I’m already lonely, and I’ll always be lonely. The day will never arrive when I’ll stop feeling lonely for good; I’ll never find a person who truly gets me; I’ll never understand my own mind, let alone the minds of others; I’ll never be safeguarded from grief and loss; I’ll never enter a relationship devoid problems.
None of this is going to happen, alas. Loneliness is eternal. It’s not that loneliness is inevitable — fleeting moments of harmony and connection have entered my life, and I know they’ll return. Ultimately, though, loneliness will always loom above my skull, like a bank of dark clouds, ready to burst into lightning.
But you know what? That’s fantastic news.
Last winter, I watched a rerun of The Big Lebowski with a group of friends and strangers. When the film was over, we huddled up outside and puffed into our fists to endure the cold.
“What’d you guys think?” one person asked.
“Great movie,” someone replied. Another person said, “Yes, I loved it! Hilarious, too. That scene where he goes, That’s just your opinion, man — ”
The rest of the group chimed in with laughter and more Jeff Bridges impersonations.
Meanwhile, I distanced myself from the huddle like an excommunicated penguin, burying my hands in my coat’s pockets. I hadn’t realized it in the theater, but seeing the others’ reactions, it dawned on me that the movie had filled me not with joy but with sorrow. This didn’t bother me per se — I tend to relish bittersweet emotions. What really bothered me was that no one seemed to share my emotions. And that, in turn, left me with something far more burdensome:
A profound sense of loneliness.
It got worse. As the night continued, I realized that even if there had been a person who had shared my feelings about the movie — even then, it would’ve been impossible to tell whether we were actually sharing the same feelings. Sure, someone could’ve said, “Hey, that ending made me sad.” But their sadness wouldn’t have been my sadness. Every feeling we want to share must first pass through an extremely fickle sieve called language. A big chunk of our individual experience — bodily sensations, indefinable thoughts, visual impressions — will inevitably get stuck in the mesh. Life is lived in private. Perfect understanding is impossible.
At that moment, as the movie theater’s marquee sign illuminated our faces, it dawned on me that loneliness is like an invisible assassin — it could strike anywhere, anytime.
Turns out, I was wrong. I don’t want to brag (who would brag about something like this?), but I suppose I had my first lonely moment when I was born. I was the third child my mother gave birth to, and I was spontaneously delivered. Even so, I took twenty hours to crawl out of the womb. For comparison, my older brother took 90 minutes.
This, I suppose, was my first rebellion against loneliness. Rather than facing a noisy, cold world, I wanted to remain tucked inside the warmth of my mother’s belly.
I’m not an exception, I don’t think. Birth is a traumatic event for every human being. Once we leave the womb, we go from plural to singular, from unison to separation. Suddenly, we’re thrown into this strange world where we’re separated from other fleshy creatures. And sadly enough, we’ll never feel as whole and sheltered as when we were a fetus.
Of course, we try to replicate this feeling of unity. As we go through life, we long to feel whole again. We talk to strangers, enter friendships, acquire material goods, have sex — and yet, nothing compares to the comforts of the womb. This may sound depressing, but the silver lining is that — to paraphrase the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott — the catastrophe we fear will happen has already happened. We’re born lonely, and we’ll die lonely.
How much worse could it possibly get?
What I didn’t realize that night outside the movie theater was that I’d already been lonely. In this sense, my loneliness was a fallacy. It was redundant. It was like trying to avoid getting wet in a rainstorm when, really, I’d already been soaked to my skin.
Loneliness is not an assassin. It’s not an external threat because it has already struck, the moment we were born. It’s tattooed across our DNA. So, in reality, loneliness is more like a constant companion. A guardian spirit that we needn’t banish but, much rather, befriend.
I learned it the hard way. For most of my life, I hoped that somewhere, someday, I would meet my soulmate, The One. I don’t mean this in a romantic context. I simply felt this sense of longing that, among eight billion people, someone must be out there who truly understands me. I thought that if I just tried long enough — like repeatedly pulling the lever of a slot machine — I would eventually meet that someone.
And I did. Just not how I expected.
After years of moving around the world like an alien, I finally committed to staying in one city. Though the first year was rough, I eventually managed to move into an apartment with three good friends. It felt surreal. It was like one of those sitcoms — Friends, New Girl, How I Met Your Mother — in which several best friends share one ostentatious apartment and literally live together. They hang out. They support each other. They talk about life. They fight and make up again.
Except this wasn’t a sitcom. This was my life.
Now, according to the world of fiction and television, my feelings of loneliness should’ve evaporated like dew in the morning sun. After all, I shared my life with people I love — this is the apparent cure for loneliness. But in reality, not much changed. No matter how I turned it, my loneliness remained. It kept hanging in the air, like the pungent smell of smoke after a bonfire.
Don’t get me wrong — living with friends has been a soothing balm for my loneliness. But that doesn’t mean I suddenly acquired immunity to loneliness. In fact, being around friends can trigger my loneliness. When I see them withdraw into their rooms with their partners, that’s loneliness. When I can’t articulate the emotional crisis I’m going through, that’s loneliness. When I want to go for a ramble but everybody is busy, that’s loneliness.
I live a good life, I suppose. But it’s still a life. And like all lives, it must encompass its share of sorrow, disappointment, and loneliness. This is how it needs to be. It’s what keeps things exciting. If my loneliness had vanished after moving in with my friends, my life would’ve been boring. Ironically, I need the loneliness I experience among my friends to remind me why I live with them in the first place.
Maybe these people are my soulmates. Maybe they’re not. Maybe my soulmate hasn’t been born yet. Or maybe I met my soulmate yesterday, on the metro, without saying hello. Maybe my soulmate died in an airplane crash above the Pacific Ocean, years ago. Or maybe my soulmate lives in a parallel universe.
It’s impossible to tell. What I’m coming to realize, though, is that the search for a soulmate is what caused most of my loneliness to begin with. Hoping to find a soulmate just maintains my fantasy that, one distant day in the future, I’ll stop feeling lonely — and that my life can finally begin once I meet the right person.
But I won’t.
And honestly? I feel pretty good about that. Because it means that I get to spend my time and attention with people who are already in my life. Perhaps not everything will be as harmonious and witty as scenes from Friends or New Girl or whatever, but it will be a life. A lonely life. A good life.
Very well, then. Life is lonely, and I must embrace the reality of eternal loneliness. When I first had this thought, my loneliness subsided from a ringing alarm into a soothing background noise. And yet, I couldn’t shake the rather grim conclusion that life is nothing but loneliness. If we’re all lonely, what’s the point?
One insight came to me after watching yet another movie rerun — nine months after The Big Lebowski. The month was August. The movie was Past Lives.
Past Lives tells the story of Nora and Hae Sung, two childhood sweethearts from South Korea, who are torn apart because Nora’s family moves to the US. Ten years later, they reconnect via Facebook and keep in touch through video chats. Then, life gets in the way, and they stop talking for a while. (Nora gets married. Hae Sung gets married and divorced.) Another ten years later, they finally reunite in real life when Hae Sung visits Nora in New York City.
And then…
Not much happens. No romantic getaway. They just talk. They share memories. And eventually, they say goodbye. Perhaps forever.
As drops of sweat gathered between my back and the seat’s red fabric, I felt a strange sense of familiarity. I’ve been here before, I thought. I’ve experienced this exact situation countless times. I would meet a fantastic person — while traveling or living abroad — secretly hoping that we would spend the rest of our lives together. But, at last, one of us needed to return to normal life, move somewhere else, or go back home. And we would never see each other again.
For a long time, I considered these encounters as tragedies. Here was this wonderful person, making me feel less lonely, and yet, our relationship was primed to part ways. And that would make me even lonelier than before.
However, there’s another way to look at it. If we accept that we’re all already lonely, the fact that multiple lonelinesses can meet and mingle is a miracle. If loneliness is the base condition, every moment of connection — no matter how fleeting — is an enrichment. We can cherish each imperfect intertwining of human souls not in spite of loneliness but because of loneliness.
To put it in the consoling words of the philosopher Bertrand Russel:
Everyone who realizes at all what human life is must feel at some time the strange loneliness of every separate soul; and then the discovery in others of the same loneliness makes a new strange tie, and a growth of pity so warm as to be almost a compensation for what is lost.
Spheres of loneliness meet. Spheres of loneliness intersect. Spheres of loneliness part. That’s the whole of life. What a pity it would be to see this as a planetary collision when, really, it’s an ecliptic spectacle of shadow and light.
I’m already lonely, and I’ll always be lonely. No person will ever grasp what I felt after watching The Big Lebowski (or any work of art). And yet, I can share my own art with the world, expressing what it’s like to be a lonely human being. I’ll never return to my mother’s womb, but I can share my life with others. I’ll never meet my soulmate, but I can create deeper connections with the people around me. I’ll never reunite with all the wonderful people I met, but still, I haven’t yet met all the wonderful people in my life.
It’s often said that loneliness is a place — and for most of my life, I wanted to escape this place. I wanted to find a way out. However, the strange reality is that I don’t need to flee from loneliness because I’m already lonely. The city of loneliness isn’t a prison or a place of exile. The vast halls and boulevards of loneliness were built for us, the moment we were born. We live in this city with no option but to explore it, meet our neighbors, and make ourselves at home.
We’re already lonely, and we’ll always be lonely. Embracing this insight, I learned, will not conjure a tsunami of loneliness but generate a smooth river of compassion and connection.