Loneliness is a measure of self-understanding

Def #1 is way off. Loneliness is to feel that other people don't relate to you; to be misunderstood _can_ create this situation but so does different likes/dislikes, different moral premises, or even plain prejudice.

Def #2 assumes that there's no such thing as non-verbal knowledge. I wouldn't be so sure; if there's one thing that all that qualia crap shows, is that some things cannot be communicated verbally.

>the lack of understanding you by other people is caused by the lack of skills to explain yourself to others,

Even if someone accepts the heavily questionable premises ("definitions") #1 and #2, this is still problematic because it is an unwarranted assumption. It is not a logical consequence of the premises, even if dressed as such.

>Ultimately, you are the recipient of feeling understood or misunderstood, not others. So it’s your task to make others understand you.

GI/GO. Questionable premises + faulty reasoning = dumb "advice".

Some people will never understand you no matter how much you know yourself, and how good you are at explaining yourself to the others. And some people will never relate to you no matter how much they understand you.

Indeed, even my most empathetic, patient friends will struggle to care about a topic entirely unrelated to them for long. You do have to make an effort to find people who can relate to you in some dimension. That's why hobbies are a common suggesting for making friends, you immediately have common ground.

For me, loneliness is not a lack of understanding but a lack of connection. The main difference being understanding is often about "knowing" and connection is often about "not knowing" (or being comfortable with not knowing something).

I personally have felt the most lonely when I feel disconnected from how I'm feeling AND how someone else is feeling.

1) If I get too focused on how I'm feeling and distant from how others are feeling, I can start to believe that no one will ever understand me, or "get me."

2) If I'm too focused on how others are feeling and not on how I'm feeling, then I may feel a lot of resentment towards them for not paying attention to me.

3) If I'm not focused on either how I'm feeling or how they might be feeling, I can feel quite numb and empty.

So for me, what helps is trying to focus on how I'm feeling and how other people might be feeling, while also trying to focus on letting myself accept uncertainty for both of those things.

Not sure how seriously to take this but:

1) First of all, staying in the world of pure deductive reasoning, isn't this fallacious?

> lack of skills to explain yourself is caused by lack of understanding yourself.

It's: (can't explain) => (doesn't understand), not (doesn't understand) => (can't explain). (I.e., there could be other reasons you can't explain yourself well).

2) More seriously, I think the "if you can't explain it you don't understand it" adage is more about concepts than about people. A person is a complicated set of constantly changing thoughts and emotions, and I'm unsure that it's possible to explain the entire phenomenon of a given person "simply".

That said, I think there's definitely a nugget of truth here. Often you feeling lonely may be the result of you not expressing yourself openly or honestly with people around you.