u/No-Pollution5401

I find myself regularly caught between two seemingly contradictory ways of looking at loneliness, friendship, and relationships. I genuinely can't decide which one is closer to the truth.

Scenario 1: Maybe we are looking for something that another person cannot give us.

I see so many posts in other subreddits from people desperately looking for friends, partners, or someone who can make them feel less lonely. But why do we assume another person can fill an emptiness that perhaps comes from the nature of wanting itself? Schopenhauer would say that desire continually recreates dissatisfaction, while Kabir's poetry repeatedly points toward the absurdity of searching outside for what we are looking for within. Maybe modern life has convinced us that our unhappiness is primarily a social deficit, that we need more friends, more intimacy, more connection although when the deeper problem is that we spend our lives doing work we don't care about, consuming things we don't need, and lacking anything meaningful enough to live and die for. Perhaps we aren't lonely because we lack people; perhaps we are lonely because we lack a life that feels worth inhabiting.

And yet, somehow, I keep coming back to the opposite thought.

Scenario 2: Maybe I'm intellectualizing my way out of something I actually need to experience.

I still have this very ordinary urge to have friends, to have people beside me while I go through life. Maybe I can't understand the futility or limitations of relationships without actually experiencing them. You can't understand a forest entirely by standing outside it and convincing yourself that you already know what's inside. And being completely free isn't necessarily the same as being fulfilled. Having nobody to answer to gives you freedom, but freedom without anything meaningful to devote yourself to can become its own kind of emptiness. Perhaps friends don't complete us, but they can make difficult things easier to bear; they can give us courage, companionship, perspective, and a reason to keep walking when the road gets difficult. Maybe I don't need someone to fill the emptiness in me, I just want someone to walk through the forest with me.

So I'm stuck between these two ideas:

Do we suffer because we are desperately looking for other people to complete something that cannot be completed from the outside?

Or do we sometimes use that philosophy as an excuse to avoid the vulnerability, compromise, and uncertainty of actually letting people into our lives

I find myself regularly caught between two seemingly contradictory ways of looking at loneliness, friendship, and relationships. I genuinely can't decide which one is closer to the truth.

Scenario 1: Maybe we are looking for something that another person cannot give us.

I see so many posts in other subreddits from people desperately looking for friends, partners, or someone who can make them feel less lonely. But why do we assume another person can fill an emptiness that perhaps comes from the nature of wanting itself? Schopenhauer would say that desire continually recreates dissatisfaction, while Kabir's poetry repeatedly points toward the absurdity of searching outside for what we are looking for within. Maybe modern life has convinced us that our unhappiness is primarily a social deficit, that we need more friends, more intimacy, more connection although when the deeper problem is that we spend our lives doing work we don't care about, consuming things we don't need, and lacking anything meaningful enough to live and die for. Perhaps we aren't lonely because we lack people; perhaps we are lonely because we lack a life that feels worth inhabiting.

And yet, somehow, I keep coming back to the opposite thought.

Scenario 2: Maybe I'm intellectualizing my way out of something I actually need to experience.

I still have this very ordinary urge to have friends, to have people beside me while I go through life. Maybe I can't understand the futility or limitations of relationships without actually experiencing them. You can't understand a forest entirely by standing outside it and convincing yourself that you already know what's inside. And being completely free isn't necessarily the same as being fulfilled. Having nobody to answer to gives you freedom, but freedom without anything meaningful to devote yourself to can become its own kind of emptiness. Perhaps friends don't complete us, but they can make difficult things easier to bear; they can give us courage, companionship, perspective, and a reason to keep walking when the road gets difficult. Maybe I don't need someone to fill the emptiness in me, I just want someone to walk through the forest with me.

So I'm stuck between these two ideas:

Do we suffer because we are desperately looking for other people to complete something that cannot be completed from the outside?

Or do we sometimes use that philosophy as an excuse to avoid the vulnerability, compromise, and uncertainty of actually letting people into our lives