On Loneliness And Being Alone
To be alone is not the same as to be lonely.
Modern media—news, magazines, the endless scroll—serves as a conduit of social control. Among its most persistent refrains is the so-called “epidemic of male loneliness”.
The term itself is revealing. To call something an epidemic is to medicalise it, to turn a mood into an illness—and who wishes to see himself as sick?
The claim rests, as these things often do, on statistics: a handful of ambiguous survey questions extrapolated into sweeping conclusions, usually by well-meaning organisations seeking funding to treat the crisis they’ve just described.
Some men do feel isolated; that’s hardly new. But are they necessarily lonely? Or is lonely—like so many words in public circulation—simply a shorthand for solitude misunderstood? For a choice that needs no cure?
We’re told endlessly that humans are “social animals” and that health requires a quota of connections to qualify as normal. Yet this assumption, too, rests on numbers: data about people who were not, and never claimed to be, experts in human flourishing.
Perhaps it is difference, not conformity, that defines normality. If so, we are not what the statistics say we should be; we are what we are. The supposed epidemic is not of loneliness but of linguistic confusion—mistaking a man’s preference for quiet as a symptom of distress.
It may indeed be difficult to stand apart from the crowd, but that, paradoxically, is the very role men have been trained to play: stoic, self-reliant, unruffled. To lead is, by definition, to stand alone. We cannot have it both ways.
Not from the absence
Loneliness arises not from the absence of others but from the absence of self-contact. To be estranged from one’s own company is the only true isolation.
And forget the fashionable labels—introvert, extrovert, ambivert—tidy inventions of a man who needed categories to make people manageable. You will be shy one day and gregarious the next; you will seek company, then silence. Each is true, but none defines you.
Statistics may measure variation, but they confer no moral weight. There is nothing wrong with being a man who keeps to himself, or one who surrounds himself with others. The measure lies in whether you chose it freely—and whether, when alone, you can stand the sound of your own peace.
A man with too many connections is no less lost than one with none. The first cannot hear himself through the noise of others; the second cannot hear others through the noise of himself.”
