“What’s interesting to me is that I’ll sit on my own in a cafe easily in the week,” she says. But the same cafe at the weekend is a space she cannot enter. Even walking the dog takes on a different cast. “I don’t feel conscious at all during the week” – but on a Sunday morning, the same walk feels acutely sad.

The agony of weekend loneliness: ‘I won’t speak to another human until Monday’

Loneliness is complex, she notes. “It can impact those who crave time to themselves after a week at work”; a double bind in which company is both a salve and an impediment.

The agony of weekend loneliness: ‘I won’t speak to another human until Monday’

Solitude will cure our distaste for a crowd, and a crowd will cure our boredom with solitude.

The mind should not be kept continuously at the same pitch of concentration, but given amusing diversions.

—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

The epidemic of loneliness and depression results from proud minds lacking in humility, from failed interpersonal relationships, from unsatisfied egotistical aspirations, from self-aggrandizement, praise-seeking, and self-love. This loneliness is strong enough to weaken a person and to make him sick. But love is stronger, capable of healing and regenerating the whole world.

Humility — An Antidote to Loneliness

Why are we lonely? Because everyone is choosing him or herself over everyone else.

Because we are greedy, other people are poor. Because we are arrogant, someone else is put down. Because we exalt ourselves, someone else is abased. Because we desire fame, someone else is forgotten. Because we see only ourselves, we are lonely.

Those Lonely Moments In The Night

Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence of paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired.

—Olivia Laing,The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

We go through life running away from our own loneliness, we put a cellophane covering over our own depth and riches and live instead at the surface of our minds, hearts, and personalities. We are too frightened of it to enter into it. The canyons of our minds and hearts are so deep and so full of mystery that we try at all costs to avoid entering them deeply. We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened: frightened because we must make that journey alone; frightened because we know it will involve solitude and perseverance; and frightened because we are entering the unknown: All these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves.

— Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

There can be no final solution to our loneliness in this life. No amount of partying and drinking, pleasure and travel, fame and fortune, success or creativity, indeed no amount of genuine human love and affection, can ever fully take our loneliness away.

—Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

Your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

—Rainer Maria Rilke,Letters to a Young Poet

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life’s cruelest irony.

—Douglas Coupland