What is the opposite of loneliness?
I guessed 'connection' but landed on 'contentment' instead. Here's why
Hi again,
You're getting this email because you either signed up to my Revue (where I wrote my first issue) or a silent Substack (which is what I’m using now).
I'm sorry this is going out later than intended. Three weeks ago, I came really close to getting a job I really wanted and plunged into despair when I didn't get it. So now I'm back to square one, searching, applying and preparing to sell myself in video interviews. Scrolling jobs on Otta, awaiting replies on LinkedIn and letting my entire sense of self hang on the actions of strangers. The problem is that I can't resist applying to roles I think I can do rather than thinking about what I want to do. Choices, rather living with their results, intimidate me. I am alone in the choices I make, except my boyfriend and friends increasingly shoulder the emotional and financial tolls of my indecision.
I'm not writing this here to seek your assurances. I'm putting this here because it is cathartic, and when I write one word after another, I feel comfortable in the knowledge that you're understanding me. Talking, which I do a lot of in interviews these days, doesn't always bring me the same satisfaction.
I think when I'm writing my mind quietens and I feel purposeful. I relish the feeling of the world falling away from me. I'm not capable of eating alone at restaurants or even going to the movies by myself, but I'm good at scribbling in a corner anywhere. When I was younger, I'd read anywhere too. It helps that I receive many patient affirmations from my loved ones when I do write.
This is a version of myself I like most and the one I retreat to in times of personal uncertainty. If loneliness is not feeling at home in oneself, then I guess this purpose I feel while writing is my antidote. 'Purpose’ as in something I want to do and find the bandwidth to focus on, not a higher calling or meaning. The word I'm looking for may be ‘fulfilling’. Psychology Today states the opposite of loneliness is "joy" or "contentment.
The inverse of this definition, loneliness as discontent, also makes a lot more sense to me than the conventional understanding of loneliness as a lack of company. It is a lacking feeling, but maybe the antidote isn't always other or more people. There are ways of being alone that are not lonely and can offer us contentment.
My boyfriend Robin and his father Ian are both bird watchers and walking the Cornish cliffs with them opens up an entire new life-affirming world for me. The windy cliff paths that feel so barren to my city-bred senses actually teem with life for them. Where I feel alone (often in a good way), they find company and contentment. It’s a different way of being in the world, just as writing is for me.
I am all too aware of the fact that nobody wants to read about loneliness on a regular (or even one-off) basis. So, this month I wanted to write about things that counter loneliness. Not just because that’d make for more life-affirming reading (and writing) especially at this time of the year, but also because I don't want to cement an emotion as a permanent aspect of my identity (or yours).
Loneliness is transient, like any other feeling, and this is a more comforting idea to me than permanence of any kind. Chances are we'll all feel bouts of loneliness in different ways, at different times, and there is more than one way to find contentment.
Since I wrote the first issue, I've had several good messages and emails about loneliness from so many of you. And while they may have started off as responses to my writing, these chats haven’t really been about loneliness at all. They’ve been more about how we spend our time alone and how we relate to the people and places we're in.
For obvious reasons, so many of us feel like our lives are in flux right now. Many, like me, have just finished degrees and re-emerged into a post-but-ongoing pandemic world. Others, who lost and found jobs in the past year and a half, are navigating delayed beginnings and the attendant emotions that come with being familiar yet unfamiliar with their own lives. Some of us are emerging relatively unchanged, but finding that our friends, families and cities don’t feel like home anymore. It’s the great unmooring.
I’m hardly the first to see this link between new beginnings and loneliness. Atlantic columnist, Arthur C. Brooks and US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy discussed this at length in a podcast about loneliness titled, ‘How to Know You’re Lonely’ in a nod towards the slippery nature of the feeling and the ashamed denial that often accompanies it. Murthy is the seminal voice on this subject and I'll definitely write about his book in this newsletter in the coming weeks. For now, I’m going to plug in his definition of loneliness here to pin us down to a fixed understanding":
“Loneliness is a subjective feeling that the human connections we need in our life are greater than the human connections we have.”
Murthy validates the idea that it’s not about the number of people in your life, but about whether you feel content with the connections you do have, whether that’s one or twenty.
Luckily for us (or me since I’m the one trying to write about how to not be lonely), Murthy and Brooks spend some time on the challenges of alleviating loneliness and how to feel connection and belonging. Seismic societal changes like the one we’re living through aside, there are several other new things that make social connection especially difficult to find, like when you move for a new job and realise that you never really learnt how to consciously make friends (as happened to a young Brooks); when your usual avenues for community don’t yield the kind of connection you’re looking for, like joining a local sports team but not getting along with your teammates, or going to graduate school and feeling like an impostor amongst your classmates.
Feeling a sense of belonging or connection often relies on factors that are not in our control, yet we often feel personal, individual shame at our inability to belong, looking inwards for deficiencies to explain our perceived failure. Those of us who have dealt with unsympathetic or even hostile institutions know this all too painfully well. Murthy doesn’t address this head on in his conversation, but describes the role of our work-oriented society in engendering loneliness. What would happen, he asks Brooks, if we had a world where we oriented our lives around our relationships:
If we, for example, decide to design a society that supports relationships, we may invest more in social-emotional learning programs in schools. We may invest more in designing workplaces that strengthen connections between colleagues and also give them opportunities to serve in communities. We may measure things differently—we may measure success in part by the strength of the relationships that we create. We would live and look at life very differently if we truly built our life around people.
The good thing in all of this, Murthy points out, is that research shows that you only need a few good, deep connections to not feel lonely. And in the case of loneliness in the workplace, psychologist Adam Grant says that just making one friend can be enough to address the problem.
The tricky thing about loneliness, which Murthy acknowledges in a different conversation with Ezra Klein, is that feeling lonely can often trigger a vicious cycle of not feeling wanted, feeling excluded or coming across withdrawn when you try to socialise, and then protecting yourself by giving up on social possibilities altogether. If you get caught in such a cycle, trying to make just one friend can feel impossible.
At times like these, when you doubt you have anything to offer the world, finding contentment somewhere else or through solo activities – reading, writing, cooking, climbing, walking – can be a way to shore up your emotional reserves before you find the resolve to try and socialise again.
Murthy’s own little way of trying to be more relationship-oriented in his workplace initially made me feel sceptical, but I’ve come around as I’ve been writing this issue.
Here’s how it goes:
On a designated day, Murthy's colleagues bring pictures of something they care about to work and do a show and tell for their colleagues. It's how Murthy found out that the office's “nerd" actually ran marathons and was part of the US Olympic team. And another stoic Marine-type showed his softer side to his teammates by bringing a picture of his mom and talking about her importance in his life.
Picture Day allows people to bring their whole selves to work and gives them space to connect with others based on the things that matter to them, not just what they do in the office, which is just one piece of their lives. This exercise takes all our little demarcated pieces of ourselves – like little dotted lines marking out the different bits of our bodies according to their specific functions – and sews them into a seamless whole that’s a much closer representation of actual people. Murthy’s initiative allows people to bring more of themselves to work, and creates new nodes for people to form potential connections.
To close this loop then, solitary activities like writing or engaging in activities we liked as kids – watching cricket or old movies – can be ways to connect with bits of ourselves that we don’t get to express for lack of anyone to share them with at work, home, school, wherever we may be when we find ourselves lonely.
I’m still processing the emails, chats and calls I’ve received from all of you in this past month, but a lot of you mentioned some things that make you feel at home in yourself and a little less lonely; walking with music or a podcast featured high on the list, some of you felt lighter when you found your experiences reflected online by other people. One particular reader (that I won’t name because I didn’t have the foresight to ask their permission beforehand) wrote to me about the solace of watching cricket – something they hadn’t done in an entire decade before they returned to it in search of a version of themselves they had enjoyed.
As I wrap up this week, I want to ask you what makes you feel less lonely/brings you contentment. But I also want to ask you what thing makes you feel most like yourself.
You can write to me here – use this space to be your whole selves.
Let's make a ‘picture day’ on The Pod.
Next weekend, I'll write about the conundrums of making new friends and the many ways in which connection and friendship are commoditised.