Success Can Make You Lonely

"I devoted my entire life to being successful and I became that. But it isn't all about that because that can make you lonely."
(from my tweets, 2015)

Most of my tweets from those years are about working harder, trying more things and not giving up. This one is different. It says out loud that a goal I chased for years came with a cost I hadn't planned for.

Earlier that same year, I had tweeted something that points the other way: "I am perfectly content being alone in a room, no TV and just strategizing." Both can be true. Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing, and the research on that difference is a good place to start.

Loneliness is a gap, not a headcount

In the early 1980s, psychologists Letitia Anne Peplau and Daniel Perlman offered a definition of loneliness that researchers still use. Loneliness, they wrote, is the unpleasant feeling that comes when your social relationships fall short of what you want, in number or in closeness. It's a gap between the connection you have and the connection you need.

That means you can be surrounded by people and feel lonely, and you can spend a whole day by yourself and feel fine. Chosen solitude can even help. In a 2018 set of studies, Thuy-vy Nguyen, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci found that spending just 15 minutes alone tended to calm people down, lowering strong emotions like excitement and anxiety. Solitude worked best when people chose it rather than having it forced on them.

So a room with no TV and a notebook can be a good place to think. The trouble starts when the room becomes the whole of life.

Why connection matters so much

In 1995, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary published an influential review called "The Need to Belong." They argued that people have a basic drive to form and keep a few lasting, caring relationships, and that when this need goes unmet, both mood and health tend to suffer.

The health part turned out to be bigger than many expected. In 2010, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy Smith and Bradley Layton pooled results from 148 studies covering more than 300,000 people. Those with stronger social relationships had about a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival over the study periods than those with weaker ones. The size of that effect was comparable to well-known risk factors such as smoking.

The late neuroscientist John Cacioppo, who spent much of his career studying loneliness, described it as something like hunger or thirst: a signal that something we need is missing. Like hunger, it's not a character flaw. It's information.

Getting what you wanted doesn't always help

Here is the part that connects most directly to my tweet. Psychologists Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan spent years comparing two kinds of life goals. Extrinsic goals include money, fame and image. Intrinsic goals include close relationships, personal growth and helping your community. In their 1996 work, people who put much more weight on extrinsic goals than intrinsic ones tended to report lower well-being.

A 2009 study by Christopher Niemiec, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci followed people for about two years after college. Those who made progress on intrinsic goals, like deeper relationships, reported more well-being. Those who made progress on extrinsic goals, like wealth and fame, did not get the same benefit, and in some measures showed more signs of ill-being.

That doesn't mean success is bad. Ambition can be part of a meaningful life, and work can be full of real relationships. But it suggests that when success crowds out time and attention for people, the success alone probably won't fill the space.

Who shows up at the highs and the lows

About six months before the loneliness tweet, I wrote, "Your true friends reveal themselves during the extreme highs and the extreme lows."

The English philosopher Francis Bacon said something similar in his 1625 essay "Of Friendship." He wrote that friendship "redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves." He also warned that without real affection, "a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal."

Bacon noticed that even powerful people, the ones who seemed to have everything, often went to great lengths to keep a close friend near them. Success can bring plenty of contacts. It doesn't automatically bring company in Bacon's sense: someone you can tell the truth to, and who will tell it back.

What this might look like day to day

None of this calls for giving up big goals. It may just mean treating relationships as one of those goals, with time set aside for them the way time is set aside for work.

Some small, research-friendly ideas:

• Schedule people, not just tasks. If the calendar is full of work, put a weekly call or meal with someone on it too.
• Keep chosen solitude. Time alone to think is valuable. Notice the difference between solitude you picked and isolation that just happened.
• Notice who showed up. After a big win or a hard loss, think about who you wanted to tell first. That's useful information about where to invest.
• Treat loneliness as a signal. Like hunger, it's a sign to reach out, not proof that something is wrong with you.

Honest caveats

Most of the research here is correlational. People with strong relationships may be healthier for many reasons, and healthier people may find it easier to keep friends. The Holt-Lunstad findings come from observational studies, not experiments.

The goal studies also rely mostly on self-reports, and they describe averages. Plenty of people find deep meaning in demanding careers, and plenty of people with modest ambitions still feel lonely.

And my tweet is one sentence from one day. It doesn't tell the whole story of my life then, and I don't want to turn it into more than it says. What it does say is worth remembering: success isn't all of it.

Sources

• Bacon, F. (1625). "Of Friendship." In Essays.
• Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.
• Cacioppo, J. T., & Patrick, W. (2008). Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. W. W. Norton.
• Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.
• Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1996). Further examining the American dream: Differential correlates of intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(3), 280–287.
• Nguyen, T. T., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2018). Solitude as an approach to affective self-regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(1), 92–106.
• Niemiec, C. P., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2009). The path taken: Consequences of attaining intrinsic and extrinsic aspirations in post-college life. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(3), 291–306.
• Peplau, L. A., & Perlman, D. (1982). Perspectives on loneliness. In Loneliness: A Sourcebook of Current Theory, Research and Therapy. Wiley.