Why We Still Feel Lonely – with Philosopher Lars Svendsen

We can be surrounded by people and still feel completely alone. We can have friends, a partner, a full social calendar, and still feel like something is missing.

This month, I spoke with philosopher Dr. Lars Svendsen about loneliness. I picked his book as I am impressed by how he weaves together philosophy, psychology, literature, film studies, and cross-cultural research.

Before this conversation, I did not know that…

Norway is one of the most individualistic countries on earth. It also has some of the lowest loneliness rates in the world.

People who see their friends every day report more loneliness than those who do not.

Creating new social spaces and community events does almost nothing to cure loneliness.

In one study, people preferred giving themselves electric shocks over sitting alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes.

I hope you come away from this conversation feeling a little less lonely. Or at least, in my own case, a bit more hopeful.

 

Dr. Svendsen is a Norwegian philosopher.  He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is the author of several books, including A Philosophy of Boredom(2005), Fashion: a Philosophy (2006), A Philosophy of Fear (2008), Work(2008), and A Philosophy of Freedom (2014). He has a unique ability to communicate difficult contemporary and international topics straightforwardly. Dr. Svendsen has received several prizes for his work, and his books have been translated into more than 35 languages.

Why We Still Feel Lonely – with Philosopher Lars Svendsen

The Trust Factor

Norway, one of the most individualistic nations on earth, reports some of the lowest loneliness rates globally. During the pandemic, a popular Norwegian joke was that everyone breathed a sigh of relief when they could finally leave the one-metre social distancing rule and return to their usual two metres. And yet, Norwegians are not lonely.

The explanation is generalized trust: the baseline belief that most strangers can, broadly speaking, be trusted.

If you walk into a room and ask 100 Norwegians whether other people can generally be trusted, most of them would say, “Of course.” And across individuals and nations, higher generalized trust consistently correlates with lower loneliness. The relationship holds at both the individual and national level.

Dr. Svendsen predicts that “tribalization,” the intensifying of partisan identity into Democrat and Republican camps, will drive loneliness upward in the years to come. When the first question you ask yourself about a stranger is which political tribe they belong to, immediacy disappears. And immediacy is crucial for connection.

The Counterintuitive Finding About Collectivist Cultures

Certain findings from Dr. Svendsen’s work prove to be surprising**.** Collectivist societies can actually heighten isolation for anyone who does not fit neatly into family or in-group expectations. If you are the odd one out in a collectivist culture, there is nowhere else to go. You cannot easily form bonds with strangers because the whole system is built around tight in-groups.

More individualized societies seem to train people in trusting and interacting with strangers beyond their immediate circles. You have to learn to deal with strangers constantly, so you develop the muscle for it. And that creates more fluid opportunities for connection.

Loneliness, Solitude, and Aloneness Are Not the Same Thing

Dr. Svendsen is careful to distinguish three terms that most of us conflate.

Loneliness is a feeling of discomfort or pain related to a perception of yourself as not sufficiently connected to others. Solitude is a positive state in which you enjoy being in your own company. Aloneness simply describes the number of people around you.

At the population level, loneliness and aloneness are only weakly related. People who report feeling lonely are surrounded by other people to pretty much the same extent as people who do not feel lonely. It is not the number of people in your surroundings that determines whether you are lonely. It is how you perceive your relationship to those people. Many lonely people are constantly surrounded by others. Many people who spend significant time alone feel deeply content.

Can You Train Yourself to Enjoy Solitude?

I asked Dr. Svendsen whether the capacity for solitude is innate or trainable. His answer: both, but you can definitely train it.

What is crucial for solitude, he explained, is getting the conversation started with yourself. You are in your own company. You are not living in the absence of others; you are actively relating to yourself. And we are getting increasingly less skilled at doing that.

A huge part of the reason is smartphones. In the past, if you missed a train or had an empty pocket of time, you were thrown back upon yourself. You had to spend that time relating to your own thoughts. Now, as soon as any gap occurs, we pick up our phones, open social media, and invite everyone else in. We rarely train the muscle for being with ourselves anymore.

Dr. Svendsen described one study that still makes him laugh. Participants were told to spend 15 minutes by themselves in a room doing absolutely nothing. In one version, they were told not to use their phones but allowed to keep them. Of course, they cheated. In another version, phones were taken away, and participants reported that the full 15 minutes really took a toll on them.

In his favourite version, participants were given an electric shock before the experiment started and told they could administer shocks to themselves during the 15 minutes to break the monotony. A surprisingly large number of them did exactly that.

What the study reveals, he suggested, is not just about loneliness or boredom, but about a widespread inability to simply draw on our own resources and be in our own company for even a short time.

More Social Contact Does Not Mean Less Loneliness

One of the strangest findings from his research: people who meet friends every single day actually report more loneliness than those who meet friends less frequently.

The likely explanation is that if you need to see your friends every day, your social needs are probably very high. And high social needs are simply harder to satisfy. You are more likely to feel the gap, even when you are objectively surrounded by people.

Correlation, not causation. But still a striking inversion of common assumptions.

What Actually Helps (And What Does Not)

When Dr. Svendsen wrote his book, there were not many intervention studies available. Now there are more, and the findings are rather sobering.

What does show results, albeit modest ones, is cognitive work. Changing how people perceive and interpret social interactions. When researchers compare chronically lonely people with non-lonely people, they find no difference in what they do, no difference in intelligence, no difference in appearance, and virtually no difference in how many people surround them during an average day. But they do find differences in perception and expectation.

Chronically lonely people tend to be social perfectionists. They have very high standards for what counts as satisfactory social interaction, so they are far more easily disappointed. They look far more for signs of rejection. They find more signs of rejection. And they react more strongly when they perceive rejection.

The picture that emerges is of the social field as a dangerous, risky place. The entire approach becomes defensive. And that defensiveness prevents the immediacy that is crucial for forming attachment.

Responsibility Without Blame

One criticism he received when his book first came out was that he was blaming lonely people for their loneliness. He pushes back on that reading. The point is that these are causes, not moral faults. And understanding causes is the first step toward addressing them.

The phenomenology of loneliness is that your surroundings are denying you something you need. The people around you are coming up short. The whole experience places the explanation out there, in the world. But for chronically lonely people, the explanation may also lie in how they perceive what their surroundings actually bring to the table. Social perception might be off. Expectations might be too high.

He is not saying that if you are lonely, it is your fault. He is saying that waiting for someone to march into your life and make loneliness vanish is not a solution. There are no quick fixes. But owning the problem, doing work on your own emotional responses and thought patterns, is the path forward. It can be done alone, with a trusted person, or with professional help. He is not endorsing therapy culture wholesale. He is just saying that the solution will not arrive from outside.

On Friendship: Aristotle and Kant

I asked Dr. Svendsen to take us on a brief tour of how philosophers have thought about friendship.

For Aristotle, friendship consists in wishing someone else well. But it takes different forms. There is friendship based on utility: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Not very stable, because people change and you might not be useful to each other anymore. There is friendship based on shared enjoyment: you have fun together, share an interest in music or literature. Also unstable, because interests shift over time. The highest form for Aristotle is virtuous friendship, where friends admire each other’s character and help each other develop virtue.

Kant offers a different emphasis. For Kant, what is crucial about the highest form of friendship is intimacy. Friendship lets you share your thoughts and feelings with someone in a way you would not feel comfortable broadcasting to everyone. Without friends, you would be stuck with your own thoughts and emotions, unable to share them. Friendship fills that gap.

Kant also identified what he called “unsocial sociability”: the tension in all humans between being drawn toward community and being pulled toward solitude and independence. We all sit somewhere on that continuum. And friends, in a way, serve as intermediaries. They allow us to be with someone without being fully public, and without being fully alone. The tension is not a flaw. It is part of the human condition.

Hope as an Active Orientation

Toward the end of our conversation, Dr. Svendsen brought up his other major research interest: hope.

He sees trust as a subcategory of hope. To trust someone is to hope they will act well toward you. And hope, properly understood, is not passive. It is not leaning back and waiting for something to happen. Hope changes how you act.

If you truly hope, there are certain things you will do and certain things you will not do. Students who hope to pass their exams relate to the curriculum differently than students who do not. People who hope for environmental change actually do something about it.

Hope has two essential functions. First, it lets you place your gaze somewhere beyond your current situation. You can see a possible future. Second, it changes your behaviour. Your thoughts do not magically change the world, but they change how you act. And how you act can change the world.

I asked him what he would say to someone who is scared of social situations and feels stuck in mistrust.

His answer was direct: go into those social situations that feel a bit scary, and dare to be hurt. Trust people. If you trust, you will get hurt sometimes. But living in a state of constant mistrust is a far worse alternative.

The pain of getting hurt in a social exchange is loud and immediate. The slow erosion of chronic mistrust and loneliness is quieter, more diffuse. But the cumulative cost of never opening yourself up is enormous.

Enter into those relations. Learn to let things slide. Give other people the benefit of the doubt. Most people mean well most of the time.

Vulnerability is the key to living a meaningful life. Hope is one of the ways we cope with that vulnerability.

He pushed back gently on Stoicism, which he sees as a philosophy for hard times but one that leads to too much acceptance. The Stoic Epictetus argued that the problem with slavery is not slavery itself, but that the slave cannot reconcile himself to being enslaved. Dr. Svendsen thinks that is, to use his word, “bollocks.”

The Stoic argument for eliminating hope, so you will not be disappointed, only makes sense if hoping does not change the likelihood of a good outcome. But it does. Hopeful people do better in education, work, family life, and sense of meaning. Hope is worth hoping for.