If You're Social But Still Lonely, You're Not Alone

"Loneliness can stem from not being able to get across things that are important to you. Sociable folks with good communication skills can experience a kind of loneliness when among people. Persons who send a call but get no response can feel cognitively isolated in some social settings. This type of experience has implications for the ways loneliness has been conceptualized and studied."

"It could be a matter of shyness or social skills. But even an individual who possesses ample social and communication skills can fail to have a meaningful exchange when there is no willing, able converser available (see Alvarado, 2025). The experience of feeling separate and alone in spaces and relationships-when you have the requisite skills but just no one to share with-is referred to as epistemic loneliness."

Epistemic loneliness occurs when a person has the communicative ability to share important thoughts but lacks a willing or able interlocutor. Solitude and objective social isolation do not inevitably produce loneliness; people can be alone without feeling lonely. Sociable individuals with good communication skills can still experience loneliness while among others when meaningful exchange is absent. Traditional links between loneliness and depression, introversion, poor social skills, or objective isolation are challenged. The distinction between social isolation and epistemic loneliness has implications for how loneliness is conceptualized and studied in psychology and for measuring and addressing different loneliness experiences.

Read at Psychology Today