---

“Once we accept loneliness, we can get creative: we can start to send out messages in a bottle: we can sing, write poetry, produce books and blogs, activities stemming from the realisation that people around us won’t ever fully get us but that others – separated across time and space – might just.”

Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)

“Most people look forward to the weekend, but for me, it’s the other way around – I look forward to Monday so I can speak to people at work. I feel really down on Fridays, because I start thinking about how I’m going to spend another weekend alone.”

— Mario*, 27, from Italy, Works for an Architecture Company, What It’s Like to Be Young and Extremely Lonely in a Big City

“A guy needs somebody―to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”

—John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

It is the most basic human loneliness that threatens us and is so hard to face. Too often we will do everything possible to avoid the confrontation with the experience of being alone, and sometimes we are able to create the most ingenious devices to prevent ourselves from being reminded of this condition. Our culture has become most sophisticated in the avoidance of pain, not only our physical pain but our emotional and mental pain as well. We not only bury our dead as if they were still alive, but we also bury our pains as if they were not really there. We have become so used to this state of anesthesia that we panic when there is nothing or nobody left to distract us. When we have no project to finish, no friend to visit, no book to read, no television to watch, or no record to play, and when we are left all alone by ourselves, we are brought so close to the revelation of our basic human aloneness and are so afraid of experiencing an all-pervasive sense of loneliness that we will do anything to get busy again and continue the game that makes us believe that everything is fine after all.

—Henri Nouwen

“And you love being isolated but you’re afraid to stay alone.”

source

I love your letter a lot because you describe, in vivid detail, half of a full life: You have the intellectual and social side of things covered. You know how to reach out to people and connect with them intellectually. You realize it takes a lot of initiative to make things happen. You stick your neck out, and you’re self-aware about the fact that even though it sometimes feels like you’re doing all of the work, people do reach out to you, too.

Aspiratinal Loner

“Solitude is as important to me now as food. I’m (fairly) sociable, and have close friends I wouldn’t be without, but I don’t feel like I did when young. Then I felt that I was like a fridge: the lights only came on when the door was opened. I knew who I was when surrounded by friends; alone, I felt I was a blank. Now, I feel most myself when alone. And in a good way. It was worth waiting for.”

—Nigella Lawson

“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’