I think other people dictate whether you are lonely as much as the individual and that is what makes chronic loneliness just another form of depression. You can be the most outgoing person in the world, but that does not mean that other people will respond to that or you will achieve connection through your overtures.

I think this is an important distinction because some people choose to live at arm's length from the world and are quite all right. They have opportunities to fill their world with connections and don't take them - or, at least, not many of them. Loneliness is fine for some people, they don't need a lot of social connections.

In fact, I would argue that social connections are diversions to confronting yourself. The most shallow social connections can create a psychological comfort zone that distracts you from your own voice - and A LOT of people really seem to need this constant white noise in their psyche.

Chronic loneliness, like any other psychological condition, is only really a concern when it becomes so great that it affects the way you function personally and is a real obstruction to taking care of yourself. Depressed people isolate themselves socially and physically, which makes it a symptom of a condition and not the condition itself.

You like being miserable.

as a clinical and altogether secular look at one aching part of the human condition, I wouldn't argue much with the article. But just as oceans aren't just changing surfaces in the wind and tides, loneliness too has its spiritual dimension, a kind of calling out from the soul for more connectedness than even the gang at Verizon can offer. There's no formula like a church or a mosque or a temple, or a plunge into exercise or far away relatives. Just as oceans have deep currents, there is the steadiness of contemplation, which asks what role loneliness and solitude play in brief lives which seek significance, but it is hard to learn in today's world. Curiously, the article mentioned neither the intensity of physical passion, which has its uses, even if men--and women too- are always sad after coitus, or of lasting love between life partners, which is a dying art form in today's more fragmented and temporary families and a more mobile society with changed roles for men and women, and the new challenges of somany much healthier and older people in the U.S. We are for better or worse, mostly for worse, destined to spend more of our years alone, either the yolk or the albumen, and not the whole egg. What to do to sustain the self? Friends are best of all, but harder to make and keep than ever, or family. But there are losses we have to weather alone, taking the time to mourn and heal both for ourselves and for the living we care for. We've mostly lost the arts, but those who want to probe will find in Shakespeare, or classical music from Mozart to Brahms--try the Brahms double concerto, the greatest love story ever written--something of what the creative mind and able heart can produce and share. Those more interested in the contemporary could try the heatbreaking poems of Louis Gluck or the sharp and cold novels of Jose Saramago. There is a practice here of slowly bringing your own mind into contact with the mind and sensibility of another that is not for everyday--it won't help you with your grocer or insurance agent--but it will lift you up by the exertion required of your own spirit. In short, there is solace to be created from contemplation and it is a better thing than loneliness or solitude. And it will help, along with friends and family, to restore you to yourself and them. But as Rilke wrote: Du musst dich andern--you must change yourself.

(Addressing the world in general, not just the posters here.)

Frankly, most of you people bore the hell outta me.

And social situations also remind me that I bore the hell outta most of you people.

Call me if there's a fire or some communal emergency; otherwise I'll be in my cave.

people who think it's wrong to want (or grasp) (or need) (or desire) were trained to think that by people who didn't feel like giving what they were required by nature to give, as if a mother bird said "eh. i don't feel like building your nest, kid. go watch TV".

so, i'd pay for a delicious gourmet dinner. in fact, i pay for all the food i prepare in my kitchen. we all do. we pay for food.

but the idea of paying an analyst for the best company anyone will ever get--

the most intimate, the only person you can say anything and everything to;

the least demanding in terms of emotional reciprocity;

the most structured (you can always count on a regular meeting instead of "hi kate, want to have lunch thursday?" "um sorry, ellie, i'm not free at all till february";

and usually the most unique perspective on your life--

the very idea makes many of us continue to cling to loneliness, superficial friendships, or disconnected marriages,

symptoms, addictions, crazy thoughts, living in our head instead of talking.

and the best part of paying for the best company of your life is she isn't afflicted with possessiveness! she also wants you to have a partner, and good friends, and great relationships with your kids and guess what, she's trained to help you have it all.

It seems to me that loneliness is an itch that can be scratched in more than one way. That suggests to me that there are different kinds of loneliness. I'm tempted to try to catalog some of them here, but will leave that to you. What I want most to say is that in considering what loneliness is, what its causes are and how it can be remediated, I do think we need to start by recognizing that we can be lonely for different kinds of social encounters at different times.