Are you lonely tonight?
Is loneliness, like depression, a genetic inheritance? Does our lineage predispose us to such a condition? The University of Chicago was the first to conduct a genome-wide association study of loneliness based on previous findings that “the risk for feeling lonely is partially due to genetics.”
Humans are fundamentally social animals, according to John Cacioppo, founder of the university’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. “Just as physical pain alerts humans to potential tissue damage, loneliness is part of a biological warning system that has evolved to alert us of threats or damage to our social bodies,” he said. “What is heritable is not loneliness per se, but the intensity of the social pain that occurs when there is a discrepancy between an individual’s desired and actual social connections.”
I have a complex relationship with loneliness, which I often confuse with solitude. A friend once told me it could be something I would flirt with in connection with my creative pursuits. I replied, as if caught red-handed, “You are invalidating my feelings,” but I did explore the thought.
Back when I considered The Smiths’ Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now as the anthem of my teenaged years, I would define life as a blank canvas sprinkled with white paint. It changed in my late 20s, the point at which I felt I entered adulthood, when I started to think of life as a white canvas with black paint splashed all over it. Remove the black paint and all that is left is white, the same way that if you took out all causes of loneliness in your life—money problems, for instance, or losing someone or a health scare—then you are happy.
Science has revealed that friends, not spouses, are the best medicine against loneliness.
The truth is I lived a lonely childhood. I found no real friend in my age group because I had a terrible lisp and I thought engaging with others opened myself up to the cruelty of children my age, who would openly make fun of my speech defect. In hindsight, it was how I found my way to my true love: writing. I spent those years reading books, many of which, around the time I turned seven, had been books meant for adults, where I found solid affinity with fictional characters, most of whom, as literature so often goes, would carry the lonely gene in them, pining for belonging, for self-acceptance, for a way out of many troubles, for true love.
Those adult books offered an early clue. Science now backs up what I felt reading those many books that inhabited my youth. Loneliness is no passing shadow, but a trait written into human DNA. Researchers estimate 14% to 27% of it passes down through common genes. Our lineage gives us more than the shape of a mouth or the shade of an eye. It hands down a specific vulnerability to sadness. Cacioppo points out that we do not inherit loneliness itself. What passes down through generations is the intensity of the alarm system. Some of us are simply born with a higher sensitivity to that distance, wired from the start to feel the spaces between ourselves and the world.
In 2023, the World Health Organization labeled loneliness a global health threat, while the US Surgeon General declared it an epidemic, citing research that as many as one in two adults experiences it. The clinical figures take away any remaining illusion. A body without human connection does not experience poetic melancholy. It undergoes physical trauma, carrying the same health risks as smoking 15 cigarettes every single day.
But I still take comfort in the words of the writers whose works have pretty much shaped the way I embrace the highs and lows of my days. To Carl Jung, for instance, “the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” Marcel Proust, on the other hand, recognized the gem in loneliness. “Happiness is beneficial for the body,” he wrote in his novel Remembrance of Things Past. “But it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
Maybe my friend was right when he said I was flirting with loneliness. Or maybe not. What happened after those days I framed life as a black canvas sprinkled with white paint is that I grew up. I had the company of books like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. I also had cautionary tales like S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. They offered immense help in forming my idea of the life I wanted, the circles to which I wanted to belong, and the experiences I needed to replicate not just in my head, but also in my body and in my soul. From my youth’s isolation, I emerged knowing, without knowing exactly why, that it was crucial to find my people. By the time I was a high school junior, I found my world populated with friends, even if some of them were like the characters in Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, a portrait of teenage apathy, drug use, and moral vacancy that, had my parents been the type to supervise what I read in my spare time, I would not have had the chance to encounter.
Recent studies, such as the landmark findings of British evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar released in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in 2025, have revealed that a good friend is the best medicine we have against a lonely life.
Friendships are messy, I know. But by looking closely at how our brains react to companionship, science has shown that sitting face-to-face with someone we care about triggers a rush of natural, feel-good chemicals. These molecules act as a built-in emotional shield, calming our nervous system and melting away the deep, heavy ache of being alone.
Romance novels like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind might suggest it is only a matter of finding a lifelong partner. But recent studies from the National Institutes of Health in the US point out a dangerous trap couples have the tendency to fall into. In 2003, Dutch sociologist Matthijs Kalmijn called it “dyadic withdrawal.” It happens when two people get so comfortable wrapped up in each other they let their outside friendships fade away, leaving themselves far more exposed to the loneliness they, with their eternal vows, tried to escape.
My canvas is still black and white, more black than white or more white than black, depending on what’s happening in my life. But I have more friends than I need and voracious reading has given me enough exposure to the full gamut of human emotions to have a better understanding of what I’m going through.
I’m not saying the loneliness has become less terrifying. But at least I have it in me to refuse to let it remain a trauma. I treat it instead as raw material, using the very grief that threatens to consume me to sketch something that makes me happy onto the canvas.
