You’re surrounded by people. Your calendar is packed. Your life feels full. And yet, something is missing—a subtle, quiet ache that creeps up unannounced.
The nagging flatness that hums beneath the surface while you smile through interactions and wonder why connection feels detached.
If you recognize this, you’re not alone, although that’s precisely the problem: feeling alone while surrounded by people.
What My Father Taught Me
As a child, my father would often share one of his favorite quotes: “The difference between loneliness and solitude is your perception of who you’re alone with and who made the choice.”
I’ve turned those words over for decades. Solitude is chosen, the quiet you seek to restore yourself, to listen inward. Loneliness is the ache of disconnection without purpose. It’s having a thousand connections and yet no one you’d call in a crisis.
The Silent Epidemic
Fifty percent of CEOs report feeling lonely, and 61 percent recognize how loneliness hinders their performance. One in five Americans overall feel lonely daily, which some research suggests may carry equivalent health consequences as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
But most of us won’t name it. Are we so conditioned to believe that strength equates to independence that loneliness feels like failure? Somewhere along the way, we swallowed the lump in our throat at the conference table and learned that honesty about our inner world was a liability.
So we keep moving. We keep shallowing.
Recently, at a Jeffersonian-style dinner, the host pulled me aside. She wanted to create rich conversations like these for her college-age children. Then, almost out of nowhere, she shared that their eldest had died by suicide nearly a year ago.
Later, I sat beside her husband as accomplished men discussed adolescent mental health in the abstract. I was deeply present to just how intimately familiar this topic was to the man sitting next to me—silent, stoic, unseen in his grief.
I turned and lowered my voice. “This must be a hard conversation. I’m so deeply sorry for your loss.”
What followed was one of the most real conversations I’ve had in years.
Everyone is carrying something. The question isn’t whether you sometimes feel alone, it’s whether you’ve let yourself know it.
The Shallowing
There’s a phenomenon I’ve tracked for years. I call it shallowing—the subtle, often unconscious way we mute our emotional lives to keep pace with demand. We put hard things into a box, seal the lid, and tuck them in the basement of our psyche.
The problem? When we push away the hard things, we don’t just lose access to pain. We lose access to joy. The same wiring that numbs grief also numbs delight. The same reflex that avoids vulnerability blocks connection. Our emotional range narrows. Life gets flatter.
This is what isolation actually looks like for most high-performers—not physical distance but emotional compression. You’re in dense proximity to people, yet you can’t make the bridge. You see them. They see you. But no one is truly seen.
The Invitation
What if loneliness is not a problem to solve, but a signal to heed? What if that nagging ache is actually the doorway forward, the system sharing something essential that has been neglected?
This is the gift hidden inside the discomfort: Loneliness is a gateway. An invitation to stop performing connection and start practicing it. Permission to want more than achievement, to want to be truly known.
Where to Begin
Start inside. You can only hold space for someone else’s truth if you’re in relationship with your own. What are you actually feeling? What have you been avoiding?
Name it. Not to anyone else, not yet. But to yourself: Maybe I feel lonely. I want more. Awareness is the gateway to change.
Go small. You don’t need to overhaul your social life. Send one text: Hey, I’ve been thinking about you. One conversation. One moment of honesty.
Identify your people. Create a list of those who truly matter, your “fab five,” your 15, or your “nifty 50.” Then tend those relationships like a garden.
Rebuild your container. Sleep, movement, stillness, connection to something larger—these aren’t luxuries. They’re the architecture of your capacity to feel and connect.
The Return
When I was a new mom, I served on a board with a man whose daughter had died of SIDS. At our next meeting, I found a moment to look him in the eye and say simply: I’m so sorry.
For years after, every time he saw me, he returned to that moment. Once, he said, most people looked past him when they learned what happened. They weren’t comfortable with it themselves, so they couldn’t hold space for his grief.
I had cracked a door. And he walked through it, again and again.
Isolation does not have to be your permanent address. It’s a season, sometimes a long one, but not the end of your story. The loneliness you feel? Others feel it too. The ache for real connection? It’s a shared human hunger.
One breath. One conversation. One door cracked open.
That’s where it begins.
