What Is Loneliness?

What Is the Question?

The question "what is loneliness?" asks us to distinguish a feeling from a situation. Being physically alone is a fact about the world: the room is empty, no one answers. Loneliness is a fact about the self: a sense that the connection one wants is missing, that no one really knows one, that one is not being met. The two often coincide, but they do not have to. People can feel acutely lonely in a crowded city or at a loud party, and people can spend long stretches alone without feeling lonely at all. The philosophical task is to say what the feeling is, what it is about, and why it hurts.

A helpful way in is through the idea of a gap. Loneliness is the experience of a discrepancy between the relationships one desires and the relationships one actually has. The gap can be quantitative: too few people. It can also be qualitative: enough people, but none who truly see one. Either way, the pain is real, and the philosophy of emotion has increasingly treated it not as a failure to cope but as an evaluative signal that something important is missing.

Historical Background

Loneliness as a named problem is surprisingly modern. Ancient philosophers discussed friendship, the city, and the good life, but they did not treat loneliness as a distinct object of analysis. The word itself enters European languages only in the early modern period. Yet the themes are old. Aristotle argued that a human being who lives entirely outside society is either a beast or a god, and Epicurus counseled friends as essential to a secure life.

The nineteenth century made loneliness a central theme. Kierkegaard took the individual to be irreducible, a self that relates to itself and to God, and he insisted that the crowd is untruth: the mass of people can be a hiding place that prevents genuine selfhood. Schopenhauer took a different route, describing the human will as restless and social life as a theater of conflict, and recommending solitude as the relief that the wise accept. Neither thinker uses the word the way a contemporary self-help book does, but both describe the structure of the experience: a self that feels disconnected and that must decide what to do about it.

Key Arguments

The first argument is that loneliness is distinct from solitude. Solitude is a state a person chooses or welcomes; it can be a condition of reflection, creativity, and peace. Loneliness is a state a person does not want; it registers loss or absence. The difference is not behavioral but attitudinal, and getting the distinction right matters for practice, because the remedy for unwanted loneliness is rarely simply more solitude.

The second argument is that loneliness is object-directed in a specific way. The philosophy of emotion treats emotions as having intentional objects: fear is about a threat, anger is about a wrong. Loneliness is about a missing relation, and its object is often vague. One may not know exactly what connection one wants, which makes loneliness harder to name and harder to address than thirst or fatigue. It is, in the language of contemporary emotion theory, an evaluative feeling about one's place in the human world.

The third argument is existential. Kierkegaard and those who follow him argue that some loneliness is ineliminable, because each person dies alone and must make decisions alone. On this view, the wish to eliminate loneliness entirely is a wish to escape the condition of being an individual. The task is not to never feel lonely but to learn what the feeling asks of one: more courage, more honesty, more real connection, or sometimes the acceptance that a certain solitude is the price of selfhood.

Contemporary Relevance

The loneliness epidemic of the twenty-first century has made the question practical. Governments and public health bodies now measure loneliness as a public health issue, and the rise of digital life has changed how connection is sought and felt. Social media can simulate presence while deepening the sense that others are living fuller lives; remote work can remove the accidental community of the office; and companion technologies promise relief from the ache.

The philosophical perspective adds something the statistics cannot. If loneliness is an evaluative signal, then the answer is not simply to increase the quantity of contact but to ask what kind of contact one needs and what one is avoiding in seeking it. Philosophy of emotion suggests that loneliness, like other emotions, can be examined, interpreted, and sometimes revised. It is not a weakness or a flaw; it is information, and understanding what it reports is the beginning of responding well to it.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Emotion" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Kierkegaard" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Arthur Schopenhauer" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/
• Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Loneliness (Reaktion Books, 2017).

Related Topics

• Solitude vs Loneliness — how the two experiences differ.
• Why Do We Feel Lonely? — the sources of the feeling.
• The Philosophy of Loneliness — a fuller philosophical treatment.
• Loneliness — the topic archive on the experience.
• Kierkegaard — the thinker of the individual self.