Carl Jung wrote that loneliness does not come from having no people about you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you, or from holding views that others find inadmissible. It’s one of his most quoted lines, and most people stop at the first half, the not-being-understood part. The half that interests me far more is the second one, the bit about inadmissible views, because it points to a loneliness that’s sharper, sneakier and a great deal more common than the lonely-in-a-crowd cliché it usually gets filed under.
Jung knew this one from the inside. In the same passage of his memoirs, he says he had felt alone since childhood, because he knew things, and had to hint at things, that other people knew nothing of and, for the most part, did not want to know. That is the engine of it. The loneliest position a person can occupy isn’t having no one to talk to. It’s holding something true to you that you’ve correctly judged the people around you would refuse to accept, and so you keep it sealed, and you perform agreement instead.
The loneliness of the secret heretic
There’s a particular kind of person who carries this, and they’re easy to overlook, because they look perfectly content. They have a tribe. A family, a faith, a circle, a workplace, some group built around a shared belief or a shared way of seeing the world. Somewhere along the line they stopped believing the central article of it, or came to hold a view the group would find unacceptable, and rather than say so and gamble with their place in it, they went silent. They kept turning up. They performed membership. Every gathering since has been a small exercise in not saying the one thing that is most true about them.
This isn’t the loneliness of isolation. These people are seldom isolated. It’s the loneliness of concealment, which is worse, because it happens in company, very often in the warmest, closest company a person has. You can be loved completely and still be lonely to the bone, if the people loving you are loving a version of you that holds the approved views, while the real you sits silent underneath, holding the inadmissible one and knowing it can never safely come up.
My great-uncle Eddie and the faith he’d lost
My great-uncle Eddie came from a fiercely devout family, the kind where faith wasn’t a Sunday activity but the very air everyone breathed, the frame around every birth, every marriage, every death. Somewhere in his thirties, slowly and without any drama, Eddie stopped believing. Not in a crisis, not in anger. He simply found, by degrees, that the belief everyone around him took as bedrock had, for him, dissolved. And he never told a single soul.
He carried on going to Mass. He said the words. He stood and knelt and crossed himself beside people he loved, for forty years, holding inside him the one fact that would have appalled every one of them, that he no longer believed a word of it. He was no hypocrite. He was a man who had weighed the cost and concluded that losing his place in the only world he had was too steep a price to pay for the relief of honesty. He decided that voicing it would cost him his family, his belonging, his whole position in life, and that the silence, lonely as it was, was the smaller loss of the two.
He told me, once, near the end of his life, because I was the family’s odd one out, the one who had left, who lived abroad, who plainly didn’t fit the mould, and was therefore safe to tell. He said it almost lightly, the way you mention something you’ve carried so long it’s gone smooth at the edges. Then came the part I have never been able to shake. He said the worst of it was never the loss of belief itself. It was sitting in a packed church every single week, hemmed in by his entire family, more alone than he could ever have been by himself, because not one of the people pressed shoulder to shoulder beside him knew the first true thing about what was happening inside his head.
Why it cuts deeper than ordinary loneliness
That is the cruelty Jung put his finger on. Ordinary loneliness, the empty-flat kind, at least matches your circumstances. You are alone, and you feel alone, and the two agree with each other. The loneliness of the inadmissible view is worse precisely because it contradicts your circumstances. Everything around you says connected, surrounded, belonging, while inside you there’s a locked room nobody knows is even there. The distance between how connected you appear and how alone you feel is itself part of the wound, and it’s a distance you can’t explain to anyone without opening the very door you’ve spent years holding shut.
It also gets worse the more you love them. A stranger finding your view inadmissible costs you nothing at all. Your own people finding it inadmissible could cost you everything, so the more precious the circle, the more complete the silence becomes, and the lonelier you are exactly where you are most surrounded. This is why the loneliest person in the room is so often the one sitting in the middle of the biggest, warmest crowd, the one with the most to lose by being honest.
The strange comfort buried inside it
There’s one part of all this that took me years to see, and I’m still not sure what to do with it. If this loneliness is as common as Jung implies, and I’ve come to suspect it’s very nearly universal, then every one of those rooms full of apparent agreement is also full of people each privately holding their own inadmissible thing. The unanimity is a performance, and almost everyone is secretly in on it, each one assuming they are the only heretic in the building. My great-uncle sat in that church convinced he was alone in his doubt. The plain odds say he almost certainly wasn’t. Some share of that congregation was sitting in the identical silence, each one certain of their own singular isolation, every last one of them wrong.
What makes this loneliness so durable is the assumption of singularity, the conviction that you alone hold the unacceptable view. But “inadmissible” is nearly always a guess, and usually one you never actually tested. We rule in advance that it can’t be said, and then serve a life sentence on a verdict that was never formally handed down. Eddie assumed his whole family would be horrified. He never found out, because he never once risked it, and so he carried alone for forty years a weight that, for all he ever knew, half the pew beside him was straining under too.
I’d like to say the answer is simple. That you speak the inadmissible thing, and the silence breaks, and the people around you turn out to have been waiting for someone to go first. Sometimes that happens. More often, I suspect, it doesn’t, or the cost of finding out is high enough that the silence stays where it is, and a person takes their inadmissible view with them to the end. That was Eddie’s choice, and I’m not sure, even now, that it was the wrong one. What I keep coming back to is just the arithmetic of it. A church full of people, each one certain they were the solitary heretic in a building packed with believers. I have come to suspect that almost none of them ever were. Whether knowing that would have been any comfort to my great-uncle, sitting in his pew on a Sunday morning, I genuinely cannot say.
