Why being alone feels boring whereas being lonely feels suffocating? Why it is easy to get out of being alone, but not loneliness. Why no matter how hard we try to not be lonely, we become lonely again? Why do we feel stuck and have no way out? How to get out of the circle of relationship failure and live life out of loneliness?
Table of Contents
A. Definitions of Loneliness and Being Alone
Loneliness means you want to be with someone, but that someone is not present in your life.
Alone means you are currently not with anyone’s company and are left with your own company.
Loneliness is a persistent state of not having a companion, whereas being alone is a temporary state of not having anyone around.
Therefore, being alone is a feeling as we are never alone, we are always with ourselves and nature. On the other hand, loneliness is an emotion, a deep persistent emotion.
B. Why Being Alone is good?
Company of ourselves is good as this allows one to think about life deeply, analyze life, assess current situations, prepare for the future, and so on.
When you are alone, away from the noise and people, you are not disturbed. You are at peace with yourself. This peace is much intended and much important in today’s time.
Whenever we are with others, we have to spend more energy, as any social or interpersonal energy needs more attention, focus, understanding another person, interacting, and if there are not many benefits from such interactions, we start getting energy-less. Even when there are other people around you, if you are not getting any of your life’s fundamental needs of survival, thriving, and reproduction met out of those interactions, you soon start losing interest in such interactions and get bored.
Being alone helps you to take a pause from all the meaningless interactions and try to take control back of your life. However, if you are not accustomed to spending time with yourself, reading, painting, singing, thinking about life, and watching nature, then staying alone for a long period of time in itself starts to get boring.
When boredom persists for a long period of time, and if there is no excitement between time-frames of boredom then, boredom soon starts transforming into sadness. And when you start staying sad for longer, it starts to take you towards depression.
Therefore being alone as a break is refreshing, whereas being alone for long becomes a habit, and eventually depression
If you are not getting time with yourself, and are always with people, friends, relatives, or work, find time out to be alone. But if you are being alone for over a week, go out of your home and seek company immediately before it becomes a habit. Otherwise, you will soon start feeling that your life has become a sad boring life.
Even if it means spending time with superficial friends, or just going out and meeting random people. Here your objective would be to somehow break the patterns.
C. Why so many people are feeling lonely today?
In modern times, we have been gaslighted by the corporates and by the families to such an extent that rarely we have gotten time to be alone from our childhood. The more we have been around our parents, our ability to individualize and see the world independently has vanquished.
Therefore our ability to pair bond, withstand the pressure that comes with a relationship, ability to understand the other person, and empathize with the other person has largely reduced.
D. Why companionship plays such an important part in our well-being?
Our brain always looks for validation and confirmation of its perception. Having someone with whom we trust, exchange energies, build and exchange memories, and share thoughts with gives our brain the opportunity to confirm our perception and feelings, and gives continuity.
We particularly are genetically hardwired to look for someone with exactly the opposite energy as ours to exchange the energy. Companionship is not a choice, but rather one of the fundamentals of humans.
Our ideas, thoughts, and feelings become random and Heyward when we fail to exchange them with our companion and build a model of them through the exchange of energy and emotions. It is then that our brain starts giving out signals of loneliness.
We find something missing in life, something deep-rooted not present, as if part of us is not present. The desire for a companion and the agony and pain of not having one increase with each passing day that we feel lonely.
E. Loneliness and imaginary world of suffering
It is then that our imagination takes over our reality, and we start living more in the fantasy world than the hard reality of loneliness. We try very hard to keep ourselves busy with things like friends, travel, food, and hobbies and try to deflect our brain from loneliness.
In the presence of all the noises of family members, relatives, social media, the internet, and Netflix, we fail to pay attention to our brain’s signal of loneliness. The surrounding environment appears like a dark desert and we find ourselves struck and chained in that darkness.
We all need healing after we complete our work. Healing again needs an emotional energy exchange through touch, love, and conversation. Lack of healing leaves our body in a state of inflammation and we start losing our sleep.
Intimacy helps the brain release a hormone called GABA which enables our brain to shut down the active threads. Without this, our threads remain active. When we try to sleep, our brain remains active, busy overthinking in the subconscious, further draining our energy.
We wake up tired, demotivated and are forced to push our bodies through the days. When we come back home at night and try to sleep, the noise of our devices, the internet, and social media, everything reduces and we start getting the loneliness signals again. This is why loneliness increases at night.
Being lonely is different from being alone because when you are alone, you know that you will be with someone(or others soon). This is momentary. However, when the loneliness sets in, there appears no way out of it.
F. Can dating and meeting apps helps help you to get over your loneliness?
With today’s tools such as Tinder and other dating apps, one tries hard to find a suitable companion.
The problem is that such applications present individuals as products, and transform seekers to consumers. The core problem is that relationship is an exchange of energies, intellect, thoughts, feelings, emotions, stories, memories, concerns, and dealing with life together. Relationships are not consumer-product.
The more one tries to seek solace through such applications, one realizes that due to the very core design of the application that transforms two individuals as products and consumers(and role reversals), everyone’s attention is to be a good desirable product.
Once individuals meet through such applications, more often or not they realize that they are hyperconscious about being desirable, rather than usable to the other. Because everyone who is on the platform is in some way or the other lonely and wants an escape from the loneliness, and because loneliness is a low energy negative feeling state, they again get struck the mutual feelings of negativity. Therefore such relationships often end in misery, elevating the pain of loneliness even further.
G. The difference between acknowledging loneliness and defense
Over the course of our evolution, we have developed various tools to not only deal with our external environment but also our internal environment, our mind, our internal pain, and suffocations.
One such tool is a defense mechanism. A defense mechanism is one by means of which we refuse to accept the severity of the current condition and pretend that everything is fine and good. Many try to justify their loneliness as an opportunity to explore the world, travel, be with oneself, and do as one wants, to party, to enjoy. However, this hardly satisfies the subconscious brain. Yes, in your aware brain, you are avoiding the pain of loneliness, but the pain continues to grow in the subconscious.
Because our subconscious is about 90% of our brain, and the aware or conscious brain is only 10%, it takes a herculean effort to defend the pain signals from the subconscious. Such an effort also requires tremendously high energy. Therefore no matter how much one pretends to be happy, or having fun due to loneliness, the reality is that one makes it difficult with each passing day to come out of the situation.
By the time one is left energyless trying to defend against the eventual collapse of loneliness, one finds himself/herself with no means, energy, resource, or ability to get over it anymore. That is an eventual collapse of life.
It is therefore better to accept our state of mind and emotion and acknowledge the signals coming from the subconscious. If the subconscious is telling you that the current situation is bad and painful, then it is. Irrespective of how much you try to avoid, use the tools like “change of environment, change of mind,” and “diversion” knowing that they are taking you towards a miserable end.
Humans are good with ruminating about the past and fantasizing about the future but are not good with realistically assessing the past through a continuous projection of their past into the future through the current times. Therefore the more you feel that you have learned to cope with your loneliness and have adjusted to the situation, the more you would be heading toward a miserable unavoidable ending.
H. Why do we try to escape to the past while lonely and jump to a future while alone?
Whenever one applies continuous defense against the feeling of loneliness, when that situation becomes uncontrollable, one thinks “Okay, I am feeling miserable at present, which I did not feel in the past, therefore past was much better than the current.”
If one was not lonely in the past and had companions such as a lover, friend, someone to take care of, someone who cared in the past, family, or relatives, one goes back to the past. Interestingly it is this past that created the situations in life that resulted in the current loneliness. For instance when the family did not support one in the past during one’s struggle, one left the family to move ahead with the life.
In loneliness, one is low on energy. So finding anyone new and establishing a new relationship is hard. However, if one has such past relationships that worked even to a degree, one finds it easy to take shelter in the past.
Often when you try to go back to the life of people who were with you in the past, you get welcomed initially. You feel accepted, and a respite that finally your loneliness ends. However, you forget that the very reason you became lonely today is due to such people in the past with whom you couldn’t feel connected.
With the past giving comfort becoming a new diversion from the pain, one soon realizes that everyone has a present, and the amount of energy and emotions one requires from past relationships to overcome the state of loneliness is so immense that one again starts to become disconnected and goes inside far deeper pit.
Always remember that it takes about three to seven years of consistent effort and struggle to make a relationship work. If a relationship has a struggle now, it will take another three to seven years of fighting together to get out of the struggle. But if you go back to the past, you have already unwound the number of years you had left those relationships behind and it is no more possible for you to overcome the loneliness ever in life.
Taking shelter of the past to overcome the pain of the loneliness of the present ends your possibility to overcome the loneliness in the future once forever
This is loneliness, but when it comes to the boredom of being alone, we often try to jump to the future too soon. People who have found themselves alone for quite some time meet new people and start feeling better. Such feelings are not because this new person is the prince charming or the rescuer one was waiting for, but because it is a change of feelings.
New connections and relationships always bring new hope and enthusiasm. This positive energy that the brain develops with the hope to sort the current boredom appears as if the happiness you waited for. It is this due to which people jump into this new relationship like one jumps out of a sinking ship, holding onto anything they can.
Jumping and sailing away too fast from the current situation again takes you far from the current. But your pain is in the present, in this environment, in this state of mind, and in yourself. So irrespective of how far you sail, you will eventually be dragged back into the current by your brain again.
I. If we can not escape the present under any circumstances then what is the solution out of our misery?
I am very sure that you have already started correlating your life with the theory and now are asking your brain “What is the solution?”
This question itself is the problem that drags people into the misery of loneliness and takes them away from people to be alone. Everyone tries to find a magic quick solution. Everyone tries to find an escape. Because no one likes to be alone for long, and no one can even imagine living a lonely life. We want a medicine for the disease. We want a quick fix.
It is extremely important to understand that there are deep-rooted psychological aspects in you like envy, jealousy, insecurities, anxiety, fear, greed, childhood trauma, guilt, and shame, which shape your behavior in such a way that you either get repelled by a close relationship or repel one with a close relationship. Irrespective of whether you sail far from the present, or take shelter in the past, these insecurities exist deep inside you.
When you are with your past, when you see them happy, you will feel envious. When you are in your past and see your present happy, you will be jealous of losing your present from which you escaped. When you have jumped out of the present for a quick good future, when you look back and see the ship has fixed itself and sailing nicely, you will become sad about still being in a dingy while the ship is sailing.
In reality, it is your brain that is playing with you. It is keeping you busy with yourself. Anyone and anything that gives validation to your current state, and promises a nice fairytale future appears your own. When you realize that the ones whom you thought are your own, essentially are busy in their life, you will feel cheated for the false good future. When you will try to move ahead, you will find that your current had already become far ahead in the future.
Eventually, you will realize by the end that you were never alone, and never lonely. There were people, there was care, there was love, there was growth, there was hope, there was happiness, there was sadness, and there was meaning in life. But you avoided understanding that meaning and preferred to stay with yourself, entangled and imprisoned by yourself. You will realize by the end that you were never with your past, with your present, and you were never ready to accept the future, but you were always with yourself, surrounded by a story that you created in your brain.
The easiest way to know if your current is the best for you to be not lonely and alone in the future is by comparing your current 3-7 years, with your past 3-7 years. If you have more knowledge, better health, better skills, more people, more responsibilities, more conversation, and more peace than in the past, then the present is your best bet for the future.
If that comparison tells you that the present is worse than the past in skills, wealth, emotion, conversation, peace, knowledge, and responsibilities, then you need to leave the present but neither jump into a future nor take shelter back into the past, but to become alone so that you can identify the inner dynamics in you that has to lead you to degrade in the present in comparison to the past.
Then you must stay alone for 3-7 years, fixing your inner flaws that have led to your misery. Once you change your inner self, you meet new people who connect to your new self.
J. Whether alone or lonely, take a walk
Let’s assume you have to walk 10 km today. How do you think you will walk? Through your legs? Nah! Whether it is walking, physical exercise, cycling, or any other exercise of the body, you push your body through the brain. You concentrate, and you gather the power, motivation, and energy for the body through the brain. When you get tired, you tell yourself “A little more.”
When you are walking and there is an inclined road, you tell yourself “A little more, only ten feet, and then a little more, upto that white car, and then a little more, upto that corner.”
In the same way, when your brain is suffering and losing motivation and energy, getting bored, suffocating, and becoming uninterested, you motivate your brain through your body. You push your body out of your body out of your home and start walking.
Initially, you would find it hard to push yourself out of your bed when you are feeling alone or lonely. Then you push yourself to walk, only upto that white car, then upto that plant with some flowers, then up to the shop some ten feet away, and then a little more.
Remember, all the problems in life can not be solved immediately. You need to have the patience and perseverance to come out of the difficult situations in life. However, when life presents you with that opportunity, you must have enough energy, motivation, emotion, enthusiasm, and zeal left to grab the opportunity with both hands.
Whether you have gone back to your past shelter, or have sailed away from the present to another end, if your present is strong and if you had grown from the past to the present, your brain would always conspire to make you meet your present. Anywhere you are, you have to remember that you are just on that inclined road, and you have to trust life to get you what is best for you, even if takes another seven years. But you have to keep walking every day, irrespective of how your life is and wherever you are so that when you get your final opportunity to come out of your loneliness one final time, you are ready.
Take that walk.
K. Conclusion
- Become alone to work on yourself so that you wouldn’t remain lonely;
- if you are not lonely but feeling alone then change the dynamics of the relationship, not the relationship;
- if you are not feeling alone when though you are lonely, then you are surrounded by the wrong people probably a lonely past if you are neither alone nor lonely but are feeling alone and lonely, then you are surrounded by your own internal demon;
- If you are both alone and lonely but make yourself believe that it is good, then you will die out of the craving for being rescued from your loneliness;
- If you believe that you are thankfully just being rescued from your loneliness by people who are helping you not being alone, then they are carrying you in their back to dump you in the deepest, darkest grave of loneliness not far from now.
Our present is our only reality, and growth and learning are the only measurement of progress. Life is a hard reality. When you are busy with only imagination and fantasy and people are giving wings to either those fantasies or fire to the past, without any actions for the future, know without any doubt that you are imprisoned by the people with the leash of your internal demons.
Set free, embrace reality, and battle out the present to finally have the future you always desired.
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