The Inevitability of Loneliness

And the Price of Comparing Yourself to Others (Vol. 5; Issue 34)

In the 1960s, many young people suffered from identity crises, haunted by the ideas of existential writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre (1943/1984), Albert Camus (1942/1989), and Franz Kafka (1925/1998). In Kafka’s book, The Trial, for example, the main character, Josef K, finds himself arrested, indicted, and imprisoned without reason—symbolizing unanswerable questions about our place in an incomprehensible world. These concepts of existential aloneness had an immense impact on those coming of age in the mid-20th century.

Now, 60 years later, a pandemic of loneliness replaces those earlier identity crises. We know the obvious, and tragic, causes of loneliness, like older people living alone without family or friends. But what about the everyday type of loneliness? The way we often feel alone even when around loved ones?

Todd McGowan (2025), a scholar of the deliberately obscure psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan (1966), points out a type of universal alienation in Lacan’s work. It differs from the types Lacan identified earlier in his work. These three forms of estrangement consist of:

1. The alienation that occurs when we are separated from our mothers at birth. We begin existence inside another human being. Our cleavage from that unified state creates a permanent gap in our subjectivities.

2. The alienation caused by how we identify ourselves, by our “self” or our “ego.” When infants reach between six and 18 months, they enter the mirror stage (Lacan, 2007). They learn from those around them, or from the culture-at-large, words to describe their personhood. These form the fundamentals of their self-image. These noun-like ways of defining ourselves, even in the most basic ways, necessarily creates alienation. Our beings unfold in-motion; we are verbs, and yet we use nouns to describe ourselves.

3. The alienation caused by language itself, which Lacan calls the symbolic order. Your subjective experience can only be described using a limited set of words. A persistent separation exists between how you feel and what you can say about it.

McGowan’s scholarship emphasizes another type of alienation that helps to explain a particularly painful and inescapable cause of loneliness. That initial ego, formed by the mirror stage, expands over time. We take pieces of our bodies and of the culture to create an enlarged identity, e.g., “I am a thin man who teaches literature at Occidental College.” Lacan (1975-6) calls the expanded self-image the sinthome. McGowan describes it as a:

privileged symptom within the subject’s psyche. It allows the subject to stave off a psychotic break. The sinthome gives the subject an ordering principle for his existence.

The sinthome is a “symptom” because, as Buddhists say, the self is an illusion. That hypothetical man’s description of his body and his job actually says little about his being. Nonetheless, it serves as a crucial anchoring point. It knots subjectivity together, and; it is unique to each individual person. The sinthome fends off insanity by providing an organizational system. Illusory or not, we all need some way of describing our lives. When discussing efforts to eliminate the self through meditation, psychoanalysis, or psychedelic substances, Baba Ram Dass (1978) quips:

You have to be a somebody before you can become nobody.

But, herein lies the rub highlighted by McGowan.

We are always comparing ourselves to culture, or to what Lacan calls the Big Other. The Big Other is a kind of hypothetical model citizen, a representation of ideals. Our individual identities, our sinthomes, can never find a match in it. There is only one YOU. This constant process of comparison, usually occurring unconsciously, creates yet another rupture.

McGowan adds:

This deformed animal or inhuman subject has a skewed relationship to the social order within which it exists. The collision between the biological entity and the structure of signification produces a subject that doesn’t belong to the social order but sticks out from it. The deformed status of subjectivity separates it from the coercive power of society.

WHOA!

Translation: The way we avoid our creatureliness, through dissociation or repression into the unconscious, creates a strange identity. We forget we are animals. We create an identity from language, itself a part of culture. This creates the “deformed” ego or self, our subjectivities. And, that “person” who “sticks out from it” can find no match in society.

Let’s say you introduce yourself at a party as a father who works as an electrician and lives in Boston. Those first three estrangements occur because, of course, you’ve already separated from your mother, you are much more than these three descriptors suggest, and none of them fully capture how you might feel at the moment you introduce yourself.

But, also, because of that continuous comparison between ourselves and the Big Other, or more accurately to the ideal of the Big Other, we always fall short. It forces a loneliness upon us.

Many try to reduce such alienation by fully identifying with existing Big Other groups like, say, Democrats, MAGA, or Catholics. Any of these are fine if they form one part of identity. But relying upon these chunks of the symbolic order to define oneself entirely quashes the uniqueness of one’s identity. It avoids a lonely but authentic individuality.

Only one mature way exists to escape from these forces of alienation. One must learn to live with, and accept, that fundamental separation, the fictitious nature of our identities, and that clash between our verb-like status and the nouns we use to describe ourselves. And, one must be capable of tolerating the type of rupture emphasized here, namely how the sinthome (or unique identity) can never find an exact copy in others.

Entering psychoanalysis or practicing meditation helps immeasurably to endure these existential challenges, to relinquish the wish to find examples of the unique you-ness in others. The mystical ends of religious traditions ranging from Buddhist to Christian, offer relief through monism. We are all part of one entity, God’s creation, Vishnu, Gaia, or the like. Ironically, attainment of such a sense of “oneness” negates all the forms of alienation Lacan identifies.

Alas, people spend decades in monasteries without full attainment of self-less-ness. No matter how successful you are at acknowledging and recognizing your (dynamic) self, some degree of loneliness remains. Ideally, it can be celebrated rather than lamented because, after all, it is an undeniable truth that you are the one and only you.

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References

Ram Dass, B. (1978). Be Here Now. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Hunaman Foundation.

Camus, A. (1942/1989). The Stranger. Trans. M. Ward. New York: Vintage.

Kafka, F. (1925/1998). The Trial. New York: Shocken Books.

Lacan, J. (1966). Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton.

Lacan, J. (2007). Ecrits. Trans. B Fink. New York, NY: WW Norton.

McGowan, T. (2025). The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sartre, J-P. (1943/1984) Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. H. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press.