menu_open Columnists
We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

Why you don’t need to be alone to feel lonely

3 84
09.01.2025

We live in a bustling, crowded world, yet loneliness appears to be on the rise. Why are so many of us feeling isolated and what can we do about it?

There are many kinds of loneliness – everyone feels it differently. But what is it to you?

Perhaps loneliness is a city. On its streets, among the hubbub, the crowds, the chatter and laughter, you remain a stranger – discombobulated, disconnected, in the way.

Maybe it's a relationship turned sour. A marriage or partnership of unheard words and unmet needs. You're there, but never seen.

Or perhaps you feel like Robert Walton, the polar explorer from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, who is surrounded by dependable shipmates but really just craves one true friend, "the company of a man who could sympathise with me, whose eyes would reply to mine".

It's common knowledge that physical isolation can lead to loneliness – and few things are as painful as the chronic, imposed solitude experienced by many of society's most vulnerable.

But if you've ever experienced situations like those described in the opening sentences of this article, you might also have suspected that other people – counterintuitively – aren't always the antidote to loneliness. They may even be part of the problem. In fact, we can just as easily be lonely in a crowd, in a romantic relationship, among friends.

It is an experience that was recently confirmed by a 2021 study involving 756 people who regularly recorded how they felt using a smartphone app over a two-year period. Feelings of loneliness seemed to increase in overcrowded, densely populated environments – in other words, modern cities. Could it be that our increasingly urban, technology-dominated lifestyles are making us feel less connected to one another? And are there solutions hiding within these findings?

It's certainly important to understand this paradox. We're reportedly living through a "loneliness epidemic" – a global outbreak that knows no boundaries, affects young and old, and can even rewire our brains. The BBC Loneliness Experiment, which sampled 55,000 people around the world in 2018, found that 40% of 16 to 24 year olds feel lonely often or very often. Other studies show that around 10% of adults around the world feel lonely – and in many different ways.

But it comes at a time when we have arguably never had more ways of connecting with others thanks to technology that lets us dial up friends and family on the other side of the globe, chat online with people we have never met, and follow the lives of those we know in social media feeds. Urban populations are also growing rapidly, with 68% of the world's people expected to be living in cities by the middle of this century.

So, in our busy, technology-connected world, why do we still feel lonely, even around others? And is it really another pandemic – something always to be avoided, medicalised, eradicated, stigmatised? Or can we also learn from it?

Loneliness is a fuzzy, complex concept, something we all experience in our own way. Fay Bound Alberti, professor of history at King's College London and author of A Biography of Loneliness, argues that loneliness, rather than being a single state of mind, is actually a "cluster" of emotions, which may include feelings such as grief, anger and jealousy. Her research reveals it is also a relatively recent "invention", with the word only taking on its current meaning around the year 1800 (more on this later).

Nevertheless, loneliness is now generally defined in science as the disconnect between actual and desired social relationships – reflecting the reality that you don't have to be alone to be lonely.

Sam Carr, a psychologist at the University of Bath who researches human relationships, believes the "biggest myth" is that people are always the solution to loneliness.

"People can actually be the cause of it," says Carr, who is also the author of All the Lonely People, an exploration of people's diverse experiences of loneliness. "Everyone's a sort of jigsaw piece and we........

© BBC