Alone in a crowd? Existential isolation and connection
University of Vermont. August 3, 2021.
Aldous Huxley and The Doors of Perception (1954), in which he recounted his psychedelic experiences with mescaline and elaborated about the philosophical and psychological implications.
A pack of wolves gains a distinct advantage over a lone wolf in the hunting of caribou, elk, and other large prey; likewise, humans can more easily meet the most basic necessities of life when they form alliances with one another. The evolutionary advantage afforded by belonging to small groups can explain a lot about the value people place on belonging and connection (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Brewer & Caporael, 2006), including the importance of the human infant’s attachment to the primary caregiver, the depression and suicidal thoughts that tend to crop up in people who feel desperately alone or socially ostracized, and the aggressive and sometimes violent reactions to those who reject us. Put simply, humans are social creatures whose very existence depends on their connections with other people.
But, as Aldous Huxley eloquently described in The Doors of Perception (1954), human social life nevertheless involves an existential variety of isolation that extends to the heart of one’s subjective experience. As he put it:
“By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves.”
Huxley gets right to the crux of what it means to be existentially isolated: whether people find themselves physically together or physically alone, or in a relationship with another person or not, an impenetrable divide nonetheless remains. That divide derives from the way in which humans sense, perceive, and interpret – in short, experience – the world around them. One person cannot know firsthand the experience of another; a person can only know what they themselves experience (Mueller, 1834/1912).
Existential isolation vs. interpersonal and intrapersonal isolation
Irvin Yalom and his classic Existential Psychotherapy (1980).
In his classic Existential Psychotherapy (1980), Irvin Yalom likewise elaborated on the experience of existential isolation, distinguishing it from interpersonal and intrapersonal isolation. Whereas interpersonal isolation refers to isolation with regard to relationships with others, intrapersonal isolation refers to feeling isolated from components of one’s own psyche.
Interpersonal isolation can result when people find themselves physically alone, but also when people feel ostracized, lack relationships characterized by mutual concern, lack positive interactions, or lack relationships with any meaningful longevity. A young man who lives alone and works as a barista, for example, might come into contact with many people at the register but might still feel lonely because those interactions are a far cry from regular participation in a caring social relationship nor valued inclusion in a social group. Interpersonal isolation can be objective, as when a prison inmate remains in solitary for a substantial period of time; or it can be subjective, as in the case of the barista depicted above.
Intrapersonal isolation can occur when people feel like they do not even know parts of themselves. People might feel this sort of self-alienation when they have difficulty making decisions or identifying their own preferences, attitudes, or opinions. They might also feel it if they struggle with impulse control and are surprised to find strong preferences they did not know they had or habits that they can not seem to keep in check.
Existential isolation, Yalom explained, refers to the “unbridgeable gulf between oneself and any other human being,” and to a “separation between the individual and the world.” Nobody else in the world can ever know what you subjectively experience as you gaze at the sky above, as you embrace your kids after school, as you listen to the news on the radio, as you paint a scene on a canvas, as you navigate the contours of office politics, or as you engage in the ongoing project of trying to piece together an accurate understanding of reality and then try to use that understanding to strive for a sense of meaning and purpose in life. You are the only one who can experience your subjective experiences. In this way, all humans are existentially isolated, whether they experience this isolation subjectively or not.
Epistemic uncertainty and sense of belonging
If there is some concrete objective reality, the isolation of one’s subjective experience makes it nearly impossible to know for certain whether one has perceived and interpreted it accurately. The isolation of our subjective experiences not only means no one else can know firsthand our experience of reality, but also that our experience of reality can never be truly validated. In this way, existential isolation leaves us vulnerable to doubts about what is “really real” and what is a wayward figment of our own imagination (Pinel et al., 2004)—thus, our epistemic need to know about the world is saddled with an abiding uncertainty.
As a result, we are constantly engaged in the social construction of reality, checking with others to try both to validate and calibrate our experience so we can feel more certain we have an accurate perception of reality. This is why people were so interested, a few years back, about whether others around them perceived a dress as white/gold or blue/black (it’s totally white/gold, by the way), or whether they thought a computerized voice said “yanny” or “laurel” (it’s yanny!). It is why a husband might ask his wife to read a text message from his mother-in-law, to make sure he interpreted it correctly. And it is why a religious believer feels her faith strengthened after visiting church, in the company of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other people who share her faith. We rely on the help of other people to “see” (metaphorically speaking) more clearly. As Hellen Keller wrote in Optimism (1903), “Once I knew only darkness and stillness . . . my life was without past or future . . . but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.”
In addition to sowing the seeds of epistemic uncertainty, our existential isolation has implications for our sense of belonging. When we are around others who seem to share our beliefs about reality, we not only feel validated by them but we also feel like we “belong” with them—that, at the core level at which we experience the world, they are like us.
By contrast, encounters with people who seem to perceive reality differently can threaten to invalidate our experiences and beliefs, and can prompt us to try to recalibrate our understanding of the world. Understandably, it can be rather difficult to feel like we “belong” with other people who don’t understand us at our core—at the level at which we experience reality—nor those who make little effort to infer our phenomenological experience.
In the song Spanish Harlem Incident (1964), Bob Dylan’s lovesick troubadour offers up the ultimate implication of people’s dependence on one another: That nothing is “really real,” not even the self, without belonging and validation from one another.
I been wond’rin’ all about me
Ever since I seen you there
On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I’m riding
I know I’m ‘round you but I don’t know where
You have slayed me, you have made me
I got to laugh halfways off my heels
I got to know, babe, will you surround me?
So I can tell if I’m really real
Dylan’s yearning for deep connection and epistemic certainty resonate with sociological, psychological, and philosophical ideas about the social construction of reality (Berger & Luckman, 1966; Cooley, 1902; Greenberg, Solomon, & Arndt, 2008; James, 1890; Mead, 1934; Swann & Bosson, 2010). Indeed, Dylan may have won a Nobel Prize in Literature, but perhaps he could just as easily have won a Nobel Prize in philosophy or psychology (if only such a prize existed).
Measuring existential isolation and connection
After nearly two decades researching the topic, my colleagues and I developed a quantitative measure of existential isolation to capture individual differences across people and across situations (Helm et al., 2019; Pinel et al., 2004; Pinel et al., 2017; Pinel, 2018). Regardless of whether or not the reader concedes that humans are truly existentially isolated, it is hard to deny that sometimes some people feel more existentially isolated and sometimes some people feel less existentially isolated (more validated/connected).
Our measure asks respondents to indicate the extent to which they agree to a set of six survey items (e.g., 1 = Strongly disagree, 10 = Strongly agree) assessing how much they do or do not feel a sense of existential isolation/connection. The items on the survey are:
I usually feel like people share my outlook on life
I often have the same reactions to things that other people around me do.
People around me tend to react to things in our environment the same way I do.
People do not often share my perspective. (reverse scored)
Other people usually do not understand my experiences. (reverse scored)
People often have the same “take” or perspective on things that I do.
Low scores indicate existential isolation, whereas high scores indicate existential connection.
Importantly, for anyone interested in topics pertaining to human connection and/or belonging, scores on the existential isolation scale uniquely predict—separate from felt interpersonal isolation (loneliness)—a variety of psychologically and interpersonally important outcomes. In line with the idea that existential isolation can cause uncertainty about our perception of reality and can impair our sense of belonging, data show that existential isolation uniquely predicts heightened depression, anxiety, and stress (Long et al., 2021). Likewise, when people feel existentially isolated, they should be motivated to try to restore a sense of connection and shared reality with others—and, indeed, our data shows existential isolation is related to greater liking for people who seemingly share their in-the-moment subjective experience (Pinel et al, 2004; 2006).
We’ve also examined existential isolation levels and correlates among various social groups. Compared to majority-group members, members of non-normative groups that American society has historically tended to disregard, disrespect, or overlook (e.g., BIPOC individuals; non-native English speakers) have higher levels of existential isolation. Michelle Obama wrote about this experience in her senior thesis (Robinson, 1985, p. 2), “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.” and later in Becoming (2018, p. 72), “If during the orientation program we’d begun to feel some ownership of the space, we were now a glaring anomaly—poppy seeds in a bowl of rice.”
Black individuals who have experience with racially motivated police mistreatment also have higher levels of existential isolation (Pinel et al., 2021; Oleskowicz et al., 2021). Disturbingly, these heightened levels of existential isolation uniquely predict suicidal ideation (Helm et al., 2019; Gehman et al., 2021; Oleskowicz et al., 2021).
I-Sharing and the impact of subjective connection
Given the implications of existential isolation for people’s grip on reality, sense of belonging, and psychological well-being, one might ask whether anything can be done to promote a subjective sense of existential connection. Moments when people feel like they and another person are having the exact same subjective experience at the exact same time may fill that bill. People can differ in significant and seemingly diametrically opposed ways—race, sex, even political views (consider supporters of Obama, Trump, and Biden)—but nonetheless find themselves laughing simultaneously at the same joke, finishing one another’s sentences, or crying together while mourning a shared loss. We use the term “I-sharing” to describe such moments.
The term I-sharing derives from the distinction that William James (1890), one of the founders of modern psychology, made between the objective and subjective aspects of the self. He referred to the objective aspects as the “Me” and the subjective aspects as the “I.” For James, the Me is our image of, or understanding of, our selves; the self-as-object. When we look in a mirror, the Me is (metaphorically and literally speaking) what we see in our reflection. For example, if I were to describe my Me, I would say that I am (among many things) the daughter of French immigrants, bilingual, a social psychologist, and fascinated by the ancient tradition of Ayurveda. All of these characteristics describe my “Me” but not my “I.” For James, the I is our perceptual experience, which shifts from moment to moment and, once described, becomes objectified. When we look in the mirror, the I refers to my experience of the image in the mirror, or whatever else captures my attention (e.g., the dog barking; the news blasting) while standing in front of the mirror. What “I” subjectively experience shifts from moment-to-moment, which is why James also called the I our “stream of consciousness.”
If people are motivated to feel certain they have a valid grip on reality, and to feel a sense of belonging, people should be motivated to seek out others who share their subjective experience (I-Sharers). The problem, though, as Huxley and Yalom articulated, is that it’s impossible to know whether other people actually share our subjective experience. So, people infer I-sharing from other cues, and often those cues consist of having similar outward, objective characteristics (Me-Sharing; Pinel et al., 2015; Long, Pinel, & Yawger, 2017). For example, given my Me, I might infer that other daughters of French immigrants who are likewise fascinated by Ayurveda will subjectively experience stimuli (e.g., a pain au chocolat at midnight) identically to how I experience them. This assumption would explain why I might gravitate toward people who share my Me characteristics; I would infer that I would I-share with them and thus feel existentially connected, validated, and like I belong.
Top: The Imaginiff game. Bottom: Data patterns reproduced from Study 1 of Pinel and Long (2012).
In my research, my colleagues and I have found data patterns consistent with these ideas. In one set of studies (Pinel & Long, 2012), we used experimental manipulations to examine the effects of Me-Sharing and I-Sharing on participants’ preferences for another person. Female participants played a game over the internet with a fellow female (thus, a Me-Sharer) named Jamie and a male (thus, not a Me-Sharer) named Alex. The game was a computerized version of Imaginiff. In each of 12 rounds, players imagined a celebrity as an item from some other category, and then compared their answers to Jamie and Alex’s answers.
So, for example, the computer might ask:
If Oprah Winfrey were a tool, would she be (A) a cocktail mixer; (B) a screwdriver; (C) a sledgehammer; or (D) toenail clippers?
Participants would choose one and compare that answer to Jamie’s and Alex’s answers. Because these sorts of evaluations are highly unusual and totally idiosyncratic to one’s internal moment-to-moment subjective experiences, it’s not terribly surprising if two people fail to match answers; if two people do match, however, it feels as though the other person must have had the exact same subjective experience of the world at that exact same moment! In other words, that’s I-Sharing!
Unbeknownst to the female participants, Jamie and Alex weren’t real—they were actually bots we pre-programmed to behave either as I-Sharers or non-I-Sharers. To manipulate that feeling of I-Sharing, we programmed the computer such that, for some participants, Jamie I-Shared with a matching answer 8 of the 12 times whereas Alex never gave a matching answer; for other participants, it was reversed. After the game ended, participants rated Jamie and Alex in terms such as how much they liked them, could imagine becoming friends with them, might want to interact with them again, and so on. In all cases, I-Sharing trumped Me-Sharing: Regardless of whether it was Jamie or Alex, participants strongly preferred the player that I-Shared. This study showed I-Sharing trumps Me-Sharing based on gender, but we’ve also found it trumps Me-Sharing based on nationality, sexual orientation, race, and even whether or not someone voted for Donald Trump.
Other experiments have used other methods of manipulating I-Sharing—for example, convincing participants that they and an interaction partner saw the same images in a series of inkblots—and found that not only does I-Sharing promote liking of others who validate our experience of reality but that it also reduces conformity in Asch’s line-matching paradigm (Pinel et al., 2010). Beyond epistemic certainty, the reduced conformity suggests that I-Sharing promotes a sense of belonging, because you don’t need to try to fit in if you already feel like you belong.
These findings echo the wisdom of Maya Angelou’s poem Human Family…
We love and lose in China,
We weep on England's moors,
And laugh and moan in Guinea,
And thrive on Spanish shores.We seek success in Finland,
Are born and die in Maine.
In minor ways we differ,
In major we're the same.I note the obvious differences
Between each sort and type,
But we are more alike, my friends,
Than we are unalike.
Such cultural wisdom, and now also a growing body of research findings, suggest that existential isolation makes people especially drawn to others with whom they I-share because it bolsters both the certainty they have about their grip on reality and their sense of social belonging.
We’ve only just begun
Research on existential isolation really has just begun. Until just a few years ago, scholars did not have a conceptually distinct, well-validated measure of existential isolation, and thus the conversation remained at the theoretical level. Now, with the development of the existential isolation scale, and experimental methods demonstrating that interventions are indeed capable of promoting existential connection, researchers have the means of empirically examining this existential feature of the human condition as well as how to help people to come to terms with it.
Other interventions might similarly be worth a look. For example, we’ve recently found that mindfulness meditation interventions could address acute or chronic feelings of existential isolation. Our data indicate that people undergoing a 7-day mindfulness meditation intervention experienced drops in existential isolation (but not interpersonal isolation) as compared to a group of people who went on a week-long vacation. It’s unclear, at the moment, exactly why mindfulness meditation promotes feelings of existential connection but it could be due to an increased acceptance of the transient nature of subjective experience, which may reduce the need for validation and belonging and may promote greater contentment with one’s own subjective experiences.
Milan Kundera and The book of laughter and forgetting (1978).
Looking to Yalom (1980), I suspect interventions that encourage people to accept their fundamental existential isolation – such as mindfulness meditation – might have different and longer lasting effects than moments of I-sharing, which almost by definition are short-lived, fleeting, and easily negated by subsequent moments of not I-sharing. Meditation, or similar practices that reduce people’s need for belonging and social validation of their perceptions and beliefs about reality, may, ironically, enable people to live more easily with the existential isolation that characterizes the human condition.
Of course, scholars will need to consider interventions from multiple angles, as interventions that make existential isolation more tolerable may have social implications insofar as they may create difficulties for maintaining a cohesive society with a set of generally agreed-upon facts, values, and beliefs that are grounded in a common sense of belonging and a shared interpretation of reality. As Milan Kundera wrote in The book of laughter and forgetting (1978):
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life – and herein lies its secret – takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
Resolving subjective isolation by calibrating (and recalibrating) our perception of reality based on communal belonging and validation may be the existential glue that holds us together and what keeps us all, so to speak, from living on different planets. But as I’ve mentioned above… the research on these topics has only just begun!
Elizabeth C. Pinel is a Full Professor of Psychological Science at the University of Vermont. She solidified her interest in existential experimental psychology while studying with Tom Pyszczynski, then earned her Ph.D. with William B. Swann, Jr. and Daniel Gilbert. Liz has received grant funding to pursue her research on I-Sharing both from NIMH and NSF, and has identified I-sharing as a unique path toward interpersonal connection, distinct from objective forms of similarity. I-sharing serves as an antidote to existential isolation, the form of isolation that results from how we, as humans experience reality: through our own sense organs and cognitive processes. Liz and her collaborators have developed the Existential Isolation Scale and have established (among other findings) that existential isolation is unique from interpersonal isolation and loneliness, and that it correlates uniquely with depression, stress, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Her current work concentrates on cross-cultural examinations of existential isolation as well as meditation’s ability to lessen feelings of existential isolation.