Humans are social creatures. Like many mammalian species, we rely on close bonds for survival from birth, and our need for affiliation and recognition is foundational. When these bonds are disrupted or absent, we often experience emotions such as sorrow, grief and fear – feelings we have learned to associate with loneliness.

From an evolutionary perspective, humans achieved safety and survival through group affiliation and collective action. Our brains evolved to prioritize connection and, conversely, to trigger anxiety when deprived of it. In this way, loneliness can be understood as a kind of warning signal: just as hunger or thirst indicate a need for food or water, loneliness signals our need for companionship.

Yet how we respond to this ‘social hunger’ – the relationships we desire, the ways we connect and the rituals we use to nurture companionship – is deeply shaped by culture and society. Cultural norms and social institutions like family, work and shared beliefs inform our understanding of connection and separation, while the broader social organization defines the expectations and possibilities of our relationships. Social norms and institutions influence not only how loneliness is expressed, articulated and even felt, but also what counts as loneliness in the first place.

Anthropology offers a way to understand the complex textures of loneliness beyond the individual psychological or structural conditions emphasized in other disciplines. A key concept in this regard is subjectivity – not as referencing an internal, private realm of experience distinct from the external world, but as something fundamentally relational. In this view, subjectivity is shaped through our interactions with others, the environments in which we live and the broader cultural and social realities that shape our language, feelings and sense of self. The ‘subjective’ experience and emotion of loneliness, then, is not only about feeling disconnected from others but also about how those feelings are made meaningful within a specific cultural and social context.

Another crucial factor for understanding the relationships formative of our subjective emotional lives are culturally embedded expectations: what we envision as necessary for well-being and a good life, or even what we imagine to be meaningful in life itself. Loneliness is not simply about the absence of relationships; it is the absence of relationships that align with culturally shared ideals of intimacy, recognition and belonging – whether in the context of family, friendship, community, work, spirituality or connection to place or nature.

By shifting attention away from loneliness as an individual psychological state and toward its embeddedness in social worlds, anthropology invites us to rethink what it means to be lonely – and, ultimately, what it means to be human. Rather than framing loneliness merely as a problem to be fixed, it can serve as a powerful lens for understanding broader social transformations, shifting relationship structures and the ways emotions themselves are culturally and historically situated.

Author: Michael Stasik