Loneliness is a measure of self-understanding

This article touches on something interesting but is woefully inaccurate to the point of causing harm. It devolves into almost an entreaty to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and take responsibility for not being understood.

Being understood is a complete joke, it's simply not important and for many of us on extreme ends of the bell curve is effectively impossible.

I was born with multiple heart defects, I was constantly at the cardiologist until about 15 with multiple surgeries and procedures. In all likelihood I will die relatively young.

My first memory and start of having memories was at 3, where I was about to go into surgery and might just die. A high probability of imminent death is the first remembered experience of my life.

I was fully grown by ~12 as a result of the stresses of surgery.

My parents both died when I was right around 20, a few years apart.

I started working fulltime at 15 to keep a roof over my families head and food on the table because of a combination of my fathers depression, the lies an old friend told him, my mothers poorly timed diagnosis of cancer and the evil state of pre-existing coverage rules pre-aca.

I was homeschooled after the age of 5.

I was not allowed to lift anything heavier than a jug of milk until 16 due to my heart problem.

I was not allowed to play organized sports.

I never had a birthday party with friend until 30 due to my birthdate.

My entire perspective on life is inverted, I am a dead person still living not an alive person avoiding death. This is fundemental and very very rarely understood.

Do you think at 7 any of my peers could understand me? No. Ditto as a teen and even into today. I am an extremely clear and concise communicator but I cannot inject complex, time layered, developmentally critical... insanity into a concise story that conveys the truth of living it. Not even as a novel.

The people I felt best understood by were a group I knew when I was 10 and they were in their late 70s and early 80s and about to die.

They played cards together at a senior citizens center, some traumas and life perspectives cannot be understood, it's a bell curve like so many things.

I am now in the top ~.5% of earnings for my cohort, this is also further isolating, I have a rare amount of resilience as well.

There are other unsusual things that are more common but still rare in and of themselves and compound the lack of shared reference points.

Small bits of my experience can be connected to by others now that I am older, the early loss of a parent, having a career as a child, the existential fear of returning to poverty, extreme poverty when young, homelessness, kids that had a leukemia relapse and the distancing that caused with their parents... but all together there is no one who can enter into my headspace, there is no cohesive framework of experiences for people to understand the extremes I have overcome.

Some trauma and experiences can smooth your edges and help you have the compassion to better connect, but at the extremes you just have to realize that being understood and being loved are not the same.

You can have a full life filled with love and many dear friends and community without being "understood".

I don’t know. I believe that language shapes reality.

For example, I decided I wanted to let go of latent homophobia by dropping a word from my vocabulary that was seen as fairly harmless by sis males when I was growing up. After consciously avoiding it and choosing not to say it, even in my mind, for a while, it truly left my pallet of words for expression. I do think that had a perceivable (to me) effect on my attitude and thinking.

How many esoteric words have you learned in life that helped you to better describe a situation? I look up any word I don’t know (in something of an OCD way). I’ve had many “aha“ moments where learning a word gave me a slightly greater ability to understand the world, hence “shaping” my view of it. It’s not exact, but I wouldn’t be so dismissive of the value in thinking about words and decisions on how to think about things.

"Loneliness is when we are surrounded by people and feel misunderstood by others." By this definition a prisoner in solitary confinement is not lonely. That seems problematic. The overall argument might still be useful, but I wouldn't call these things definitions, just implications (IF you are surrounded by people and feel misunderstood by others THEN you feel lonely).

"As a man, I have lots of people in my life who love me, but they consistently fail to take notice of my emotional needs."

Although every man's circles are different, your experience is highly common. I'm going to intentionally dramatize a little to get the point across efficiently.

Men effectively live in an emotional desert. Showing emotion, vulnerability or dependency is discouraged, dismissed or even ridiculed. Men lack a support system. They're often the last buck and there's nothing or nobody to back them up.

This is why to many men, their relation with their mother is holy. It's often the only source of genuine unconditional love and a safe place to be vulnerable. Of course, you can't even have that, this too is to be ridiculed, hence the many "your mum" jokes.

When men get sick, they're ridiculed for being such a baby. Here too a rare sign of vulnerability expressed is to be laughed at.

Men are judged by utility. Society doesn't care about men's needs or problems. They are willingly sacrificed in war, work, homeless on the streets, and in suicide without this even being a topic of mainstream interest.

The handful of reasonable feminists spotting how this complete indifference is a problem are shouted down by their radical counterparts, that have seized the movement. Not only is there no mainstream culture to care about men, it's openly hostile to men in general.

If I were to post my little lecture on a social network, I'd be piled on with: "oh you poor man, you have it sooooo bad lmao!!!"

Anyway, I know none of this helps, but I just wanted to share that your experience in many ways is the experience of many if not most men. And I think you analyzed the situation very well with the "deer in the headlights" remark.