essay loneliness and love brainly

Paris, 1951. Photo by Elliot Erwitt/Magnum

Loved, yet lonely

You might have the unconditional love of family and friends and yet feel deep loneliness. can philosophy explain why.

by Kaitlyn Creasy   + BIO

Although one of the loneliest moments of my life happened more than 15 years ago, I still remember its uniquely painful sting. I had just arrived back home from a study abroad semester in Italy. During my stay in Florence, my Italian had advanced to the point where I was dreaming in the language. I had also developed intellectual interests in Italian futurism, Dada, and Russian absurdism – interests not entirely deriving from a crush on the professor who taught a course on those topics – as well as the love sonnets of Dante and Petrarch (conceivably also related to that crush). I left my semester abroad feeling as many students likely do: transformed not only intellectually but emotionally. My picture of the world was complicated, my very experience of that world richer, more nuanced.

After that semester, I returned home to a small working-class town in New Jersey. Home proper was my boyfriend’s parents’ home, which was in the process of foreclosure but not yet taken by the bank. Both parents had left to live elsewhere, and they graciously allowed me to stay there with my boyfriend, his sister and her boyfriend during college breaks. While on break from school, I spent most of my time with these de facto roommates and a handful of my dearest childhood friends.

When I returned from Italy, there was so much I wanted to share with them. I wanted to talk to my boyfriend about how aesthetically interesting but intellectually dull I found Italian futurism; I wanted to communicate to my closest friends how deeply those Italian love sonnets moved me, how Bob Dylan so wonderfully captured their power. (‘And every one of them words rang true/and glowed like burning coal/Pouring off of every page/like it was written in my soul …’) In addition to a strongly felt need to share specific parts of my intellectual and emotional lives that had become so central to my self-understanding, I also experienced a dramatically increased need to engage intellectually, as well as an acute need for my emotional life in all its depth and richness – for my whole being, this new being – to be appreciated. When I returned home, I felt not only unable to engage with others in ways that met my newly developed needs, but also unrecognised for who I had become since I left. And I felt deeply, painfully lonely.

This experience is not uncommon for study-abroad students. Even when one has a caring and supportive network of relationships, one will often experience ‘reverse culture shock’ – what the psychologist Kevin Gaw describes as a ‘process of readjusting, reacculturating, and reassimilating into one’s own home culture after living in a different culture for a significant period of time’ – and feelings of loneliness are characteristic for individuals in the throes of this process.

But there are many other familiar life experiences that provoke feelings of loneliness, even if the individuals undergoing those experiences have loving friends and family: the student who comes home to his family and friends after a transformative first year at college; the adolescent who returns home to her loving but repressed parents after a sexual awakening at summer camp; the first-generation woman of colour in graduate school who feels cared for but also perpetually ‘ in-between ’ worlds, misunderstood and not fully seen either by her department members or her family and friends back home; the travel nurse who returns home to her partner and friends after an especially meaningful (or perhaps especially psychologically taxing) work assignment; the man who goes through a difficult breakup with a long-term, live-in partner; the woman who is the first in her group of friends to become a parent; the list goes on.

Nor does it take a transformative life event to provoke feelings of loneliness. As time passes, it often happens that friends and family who used to understand us quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did, failing to really see us as they used to before. This, too, will tend to lead to feelings of loneliness – though the loneliness may creep in more gradually, more surreptitiously. Loneliness, it seems, is an existential hazard, something to which human beings are always vulnerable – and not just when they are alone.

In his recent book Life Is Hard (2022), the philosopher Kieran Setiya characterises loneliness as the ‘pain of social disconnection’. There, he argues for the importance of attending to the nature of loneliness – both why it hurts and what ‘that pain tell[s] us about how to live’ – especially given the contemporary prevalence of loneliness. He rightly notes that loneliness is not just a matter of being isolated from others entirely, since one can be lonely even in a room full of people. Additionally, he notes that, since the negative psychological and physiological effects of loneliness ‘seem to depend on the subjective experience of being lonely’, effectively combatting loneliness requires us to identify the origin of this subjective experience.

S etiya’s proposal is that we are ‘social animals with social needs’ that crucially include needs to be loved and to have our basic worth recognised. When we fail to have these basic needs met, as we do when we are apart from our friends, we suffer loneliness. Without the presence of friends to assure us that we matter, we experience the painful ‘sensation of hollowness, of a hole in oneself that used to be filled and now is not’. This is loneliness in its most elemental form. (Setiya uses the term ‘friends’ broadly, to include close family and romantic partners, and I follow his usage here.)

Imagine a woman who lands a job requiring a long-distance move to an area where she knows no one. Even if there are plenty of new neighbours and colleagues to greet her upon her arrival, Setiya’s claim is that she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness, since she does not yet have close, loving relationships with these people. In other words, she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness because she does not yet have friends whose love of her reflects back to her the basic value as a person that she has, friends who let her see that she matters. Only when she makes genuine friendships will she feel her unconditional value is acknowledged; only then will her basic social needs to be loved and recognised be met. Once she feels she truly matters to someone, in Setiya’s view, her loneliness will abate.

Setiya is not alone in connecting feelings of loneliness to a lack of basic recognition. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), for example, Hannah Arendt also defines loneliness as a feeling that results when one’s human dignity or unconditional worth as a person fails to be recognised and affirmed, a feeling that results when this, one of the ‘basic requirements of the human condition’, fails to be met.

These accounts get a good deal about loneliness right. But they miss something as well. On these views, loving friendships allow us to avoid loneliness because the loving friend provides a form of recognition we require as social beings. Without loving friendships, or when we are apart from our friends, we are unable to secure this recognition. So we become lonely. But notice that the feature affirmed by the friend here – my unconditional value – is radically depersonalised. The property the friend recognises and affirms in me is the same property she recognises and affirms in her other friendships. Otherwise put, the recognition that allegedly mitigates loneliness in Setiya’s view is the friend’s recognition of an impersonal, abstract feature of oneself, a quality one shares with every other human being: her unconditional worth as a human being. (The recognition given by the loving friend is that I ‘[matter] … just like everyone else.’)

Just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends

Since my dignity or worth is disconnected from any particular feature of myself as an individual, however, my friend can recognise and affirm that worth without acknowledging or engaging my particular needs, specific values and so on. If Setiya is calling it right, then that friend can assuage my loneliness without engaging my individuality.

Or can they? Accounts that tie loneliness to a failure of basic recognition (and the alleviation of loneliness to love and acknowledgement of one’s dignity) may be right about the origin of certain forms of loneliness. But it seems to me that this is far from the whole picture, and that accounts like these fail to explain a wide variety of familiar circumstances in which loneliness arises.

When I came home from my study-abroad semester, I returned to a network of robust, loving friendships. I was surrounded daily by a steadfast group of people who persistently acknowledged and affirmed my unconditional value as a person, putting up with my obnoxious pretension (so it must have seemed) and accepting me even though I was alien in crucial ways to the friend they knew before. Yet I still suffered loneliness. In fact, while I had more close friendships than ever before – and was as close with friends and family members as I had ever been – I was lonelier than ever. And this is also true of the familiar scenarios from above: the first-year college student, the new parent, the travel nurse, and so on. All these scenarios are ripe for painful feelings of loneliness even though the individuals undergoing such experiences have a loving network of friends, family and colleagues who support them and recognise their unconditional value.

So, there must be more to loneliness than Setiya’s account (and others like it) let on. Of course, if an individual’s worth goes unrecognised, she will feel awfully lonely. But just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends. What plagues accounts that tie loneliness to an absence of basic recognition is that they fail to do justice to loneliness as a feeling that pops up not only when one lacks sufficiently loving, affirmative relationships, but also when one perceives that the relationships she has (including and perhaps especially loving relationships) lack sufficient quality (for example, lacking depth or a desired feeling of connection). And an individual will perceive such relationships as lacking sufficient quality when her friends and family are not meeting the specific needs she has, or recognising and affirming her as the particular individual that she is.

We see this especially in the midst or aftermath of transitional and transformational life events, when greater-than-usual shifts occur. As the result of going through such experiences, we often develop new values, core needs and centrally motivating desires, losing other values, needs and desires in the process. In other words, after undergoing a particularly transformative experience, we become different people in key respects than we were before. If after such a personal transformation, our friends are unable to meet our newly developed core needs or recognise and affirm our new values and central desires – perhaps in large part because they cannot , because they do not (yet) recognise or understand who we have become – we will suffer loneliness.

This is what happened to me after Italy. By the time I got back, I had developed new core needs – as one example, the need for a certain level and kind of intellectual engagement – which were unmet when I returned home. What’s more, I did not think it particularly fair to expect my friends to meet these needs. After all, they did not possess the conceptual frameworks for discussing Russian absurdism or 13th-century Italian love sonnets; these just weren’t things they had spent time thinking about. And I didn’t blame them; expecting them to develop or care about developing such a conceptual framework seemed to me ridiculous. Even so, without a shared framework, I felt unable to meet my need for intellectual engagement and communicate to my friends the fullness of my inner life, which was overtaken by quite specific aesthetic values, values that shaped how I saw the world. As a result, I felt lonely.

I n addition to developing new needs, I understood myself as having changed in other fundamental respects. While I knew my friends loved me and affirmed my unconditional value, I did not feel upon my return home that they were able to see and affirm my individuality. I was radically changed; in fact, I felt in certain respects totally unrecognisable even to those who knew me best. After Italy, I inhabited a different, more nuanced perspective on the world; beauty, creativity and intellectual growth had become core values of mine; I had become a serious lover of poetry; I understood myself as a burgeoning philosopher. At the time, my closest friends were not able to see and affirm these parts of me, parts of me with which even relative strangers in my college courses were acquainted (though, of course, those acquaintances neither knew me nor were equipped to meet other of my needs which my friends had long met). When I returned home, I no longer felt truly seen by my friends .

One need not spend a semester abroad to experience this. For example, a nurse who initially chose her profession as a means to professional and financial stability might, after an especially meaningful experience with a patient, find herself newly and centrally motivated by a desire to make a difference in her patients’ lives. Along with the landscape of her desires, her core values may have changed: perhaps she develops a new core value of alleviating suffering whenever possible. And she may find certain features of her job – those that do not involve the alleviation of suffering, or involve the limited alleviation of suffering – not as fulfilling as they once were. In other words, she may have developed a new need for a certain form of meaningful difference-making – a need that, if not met, leaves her feeling flat and deeply dissatisfied.

Changes like these – changes to what truly moves you, to what makes you feel deeply fulfilled – are profound ones. To be changed in these respects is to be utterly changed. Even if you have loving friendships, if your friends are unable to recognise and affirm these new features of you, you may fail to feel seen, fail to feel valued as who you really are. At that point, loneliness will ensue. Interestingly – and especially troublesome for Setiya’s account – feelings of loneliness will tend to be especially salient and painful when the people unable to meet these needs are those who already love us and affirm our unconditional value.

Those with a strong need for their uniqueness to be recognised may be more disposed to loneliness

So, even with loving friends, if we perceive ourselves as unable to be seen and affirmed as the particular people we are, or if certain of our core needs go unmet, we will feel lonely. Setiya is surely right that loneliness will result in the absence of love and recognition. But it can also result from the inability – and sometimes, failure – of those with whom we have loving relationships to share or affirm our values, to endorse desires that we understand as central to our lives, and to satisfy our needs.

Another way to put it is that our social needs go far beyond the impersonal recognition of our unconditional worth as human beings. These needs can be as widespread as a need for reciprocal emotional attachment or as restricted as a need for a certain level of intellectual engagement or creative exchange. But even when the need in question is a restricted or uncommon one, if it is a deep need that requires another person to meet yet goes unmet, we will feel lonely. The fact that we suffer loneliness even when these quite specific needs are unmet shows that understanding and treating this feeling requires attending not just to whether my worth is affirmed, but to whether I am recognised and affirmed in my particularity and whether my particular, even idiosyncratic social needs are met by those around me.

What’s more, since different people have different needs, the conditions that produce loneliness will vary. Those with a strong need for their uniqueness to be recognised may be more disposed to loneliness. Others with weaker needs for recognition or reciprocal emotional attachment may experience a good deal of social isolation without feeling lonely at all. Some people might alleviate loneliness by cultivating a wide circle of not-especially-close friends, each of whom meets a different need or appreciates a different side of them. Yet others might persist in their loneliness without deep and intimate friendships in which they feel more fully seen and appreciated in their complexity, in the fullness of their being.

Yet, as ever-changing beings with friends and loved ones who are also ever-changing, we are always susceptible to loneliness and the pain of situations in which our needs are unmet. Most of us can recall a friend who once met certain of our core social needs, but who eventually – gradually, perhaps even imperceptibly – ultimately failed to do so. If such needs are not met by others in one’s life, this situation will lead one to feel profoundly, heartbreakingly lonely.

In cases like these, new relationships can offer true succour and light. For example, a lonely new parent might have childless friends who are clueless to the needs and values she develops through the hugely complicated transition to parenthood; as a result, she might cultivate relationships with other new parents or caretakers, people who share her newly developed values and better understand the joys, pains and ambivalences of having a child. To the extent that these new relationships enable her needs to be met and allow her to feel genuinely seen, they will help to alleviate her loneliness. Through seeking relationships with others who might share one’s interests or be better situated to meet one’s specific needs, then, one can attempt to face one’s loneliness head on.

But you don’t need to shed old relationships to cultivate the new. When old friends to whom we remain committed fail to meet our new needs, it’s helpful to ask how to salvage the situation, saving the relationship. In some instances, we might choose to adopt a passive strategy, acknowledging the ebb and flow of relationships and the natural lag time between the development of needs and others’ abilities to meet them. You could ‘wait it out’. But given that it is much more difficult to have your needs met if you don’t articulate them, an active strategy seems more promising. To position your friend to better meet your needs, you might attempt to communicate those needs and articulate ways in which you don’t feel seen.

Of course, such a strategy will be successful only if the unmet needs provoking one’s loneliness are needs one can identify and articulate. But we will so often – perhaps always – have needs, desires and values of which we are unaware or that we cannot articulate, even to ourselves. We are, to some extent, always opaque to ourselves. Given this opacity, some degree of loneliness may be an inevitable part of the human condition. What’s more, if we can’t even grasp or articulate the needs provoking our loneliness, then adopting a more passive strategy may be the only option one has. In cases like this, the only way to recognise your unmet needs or desires is to notice that your loneliness has started to lift once those needs and desires begin to be met by another.

Psychiatry and psychotherapy

Decolonising psychology

At times complicit in racism and oppression, psychology has also been a fertile ground for radical and liberatory thought

Rami Gabriel

Meaning and the good life

Beyond authenticity

In her final unfinished work, Hannah Arendt mounted an incisive critique of the idea that we are in search of our true selves

Samantha Rose Hill

Politics and government

Governing for the planet

Nation-states are no longer fit for purpose to create a habitable future for humans and nature. Which political system is?

Jonathan S Blake & Nils Gilman

History of ideas

Baffled by human diversity

Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today

Jacob Zellmer

Philosophy was once alive

I was searching for meaning and purpose so I became an academic philosopher. Reader, you might guess what happened next

Pranay Sanklecha

Biography and memoir

The adoption paradox

Even happy families cannot avoid the reality – my reality – that adoption is predicated on transacting the life of a child

Fiona Sampson

Is There Anything Good About Loneliness?

Loneliness hurts. but does it also help.

Posted January 10, 2021 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

• Understanding Loneliness
• Take our Social Anxiety Test
• Find a therapist near me

With the pandemic continuing to rage on, concern about loneliness is intensifying. Even before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19 , worries about all the lonely people were growing. The increasing numbers of single people , of older people, and of people living alone, contributed to that.

Some of the panic over loneliness is misplaced. Neither being single , living alone , nor growing old alone necessarily means that you will end up lonely. Loneliness is different from living alone or spending time alone . Many people, including those who are single at heart , savor their solitude.

Loneliness, though, is not about savoring, it is about pain. It is the distress we feel when our social relationships are not what we want them to be. People can feel deeply lonely when they are in a marriage and when they are in a crowd.

Because loneliness is so painful, it needs to be taken seriously as a social problem. Yet it is worth stepping back and asking whether any good can come from experiencing loneliness. Several writers have dared to suggest that the answer is yes.

Jessica Crispin is one of them. In a beautifully-written opinion piece in the New York Times, “ St. Teresa and the Single Ladies ,” Crispin suggests:

“But loneliness and vulnerability can be tools, if you can stand the pressure of them. Loneliness awakens not only your attention , as you scan rooms in the hopes of finding someone to alleviate it, but it also drives your empathy.”

The brilliant author and social critic, Vivian Gornick, also described the power and the potential in loneliness in her essay in the Nation, “ The Dread of Loneliness ":

“…loneliness, once demystified, is not only not fatal, it can be a source of revelation. If you determined on not drowning in it – that is, if you swam steadily against the current – you discovered a power of survival you’d never have thought part of your psychic apparatus.”

I’m a true believer in research-based conclusions, so I see personal essays such as Crispin’s and Gornick’s as sources of intriguing hypotheses rather than evidence for the positive possibilities in loneliness. They are wake-up calls to researchers to broaden their perspectives on the meanings of loneliness and other painful psychological experiences.

There are some telling precedents, such as what we learned from mountains of research on depression . Like loneliness, depression is a painful experience. Psychological research suggests that it is linked to other unfortunate outcomes. Yet, research on depressive realism also showed that depressed people sometimes have special insights and sensitivities. For example, they can be more realistic in their appraisals of other people, when those who are not depressed are too quick to be taken in by what other people want them to believe.

I discovered that myself in research I did with people who were mildly depressed and those who were not depressed at all. My colleague Julie Lane and I played video and audio recordings of people in several studies who were being less than honest. In one of the studies, participants talked to an art student about her paintings, including a few that they really disliked. In another, college students tried to ingratiate themselves with other students. It was the mildly depressed people, rather than the people who were not depressed, who were particularly attuned to the false reassurances and the phoniness .

That doesn’t mean I’d want to spend time feeling lonely or depressed. I wouldn’t. But painful experiences of all sorts are not all bad, as Alison Escalante explained in “ We’ve got depression all wrong. It’s trying to save us .” And that’s a valuable thing to know.

Are you looking for “ The intrigue of people who like being alone ”? Yes, you did see it here briefly, but I moved it to my blog at Medium .

Bella DePaulo, Ph.D. , an expert on single people, is the author of Single at Heart and other books. She is an Academic Affiliate in Psychological & Brain Sciences, UCSB.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Essay on Love for Students and Children

500+ words essay on love.

Love is the most significant thing in human’s life. Each science and every single literature masterwork will tell you about it. Humans are also social animals. We lived for centuries with this way of life, we were depended on one another to tell us how our clothes fit us, how our body is whether healthy or emaciated. All these we get the honest opinions of those who love us, those who care for us and makes our happiness paramount.

What is Love?

Love is a set of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs with strong feelings of affection. So, for example, a person might say he or she loves his or her dog, loves freedom, or loves God. The concept of love may become an unimaginable thing and also it may happen to each person in a particular way.

Love has a variety of feelings, emotions, and attitude. For someone love is more than just being interested physically in another one, rather it is an emotional attachment. We can say love is more of a feeling that a person feels for another person. Therefore, the basic meaning of love is to feel more than liking towards someone.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Need of Love

We know that the desire to love and care for others is a hard-wired and deep-hearted because the fulfillment of this wish increases the happiness level. Expressing love for others benefits not just the recipient of affection, but also the person who delivers it. The need to be loved can be considered as one of our most basic and fundamental needs.

One of the forms that this need can take is contact comfort. It is the desire to be held and touched. So there are many experiments showing that babies who are not having contact comfort, especially during the first six months, grow up to be psychologically damaged.

Significance of Love

Love is as critical for the mind and body of a human being as oxygen. Therefore, the more connected you are, the healthier you will be physically as well as emotionally. It is also true that the less love you have, the level of depression will be more in your life. So, we can say that love is probably the best antidepressant.

It is also a fact that the most depressed people don’t love themselves and they do not feel loved by others. They also become self-focused and hence making themselves less attractive to others.

Society and Love

It is a scientific fact that society functions better when there is a certain sense of community. Compassion and love are the glue for society. Hence without it, there is no feeling of togetherness for further evolution and progress. Love , compassion, trust and caring we can say that these are the building blocks of relationships and society.

Relationship and Love

A relationship is comprised of many things such as friendship , sexual attraction , intellectual compatibility, and finally love. Love is the binding element that keeps a relationship strong and solid. But how do you know if you are in love in true sense? Here are some symptoms that the emotion you are feeling is healthy, life-enhancing love.

Love is the Greatest Wealth in Life

Love is the greatest wealth in life because we buy things we love for our happiness. For example, we build our dream house and purchase a favorite car to attract love. Being loved in a remote environment is a better experience than been hated even in the most advanced environment.

Love or Money

Love should be given more importance than money as love is always everlasting. Money is important to live, but having a true companion you can always trust should come before that. If you love each other, you will both work hard to help each other live an amazing life together.

Love has been a vital reason we do most things in our life. Before we could know ourselves, we got showered by it from our close relatives like mothers , fathers , siblings, etc. Thus love is a unique gift for shaping us and our life. Therefore, we can say that love is a basic need of life. It plays a vital role in our life, society, and relation. It gives us energy and motivation in a difficult time. Finally, we can say that it is greater than any other thing in life.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

• Share full article

The Interview

Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely

Credit... Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Supported by

By Lulu Garcia-Navarro

• July 13, 2024

More than two decades ago, Robert Putnam became something rare: a celebrity academic. In 2000, he published a groundbreaking book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” in which he demonstrated, with copious data, that America was transforming from a nation of joiners to a nation of loners — we were going to church less, joining clubs less and, he warned, losing trust in our fellow Americans and our institutions. But even before the book reached shelves, Putnam’s work attracted widespread attention, including from President Bill Clinton, who invited him to the White House. For a moment it seemed as if those in power might work toward reversing the trends Putnam warned about.

Listen to the Conversation With Robert Putnam

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon Music | NYT Audio App

We all know how the story unfolded from there. Putnam, who has spent most of his career as a political scientist at Harvard, is now 83. He has watched as the nation has become more divided, more lonely and less confident about the way forward. That’s why, when I heard about “Join or Die” — a new documentary about Putnam and his work — I knew I wanted to talk to him about where American community stands today.

Your work is all about connection, so I’m wondering first, can you describe your own social life? What clubs are you in? That’s a really embarrassing question. [Laughs] I write about and talk about the importance of connections, but my wife actually does it. She is actually the one who joins everything, who has been a tutor and a teacher and a terrific mother and an even better grandmother. In the long run, her work is going to have a longer half-life than mine, because those kids are going to be around long after people have forgotten anything about this Putnam.

Part of why I was interested in having this conversation with you is that when it comes to social connection, things feel bad right now. Do things feel bad to you too? I think we’re in a really important turning point in American history. What I wrote in “Bowling Alone” is even more relevant now. Because what we’ve seen over the last 25 years is a deepening and intensifying of that trend. We’ve become more socially isolated, and we can see it in every facet in our lives. We can see it in the surgeon general’s talk about loneliness. He’s been talking recently about the psychological state of being lonely. Social isolation leads to lots of bad things. It’s bad for your health, but it’s really bad for the country, because people who are isolated, and especially young men who are isolated, are vulnerable to the appeals of some false community. I can cite chapter and verse on this: Eager recruits to the Nazi Party in the 1930s were lonely young German men, and it’s not an accident that the people who are attracted today to white nationalist groups are lonely young white men. Loneliness. It’s bad for your health, but it’s also bad for the health of the people around you.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Advertisement

essay about loneliness and love​

Explanation:

love is a feeling u get around a serton person that u dont feel for no one else and all u can think about is that person and when your with them u dont worry about anything but them or u could have love for a pashon witch u just love to do and nothing with stop u

Related Questions

30 points HEEEEEEEEEEEELLLPPPPP ONLY FOR PEOPLE WHO READ THE EXCERPT OF RULES OF THE GAME Choose the strongest theme you have identified in the previous activity. Then, in a well-constructed, well-supported I.C.E.C.E.E. paragraph, answer the following question: What is the central theme of “Rules of the Game”? Support with at least TWO textual examples.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm nose

Sample Response: Throughout history, there have been a lot of different heroes. Even though heroes are not always the same, they tend to have traits that other people value or wish they had themselves, such as bravery. What did you include in your response? Check all that apply. I retold the main ideas of the passage. I used my own words. I wrote about what a hero is.

1. I retold the main ideas of the passage 2. I used my own words

Answer:1. I retold the main ideas of the passage 2. I used my own words

What did you include in your response? Check all that apply.

So when you hear a pronoun mix like he/they, that's usually shorthand for "I use both he/him/his and they/them/theirs pronouns." But what does that MEAN? What do you do with it? cuando escuchas una mezcla de pronombres como he/they, generalmente es una forma abreviada de "Yo uso los pronombres he / him /his y They / them / theirs". ¿Pero qué significa eso? Qué haces con eso?

That means you address that person as a he/him/his. You cannot ASSUME they are a girl because they have "he" pronouns, and you can correctly identify them as a male.

Make those words in bold in a paragraph that makes sense thank you!!! If you do this your saving me a lot of time I appreciate you!シ❤︎

What is the micanical ​

Mechanical engineers design power-producing machines, such as electric generators, internal combustion engines, and steam and gas turbines, as well as power-using machines, such as refrigeration and air-conditioning systems. Mechanical engineers design other machines inside buildings, such as elevators and escalators.

Mechanical refers to the expertise or use of machinery or tools.

13. Centuries of erosion have exposed __________ rock surfaces in the Painted Desert of northern Arizona. (A) in colors of the rainbow (B) colored like a rainbow (C) rainbow-colored (D) a rainbow’s coloring

C) Rainbow Colored

Why was Jefferson confused on how influential Hamilton had become?

Jefferson, saw Hamilton as "a hypocrite" and he thought Hamilton had a big head in my opinion. Like when Hamilton knew what he wanted, he went for it, and might have caused some tension between him and maybe his peers because they saw him as a threat. So Jefferson was believed to be jealous of Hamilton.

helppppppppppppppppppppppppp làm + dịch đoạn văn

2. athletic

4. entertainment

6. children

What is the correct choice

Which word has the most positive connotation? A. Brave B. Reckless C. Brash D. Foolish

character filler

I hope this helps :)

Reckless, Brash, and Foolish all sound negative

What does Macbeth’s reaction to the news of his wife’s death say about his state of mind

Answer:Macbeth's reaction to the news that his wife is dead is sadness mixed with regret. He says, "She should have died hereafter; / There would have been a time for such a word." He means that he wishes she would have died when he had the time to properly mourn her.

Answer: When Macbeth finds out Lady Macbeth died , he is emotionless

He said "she should have died hereafter" ( see act 5, scene 5)

The thunder gradually abates. [what does 'abates" mean] ▪becomes more intense ▪becomes less intense ▪ becomes no intense ▪ Other​

The term " abates " means :

The word "abates" means:-

becomes less intense . .

Though both Maame and Nana are eligible, neither……..interested A.was B.were C. Are D.is

Explanation: hope this helps

can u help me with this​

Well I can't really tell you what to write ( because it's YOUR happiest day, not mine ), but I can give you tips on how to get your brain flowing!!!

_______________________________

Try to Listen to Calm M u s i c! That usually helps you get relaxed!

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Drink some water! Get refreshed!

Try to remember you happiest memories , ask your guardian / parents / siblings if they remember any happy/ fun times! !

Sorry I couldn't directly help you, but hopefully these help you!

Tell this story: “Well, I thought it was going to be a regular summer doing all our regular things…” 125 words or more

but then when school came around everything changed. my teacher wasn't at school we had a sub. he lived in an old condemned house where there was no one around. me and my friend are walking and discovered his house one of my friends said " we should go check it out" . at first I hesitated didn't know what to do I didn't want them to think I wasn't cool so I decided to go..

What is Equiano's message to the Christians?

He explains that a female relation of his master often told him that he could not go to Heaven unless he was baptized

"Achoo! Everyone suffers from the miserable symptoms of the common cold. Lots of boxes of tissues later, you wish someone would fix you up as good as new. Well, folks. Guess what? Your wishes are about to come true. Our lab will win next year's Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery that all you really need is some hot tea and sympathy. Grandma was right, after all." Why might you question the reliability of the author's claim that the lab will win a Nobel Prize in Medicine?

There isn't actually a reason to believe this

Viewers might wonder, "how can hot tea cure us??" "where is the reason?" "why should we believe this!?"

Answer: An article that mentions home remedies is usually folklore.

Which of the following statements best explains why Romanticism and Transcendentalism rejected industrialism? Answer choices for the above question A. Industrialism discouraged people from organized religion and faith, while Romanticism and Transcendentalism prioritized spirituality. B. Romanticism and Transcendentalism highly valued the power of nature and industrialism was a threat to the natural world. C. Industrialism was centered on rational thought and efficiency, while Romanticism and Transcendentalism privileged emotion and leisure. D. Americans created Romanticism and Transcendentalism to directly oppose the industrial movement in England.

The statement that best explains why Romanticism and Transcendentalism rejected industrialism is;

Romanticism and Transcendentalism were movements that came to be in Europe and America in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Romanticism was a literary movement that stressed the importance of nature , emotions, and individualism .

Transcendentalism also emphasized the importance of nature and spirituality.

They were a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment when people were stirring away from nature and focusing on materialism .

Summarily , both movements valued nature and were against the fact that industrialism was taking attention away from nature.

Learn more here:

https://brainly.com/question/982426

The answer is B

What does Damon do after Pythias tells him why he is troubled? A He goes to visit Pythias's family and to settle his friend's affairs. B He tells the king that he wishes to be executed instead of Pythias. C He asks the king to let him take Pythias's place in prison. D He pleads with the king to set Pythias free.

Which of the following would be considered an intimation? A. A teacher reminding you that you might have a test tomorrow. B. A teacher collecting homework on the day it is due. C. A teacher assigning an essay that is due on Monday.

Which statement best describes a central idea of The Way to Rainy Mountain?

The statement that best describes the central idea of “The Way to Rainy Mountain” is “It is important to preserve the oral tradition of the Kiowa people”.

Look at this public service announcement. What is the purpose of this public service announcement? to urge people to use the Internet more to urge people to support the government to persuade people to eat healthier *to persuade people to exercise

D. to persuade people to exercise

correct on e2021

The purpose of this public service announcement is to encourage individuals to engage in regular physical activity and exercise for their well-being. Therefore, option D is correct.

PSA s are messages disseminated in the public interest without charge, aiming to raise awareness and bring about changes in public attitudes and behavior towards social issues.

In this specific PSA , the goal is to encourage individuals to engage in regular physical activity and exercise, emphasizing the importance of a healthy lifestyle .

By persuading people to incorporate exercise into their daily routine, the PSA seeks to promote overall well-being, raise awareness of the benefits of physical activity , and inspire positive behavior changes that contribute to a healthier society.

Therefore, option D is correct.

Learn more about PSA here:

https://brainly.com/question/7351162

pls, help I will mark brainliest. write a sentecne using the word Belligerent p's don't copy and paste and it needs to be 12 words

Katie called, "He looked so belligerent he could have devoured me."

Her mood was belligerent when the most funny scene came in movie.

(Belligerent) meaning : hostile and aggressive.

Hope this helps . . . . . .

Although it's cold outside, I still want to walk home anyway. wherever you are OR in the enormous tree when, after, that, because, although We didn't like the movie, nor did we finish watching it. wherever you are Marcus called Choices: subordinate clause compound sentence subordinate conjunctions complex sentence Phrase independent clause

1. complex sentence

3. subordinate conjunction

4. compound sentence

5. subordinate clause

6. independent clause

A sentence is a collection of words that includes a subject (the noun or pronoun about which something is spoken , usually the action's doer) and a verb (a doing word).

1. complex sentence =anyway.

2. phrase=wherever you are OR in the enormous tree

3. subordinate conjunction =when, after, that, because, although

4. compound sentence=We didn't like the movie, nor did we finish watching it.

5. subordinate clause=wherever you are

6. independent clause= Marcus called

To know more about clause, refer to the link:

https://brainly.com/question/22609906

Compare and contrast how the structures of "the lottery" and "the glass of milk" contribute to their meaning. Write two paragraphs, and use evidence from the text as support. 60 POINTS!!

this is a story will u mark branliest please. Anyway, in The Lottery it is a lot different from the glass of milk because of the storyline. In the glass of milk it talk about completely different subjects than the lottery. such as, how the storyline takes place.

I feel that the mood being set in this story is tense and when the main character says," it isn't fair", she is most definite complaining and feels concerned and agitated. :3

Which is the best paraphrase of the text? Ellis Island officers sometimes changed an immigrant’s last name. For example, the name Bietzy might be changed to Peachey. As a result, today many Americans have family names that differ from the original name. The officers may have changed an immigrant’s name because they did not understand it or because they wanted to make the spelling easier. Sometimes people’s surnames were changed. Bietzy to Peachey. Hecht to Heck. Many Americans can point to the fact that their family names are different from their original spelling in the “old country.” It is commonly thought that the clerks at Ellis Island misunderstood the names or decided to simplify them. Immigration officers at Ellis Island sometimes changed an immigrant’s last name. For instance, Bietzy might become Peachey, while Hecht might become Heck. Immigration officers often changed an immigrant’s name. For example, the name Bietzy might be changed to Peachey. As a result, many Americans have family names that differ from the names of their foreign relatives. This can often make it difficult for some Americans to connect to their heritage.

Immigration officers often changed an immigrant’s name. For example, the name Bietzy might be changed to Peachey. As a result, many Americans have family names that differ from the names of their foreign relatives. This can often make it difficult for some Americans to connect to their heritage.

Can you recognize the duck-billed platypus (Change to a declarative sentence.)

Millions of tourists eat potatoes in Peru and Bolivia every day.Millions of tourists eat potatoes in Peru and Bolivia every day. en vos pasiva

Passive voice:

Potatoes are eaten by millions of tourists in Peru and Bolivia every day.

Find the sentence with no capitalization errors. Is your Aunt a professor of German at Penn State? Is your aunt a professor German at Penn State? Is your aunt a Professor of German at Penn state?

the first option would be your answer

hope this helps

She _____ more than 600 pieces of music.

Loneliness . . . an American Malady

By carson mccullers (1917-1967).

This city, New York--consider the people in it, the eight million of us. An English friend of mine, when asked why he lived in New York City, said that he liked it here because he could be so alone. While it was my friend's desire to be alone, the aloneness of many Americans who live in cities is an involuntary and fearful thing. McCullers presents this statement as a fact. Do you agree with her statement? It has been said that loneliness is the great American malady an undesirable state; a disease or disorder of the body . What is the nature of this loneliness? It would seem essentially to be a quest for identity.

To the spectator, the amateur philosopher, no motive among the complex ricochets of our desires and rejections seems stronger or more enduring than the will of the individual to claim his identity and belong. From infancy to death, the human being is obsessed by these dual motives. During our first weeks of life, the question of identity shares urgency with the need for milk. The baby reaches for his toes, then explores the bars of his crib; again and again he compares the difference between his own body and the objects around him, and in the wavering, infant eyes there comes pristine unblemished; uncorrupted wonder.

Consciousness of self is the first abstract problem that the human being solves. Indeed, it is this self-consciousness that removes us from lower animals. This primitive grasp of identity develops with constantly shifting emphasis through all our years. Perhaps maturity is simply the history of those mutations that reveal to the individual the relation between himself and the world in which he finds himself.

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

In The Member of the Wedding a novel and play by Carson McCullers the lonely twelve-year-old girl, Frankie Addams, articulates this universal need: "The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome."

Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We , and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: "Who am I?" Why am I?" "Where am I going?" McCullers uses the inclusive first-person plural throughout this piece. What effect does it have on the essay? Why might she have made this choice? --and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.

McCullers claims that love can defeat fear and the sense of isolation.

For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question "Who am I?" recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: "Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not ." The corollary something that naturally and immediately follows; an easily drawn conclusion of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate.

The xenophobic afraid of foreigners individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.

The loneliness of Americans does not have its source in xenophobia; as a nation we are an outgoing people, reaching always for immediate contacts, further experience. But we tend to seek out things as individuals, alone. The European, secure in his family ties and rigid class loyalties, knows little of the moral loneliness that is native to us Americans. While the European artists tend to form groups or aesthetic related to beauty, emotion, or sensation schools, the American artist is the eternal maverick an independent individual; a nonconformist --not only from society in the way of all creative minds, but within the orbit of his own art.

Thoreau took to the woods to seek the ultimate meaning of his life. His creed was simplicity and his modus vivendi Latin for "manner of living" the deliberate stripping of external life to the Spartan frugal; basic necessities in order that his inward life could freely flourish. His objective, as he put it, was to back the world into a corner. And in that way did he discover "What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."

On the other hand, Thomas Wolfe turned to the city, and in his wanderings around New York he continued his frenetic frantic; frenzied and lifelong search for the lost brother, the magic door. He too backed the world into a corner, and as he passed among the city's millions, returning their stares, he experienced "That silent meeting [that] is the summary of all the meetings of men's lives."

Whether in the pastoral joys of country life or in the labyrinthine complicated; like a labyrinth (maze) city, we Americans are always seeking. We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart--the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong. What personal response might McCullers want the reader to have here?

Educational Options, Inc. is grateful to the author and publisher for the use of this selection.

"Loneliness . . . an American Malady" from The Mortgaged Heart by Carson McCullers. Copyright 1949, and renewed 1977 by Floria V. Lasky, Executrix of the Estate of Carson McCullers. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.