How to escape existential isolation
What Dostoyevsky tells us about the psychology of loneliness
Hello!
In this edition of 60-Second Psychology, I’d like to talk about existential isolation. (Don’t worry, it’s not as bleak as it sounds.)
I was inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, which has become a surprise best-seller in the English-speaking world, 177 years after it was first published in Russian and nine years after this new edition was published by Penguin. Like thousands of others, I followed the herd, and was bowled over by the novella.
From a psychological perspective, I was especially interested in Dostoyevsky’s descriptions of the protagonist’s loneliness. He recounts having lived in St Petersburg for eight years without making a single acquaintance, but finds comfort in the crowds around him, and the faces that he has come to recognise on his daily walks. “Of course, they don’t know me, but I know them,” the narrator says. “I have practically learned their faces by heart – and I admire them when they are cheerful and I’m crestfallen when they grow sad.” He describes one man whom he sees each day by the Fontanka River. “We sometimes almost greet each other, particularly when we’re both in a good mood.”
One day, however, he finds that all these acquaintances are leaving the city for their country homes – resulting in a real sense of abandonment. “No one, absolutely no one, invited me. It was as if I was indeed a stranger to them.” The reality of his situation – that he doesn’t really know anyone – threatens to crush him, until he meets a young woman waiting for a lover, and strikes up an intense friendship with her.
Dostoyevsky’s descriptions reminded me of research by Elizabeth Pinel, who defines existential isolation as the unbridgeable gap we feel between ourselves and other people. She has found that she can trigger people to experience this by asking them to consider the following scenario:
“You can be lonelier in a crowd than by yourself. With this saying in mind, please now think of a situation in your past when you felt disconnected or very isolated from the other people around you.”
Some common examples include standing up for something only you believe in when no one else agrees; watching a film you do not think is funny when everyone else is laughing; and not being included in a private joke.
The exercise offers a very mild reminder of what it feels like to be existentially isolated, and yet Pinel has found that it can prime greater sensitivity to the slightest sign of social connection.
In one experiment, she asked participants to complete some compound words following a simple prompt. For example, they were given photo___ and then asked to complete it with graph, genic, copy, or finish. While providing their own answers, they were then told what another participant had responded – and asked to say how much they thought they would like that person.
Rationally speaking, these kinds of tasks will tell you very little about your potential affinity with someone. After they had experienced existential isolation, however, Pinel’s participants were considerably more likely to warm to a partner who had shared the same responses to the word game. Like the unnamed narrator of White Nights, they seemed desperate for connection.
My book The Laws of Connection offers lots of strategies to build more authentic and meaningful relationships with others. When researching it, I found that one of the major causes of existential isolation is a lack of “self-disclosure”: we’re often too shy to share our inner lives, or to ask others about theirs. We assume that such conversations will be too awkward, and that the other person won’t really care what’s going on under our skin. When we’re pushed to talk about our deepest thoughts and feelings, however, we may find that we share far more in common than we expect – closing the gap between us.
Scientists at New York University have designed a series of conversation prompts – known as the Fast Friendship Procedure – that can ease this kind of discussion to put people on the fast track to intimacy. Here are a few examples:
What would constitute a perfect day for you?
If you were able to live to the age of ninety and retain either the mind or body of a thirty-year-old for the last sixty years of your life, which would you want?
Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
While I was in Paris last year, I was surprised to find that the Shakespeare & Company bookshop has its own version on its café’s placemats. The questions include:
If you could spend the rest of your life with a character from a book, who would it be?
If you could ask the leader of your country to read one book, what would it be?
Which books do you have on your nightstand that you know you’ll never read?
What to you is the most beautiful word, or words?
If you’re willing to share your thoughts, I’d love to hear them on the Substack chat!
Thank you for reading, and please do share this with anyone who might be interested.
David x
I write memoir and that is mostly what I read, however, your article reminded me of how, as a young man, I had really enjoyed Dostoevsky. Thanks, may read him again!