Lonely, Oh So Lonely

Philosopher Kaitlyn Creasy has meditated on loneliness. Unfortunately, she descends into psychobabble and ends up suggesting that we feel less lonely when we surround ourselves with people who see us for whom we really are, who affirm our inner truth and who love us unconditionally.

In truth, without delving too deeply into such thought, we can point out that the only person who is going to love you unconditionally, and for whom you really are, is your mother. Creasy seems to understand this, but she suggests that she wants everyone to love her unconditionally.

Creasy does reflect that human beings are social animals, but she considers herself and everyone else to be self-absorbed monads, individuals who expect to be loved for their unique individuality.

Of course, no one can really love you for your unique individuality. 

Her argument fails because she does not seem to understand socialization. Let’s imagine that you join a football team. You have a role to play; you must follow rules; you wear a uniform and participate in team exercises; you even hang out with your teammates.

Does this make you feel lonely? Would it be better if they were all privy to your deepest secrets. I suggest that it does not. The same applies to getting a job, having a role in a company, having a title and duties. As eminent Harvard psychiatrist Richard Mollica once opined: “The best antidepressant is a job.”

Whether we consider the example of a team member or a building manager, we do not expect that other people know everything that matters about us. We ought, if we have an ounce of dignity, to keep our private matters out of the workplace and off the football field. 

Nothing would be quite so exhausting as trying to know everything that matters about each of our teammates. Such an empty gesture would make us very poor teammates.

Creasy explains that her sense of loneliness began when she returned home from a semester in Italy. She discovered that she could not share many of the scintillating experiences she had had:

When I returned from Italy, there was so much I wanted to share with them. I wanted to talk to my boyfriend about how aesthetically interesting but intellectually dull I found Italian futurism; I wanted to communicate to my closest friends how deeply those Italian love sonnets moved me, how Bob Dylan so wonderfully captured their power. 

A minimum of decorum would have told her that the people in her life, especially those who had not spent a semester in Italy, did not care about her experience. In the end she sounds self-involved and self-absorbed. I cannot imagine a better way to consign yourself to loneliness:

In addition to a strongly felt need to share specific parts of my intellectual and emotional lives that had become so central to my self-understanding, I also experienced a dramatically increased need to engage intellectually, as well as an acute need for my emotional life in all its depth and richness – for my whole being, this new being – to be appreciated. When I returned home, I felt not only unable to engage with others in ways that met my newly developed needs, but also unrecognised for who I had become since I left. And I felt deeply, painfully lonely.

The theory is worthy of a high school girl. I have nothing against high school girls, but the notion that she cannot share the depth of her rich emotional life sounds vapid. It sounds like a bad therapy session.

But then, Creasy also suggests that her sojourn in Italy had made her someone else, had totally transformed her, to the roots of her being, if not the roots of her hair.

As time passes, it often happens that friends and family who used to understand us quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did, failing to really see us as they used to before. This, too, will tend to lead to feelings of loneliness – though the loneliness may creep in more gradually, more surreptitiously. Loneliness, it seems, is an existential hazard, something to which human beings are always vulnerable – and not just when they are alone.

So, Creasy got back from Italy brimming over with-- who knows what? If she had joined a football team or even a knitting circle, sharing inner truths would have been inappropriate. Imaging that other people are going to care about your deep emotions is a good way to consign yourself to loneliness. Those nearest and dearest might, but everyone else will consider you a boor.

Creasy expects to be cared for unconditionally. She imagines that other people will thrill to her musings about frescoes. Because she believes that said reflections are who she really is. One would prefer that philosophers not use such empty phrases. You are who you are if I can trust you. It has nothing to do with your love for pasta or your aesthetic sensibility.

In other words, she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness because she does not yet have friends whose love of her reflects back to her the basic value as a person that she has, friends who let her see that she matters. Only when she makes genuine friendships will she feel her unconditional value is acknowledged; only then will her basic social needs to be loved and recognised be met. Once she feels she truly matters to someone, in Setiya’s view, her loneliness will abate.

While she ponders Italian architecture, does she spend as much time trying to plumb the depths of what her American friends care about?

She even wants people to see her as a fully fledged human being, even though, as she suggests, people are social beings. If so, they are more likely to be defined by their roles in the family, in society and on the job. 

Dare I mention that Creasy imagines that the cure for loneliness lies in being sufficiently loving.

What plagues accounts that tie loneliness to an absence of basic recognition is that they fail to do justice to loneliness as a feeling that pops up not only when one lacks sufficiently loving, affirmative relationships, but also when one perceives that the relationships she has (including and perhaps especially loving relationships) lack sufficient quality (for example, lacking depth or a desired feeling of connection)

Again, it’s all about sharing all of her inner life, prospect that will certainly make her insufferable to all but the precious few who are her true intimates. Keep in mind, you cannot have very many intimates in your life.

I felt unable to meet my need for intellectual engagement and communicate to my friends the fullness of my inner life, which was overtaken by quite specific aesthetic values, values that shaped how I saw the world. As a result, I felt lonely.

One recalls a line by Yeats:

Only God, my dear, 

Could love you for yourself alone,

And not your yellow hair.

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