Loneliness in the middle of a full life: alone among people

Tuesday, twenty to eleven at night. The dishwasher is humming, the children are asleep, your partner is at the other end of the sofa answering the last work messages. The day was full: a morning meeting, lunch with colleagues, three calls, the drive to training, a short phone conversation with your mother, dinner for four. And then, while switching off the kitchen lights, a thought that arrives uninvited: “I have spoken to at least thirty people today. Not one of them knows how I am.”

People are often more ashamed of this kind of loneliness than of any other. Someone who lives alone and is lonely at least has an explanation. Someone with a job, a family and friends quickly tells themselves they are ungrateful, spoilt, or making it up. How can a person without a single free hour be lonely?

They can. Feeling lonely among people is not rare. In this post I would like to show why a full diary does not protect against loneliness, what it is in contact that actually counts, and how, in a life with plenty of people in it, you get back to being known by someone.

The loneliness a diary does not show

Loneliness is not a shortage of people. It is the gap between the contact you have and the contact you need. A shortage of people has its own name, social isolation, and can be counted; loneliness is a feeling and cannot. I explained the difference between the two, and a third concept, solitude, in detail in the post Loneliness is not solitude: the difference that changes everything, so here only this much: a person with a full diary is not isolated, but can be every bit as lonely as anyone else.

That this is no marginal exception is clear from the way loneliness is measured. One of the most widely used scales in the world, the UCLA Loneliness Scale, asks among other things how often you feel that people are around you but not with you. The question is in the scale because this experience belongs to the very core of loneliness, not to its edge. The concept itself is also briefly described in the knowledge base under loneliness.

It often sounds like this: “Everyone needs me, nobody asks me.” Or: “If I stopped keeping things running tomorrow, they would notice because things had stopped running, not because I was gone.” Or quite simply: “I don’t know who I would call at two in the morning.”

What counts: quality before quantity

In 2010 the psychologist Matthias Mehl and colleagues published a small but ingenious study. For four days, 79 students wore a recorder that switched on its microphone for half a minute every few minutes. The researchers then sorted the recordings: when the person was alone, when they were talking, and whether the conversation was small talk about weather and food or a conversation of substance. The most satisfied participants had roughly twice as many substantive conversations as the least satisfied.

The study did not measure loneliness but satisfaction with life, and we cannot tell from it what is cause and what is effect. What happened later is interesting, though. When Anne Milek and colleagues tested the finding in 2018 on more and larger samples, the link with substantive conversations held. The original impression that small talk is bad for well-being did not: there is no need to chase small talk away, it is just not enough.

Research on loneliness shows a similar picture. In 2001 Martin Pinquart and Silvia Sörensen found, in a meta-analysis of studies with older adults, that the quality of contacts is more strongly related to loneliness than their quantity. Their data apply to older people, so I would not transfer them literally to a forty-year-old with three parents’ groups on their phone. But the direction is the same wherever it has been looked for: the number of people tells you little, what the conversations with them are like tells you a great deal.

What “quality” actually means

The word is dangerously loose, so it is worth taking apart. In 1988 Harry Reis and Phillip Shaver described closeness as a process with two steps. In the first, someone says something that matters to them personally. In the second, the other responds in a way that leaves the first feeling understood, accepted and cared about. Closeness does not arise at the disclosure but at the response to it.

Two things follow. First: if you never say anything personal, closeness has nothing to grow from, however kind the people around you are. Second: if you do say it and meet advice, a joke, a change of subject or a phone in someone’s hand, you learn that it is not worth it. Most people who are lonely in the middle of a full life know both. Somewhere they got out of the habit of speaking because there was no response, and now there is no response because they do not speak.

Quality, then, is not a deep conversation about the meaning of life every evening. It is that with at least one or two people there is a path along which the things that are not tidy, successful or amusing can also come out, and that someone on the other side receives them.

Roles that hide you

A full schedule is almost always a schedule of roles. At work you are the manager, the expert, the one who sorts out the tangle. At home you are the parent who knows where the slippers are and the partner who remembers the car service. With your parents you are the child who comes to check that everything is all right. Among friends you are the one who organises everything, or the one who always listens.

In each of these roles people see you and need you. But they see the role. The role of the reliable one, the strong one, the witty one. The praise you get is for the role, and even when it is sincere it does not feed the part of you the role does not show. Hence the strange sense of being valued and invisible at once. How this plays out at work I described in the post The professional mask: the cost of being someone else at work.

These roles rarely begin in adulthood. A child who was “the good one” in the family, or “the one who causes no trouble”, found out early that they were loved when they gave, and that it was better to wait with their own needs. As an adult they have many people around them precisely because they give so much, and are alone among them precisely because they take nothing. If you recognise yourself in this, you may find something in the post Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours?.

Three levels of conversation

For everyday use I find it helpful to divide conversations into three levels. This is not a research category but a simple tool for looking at your day.

On the first level is logistics: who, when, where. “You pick them up at five.” On the second is news: what happened. “The boss has moved the deadline again.” On the third is experience: how I am with it. “I’m afraid I won’t manage, and I’m ashamed to say so.” The first two levels are essential; shared life does not run without them. But nobody gets to know you on them. Anyone in your place could carry them out.

It is striking how quickly this happens even in the closest relationships. A couple with small children can spend weeks on the first level without either of them wanting to. A friendship once full of long evenings shrinks to a yearly coffee at which you exchange news. Nothing has broken and nobody is to blame; it is just that the third level takes time and attention, and those are the first things a full day cuts. When this happens between partners it has features of its own, which I write about in the post Loneliness in a relationship: alone beside someone.

Why it is so hard to say

If the way out is so clear, why do people not take it? Because the third level requires vulnerability, and that is comfortable for no one, least of all for people who are used to being on top of things.

The first obstacle is fear of what disclosure will do to the picture others have of you. If you are the one everyone relies on, the sentence “I can’t cope” feels like a betrayal of the role. The second obstacle is habit. In a review article in 2010, Louise Hawkley and John Cacioppo described how loneliness makes a person more alert to signs of rejection: they expect less good, so they risk less, so they receive less. Someone who feels invisible begins to assume in advance that others are not interested, and stops checking whether that is true.

The third obstacle is that many people simply do not know what they would say. Anyone who has lived for years in “get it done, sort it out, move on” mode often has no words for what they feel. They are not secretive, only out of practice. This is called emotional literacy, and it can be learned like any other kind. For some, though, the reserve is older and deeper: closeness itself feels effortful and withdrawal soothing. I describe this pattern in the post Avoidant attachment: why closeness tires and retreat calms.

The turning point, however, often looks small. A conversation like that between two friends might go something like this (composed; these are not real people):

“How are you?”
“Fine. Madness, you know. You?”
“Same. … Wait, can I try that again? I’m not fine. For months I’ve felt as if I just drive people from one place to another and I’m not anywhere myself.”
“Oh. Yes. I thought I was the only one.”
“Why did you never tell me?”
“Because it looked as if you could handle everything.”

Those six lines show nearly everything I am writing about. Both had a full week and both were lonely. Both kept quiet because each thought the other was coping. And it was enough for one of them to answer “how are you” a second time, this time for real.

Fullness as a shelter

There is one more, less comfortable possibility that it is only fair to mention. Sometimes a full life is not the cause of loneliness but a way of not feeling it. As long as every hour is taken, there is no silence in which the question “how am I” could make itself heard. Being busy is the most socially acceptable form of avoidance: nobody will ask you why you work so much, help so much and organise so much.

How do you know whether this applies to you? One sign is that an empty evening does not relax you but unsettles you. Another is that loneliness speaks up precisely in the pauses: on holiday, on a Sunday afternoon, in the car after you have dropped everyone off. A third is that when asked what you would want for yourself, you find no answer and quickly think of someone who needs you. When a person’s worth depends entirely on how useful they are, rest becomes a threat. I wrote about this pattern in the post People-pleasing: when your worth is in other people’s hands.

Exercise: one step deeper

This exercise does not require new people or a free evening. It requires that, in a conversation you would be having anyway, you take one small step from the first or second level to the third. You can do it today.

1. Choose one person. Not the hardest one, and not the one with whom most is at stake. Someone with whom the risk is small: a friend, a brother, a colleague you trust.
2. Prepare one sentence. Let it begin with “I” and contain a feeling, not an assessment of the situation. Not “work is chaos” but “lately I’ve been completely empty in the evenings”. If you cannot find the word, “I don’t know exactly what’s wrong, but I’m not all right” is enough.
3. Say it and do not correct it. No “but it’s nothing really” and no joke straight after. Those two are how you take a disclosure back before the other person has heard it.
4. Hold three seconds of silence. The other person needs a moment to switch. If you fill the silence yourself, you take away their chance to respond.
5. In the evening, write down what happened. What they said, what you felt in your body, whether it was harder or easier than you expected. Your prediction and the real outcome often differ, and that difference is worth seeing in black and white.

If the other person did not respond as you had hoped, that is not yet proof that it is not worth it. They may have been tired, surprised, or not known what to say. Try once more, or with someone else, before concluding that you were right.

Where this does not hold

The thesis “quality before quantity” is useful, but it has limits, and some of them I need to state plainly.

Passing contact counts too. In 2014 Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn showed that on days when people had more contact with acquaintances, such as a neighbour or a shop assistant, they reported more happiness and a greater sense of belonging. A short chat is not second-rate; it keeps us in the world. Not every relationship needs to be deep, and anyone who expects the third level from every conversation will be disappointed and will wear out the people around them.

Not everything is loneliness. A sense of emptiness in the middle of a full life can also be a sign of depression or burnout. If nothing gives you pleasure any more, if you are exhausted even after rest, if you struggle to concentrate and sleep badly, talk to your GP. I describe the difference between sadness and depression in the post Depression is not sadness: how to tell them apart and why it matters. In that state the advice “be more open” does not help, because there is no strength even for the basics.

Sometimes it really is too much. Someone caring for small children, ageing parents and a demanding job all at once is not short of courage but short of hours. For them the first step is relief, not an exercise in vulnerability, and the solution is not always in their hands.

And not every relationship is safe for openness. If someone has already mocked you when you showed weakness, or later used your words against you, caution is reasonable. The third level belongs where the response is at least likely to be good.

If loneliness turns into thoughts that nobody would miss you, do not stay alone with that. In Slovenia you can call the mental distress line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112.

When it makes sense to look for help

Many people take the first step on their own and find that those around them were readier than they thought. Some, though, notice the same pattern repeating everywhere: in every job, every relationship, every friendship they are the one who gives and does not show themselves. That is when it makes sense to look at where the pattern comes from.

As a therapist in training in marriage and family therapy under supervision, I am studying relational family therapy, which starts from exactly this question: in which relationships did you learn how you are allowed to be with others. The therapeutic relationship is also practice in this. It is a place where you can say something on the third level and notice what happens in you when someone neither corrects you, nor comforts you too quickly, nor leaves. From there, the step to the people in your life is shorter. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• Loneliness is the gap between the contact you have and the contact you need. A full diary does not rule it out.
• The research points the same way: the quality of contact says more about loneliness than the number of contacts.
• Closeness arises when you say something personal and the other responds with understanding. Without the first step, the other has nothing to respond to.
• Roles (the reliable one, the strong one, the carer) bring plenty of contact and little of being known.
• It starts with one sentence to one person, not with rebuilding your whole life.