“People tell me I come across as anything but lonely,” Eva told me when I interviewed her for The Loneliness Project.
Others saw her as a “strong, energetic and independent woman,” she assured me. They did not see the shame beneath the veneer — the loneliness that had quietly accompanied her since her husband’s death.
They had been married for twenty-five years. Without him, she told me, she no longer knew where she fit or who she was.
“Oh, I definitely carry a sense of inadequacy and shame about feeling so lonely,” she explained. “I’ll act the part, but often with an inner terror that if I let my guard slip, the loneliness will show.”
It struck me that she was deeply ashamed of her loneliness. Somehow, she understood it as a personal failure, something that separated her from others.
I’m increasingly convinced that experiences like Eva’s are partly the cost of a dominant narrative around loneliness. Psychologist Dolores Albarracín and colleagues have argued that there has been a tendency to pathologize, diagnose, and seek to “cure” difficult psychological experiences that may be fundamental parts of being alive.
Loneliness is not treated any differently. Increasingly, it is described as a public health crisis, a pathology to be treated, or a defect to be eradicated.
My concerns centre around two arguments: (1) framing loneliness as primarily pathological risks breeding shame and secrecy around it; and (2) what if loneliness often arises as a deeply human response to life?
The Public Health Narrative
It helps to examine how loneliness has come to be spoken about at the highest levels of public authority and in culture.
One of the most influential interventions came from Vivek Murthy, then United States Surgeon General. In 2023, Murthy issued an advisory on what he called an epidemic of loneliness. The report warned that the mortality impact of insufficient social connection is comparable to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. By such logic, loneliness is primarily viewed as a health risk, while its emotional and existential meaning can shrink from view.
Of course, we have much for which to thank this narrative. For much of history, loneliness has remained confined to private inner life. People haven’t had the language or permission to speak about it. Its emergence as a public-health concern has helped to bring such suffering to light. Without this, governments and institutions would find it easier to look past loneliness.
The public-health narrative has also encouraged researchers to examine the relationship between loneliness and sleep, stress, cardiovascular health, depression, cognitive decline, and mortality. Whatever complexities surround these associations, they should not be dismissed. For some people, loneliness is an entrenched and painful condition that constricts their world and dampens well-being.
Symptom or Signal?
But for all the good it does, the public-health narrative also shifts our focus from understanding why loneliness has appeared, and searching for its meaning, to assuming meaning a priori. The emphasis shifts from understanding why loneliness has appeared in someone’s life — and what it may mean — to focusing predominantly on its elimination.
Loneliness becomes a symptom, rather than a signal.
When we approach something as a symptom, we tend to assume it is evidence that something has gone wrong. Symptoms often point us towards deficits, malfunction, disorder, and pathology.
Signals occupy a different category. A signal is not necessarily evidence of dysfunction. It is informational and tells us that something important is taking place that we may want to pay attention to.
Loneliness Essential Reads
In my research, I have often found that when we listen to a person’s loneliness, it can point toward meaningful absence, threatened connection, unlived possibility, neglected relationships, a hidden part of the Self seeking expression, or significant life transition. In these examples, the experience remains painful, but the meaning of the pain changes.
Pain Is Not the Same as Pathology
Loneliness is not a uniform state. It varies in intensity, duration, origin, meaning, and consequence. The important distinction is not between loneliness that hurts and loneliness that doesn't. In my experience, almost all loneliness hurts.
For example, grief can be excruciating without constituting illness. A period of profound loneliness after bereavement may be painful precisely because the relationship that has been lost was deeply significant.
At times, loneliness can impair sleep, motivation, self-care, relationships, and a person’s capacity to participate in life. And when it becomes entangled with sustained despair, serious functional decline, or thoughts of self-harm or death, it should never be treated simply as an interesting existential message. Understanding is important, but so is care, protection, companionship, and appropriate professional support.
What Does Loneliness Need?
The loneliness arising from bereavement asks something very different of us from the loneliness produced by exclusion. The loneliness of feeling unseen by those we are closest to may not require the same response as loneliness rooted in illness or the gradual disappearance of someone’s social world.
This requires what I like to call loneliness literacy; the capacity to recognise loneliness in its different forms, understand it in the context of a person’s life, and discern what kind of response it requires. The task is to understand a particular loneliness before deciding what should be done about it.
Eva did not need to be persuaded that her loneliness was beneficial. She was grieving a man she had loved for twenty-five years and was trying to discover who she was without him. She had lost the map by which she had navigated life. Her loneliness was testimony to love, loss, and a profound need for connection. It also pointed towards a new identity and a life that was being painfully reconfigured.
What compounded her suffering, however, was the story that feeling lonely meant something was wrong with her — that she was somehow "less than" because of it.
Not every loneliness needs to be cured. But all loneliness deserves to be understood.
I write more about loneliness, connection, and the quieter dimensions of inner life at The Inner Room.