particularly the influence of social media on our perception of relationships, has created a mentality that constantly tells us:
“If they wanted to, they would.”
Or “If they really cared, they would know.”
Or even “If they loved you, you wouldn’t have to ask.”
Although these statements can sometimes reveal a lack of effort or genuine intentions, taking them too far creates an unhealthy expectation: that we do not need to express our feelings because others should automatically understand them.
But we all forget something.
The person in front of us is also a human being.
They have their own insecurities, their own flaws, their own thoughts, their own emotions and their own world.
And in their world, they are usually the main character.
We cannot blame people for not making us the main character of their own world.
Of course, if a person took the time to analyse every facial expression, every word that came out of our mouth, every look that we gave them, every change in our tone, perhaps they could decipher us somehow. Maybe they could give us a little more consideration.
But have we ever thought about what we are asking people to do?
What are we asking them to sacrifice?
We are asking people to sacrifice a majority of their attention and time and to make us the main character of their own world so that we can feel comfortable.
Yet we forget that we also have a responsibility to express our feelings so that others can understand us.
People cannot read what we refuse to reveal.
And sometimes, what we call loneliness is partly the distance between what we feel inside and what we allow other people to see.
Now, there is another side to loneliness.
When You’re Surrounded by People but Still Feel Alone
Sometimes it is not that we cannot express ourselves. Sometimes we find ourselves surrounded by people who do not share our values, interests, empathy, moral principles, sense of justice, or way of seeing the world.
And this can be a very painful situation.
Because sometimes you do not want more people.
You want your people.
You want people with whom you can speak about the things that matter to you without having to translate your entire inner world. People who understand certain things without you having to explain every layer. People who see something in the world that you also see.
And when you do not have that, you can feel lonely even inside a group.
This is not simply a modern philosophical idea. Governments and public-health institutions have increasingly had to recognise loneliness as a societal issue rather than something that belongs only to the private lives of individuals. In 2018, the United Kingdom launched what its government described as a world-first strategy specifically dedicated to tackling loneliness and appointed its first Minister for Loneliness. The government explicitly described loneliness as a serious public-health and social issue.
Think about that for a moment.
A government creating an entire strategy around something that happens inside the private emotional lives of human beings.
That tells us something.
Loneliness is not simply, “I don’t have enough friends.”
It can be connected to the way our communities are built, the way we work, the way we live, the relationships we maintain, the relationships we lose and the sense of belonging we experience.
The Choice to Find Your People
But even with all of that being true, I still believe there is a choice involved.
If you are surrounded by people whom you feel do not understand you—people who do not share your values, your interests or the way you see the world—is it not also your choice to step outside of that circle and go into the world to find other people?
You might say, “But it is hard for me to meet people.”
Or you might be socially anxious. You might constantly wonder, What are they going to think of me? You might think, I cannot take the first step.
And all of these things can be true.
But sometimes they can also become frames that stop us from actually living the life we want to live.
There is a difference between something being difficult and something being impossible.
And sometimes loneliness asks us to cross the distance between those two things.
Finding “Your People”
I do not know what religion you belong to, where you come from or how you see the world. And certainly, I know that there are different groups of people who could be reading this.
But personally, I believe that we come from different soul groups that our souls were created alongside other souls that, in some way, may be like us, and that throughout this world, sometimes we meet them and sometimes we do not.
Maybe this is why we are naturally drawn to certain people.
Some people appear in our lives and we immediately want to know them. With some people, friendship feels natural. With others, we simply do not feel that attraction at all.
Some people we want to build friendships with.
Some people we instinctively move away from.
And perhaps part of life is learning to recognise these differences without forcing every person to belong in our world.
Sometimes, finding our people is also a responsibility.
Just as there are people who are supposed to find us, perhaps we are also supposed to go out into the world and find them.
We cannot sit inside the same room, surrounded by the same people, repeating the same patterns, and then wonder why nobody new enters our lives.
Sometimes you have to open the door.
And Then There Is Another Kind of Loneliness
But what happens when you actually have good people?
What happens when you are surrounded by people who understand you? People who are on the same conscious level as you, whom you can express yourself, who make you laugh, who listen to you and are actually there for you.
And yet…
Something is still missing.
Something is still not adding up to the equation.
This is where, for me, God enters the equation.
The Part of the Equation We Sometimes Leave Out
We do not see God. We do not hear God. And a lot of people nowadays reduce God to an abstract idea—a higher being who is supposed to be there for you because you are scared to move out into the world alone.
But we sometimes leave out the most important aspect:
God is always with you, listening and seeing.
And when everything happens around us, the inequalities, the injustices, the things we lack, the disappointments, the loneliness—we sometimes forget that the presence of God can be what helps us release the negative energy we have gathered inside ourselves, speak it out and decide to change direction.
We always expect God to shoot a magical arrow from the sky and somehow make our problems disappear simply because we prayed.
But perhaps we forget the role we have been given in this world.
God created this world with destiny, but He also gave us something incredibly powerful: free will.
He can guide us, put people in our path, close doors and open others.
But we are still the ones who have to take the step.
And perhaps this is one of the reasons why people sometimes reject God when they feel lonely or disappointed. They ask God to change their lives. They ask God to make their lives better. But they forget that if God were to completely take over our free will, He would also have to take responsibility for the choices we desperately want to make even the choices that may not be good for us.
And then perhaps we would be the same people blaming God for stopping us from feeling something we desperately wanted to feel.
Imagine wanting something so badly but never getting the freedom to pursue it.
Would you not eventually ask:
Why didn’t You let me?
Why didn’t You give me the freedom to choose?
But this world gives us that freedom.
And that freedom is, in a way, our ticket to saying:
“I really wanted it. I tried. And if I made a mistake, the mistake was mine.”
Sometimes we do not want others to prevent us from making every mistake.
We want the freedom to live, to choose, to learn, to fall, to get back up and to understand.
Loneliness Can Become a World We Build Ourselves
And this is where loneliness can become dangerous.
Not because being alone is inherently dangerous. Solitude can be beautiful.
But because, when we forget that we have free will, we can slowly build a world around ourselves that gives us nothing back.
We isolate or we stop reaching out.
We prevent ourselves from expressing our feelings.
Convincing ourselves that nobody understands.
Assuming people will disappoint us before they have even had the opportunity to know us.
And slowly, the world becomes smaller.
The thoughts become heavier.
The negative energy accumulates.
And eventually, the isolation that began as a response to loneliness becomes part of the reason why we remain lonely.
Research gives us a reason to take that cycle seriously. Loneliness can harm both physical and mental health. A 2018 meta-analysis of 35 studies involving more than 77,000 participants found that loneliness was associated with a higher risk of death from any cause, even after researchers accounted for several other factors. These studies do not mean that loneliness mechanically causes an individual person to die earlier, but they show that prolonged loneliness is not something we should simply dismiss as a passing emotional inconvenience.
This is where the responsibility returns to us.
Maybe the answer is not always to wait for somebody to come and save us from loneliness.
Maybe sometimes the answer is to speak.
To reach out, to leave, to meet someone new, to express what we have been keeping inside, to search for people who share our values.
And, above all, to return to God.
Because perhaps God’s guidance does not always mean that He removes the road in front of us.
Sometimes it means that He gives us the strength to walk it.
Maybe Loneliness Is Sometimes an Invitation
Maybe loneliness is not always telling us:
“Nobody is there.”
Maybe sometimes it is asking:
“What are you going to do now?”
Are you going to continue assuming that nobody understands you, or will you continue waiting for people to read your mind, are you going to stay surrounded by people who make you feel like a stranger?
Or will you take the step?
Will you speak?
Are you willing to search and leave what no longer belongs to you?
Will you allow yourself to meet people you have never met before?
And when you have done everything you can, will you remember that you were never truly alone?
Because perhaps the deepest form of loneliness is not having nobody around you.
Perhaps it is forgetting that you were never walking through this world without God.
Perhaps that is why we cannot always overcome loneliness by simply adding more people to our lives.
Sometimes the answer is to become more honest with the people already around us, to leave circles that no longer reflect who we are or to stop expecting people to understand what we have never expressed. Sometimes it is to take the uncomfortable first step toward someone new.
And sometimes, after all the noise has disappeared, perhaps what we were searching for was not another person at all.
Perhaps we were searching for God.
As they say:
Even the storm becomes peace in the presence of God, while peace becomes a storm in the absence of God.
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