"Lessons in Loneliness": An essay by Kaitlyn Creasy (Keywords: Recognition;Connection; Identity;Vulnerability;Self-knowledge)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 2 ("Crossing the Floods")

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Two summers ago, and almost two years after giving birth to my son, I found myself driving aimlessly through the streets of Los Angeles with a dull, deep ache in my chest, an ache somehow amplified by the brilliant midday sun and blue sky above. Being somewhat picky, I had driven in on a weekday for a haircut. The plan had been to return home immediately afterwards to avoid the worst of the day’s traffic on the interstate so that I could make it home for dinner. Instead, I drove aimlessly through the streets of Silver Lake, stopped for a coffee in West Hollywood, and drove deeper into the city, all with a lurking awareness that every stop and detour was inching me closer to rush hour in a city notorious for soul-crushing traffic. By the time I punched my home address into Google Maps from the parking lot of the Getty – a destination I’d chosen because it felt like an especially dignified place to brood – the drive time to home had more than doubled. Simultaneously frustrated with myself (I would, after all, have to sit through more traffic) and strangely satisfied (the trap I’d half-wittingly laid for myself had worked), I called my husband to say it wouldn’t make sense to leave the city anytime soon, that I wouldn’t be home in time for dinner.

Seated on the tram to the galleries and gardens, I turned my attention back toward that ache, thinking about how best to describe the feeling. It felt a bit like a weight had been attached to my heart, I thought to myself. No – more like a hole in the middle of my chest, a thrumming emptiness. And I wondered how empty space could ache.

Looking out at the Pacific Ocean from the garden wall at the Getty, sensing the depth and intensity of my loneliness, it became clear to me that I was experiencing loneliness of a sort I hadn’t in many years. This bewildered me and set in motion a years-long process of sense-making – of which this piece, too, is a part. Then, I had wondered to myself: how could I be lonely? I had a loving partner who appreciated me. My young son was a persistent source of joy and wonder who showed me a depth of love I hadn’t yet experienced, just as every cliché about parenthood suggested he would. I had an active and engaging career and several close friends. So why did I feel this way?

***

Loneliness is ubiquitous: everyone experiences it at some time or other. But we’re extremely complicated creatures. Each of us possesses an elaborate (and often idiosyncratic) set of needs and desires, many of which we require others to meet. While experiences of loneliness are widespread, they vary – sometimes widely – in part because the unmet desires and needs at the root of these experiences do.

Broadly characterized, loneliness is a painful subjective feeling that results when our desires for recognition or connection are not fulfilled (or are perceived to be unfulfilled). Importantly, however, there are many forms of meaningful recognition and endless forms of connection that we may need, not all of which can be offered even by beloved others who know us extremely well and appreciate many features of us. In addition to desiring recognition of our basic worth as human beings – wanting to be recognized as beings with unconditional value, as Hannah Arendt and Kieran Setiya highlight – we want to be recognized in our particularity: we want to be seen, understood, and valued as the particular individuals that we are. Just as I may become lonely if no one reflects my unconditional worth back to me, I may become lonely when others in my life fail to acknowledge or sufficiently appreciate a valued aspect of my identity or self-conception. Indeed, even in cases where my beloved appreciates certain features of me (perhaps my sense of humour and my passion for analysis) simply because they are features of me and I am their beloved, I may experience loneliness absent a deeper form of appreciation, one that requires that these features resonate affectively with my beloved in the way required for him to genuinely value them.

Loneliness is a painful subjective feeling that results when our desires for recognition or connection are not fulfilled (or are perceived to be unfulfilled).

What’s more, we often want to be seen and appreciated as the kind of individuals we aspire to be: as potentially great artists or writers, as morally exemplary people, as especially thoughtful and sensitive lovers. Absent recognition and appreciation of the existence of these possible versions of me, loneliness may result – especially when I’ve experienced acknowledgement and appreciation of certain of my aspirational selves in the past. This might seem strange. What could it even mean to be recognized (or to fail to be recognized) as someone one has not yet become (or perhaps is in the process of becoming)? Here, we should keep in mind first that our aspirations are already part of us, in the form of goals and ideals we hold, around which we hope to orient our lives. To fail to be recognized for these thus involves a failure to be recognized as the individual one presently is, which is likely to result in loneliness.

Yet there is another set of cases that matter here, in which others seem to sense and affirm a version of me that I long to be but have not yet become – and then, for various reasons, fail to do so. Take, for example, the case of a shy student with a talent for poetry who has her first meaningful encounter with poetry in a required course in college. Imagine that the course instructor affirms the student’s poetic talent, fostering in her a desire to become a great poet. If, after the course ends, the student loses touch with her instructor – if she remains invested in this aspirational identity yet has no one to reflect its possibility back to her, no credible person to ‘believe in’ this possible self of hers – she may feel lonely. Additionally, this loss may undermine her aspiration, leaving her not only lonely but also in doubt of the possibility that she became able to see only with another’s help.

Experiences of romantic love, which both structure the lover’s aspirational self and provide affirmation of that self, are instructive here. As Anne Carson notes, when an individual is in love, ‘there appears within him a sudden vision of a different self, perhaps a better self, compounded of his own being and that of his beloved. Touched to life by erotic accident, this enlargement of self is a complex and unnerving occurrence … All at once a self never known before, which now strikes [him] as the true one, is coming into focus’. Through attaching to and desiring a particular other when in love, I come to value and desire to manifest certain qualities and to pursue certain projects or forms of life. Spurred on by erotic desire, the lover may aspire not only to be more like the beloved but to be more like the beloved’s ideal lover, even to be better in general. In addition, love often transforms the lover’s projects, desired forms of life, and reasons for acting. In these ways and others, romantic love tends to create an aspirational self. As this aspirational self develops, it is often shared with the beloved (I feel more alive; I’ve become gentler, more forgiving). This positions the beloved especially well to see that self – and, when love is attentive and mutual, to reflect a deep appreciation of that self back to the lover.

In experiences of mutual romantic love, the lover’s aspirational self may also be shaped by a picture of the lover constructed by their beloved, a picture of someone with qualities, projects, and reasons for acting that the lover does not yet possess. Reflecting that (often highly idealized) picture back to the lover, the beloved may draw the lover beyond himself, inspiring him in directions he had not yet envisioned for himself. Whether this involves a recognition of the lover’s potential that is genuinely responsive to the lover or a more fanciful process that Stendhal calls ‘crystallisation’ – a ‘process of the mind which discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events’ – the lover’s adoption of certain features of this picture, whether as already extant or aspirational, expands his self. In this way, both the lover’s aspirational self and his sense of what is possible may be shaped. But of course, love affairs may end. And in cases where the lover does not have others in his life to see and affirm his aspirational self, the lover may not only feel less himself but extremely lonely. Without anyone to affirm (however idealistically) his aspirant identity as a great artist or sensitive lover, to inquire into and support his aspiration, he may experience a painful feeling resulting from a lack of recognition – not only of who he is but who he is capable of being.

Just as we tend to experience loneliness if certain of our social needs go unmet, so too will we tend to experience loneliness if we do not feel needed by others in the way that we desire to be needed.

While this feeling of lack and loss is perhaps most intense at the end of a romantic relationship, given that our selves are formed in relationship with others, it is one to which we are all susceptible, especially at moments of relational breakdown. Although the relevant dynamics – crystallisation, the relational shaping of the self and one’s aspirations, and the powerfully transformative effects of another’s affirmation of one’s aspirational self – tend to be especially pronounced in romantic love, these also take place in the context of other relationships, including parent-child relationships, mentoring relationships, and friendships.

In addition to failures of affirmative recognition, loneliness results from failures of connection: when we fail to connect or engage with others in the ways we desire to connect or engage. Of course, there are endless ways in which we might desire to connect with others, and so endless ways in which that desire might be frustrated, resulting in loneliness. Absent interlocutors to meet her need for intellectual engagement, the individual hungry for certain forms of conversation may feel lonely. So too with individuals who lack friends with whom they feel comfortable processing certain of life’s difficulties or sharing certain of life’s joys, or who lack others with whom they can pursue shared projects of value.

An especially important form of connection – the absence of which can result in distinctly painful experiences of loneliness – is mattering to others, where that involves playing a significant role in others’ lives. To put it a bit too simply: just as we tend to experience loneliness if certain of our social needs go unmet, so too will we tend to experience loneliness if we do not feel needed by others in the way that we desire to be needed. In other words, we’ll tend to feel lonely when we feel that we do not matter to others in the way we desire to matter. And notice that the problem here is often not one of mattering, full stop, but of mattering in a specific way. Think of the intense loneliness experienced by someone in unrequited love with a close friend, for whom many ways of mattering remain open, save one, and who suffers immensely from this lack.

In the years leading up to my lonely, aimless drive through Los Angeles (one of many lonely, aimless drives during that time and since), I had experienced a series of major life changes. A year and a half after landing my first tenure-track job in Indiana – which I experienced as something of a miracle – I landed a second tenure-track job in California. After weathering the first year and a half of Covid in a place without friends or family apart from my husband, I had a child. Toward the end of my pregnancy, my career had picked up steam, and there were no signs of it slowing down. (I remember responding to critics of my book while seven months pregnant on Zoom, wondering whether anyone knew.) And I found, to my surprise, that I didn’t want it to slow down. I had always tried to treat academic philosophy as just a job. Now, I realized that this was a way of guarding against disappointment – and that philosophy not only engaged and allowed for the expression of centrally important parts of me but also could serve as a venue in which I might make distinctive contributions. Listening to Alvvays’ Blue Rev on the Getty Center Tram, I felt unrecognizable to family and friends. I hardly felt recognizable to myself.

Without my newly developed needs met, however, I felt painfully alone, like a part of me was missing from my everyday life.

Of course, along with these changes came changes to my complex of needs. For one, my need for certain forms of intellectual engagement intensified. I longed for contexts in which I could engage in this way – and, importantly, for contexts in which I felt comfortable enough to let my mind run, to think out loud with another person gripped by similar things. For another, I wanted people in my life to appreciate the value of the projects about which I was passionate – doing, reading, and writing philosophy – in a deep way. I wanted them not only to judge my pursuits valuable but to value those pursuits. And I wanted the same people to also appreciate me, to desire to engage in deep and meaningful forms of relationship. While it didn’t feel fair to expect all of this from my husband, my hopes did not seem unreasonable – especially because I had felt these needs being met, in the context of certain relationships I’d developed. But those people were scattered across the globe, and meaningful opportunities for connection difficult to arrange outside of the context of conferences. Without my newly developed needs met, however, I felt painfully alone, like a part of me was missing from my everyday life.

Reflecting on my lonely condition, it became extremely salient to me how dependent I had become on certain people. In the throes of loneliness, I became keenly aware of my status as a needy, vulnerable social being – an uncomfortable fact, given that I had long prized myself on my independence, my self-sufficiency, my ability to take care of others (typically while avoiding the need to be cared for). I didn’t like it. I longed to be over my loneliness, to be out of this vulnerable, needy state as soon as possible.

***

The reaction I had is not uncommon. Experiences of loneliness tend to make certain features of human existence salient: our fundamental vulnerability to others, our powerlessness in the face of certain of our needs. And in a world where so much is out of our hands – including, often, our own flourishing – it can be tempting to respond to these hard facts with what are effectively attempts to exert more control. One response is to turn away from the deliverances of loneliness, to insist on your independence and self-sufficiency, perhaps by implementing practices (like those recommended by pop Stoicism) aimed at detaching from certain outcomes, quieting certain needs, and mastering difficult feelings. Another is to actively try to secure the acknowledgement or connection you crave, perhaps attempting to matter to others in the ways you wish to matter by crafting your image on social media or insisting upon engaging in a particular kind of relationship with another despite their stated unwillingness.

Experiences of loneliness tend to make certain features of human existence salient: our fundamental vulnerability to others, our powerlessness in the face of certain of our needs.

While some of these responses are ethically suspect, others are understandable, even potentially laudable ways of coping in the face of loneliness. My interest here is not to adjudicate among problematic and non-problematic forms of coping. Instead, I want to explore how responses like these – all of which aim at ridding oneself of loneliness as quickly as possible – may not only be problematically defensive, but may also alienate us from important parts of ourselves. While it is often deeply painful and lamentable, loneliness can serve as a means of becoming acquainted with important features of ourselves, features we might miss if we’re too quick to eradicate or look away from our lonely condition. In addition to preventing us from properly facing up to powerlessness and vulnerability as fundamental conditions of human existence, conditions we must acknowledge and respond to properly if we are to live well as the needy creatures we are, these reactions can lead us to miss what loneliness can show us. In short, they can obstruct loneliness’ insights, hindering the positive, disclosive potential of loneliness. As an experience that may show us who and what matters to us, loneliness can be a means of self-knowledge and an engine of transformation.

***

To begin, loneliness can be a means of self-knowledge, making certain needs, desires, and values salient to the individual in its throes. While certain of these needs, desires, and values may be longstanding, others may be newly developed, perhaps formed in relationship with particular others. By noticing the intensely painful loneliness that resulted from a perceived lack of affirmation of my obsessive, analytic mind in my everyday life – and how deeply seen and appreciated I felt by the close friends I’d made at conferences, who clearly cherished this part of me – I came to see how central that feature was to my self-conception. This particular experience of loneliness taught me more about who I was and how I understood myself. Noticing how connected and fulfilled I felt when engaged in thoughtful, rigorous philosophical conversations – and how alone I felt when I was unable to connect in this way – I came to recognize this activity as a necessary feature of a good and worthwhile life for me.

Loneliness experienced due to the loss of a relationship with someone bound up with one’s aspirational self – whether it is a close relative, a beloved, a mentor – also has disclosive power. For instance, an experience of deep loneliness after the end of a romantic relationship can indicate that I saw my former beloved as the only person capable of seeing me as the person I aspired to become, thus making especially salient to me an ideal self to which I remain attached. For loneliness to have this disclosive power, however, one must attempt not to rid oneself of its pain too quickly. As the protagonist’s father in André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name advises: ‘If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out … We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster … But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!’

Loneliness can serve as a means of becoming acquainted with important features of ourselves.

What’s more, when the time is right – after the lonely individual has turned toward herself and attended to potential lacks in her life – loneliness may also function as an engine for personal change. This potential is captured by Virginia Woolf in a diary entry from October 1929. There, she begins by describing ‘October days … a little strained and surrounded with silence’, a silence that perplexes her in part because she has ‘never stopped “seeing” people’, including her husband, friends, and lover. Deciding that what she characterized as silence is in fact ‘some inner loneliness’, she sketches an example of what she intends to capture:

I was walking up Bedford Place … and I said to myself spontaneously, something like this. How I suffer, and no one knows how I suffer, walking up this street, engaged with my anguish, as I was after Thoby died – alone; fighting something alone. But then I had the devil to fight, and now nothing … [Y]et I am writing … And it is autumn; and the lights are going up … and this celebrity business is quite chronic – and I am richer than I have ever been – and bought a pair of earrings  today – and for all this, there is vacancy and silence somewhere in the machine.

Woolf’s recurrent bouts of intense loneliness, which she experienced despite close relationships and literary success, were clearly painful. But, in her telling, they were also extremely generative: ‘[W]hat I like is to flash and dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality. If I never felt these extraordinarily pervasive strains – of unrest or rest or happiness or discomfort – I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight; and when I wake early I say to myself Fight, fight.’

What might it look like to fight in the face of one’s loneliness? Many things, it seems to me. As a visceral indication that we may merely be settling for forms of life and relationships that do not engage or fulfil important parts of us, loneliness can function as a call to action: to make bids for relationships with others; to share more of ourselves with our loved ones; to more intentionally pursue valued projects in spaces where others may share our interests; to embody one’s aspirational self so that others may reflect it back to you. The aversive quality of loneliness can also serve as a motivating force, goading us to try to meet certain of our unmet needs or desires – perhaps by experimenting with relationships or forms of relationship that we otherwise would not have been tempted to pursue. In these ways, loneliness may spur transformative change.

But for loneliness to function in this way requires that one not sink under its weight. Despair is a common response to loneliness. And when it appears, it’s all too easy to drown in this feeling – for instance, for reflection on one’s condition to morph into rumination, and for this rumination to make one feel lonelier, more stuck. Those experiencing long-term loneliness tend to become more withdrawn, not less. While loneliness may spur transformation, it can also exert considerable drag on those subject to its force.

Absent a clear path forward, the best one can do might be to refuse defiantly to give in to despair. In full knowledge of our unavoidable dependence on and vulnerability to others, sometimes all one can do is try to keep going, proceeding – however hopelessly – on faith. It is often in such moments that more innovative strategies emerge, strategies one cannot have mapped in advance and that reveal hitherto unseen avenues for recognition or connection. For instance, it was in a moment of despair like the one described here that, returning to the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains from Los Angeles, I sat down to write about loneliness for the first time.

Kaitlyn Creasy writes in the areas of nineteenth-century European philosophy, moral psychology, and ethics. Her work in these areas explores how our psychological lives are formed and sustained, as well as how various emotional experiences may facilitate or hinder agency, self-formation, and flourishing. She is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino.

First published online on 31st May 2026

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