Every lonely soul processes the world in their own idiosyncratic way

How shame and gender norms make weirdos lonelier

(Note: Substack sent out an earlier version of this post in the email this morning, then I was able to find the finished version which is now below, except I took out a bit I’d written about someone whose name I’d included in the draft/outline since I usually write about people anonymously and the fuck-up ended that anonymity. But it was just a graf so it doesn’t really impact the piece.)

I had big feels reading this 2023 UCLA study on whether lonely people think differently from non-lonely people, and from each other. It’s helping me better understand one reason, at least, that I’m so obsessed with shame and loneliness. 

The authors “tested the following hypothesis: Nonlonely people are all alike, but every lonely individual processes the world in their own idiosyncratic way.” And yes, they were “inspired by the opening line from the novel Anna Karenina: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ (Tolstoy, 1997).” For some reason, that citation is absolutely giving me life. 

We already know of a few ways that lonelier people think and experience the world differently than less-lonely people. From Loneliness, I learned that as the years progress, lonelier people see their cognitive abilities decline, which impacts their ability to correctly interpret social cues and gain benefit from social interactions. Chronically lonely people get less enjoyment out of even positive social interactions. Loneliness is self-reinforcing.

But these are ways that lonelier people are different from less-lonely people and similar to each other. The UCLA researchers wanted to know if lonelier people are also different from each other as well.

The study is very limited. It relies on fMRI and included only 63 participants, all UCLA students as far as I could tell.

But it did find evidence that lonely people experience the world in “idiosyncratic ways.”

The authors point out that being weird makes it harder for normies to understand you. And that feeling misunderstood contributes to feelings of loneliness.

Which makes me think about how shame and gender norms contribute to loneliness.

The study seems to reinforce the idea that “weird” really is a spectrum. Everyone is weird, but some really are much weirder than others.

As a person of weirdness, at some point pretty early in life I started to expect “normal” people to misunderstand me. To this day, I find it draining to try to connect with people who aren’t fringe/extreme in some way that connects with the ways in which I’m fringe/extreme.

It makes me think about regressive masculinity norms which make it more difficult for men to share their more vulnerable feelings and experiences with others.

So men, especially men weirder men, think they’re weird in ways that don’t even really comport with reality.

I think shame and gender norms inhibit people who are idiosyncratic from discovering when and where they are in fact very well understood by others. Which unnecessarily exacerbates loneliness.

This is why the internet has been such a boon for helping ease weirdo loneliness, and one reason I think AI could be as well. Before the internet, it was far more difficult to find and connect with the people who were weird in similar ways.

I imagine AI as a shame-free personal assistant. Someone you can say or ask anything without worrying about what they think of you. In fact, one of the best parts of therapy for me is having someone I can vent to who will listen intently without judging me, who I don’t have to worry about exhausting or upsetting. AI can be that for everyone. AI could, with permission, seamlessly connect all the people who think they’re the only person on Earth who…

To me, there’s nothing inherently good about normal or bad about weird. Plus, if variation weren’t adaptive, humanity probs wouldn’t have evolved it. Most importantly to me, aesthetically, uniqueness is more interesting than uniformity.

But idiosyncrasy is also necessarily alienating. And that’s not so good. So I’m super happy to see research on this topic and look forward to much more thinking on how to connect everyone. Even and especially the weirdos.

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