Solitude Isn‘t the Opposite of Connection—The Data Proves It

A historian, a Yale psychologist, and a bestselling author make the case that solitude and loneliness are not the same thing—and that mistaking one for the other may be making us miserable

We’ve been told, repeatedly and urgently, that we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy‘s landmark 2023 advisory put the health toll of disconnection on par with smoking, and the World Health Organization has since reported that one in six people worldwide is affected. Dr. Laurie Santos argues that this relentless messaging, however well-intentioned, might be backfiring, training us to dread time alone that could actually be doing us good.

Loneliness Is a Surprisingly Modern Invention

Santos talks with Fay Bound-Alberti, a historian at King’s College London and author of A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion. Bound-Alberti’s research suggests loneliness as we experience it today barely existed before the 1800s. Before industrialization eroded religious belief and small communities, “if we are aware of something bigger than ourselves, we are less likely to feel lonely,” she said. Solitude used to just mean being alone, full stop. It’s only with “the rise of the individual, the decline of the collective,” she said, that being by oneself curdled into something painful. She points out that our vocabulary has calcified that shift: framing loneliness as an “epidemic” turns it into a diagnosis rather than a feeling, which she argues “massively oversimplif[ies]” an experience that’s really “a cluster of different emotions.”

Loneliness and Solitude Are Barely Related

That confusion between being alone and feeling lonely is the focus of Micaela Rodriguez, a psychologist at Yale. Her research has found the two states are only weakly correlated—around 0.2, on a scale where 1 would mean they’re identical. “There are many, many instances in which people are alone and not lonely at all,” she told Santos. In one study, Rodriguez showed that simply reading a news article about the dangers of solitude changed how people expected to feel during alone time, and in a follow-up using experience-sampling, people who held negative beliefs about solitude reported feeling lonelier, more anxious, and more bored whenever they ended up alone, while people with positive beliefs felt calmer and more content. Her cross-cultural work found the same pattern: adults in more individualistic countries like the U.S. and U.K. rated being alone as more negative than adults in Japan and Mexico, where a more interdependent sense of self seems to soften solitude’s sting.

What the Words We Use Get Wrong

Rodriguez’s research also points to something oddly fixable: vocabulary. In one study with Ohio State’s Scott Campbell, she found people rated “me time” as the most positive way to describe solitude and “isolation” as the most negative—and when she assigned college students to spend thirty minutes either in “me time” or in “isolation,” the me-time group left feeling measurably better, even though both groups did the exact same thing.

Practicing the Skill of Being Alone

Writer Emma Gannon, author of A Creative Compass, offers a practical coda: solitude, she argues, is a skill that has to be practiced, not endured. She’s a devotee of what The Artist’s Way author Julia Cameron calls “artist dates”—solo excursions to a bookstore, a film, a concert—and describes returning from trips alone feeling like she’s taken “the mask off.” She’s also candid about solitude’s limits: a month traveling by herself in New York eventually tipped into real loneliness, a reminder that alone time is a tool, not a cure-all. The upshot, Santos suggests, isn’t that connection doesn’t matter. It’s that treating solitude as inherently dangerous may itself be the problem.

Listen to the full episode on The Happiness Lab.