Posted: July 29, 2025
Some forms of loneliness have nothing to do with being alone. You can be surrounded by people, well-liked, relationally connected, even romantically partnered, and still feel profoundly isolated. This is the loneliness that emerges not from social absence, but from a deeper rupture in how we relate to ourselves, to the world, and to meaning itself.
In clinical work, this form of estrangement can be described as “existential loneliness.” It sits beneath symptoms like anxiety, depression, or burnout, quietly shaping how we experience our days. It shows up in those moments when life feels thin or hollow, when the question “Is this all there is?” whispers beneath the noise of everyday achievement. It’s not just that we’re disconnected from others, it’s also that we’re disconnected from a sense of resonance with the world.
This blog is about that kind of loneliness. And how, perhaps, it isn’t just a personal failing or temporary mood, but a symptom of something deeper: disenchantment.
Edward Hopper – Nighthawks, 1942[/caption]
Philosopher Charles Taylor famously described modernity as an “age of disenchantment,” where the sacred canopy that once held meaning together has been replaced by fragmented, often flattened understandings of life. In a disenchanted world, mystery gives way to measurement; faith to functionality; community to consumerism. The self becomes buffered, hardened, and isolated in the name of autonomy.
Edward Hopper – Office in a Small City, 1953[/caption]
Research by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and others has shown that loneliness is as harmful to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. But what about the kind of loneliness that persists even when we’re surrounded by people? What about those who appear connected, but inwardly feel unseen or unknown?
Here, we touch on the limits of purely social solutions. While friendships, therapy, and supportive communities are vital, they do not always resolve this deeper sense of estrangement. Because the disenchanted self is not just longing for people, it’s longing for meaning, for wonder, for belonging in a world that feels flat.
In practice, this can look like:
● A high-achieving professional who suddenly finds their work meaningless, despite external success.
● A married person who feels emotionally alone, even in a committed relationship.
● A spiritual seeker who feels like their beliefs no longer “land” in the way they used to.
What connects these experiences is not the absence of people, but the absence of resonance, a feeling of being connected to something good, true, and beautiful. We were not made only to be efficient. We were made to be oriented toward meaning.
Vincent van Gogh – The Starry Night, 1889[/caption]
Modern Western culture often celebrates the self as sovereign—a builder of its own destiny, a shaper of its own truth. This sounds empowering, but for many, it ends up being isolating. When we are told to “be true to ourselves” without any deeper context or communal grounding, we may struggle to know who that self is in the first place.
This cultural script also makes suffering feel like a personal failure. If you’re lonely, you just need to try harder to connect. If you’re empty, maybe you’re not manifesting the right mindset. If you’re confused, maybe you’re just not self-aware enough. It’s a subtle but suffocating message: you are the problem, and you are the solution.
This framing erodes our capacity for grace. It undermines the role of mystery, dependency, and surrender. And it deepens the isolation of the disenchanted self, who now not only feels alone, but responsible for fixing their aloneness.
Pierre Bonnard – The Breakfast Room, c. 1930[/caption]
What, then, is the way forward? While therapy cannot magically restore meaning to the universe, it can help a person reconnect with meaning in their particular story. In many ways, good therapy is a re-enchanting process. It invites clients to slow down, to pay attention to the texture of their experience, to discover (or rediscover) that their life holds value beyond utility.
Practices like narrative therapy, existential therapy, and spiritually integrated psychotherapy offer frameworks for helping clients explore their relationship to meaning, mystery, and selfhood. Even Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) leans toward this re-enchantment by helping clients identify personal values that point beyond performance or pleasure and toward purpose.
Some clients begin to reawaken to meaning through beauty: art, nature, music. Others find it through grief and letting go. Still others discover it in ancient traditions, sacred texts, or prayer. The goal is not to offer easy answers, but to help restore a sense that life is not merely something to endure, but something to receive.
Claude Monet – Impression, Sunrise, 1872[/caption]
Re-enchantment doesn’t mean returning to naïveté or romanticizing the past. It means reclaiming our capacity to see the world, and ourselves, as layered, mysterious, and worth loving. It means opening the self to resonance, to that which is beyond us, and to that which grounds us.
Loneliness will still come. But perhaps it won’t be quite so final. Perhaps it will become a signal, not of our inadequacy, but of our longing for something real. And in that longing, we might find our way back to connection.
Not just with others. But with the world. And with ourselves.
Disenchantment and the Modern Condition
[caption id="attachment_4680" align="alignleft" width="342"]In this context, loneliness isn’t just a feeling, it’s a cultural condition. When we no longer see the world as inherently meaningful or animated by something greater than ourselves, we begin to carry the weight of meaning alone. We become, in Taylor’s words, “exclusive humanists”—seeking fulfillment within an immanent frame that has no room for transcendence.
This has real psychological consequences. If everything is up to us, our purpose, our identity, our healing, then we bear an immense existential burden. We become curators of our own worth, constantly managing an internal economy of self-worth through performance, productivity, or public perception. The result? A chronic sense of insufficiency. And underneath it, a growing ache: a loneliness not solved by more social connection, but by deeper resonance.