Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

The loneliness we all share

There's something both unsettling and oddly liberating about this idea. We spend enormous energy trying to avoid loneliness—filling silence with our phones, scheduling ourselves into exhaustion, performing connection on social media. But Wolfe suggests this impulse itself might be missing the point. Loneliness isn't a failure of friendship or a sign you're doing life wrong. It's the baseline human condition, the thing that never fully goes away no matter how close you get to someone.

This hits differently once you stop fighting it. The deepest loneliness often strikes not when you're physically alone, but in a crowded room or even with someone you love. Because you can't actually hand your inner experience to another person. They can't live it for you. They can't erase the fact that you're the only one inside your own head, making sense of your own mortality, your own choices, your own bewilderment at being alive.

Maybe the real shift is accepting this rather than treating it as something to cure. Once you do, loneliness stops feeling like a personal deficit and starts feeling almost like the price of consciousness itself—something you share with every other thinking person who's ever lived. That's not cheerful exactly, but it's grounding. It suggests that your isolation isn't separating you from others. It's connecting you to them.