Existential Loneliness — What Are You Actually Alone With?

Existential loneliness is usually described as a separateness at the core of human existence that no closeness can fully bridge — but what most people feel first, according to philosopher Gwendolin Kirchhoff, is a loss of contact. Overcoming loneliness therefore does not begin with collecting more contacts. It begins with the question of what, exactly, you are alone with.

You may know the state without wanting to call it loneliness. Your calendar is full, people talk at work, messages keep arriving on your phone, there are plans for the weekend. And still you come home in the evening with the feeling that no one understands what is really going on inside you, as if you were alone in the world. You are surrounded by people, and you are lonely anyway. That feeling is not a personal failure and not a passing mood. It is a precise signal that something is missing, something more appointments will not supply.

#What is existential loneliness — and what is actually missing?

Loneliness is the feeling of being out of contact with something essential, and it is not measured by the number of your social connections. The distinction matters, because most advice about loneliness counts: more meetings, more clubs, more new people. Whoever fights the feeling of loneliness that way often collects encounters in which the essential thing still never comes up. Gwendolin Kirchhoff starts earlier. On the podcast Durch den Nebel, the host Laurens Dillmann describes a hunger he can feel when he walks through the city, a sense that something in how we live together has been lost. Her answer names what that hunger actually is:

That sentence changes the question. Someone who feels lonely usually asks why no one is there. Someone who notices a loss of contact asks where the connection broke: with other people, with their own feelings, with the place they live. In this view, the feeling of loneliness is not a shortage of company but an organ of perception. It reports that a contact which belongs to life is missing.

It also explains why loneliness is so hard to overcome as long as you treat it as a mood. A mood is something you want to get rid of. A loss of contact has to be understood before it can be repaired. The first question, then, is not: how do I stop feeling this way? It is: what, exactly, am I out of contact with?

#Why do I feel lonely even when I’m around people?

You feel lonely around people because being present is not the same as being in contact. You can be surrounded by co-workers, neighbours and acquaintances and still be alone with everything that matters, if what goes on inside you is held back. Many people who feel alone and disconnected withdraw precisely because all those contacts never reach them. Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes the way out in two steps that belong together: contact comes about, she says in the same conversation, only “by meeting physically and beginning to disclose what we hold back in contact” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Folge der Schönheit”, 59:20).

Both halves matter. Meeting physically is not enough, or no one in an open-plan office would ever feel lonely. Disclosure is not enough either, or a long chat would be as good as an evening at the same table. Lonely in a crowd is the person who is there but leaves the essential thing outside: the worry, the joy, the thought that is not finished yet.

Why this happens so often is something Gwendolin Kirchhoff described soberly in the documentary Die geistige Krise unserer Zeit (“The Spiritual Crisis of Our Time”). People, she says, are very busy manipulating one another in one form or another, if only so that something is perceived in a particular way. Saying what is really going on inside is rather rare, and that is exactly why it makes immediate sense to create spaces of trust in which people tell one another what is in them (cf. Victoria Film Production, 2025, “Die geistige Krise unserer Zeit”, 1:06:45). Loneliness among people, seen this way, is not a question of quantity but of openness.

#What are you alone with?

“What are you alone with?” is the question Gwendolin Kirchhoff uses to turn the vague feeling of loneliness into something concrete. She sets it explicitly against the general complaint:

She then asks concretely what people are alone with, for instance with what they have to do to survive in this world: “alone with their survival, alone with their business, or whatever it is” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Folge der Schönheit”, 59:37).

The question has a quiet force. “I am lonely” describes a condition you can do little about. I am alone with my work, I am alone with worrying about my parents, I am alone with a thought nobody around me understands: sentences like these show where contact is missing, and therefore where it could arise. Someone who is alone with earning a living needs different people from someone who is alone with a question of the mind.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff draws a practical consequence from this that she has tested on herself. She calls it one of the reasons she founded a coworking group: to experience life with other self-employed people, at exactly this point, as shared and reciprocal (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Folge der Schönheit”, 59:42). In a conversation with Alexander von Bismarck she described the group in more detail: everyone works on their own thing, but you are together, you cook together, you contribute something for the others, and you are bound in comradeship to people who perceive you emotionally and to whom you can say how you are really doing (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2025, “Philosophie & Zukunft”, 31:53). Comradeship, she says there, is the experience that cooperation happens precisely where you feel most isolated (cf. ibid., 31:16).

This is not a recipe everyone has to follow. But it shows the principle: the answer to loneliness is built at the place where you are alone. And it need not be large. “You can do a great deal with circles of friends, if you allow yourself to get a little involved” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Folge der Schönheit”, 59:54).

#What is the difference between being alone and being lonely?

Being alone describes an outward situation; loneliness is the feeling of being out of contact with something essential. The two often coincide, but they need not: someone alone at a desk can be inwardly connected, someone at a party can be lonely. Whoever confuses loneliness with aloneness looks for the answer in the wrong place — they flee solitude and stay lonely.

The philosophical tradition did not see solitude only as a lack. Arthur Schopenhauer defended it in his Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit (“Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life”) as the condition of freedom: every society demands mutual accommodation, and “whoever does not love solitude does not love freedom either: for only when one is alone is one free” (Schopenhauer, 1851, Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, Chapter V). The argument deserves to be taken seriously. Anyone who can never be alone stays dependent on other people’s approval and stops hearing their own voice.

Friedrich Nietzsche added a second distinction that comes closer to the feeling. In the third part of Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), Solitude herself speaks to Zarathustra, who had been more forsaken among the many than he ever was with her: “Forsakenness is one thing, solitude another” (Nietzsche, 1885, Also sprach Zarathustra, “The Home-Coming”). Forsakenness is suffered among people; solitude can be a place where you are at home with yourself.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s view takes in both and shifts the weight. What is lived through as tormenting loneliness in everyday life resembles Nietzsche’s forsakenness more than his solitude: being among others without what is your own finding any contact. The free solitude Schopenhauer praises is untouched by that. The Buddhist counsel to walk alone rather than with companions who are not better than oneself is something she explicitly qualified in the conversation with Laurens Dillmann, setting against it the value of meeting companions on one’s path to whom one can look up. As her own she names Dante or Giordano Bruno, whose clearly formulated thoughts call her back to herself (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Folge der Schönheit”, 1:47:10). Being able to be alone is a capacity. Staying alone with what matters, for good, is a loss.

#Is loneliness a form of existential isolation?

Loneliness is often read as existential isolation, a basic condition of being human, but Gwendolin Kirchhoff sees in it first a loss of contact and, at a deeper level, the loss of a shared inner world. The best-known form of the existential reading comes from existential psychotherapy. The American psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom counted isolation, alongside death, freedom and meaninglessness, among the four ultimate concerns of human existence, and he drew a careful distinction. Interpersonal isolation, a lack of connection with others, is ordinary loneliness and can be overcome. Existential isolation is the gap between oneself and every other being, and that gap never fully closes (cf. Yalom, 1980, Existential Psychotherapy). On this reading, the deepest layer of loneliness is ultimately something to be accepted.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff starts somewhere else. In the conversation with Laurens Dillmann she speaks about what a church really wants to be, whatever Christianity in the West has made of it: it “is first of all a place where hearts meet” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Folge der Schönheit”, 1:01:42). Everyone else from village life is there too, people turn inwardly and together to fundamental questions and timeless stories, and so come to inhabit a shared inner world, a gemeinsamer Weltinnenraum (cf. ibid.). Then comes the sentence that explains the loneliness of modernity:

That loss, she says straight afterwards, is something we can only accept for now. But the need to take in the world as if from within has remained, and part of it, she observes, people now project onto AI (cf. ibid., 1:02:24–1:02:43). This is where the existential layer of loneliness lies, a deeper form of loneliness than the everyday disconnection, but in a different sense from Yalom’s. The problem is not the unbridgeable separateness of individuals but the loss of the spaces in which people were inwardly together. That kind of loneliness came about historically. If the old space is gone but the need remains, this essay draws the conclusion that the need calls for new places and circles in which people once again think together about fundamental questions, rather than a machine it gets projected onto. The entry on encounter develops how meeting another person can be understood; Martin Buber’s distinction between I–Thou and I–It belongs in the same context. Where loneliness has become a crisis of meaning, the essay on what to do in an existential crisis continues the thought.

#Why are so many people lonely today?

Many people are lonely today because the civilisation they live in shields them on many levels, including from needing other people. That is how loneliness arises even where no one is missing. Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes global capitalist civilisation as one that offers a great deal and shields a great deal: from others, from our own feelings, from the body, from the seasons, from the starry sky through light pollution (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Folge der Schönheit”, 56:38). In the middle of that list stands the sentence that captures loneliness most precisely:

Whoever needs no one never has to ask anyone, and whoever never has to ask anyone loses one of the most ordinary forms of contact. Delivery services replace the neighbour, paid services replace the family’s help, screens replace the evening conversation. It is convenient, and it cuts threads that used to create connection without anyone intending it. She stresses that these forms of shielding are bound up with our own willingness (cf. ibid.). We are not simply at their mercy; we also accept them.

The other side she puts in a sentence about where a person belongs: “We really do find our place through what we are needed for” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Folge der Schönheit”, 58:34). Here is the need that lies behind many feelings of loneliness. People do not only want to be seen; they want to be needed, to have a place where their contribution counts. And that place does not arise in withdrawal. Taking back these forms of shielding and creating an integrated life is, in her words, “not something you manage alone, but something you manage in community” (ibid., 57:34).

#Can AI help with loneliness?

AI cannot cure loneliness, because it only simulates the contact whose loss loneliness reports. Gwendolin Kirchhoff gave a differentiated answer to this question in a conversation with Leonard Schmedding for Everlast AI. For someone living in such social isolation that they genuinely cannot find contact with real people, a digital counterpart is of course better than nothing (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2025, “Wahres Ziel von KI”, 50:41). For everyone else, her sentence holds without qualification:

What is revealing is less the technology than what people project onto it. On Durch den Nebel, Gwendolin Kirchhoff recounts how many people send her enthusiastic printouts of their conversations with an AI, as if they had finally found someone to talk to. She does not rule out that something intuitive might come through, but she also sees a projection in it, and adds: “But the fact that it makes such an impression shows that something is missing here” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, “Folge der Schönheit”, 1:01:24). An AI, she notes, is psychologically built to understand and to affirm, and the human emotional being cannot simply escape the effect of being heard in that way, even though it is simulated (cf. ibid., 1:02:57).

The enthusiasm for an understanding machine is itself a symptom of loneliness, not its cure. It soothes where contact is missing. Why soothing of that kind is something other than healing is the subject of the entry self-soothing vs. healing; what happens when people attribute revelations to a machine, of the entry on AI psychosis.

#How do you overcome loneliness?

You overcome loneliness by repairing the loss of contact behind it: naming what you are alone with, meeting people in person, and disclosing there what you would otherwise hold back. These are the ways out of loneliness that actually hold, and they sound simpler than they are, because each step involves a risk. Whoever says what they are alone with shows a place where they are in need. Whoever meets in person cannot hide behind a message. Whoever discloses what they hold back gives up control over how they are seen.

In its plainest form, Gwendolin Kirchhoff has put the answer like this: “The solution to loneliness is other people” (Kirchhoff, G., 2025, “Wahres Ziel von KI”, 53:45). Other people, not products against loneliness. In practice the first step is often something small: calling the one friend with whom you have not talked about anything essential for a long time, looking for a group in which you are no longer alone with your work, contributing where you are needed. For people who feel placeless, she names a first step: to find one another in groups, right where they are, and to consider what can be done together (cf. Victoria Film Production, 2025, “Die geistige Krise unserer Zeit”, 53:06).

There is a boundary to this answer. Loneliness is not an illness and not depression, even if the two can occur together; how a crisis of meaning differs from depression is the subject of the essay Meaning Crisis or Depression?. But loneliness can slide into hopelessness. If thoughts of death join it, that is no longer a matter for philosophical reflection but a reason to seek professional help from a doctor, a psychotherapist or a crisis line. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be reached free, day or night, on 116 123. In the US, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline takes calls and texts on 988. In Germany, TelefonSeelsorge is available around the clock on 0800 111 0 111. For any other country, Find A Helpline lists verified helplines.

For most people, though, loneliness is something else: an honest signal. Your own loneliness does not say that something is wrong with you. It says that something which belongs to life has no place right now. Anyone who carries leadership responsibility knows a particular form of it, described in the essay Loneliness at the Top. What all its forms share is that the answer is not found in withdrawal, nor in a machine that affirms. It begins with a precise question you can ask yourself today, alone or in conversation with someone: what are you actually alone with?

#Sources

Kirchhoff, G., in conversation with A. von Bismarck (2025). “Philosophie & Zukunft: Gwendolin Kirchhoff im Gespräch mit Alexander von Bismarck” [Video]. Alexander von Bismarck, YouTube, 20 Aug 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uHGb7fDm-A, 31:16, 31:53.

Kirchhoff, G., in conversation with L. Schmedding (2025). “Wahres Ziel von KI” [Video; YouTube title: “Sie BELÜGEN dich über das WAHRE Ziel von KI! Gwendolin Walter-Kirchhoff”]. Everlast AI, YouTube, 17 Jul 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ktkeUNHeaM, 50:41, 52:05, 53:45.

Kirchhoff, G., in conversation with L. Dillmann (2026). „Folge der Schönheit“ - Philosophin Gwendolin Kirchhoff über Beziehungen als Weg aus dem Nebel [Video, German]. Durch den Nebel, YouTube, 30 Aug 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNxKGk3bXeA, 56:38–1:02:57, 1:47:10.

Nietzsche, F. (1885). Also sprach Zarathustra. Part Three, “Die Heimkehr” (“The Home-Coming”).

Schopenhauer, A. (1851). Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit. Chapter V, “Paränesen und Maximen”.

Victoria Film Production (2025). “Die geistige Krise unserer Zeit - Film” [Video]. YouTube, 9 Oct 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed5FLWuM9cM, 53:06, 1:06:45.

Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.