There is a particular kind of loneliness that I don’t think we talk about very much. It doesn’t necessarily look like being alone. In fact, from the outside it might look like quite the opposite.
You can have a full diary, spend your days talking to colleagues, have friends and family around you, attend meetings, go out for dinner and have several WhatsApp groups permanently demanding your attention. By most conventional measures, you are connected.
And yet you can still feel lonely.
Perhaps that’s because being around people, fitting in and actually belonging are three quite different things.
Loneliness isn’t always about being alone
Imagine someone we’ll call David. He’s 53, has a senior role, a partner, grown up children, colleagues he has known for years and a decent group of friends. He isn’t isolated and, if you asked him whether there were people in his life who cared about him, he would probably say yes.
But recently he has started noticing something. If he doesn’t suggest dinner, it often doesn’t happen. If he doesn’t message an old friend, months can pass. At work, people contact him constantly, but usually because they need a decision, an introduction, some advice or a problem solved.
His phone is busy. His life is busy. He knows plenty of people.
But occasionally a thought arrives that is difficult to ignore.
If I stopped making the effort, who would come looking for me?
That is a very different question from “Do I have friends?” and I think it takes us somewhere important when we talk about loneliness.
The World Health Organization describes loneliness as a painful feeling that arises when there is a gap between the social connections we want and those we actually experience. That distinction matters because loneliness isn’t simply a headcount. You can spend considerable amounts of time alone without feeling lonely, just as you can be surrounded by people and feel profoundly disconnected.
Perhaps what we are looking for isn’t simply company. Perhaps we are looking for belonging.
The difference between fitting in and belonging
And the word that keeps coming to mind when I think about belonging is safe.
Not physical safety. Something quieter and harder to measure. The feeling that I don’t have to perform here. I don’t have to prove my usefulness or constantly monitor whether I’m saying the right thing. I don’t have to earn my place every time I walk into the room. I can simply be here and trust that there is a place for me.
That might be where fitting in and belonging start to separate.
When we are trying to fit in, we can become remarkably aware of ourselves. Am I talking too much? Am I not talking enough? Did that joke land? Do they agree with me? Should I say what I actually think? Do these people genuinely want me here?
We become observers of our own participation.
Belonging seems to contain less calculation. We relax into the relationship because we aren’t continually looking for evidence that we’re allowed to be there.
What belonging looks like at work
You can see versions of this in workplaces all the time.
Imagine a new employee joining a well established team. Everyone is pleasant. There’s an onboarding process, introductions, perhaps a team lunch and the obligatory photograph on LinkedIn welcoming them to the organisation.
Technically, they have been included.
But meetings tell a slightly different story. There are jokes they don’t understand and references to things that happened years ago. Decisions sometimes seem to have been half made in conversations they weren’t part of. When something difficult comes up, three people who have worked together for years instinctively turn towards each other.
Nobody is deliberately excluding the newcomer. Nobody has done anything obviously wrong.
But gradually the newcomer starts watching themselves. They become a little more cautious. They wait until they are certain before contributing. They hold back the slightly unusual idea. They spend energy reading the room rather than participating in it.
They are in the team, but do they feel that they belong to the team?
Research suggests this distinction matters. Studies of workplace belonging have associated a stronger sense of belonging with better performance, greater engagement and lower intentions to leave. Research into psychological safety has also repeatedly pointed towards the importance of people feeling able to speak, question, admit uncertainty and take interpersonal risks without fearing humiliation or punishment.
There is something very human underneath all those organisational terms.
When I feel that I belong, I don’t need to spend quite so much energy working out whether I belong.
That energy becomes available for something else. Thinking. Creating. Disagreeing. Asking the question everyone else seems reluctant to ask. Saying “I don’t know.” Offering an idea that might be wrong. Challenging a decision. Or simply being myself.
When relationships require more effort
Perhaps this becomes particularly important as we get older because relationships change in ways we don’t always notice while they are happening.
Careers become demanding. People move. Children arrive and eventually leave home. Parents get older. Friends develop different priorities. Colleagues we saw every day disappear surprisingly quickly when one of us changes jobs. Someone who was once part of the fabric of Tuesday afternoon can become a person we exchange Christmas messages with.
Relationships increasingly require deliberate maintenance.
There is nothing wrong with that. Good relationships often require effort. But there can be a subtle difference between maintaining relationships and feeling held by them.
Sometimes we become the organiser. The person who remembers birthdays, starts the WhatsApp conversation, suggests lunch, books the restaurant and gets everyone together. We might even enjoy playing that role.
But occasionally another question appears.
What would happen if I stopped?
Not as a test. Not to punish anybody. Just as a quiet curiosity about whether the connection would travel in the other direction.
Because there is something surprisingly powerful about another person saying, “I thought about you,” or “I wondered how you were getting on,” or simply, “Fancy a coffee?”
These are tiny sentences. Yet they communicate something much bigger.
For a moment, you existed in somebody else’s world without having to announce yourself first.
Our need for that kind of connection isn’t simply sentimentality. A substantial body of research now links social connection with physical and psychological wellbeing. One influential analysis involving more than 300,000 participants across 148 studies found that people with stronger social relationships had a significantly greater likelihood of survival during the periods studied. More recent research continues to associate loneliness and social isolation with poorer health outcomes, although researchers are rightly careful to distinguish between loneliness, living alone and objective social isolation.
The WHO has gone as far as arguing that social health deserves attention alongside physical and mental health. That seems significant. Our need to feel connected isn’t some personal weakness that emotionally self sufficient adults should eventually grow out of. It appears to be a fairly fundamental part of being human.
Feeling connected at work is not the same as belonging
Which raises some interesting questions about the way we work.
We talk endlessly about engagement, culture, retention, hybrid working, employee experience and leadership. Yet underneath some of those conversations might be a much simpler question.
Do I feel that I have a place here?
A person can be invited to every meeting and still feel outside the group. A remote employee can speak to colleagues every day and feel disconnected. A CEO can spend twelve hours surrounded by people and have nobody with whom they feel able to say, “I’m struggling with this.” A manager can be the person everyone turns to while quietly wondering who they would turn to themselves.
A freelancer can have hundreds of professional contacts and still miss having colleagues who notice when they have had a difficult week. Someone can walk into an office three days a week, sit among fifty people and still eat lunch alone.
Proximity isn’t necessarily connection.
Nor is communication.
Being needed is not the same as being known
There may also be a particular trap here for capable people.
The more useful we become, the more people come to us. They ask for our opinion. They invite us to meetings. They want advice, introductions, decisions, experience and help solving difficult problems.
That can look remarkably like connection.
And being needed can feel good. But being needed and being known are not quite the same thing.
Perhaps that is one reason loneliness can surprise people who, on paper, seem least likely to experience it. They aren’t lacking interaction. They may be lacking a particular quality of interaction.
A place where nothing needs to be achieved. A relationship that doesn’t depend upon usefulness. Someone who contacts them without needing anything. Somewhere they can stop performing competence for a while.
Belonging can begin with small moments
I don’t think the answer to this is another list of seven things we should all do before breakfast to become less lonely. Human relationships deserve a little more respect than that.
But perhaps we can become more curious about the distinction between fitting in and belonging.
We can notice where we are performing and where we relax. Where we are continually initiating and where connection sometimes comes towards us. Where we are valued primarily for what we do and where we have the sense that our presence itself matters.
And perhaps we can become curious about the people around us too.
Think about the colleague who always organises lunch. The friend who starts the group conversation. The manager everybody relies upon. The person who appears confident, sociable and connected.
We don’t need to assume that any of them are lonely. That would be another form of not seeing them properly.
But occasionally we could be the person who sends the message first.
Not because we think they need rescuing. Not because there is a problem to solve. Simply because we thought about them.
Perhaps belonging is created through moments much smaller than we imagine.
Where do you truly belong?
There are a few questions I keep coming back to.
Where in your life do you genuinely feel that you belong? How do you know? What is different about the people or places where you don’t have to work quite so hard to fit in?
And perhaps the more uncomfortable question is this: where are you working hard to fit in when what you really want is to feel that you don’t have to try quite so hard?
I don’t know that these questions have quick answers.
Maybe they shouldn’t.
They are exactly the kind of questions Myles was created to explore. Not to diagnose what you’re feeling or tell you what you should do about it, but to give you somewhere to think out loud, notice what matters and perhaps understand your own experience a little better.
Because sometimes connection might begin with something remarkably simple.
Having somewhere safe enough to say, “Actually, I’ve been feeling this too.”
