Loneliness When Shared Becomes Something Else
Or, solo dining and other extreme sports while travelling
When I was in Sri Lanka recently, I met a girl who’d been travelling for years. Like, plural. Her passport looked like a Jackson Pollock painting of visa stamps. She was one of those people who can just sit by the beach and chill. I mean, actually chill. Not scroll-through-Instagram-while-waiting-for-the-next-dopamine-hit chill. Just… be.
And I—I who pack books and podcasts and contingency snacks just to survive a solo lunch—I could not appreciate it enough.
“Don’t you ever get lonely?” I’d ask, again and again, to every long-term traveller I met—like maybe if I asked it enough times, their answer would start to apply to me. They always had this light in their eyes, like they carried freedom in their pockets. And I wanted that. God, I want that so much.
But whenever I try to be alone, really alone, it doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like something heavy sitting in my stomach. Like I’ve been left behind by a party I didn’t know was happening. The idea of eating dinner by myself or just… sitting by the sea with no one to talk to—it doesn’t feel peaceful. It’s rather painful. Feels like forgetting. Like I’ve been forgotten.
Too often, I fill the empty spaces of my days as though trying to seal leaks in a sinking boat. Silence? Put on an audiobook. Sitting by the beach? No, let’s try surfing—it’s active, productive even. Even meals, those humble moments humans have cherished together for thousands of years, become practical affairs, stripped of joy and ritual when I confront them alone. Meals alone, unlike meals shared, feel transactional—mere nutrients instead of communion. Is loneliness simply a hunger we mistake for something deeper?
At home? Sure, I can eat dinner while watching YouTube videos of people cooking better dinners. But out in the world—at a café or a beach or a bench in some scenic foreign country—being alone feels like failure. It feels like the world is watching and whispering, “Look at that poor guy. Nobody wants to eat with him.”
Even though, of course, the world isn’t whispering. The world isn’t even watching.
But try telling that to the voice in my head.
It’s weird, right? How I can know something logically—that no one cares if I’m alone—but still feel like I’m wearing a giant neon sign that says: UNLOVED.
And that’s the thing about loneliness. It’s not always about the absence of people. Sometimes it’s about the presence of self. Sitting still with myself—with no goal, no agenda—feels like a kind of falling. Like I’ll dissolve into the silence and never quite reassemble.
I admire people who are at peace with their solitude. People who treat their own company like a warm bath instead of a cold shower. I envy them. I want to be them. Not because they’re cool or mysterious—but because they seem to genuinely like themselves.
They don’t sink into self-doubt because their worth isn’t measured by counting companions or filling schedules. They possess something internal, a kind of invisible friendship with themselves that I’ve only glimpsed, like an exotic bird flashing its wings brightly for a second then disappearing into the forest of my anxiety.
And maybe that’s the heart of it. Maybe the fear of being alone in public is less about what others see and more about what I see.
Why does it make some of us feel so acutely self-conscious, while others seem at ease? Is it cultural expectation reminding us we must be liked, included, popular—the modern virtues of social status? Is it simply our own quiet voices whispering stale old stories about our unimportance or abandonment? Or maybe it’s all of this, together?
There’s a version of me I’d rather want to be: someone who drinks coffee alone not to look interesting, but because he genuinely enjoys the taste. Someone who can sit at the edge of the ocean and not feel the pressure to document it, or explain it, or turn it into some achievement. Someone who can just… exist.
But here’s who I actually am: a person who feels lonely more often than he admits. A person who gets a little sad eating alone. A person who wishes every good moment could be shared with someone. A person who has spent years trying to fill every silence with noise.
And I think both selves are real. Both are trying their best.
But I desperately want to tell my anxious self something comforting. Something not about how uncool it is to obsess over these things, but something earnest, human: It’s okay. It’s okay to feel unsure. It’s okay not to have perfected the subtle, delicate art of dining with yourself, or lounging emptily and happily by a picturesque beach. Loneliness is human, and all humans share it, however secretly or perfectly hidden beneath confident smiles at cafés.
Maybe there isn’t a fix—no tidy self-help trick to make the loneliness disappear. Maybe all we get is the quiet comfort of knowing that lots of us are stumbling through the same strange emptiness. And maybe that’s enough. Because even loneliness, when shared, becomes something else. Like two strangers sitting alone at different corners of the same café, each thinking they’re the only one without someone to talk to—unaware they’re already part of something together.
Sri Lanka gave me a lot—sunburns, stories, and way too much time alone with my thoughts. Somewhere between long bus rides and late-night silences, I started having these quiet, intense conversations with myself. In the next few posts, I’ll try to trace those wandering thoughts and see where they lead.