From loneliness to solitude

While working at a college in Mumbai, I noticed something odd. Students would walk into the counselling room — carrying whatever concerns lay heavy on them — and once they sat down, a familiar sentence would surface, in different words each time: “I have people around me. But I don’t really have anyone to talk to.”

What struck me wasn’t the sentence itself — loneliness runs through almost every session I’ve conducted. What struck me was that for most of them, this was their first experience of someone actually listening — without judging, without belittling what they had to say, and without rushing in with a quick fix or the usual “it’s okay, don’t worry, just stay positive.” They seemed almost surprised that someone was simply listening, as if they had never quite experienced that before.

We tend to assume loneliness means being alone. But often, it’s the opposite — being constantly around people and yet feeling completely unheard. As Carl Jung put it, loneliness doesn’t come from having no one around, but from being unable to communicate the things that feel important to you.

I don’t experience loneliness often myself — books have been steady company for me. But that’s made me notice something: solitude and loneliness aren’t the same thing. One can feel peaceful; the other can feel unbearable, even in a crowd. The difference isn’t how many people are around — it’s whether you feel safe enough to be honest with even one of them.

This is also where I think about AI as company. I understand why it feels easier — it doesn’t judge, doesn’t get tired, doesn’t leave. But that ease is also its limit. Being truly known by someone requires a kind of risk that AI can’t offer — you can’t be misunderstood by it, but you also can’t be truly seen by it either. As one option among many, it’s fine. As a replacement for being known, it isn’t.

So what actually helps? In my experience, not “more people” or “more activities” — but learning to sit with the discomfort of loneliness instead of immediately distracting from it. That discomfort is often pointing somewhere — toward a conversation you’ve been avoiding, or a feeling you haven’t said out loud yet.

Sitting with that discomfort is the very first step toward what Wordsworth called “the bliss of solitude” — that quiet, peaceful aloneness, rather than the ache of loneliness.

If you’ve ever felt lonely in a room full of people — what is it you wished you could have said, but didn’t?