Loneliness Is A Symptom, Not A State

The feeling of loneliness is your soul’s way of telling you that you’re keeping the wrong company. Maybe they’re just too square, man, maybe they are just too hip, maybe they talk about their stupid jobs and petty careers, maybe they talk about football, or maybe you want to be with people who talk about their promotions and how they sold a piece of crap to some dumb client.

The point is, whoever you’re with, if you’re feeling lonely, it’s not someone you want to be with.

It’s not about the quality of the connection. I knew a lot about some of the people I didn’t really want to be with. We had similar problems, because we were at the same stages of our lives. There were plenty of similarities, and really, not that many differences. The only real turn-off then was what it is now: holding and expressing a certain kind of pop-culture idea. Show me a mother who believes that the triple-shoot will harm her child, and I’ll be polite, make my excuses and leave.

So I didn’t feel lonely because I didn’t have deep, meaningful, intimate connections with other people. Given my frakked-up emotional state at the time, that was never going to happen. Other people can’t have a relationship with a walking, talking neurosis. I felt lonely with other people because I didn’t want to be with myself, and being with other people stopped me distracting myself with books or movies or whatever else. Hence the neuroses were raw. It took sobriety, the Steps and a lot of other stuff before I got more comfortable with myself.

In the movies, that recovery would be a story about how I learned to love and trust, and learn the true value of friends. However my life isn’t a movie, so it doesn’t end like that. It ends with me reaching peace through acceptance.

What they don’t tell you about any kind of therapy or recovery is that, when the patient succeeds, whatever that means, they are still where they are: they don’t get the time back, and they don’t get the life they would have had if they hadn’t had whatever it was. It’s not an episode of Buffy, where killing the witch makes all the spells reverse and undoes all the damage. They are still where they are, they just don’t feel the same way, and they know how not to make it any worse.

So there the patient is, at some point in middle-age, and try re-building a life at that point. Everyone is married, divorced and spending Saturdays with their children. They have their social circle, and they have their stories and memories and loyalties and secrets and that is a lot of doors to open and hurdles to jump. His challenge is not to try to build the-life-he-would-have-had-if… because that is impossible. It is to find a way of living that satisfies him and avoids raising feelings of regret, self-pity and loneliness.

Contrary to every pop-therapist ever, one very effective way of avoiding loneliness is not to hang out with random people who have no idea what he has been through. Before you ask, work does not count as ‘hanging out’.

Part of the cure for loneliness is not more people. It’s less people. Anyone who tells you to find some like-minded people knows nothing and is repeating empty advice they heard once.

The other part is not faking for too much of your life. If you know you're putting on an act for the people you are with, because that act is all they will take, you're going to feel lonely. Or resentful. The fewer people you have in your life you have to be fake around, the less bad you're going to feel. The therapists can suggest you find someone you can be honest with, who will accept the real you. Sure. Any idea where? In the house where the rainbow ends in the garden?


I was caused to think about these things by a remark someone made in a You Tube video, about how, though he had had quiet the time with girls when younger, it began to feel lonely. That’s what happens when you have to sustain being someone you’re not, and that seems to be common among PUAs. He didn’t really want to be with those girls, however easy it was to get them to bed, and much more, he didn’t want to be with the man he had to be to get them to bed. That’s loneliness.