Thought by Carl Jung: "Loneliness does not come from having no people around, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible."

For years I thought loneliness was a maths problem. Not enough people. Solve for more.

So I added people. I ran a restaurant, which is basically a machine for manufacturing company. There were faces every night, regulars who knew my name, a staff I loved, a dining room that hummed. And some evenings I’d stand by the pass at full service, the place absolutely packed, and feel like I was watching it all through glass.

Carl Jung nailed why, decades before I was born. In his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he wrote that loneliness “does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”

Read that again. Loneliness isn’t the empty room. It’s the full room where nobody can hear the part of you that matters.

The room can be full and you can still be starving

We measure loneliness like it’s a headcount. How many friends, how many texts, how many people at the funeral. But the ache Jung is describing has nothing to do with volume. Psychologists define loneliness as a gap between the connection you want and the connection you’re getting, which is why the numbers never tell you much.

You can be surrounded and starving. You can have a partner asleep next to you and feel like you’re keeping a secret you can’t even name. You can have three hundred people wish you happy birthday online and not have one you’d ring at 3am.

I learned this properly as a kid at boarding school, thousands of miles from home, in a country that wasn’t mine. I was never physically alone. There was always a dorm, a queue, a rugby pitch full of other boys. And I was lonelier than I have ever been since, because the things that felt enormous to me were things I had no one to say out loud.

That’s the trap. Company and connection look the same from the outside. Only one of them feeds you.

We get very good at not saying the real thing

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. A lot of the time, the reason we can’t communicate what matters is that we’ve quietly decided not to try.

We test the water with something small. We mention we’ve been a bit off lately, and the other person says “ugh, same, I’m so tired,” and we nod and let it slide, because the real sentence, the one underneath, felt too heavy to put on the table. So we pocket it. Again. And every time we pocket it, the gap between what we show and what we feel gets a little wider.

I did this for years. I’m charming enough to run a whole conversation on autopilot. I can host. I can keep a table laughing. And I used those skills, without really noticing, as a way to never be found. If I’m entertaining you, you’re not asking me anything real. Brilliant defence. Terrible way to live.

The thing about being good at surface is that it works, right up until it doesn’t. You build a life full of people who know your bits and none of your weather.

Some views really are inadmissible, and that’s lonelier still

Jung’s second cause is the sharper one. Sometimes you can’t share what matters not because you won’t, but because you know how it’ll land. You hold a view, a doubt, a way of seeing things that the people around you find genuinely unacceptable.

Maybe you’ve stopped believing something your whole family still believes. Maybe you’ve changed your mind about how you want to live and everyone who loves you is invested in the old version. Maybe you just see the world at a slightly odd angle and you’ve learned that saying so out loud gets you the polite, worried face.

So you hold it in. And holding a real part of yourself in permanent quarantine is its own specific loneliness. You’re not misunderstood. You’re un-attempted. There’s a difference.

I’ve moved between Manila, Australia, New York, London, and now Bangkok, and one thing that travels with you is this: every room has an unwritten list of things you’re allowed to think. Cross it and the temperature drops. After a while you learn the list by heart and edit yourself before you’ve even spoken.

The editing keeps the peace. It also keeps you alone in the crowd.

Solitude is not the enemy

Now, a plot twist that took me an embarrassingly long time to understand. Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing, and confusing them makes both worse.

I sold the restaurants during the pandemic, which meant I went, almost overnight, from a life of nonstop human contact to a lot of quiet. I braced for loneliness. What I got, once the panic wore off, was something closer to relief.

Turns out a chunk of what I’d called connection was just noise. And a chunk of what I’d feared as loneliness was actually solitude, which is a completely different animal. Solitude is being at peace in your own company. Loneliness is being at war with your own company and using other people as a ceasefire.

If you can’t stand being alone with yourself, more people won’t fix it. They’ll just drown it out for a bit. The cure for that flavour of loneliness starts, annoyingly, on your own, learning to be someone you’d actually want to spend an evening with.

How I climbed out

I’m wary of tidy five-step solutions, because feelings don’t file neatly. But a few things did real work for me, so here they are, stripped of the self-help gloss.

I started saying one true thing per conversation. Not a confession. Just one sentence I’d normally have swallowed. “Actually, I’ve been dreading this.” “I don’t think I agree, and here’s why.” Small. Terrifying at first. It’s a muscle, and it strengthens fast.

I stopped auditioning for people who kept giving me the worried face. Not dramatically, no burned bridges. I just spent less energy trying to be admissible to rooms that were never going to have me whole. That energy went to the two or three people who could.

Because that’s the other secret. You don’t need a village. Jung’s cure isn’t a bigger crowd, it’s one person who can hear the important thing without flinching. The research backs him up too: it’s the quality of your friendships that fends off loneliness, not the number of them. I’d take one friend I can be fully strange with over a hundred who get the edited version.

And I got comfortable alone. I learned to cook for one and mean it. To sit with a coffee and no phone. To notice that my own thoughts, given room, were reasonable company. That took the desperation out of connection, which, funnily enough, made connecting easier. Nobody’s drawn to a person clutching at them for air.

What I’d tell you

If you feel lonely in a full life, you’re not broken and you’re not ungrateful. You’ve just been solving the wrong equation.

The question was never “how do I get more people.” It was “where can I say the true thing, and who can hear the inadmissible one.” Answer those and the crowd stops mattering so much.

Start with the one true sentence. Find the one person. Make peace with your own company so you’re choosing others, not clinging to them.

The full room will still be there. But you might, finally, be in it.