Keywords: alonetude, human right to rest, solitude, social justice, loneliness epidemic, scholarly personal narrative, precarious labour, embodied rest
If loneliness is a public health crisis, is the capacity for solitude a human right?
Image: Finding Space to be Alone
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. An empty chair symbolises the threshold between imposed isolation and chosen presence.
Loneliness, Solitude, and the Philosophical Distinction
Tillich extended this distinction beyond description to practice, arguing that loneliness can only be transformed by those who learn to bear solitude. He wrote that humans seek to feel their aloneness “not in pain and horror, but with joy and courage,” and that solitude itself can be understood as a form of spiritual or existential practice (Tillich, 1963, chap. 1). This framing anticipates contemporary understandings of solitude as an active, meaning-making process rather than a passive state, and provides a philosophical grounding for the concept of alonetude as the labour of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence
There is a difference between loneliness and solitude. Philosophers have known this for centuries.
Image: The Liminal Threshold
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. A shoreline marking the in-between space where loneliness becomes alonetude.
Paul Tillich (1963) named it simply: loneliness expresses the pain of being alone, while solitude expresses its glory. Psychologist Anthony Storr (1988) challenged the assumption that intimate relationships serve as the only source of human happiness, arguing that solitude ranks alongside connection in its capacity to sustain well-being. Contemporary research confirms what contemplatives long understood: loneliness arises from perceived inadequacy of connection, while solitude emerges through chosen, meaningful engagement with oneself (Perlman & Peplau, 1981; Nguyen et al., 2018).
Loneliness is inflicted; solitude is chosen.
Loneliness is inflicted; solitude is chosen. Loneliness is the pain of being alone; solitude is the peace of it. To be lonely is to desire an absent want, to feel an emptiness that remains unsatisfied. To be solitary is to retreat into oneself and find, there, good company.
This framing resonates with, yet extends, existing scholarship on solitude (Storr, 1988), relational autonomy (Mackenzie & Stoljar, 2000), and affective infrastructures of belonging (Ahmed, 2017). However, alonetude departs from romanticised accounts of solitude by foregrounding structural constraint and political economy. It insists that the capacity to be alone generatively is unevenly distributed and socially produced. This study extends Tillich’s existential framing by situating being-alone within colonial, institutional, and political-economic architectures that unevenly distribute the capacity for solitu
Tillich’s existential theology offers an early philosophical distinction between loneliness, the suffering of being alone, and solitude, a generative form of being alone, situating solitude as an existential practice rather than a passive condition. His work frames solitude as a site of encounter, creativity, and ethical reflection, providing a conceptual genealogy for understanding being-alone as both refuge and critique. Building on this lineage, aloneness is theorised here as the labour of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence within structurally produced conditions of separation (Tillich, 1963).
Tillich’s distinction provides a philosophical grounding for alonetude as the labour of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence. By defining loneliness as the pain of being alone and solitude as its glory, Tillich establishes solitude as an existential achievement rather than a passive state. His framing implies that solitude must be borne, cultivated, and enacted, thereby opening conceptual space for alonetude as the agentic work of meaning-making within structurally imposed aloneness. While Tillich locates this transformation within existential theology, this study extends his genealogy into political economy and human rights, conceptualising aloneness as both refuge and critique within institutional architectures that produce separation.
But what happens in between?
Alonetude: The Space Between Loneliness and Solitude
“Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone; solitude expresses the glory of being alone.” (Tillich, 1963, chap. 1)
What do we call the space where loneliness has been imposed by circumstance, yet something in us begins to transform it into something generative? Where isolation, uninvited, slowly becomes a place we learn to inhabit?
I have started calling this alonetude: the liminal space between loneliness and solitude, where we do the quiet work of reclaiming our being-alone from the systems that made it a punishment.
In this work, alonetude is conceptualised as a relational, ethical, and political practice of being alone that emerges within structural conditions of isolation. Unlike solitude, which is typically framed as voluntary retreat, and loneliness, which is framed as social deficit, alonetude names the agentic labour of meaning-making within imposed aloneness. It is both an embodied practice and a critical analytic lens, situating individual experience within institutional and political architectures that produce separation.
Alonetude is the agentic labour of meaning-making within imposed aloneness.
Epidemic Loneliness and Institutional Responsibility
In May 2023, United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an epidemic, issuing an 82-page advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023). By November of that year, the World Health Organization had launched a Commission on Social Connection, naming loneliness a pressing global health priority requiring urgent intervention (World Health Organization, 2023). The Commission’s 2025 flagship report revealed that loneliness accounts for approximately 871,000 deaths annually, equivalent to 100 deaths per hour (World Health Organization, 2025).
We are beginning to understand that chronic loneliness carries health risks comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes daily (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010). Social isolation increases the risk of premature death by nearly thirty percent, elevates stroke risk by thirty-two percent, and raises heart disease risk by twenty-nine percent (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023).
Yet the harder question remains unasked.
If loneliness is a public health crisis, is the capacity for solitude a human right?
I think it might be. And I think the distinction matters enormously for how we understand social justice.
Belonging, Solitude, and the Politics of Human Rights
Consider who has access to solitude and who is forced into loneliness.
Image: The Privilege of Passage
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. A shaded walkway framed by flowering vines and cultivated desert plants, symbolising solitude as a curated and protected passage. The image evokes how access to quiet, beauty, and withdrawal is often architected, maintained, and unevenly distributed, highlighting solitude as a spatial and political privilege rather than a universally available condition.
The elite retreat to cabins in the woods, meditation centres, and silent spas. They pay for the privilege of being beautifully alone. Meanwhile, the precarious are isolated by design.
The elite retreat to cabins in the woods, meditation centres, and silent spas. They pay for the privilege of being beautifully alone. Meanwhile, the precarious are isolated by design: by shift work that fails to align with anyone else’s schedule, by housing too expensive to afford near community, by immigration policies that separate families across oceans, by institutions that count bodies yet fail to learn names.
Their aloneness is uninvited. It is inflicted.
And then I wonder why I struggle.
My solitude is partially chosen and partially imposed, shaped by precarity, digital tethering, and institutional expectations of constant availability.
I write this from a bench behind an institutional building, between meetings that require presence and systems that rarely offer belonging. My solitude is partially chosen and partially imposed, shaped by precarity, digital tethering, and institutional expectations of constant availability. Alonetude becomes both a refuge and a critique, a way of surviving while refusing to normalise the conditions that make refuge necessary.
Belonging, Isolation, and Rights-Based Frameworks
Contemplative teachers have long pointed toward this transformative potential.
Pema Chödrön (2000) teaches that we must learn to befriend our loneliness rather than flee it, to sit with discomfort until it reveals what it has to teach. Wendell Berry (2012) writes that in wild places, where we are without human obligation, our inner voices become audible, and the more coherent we become within ourselves, the more fully we enter into communion with all creatures. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) braids Indigenous wisdom with scientific attention, showing how presence to place can root us even when we have been displaced.
Viktor Frankl (1959), writing from the concentration camps, insisted that meaning could be made even in extremity, that the last human freedom is the ability to choose one’s attitude toward suffering.
Image: Learning to Be With
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. Paths and landscapes evoke contemplative traditions and relational presence to land.
These teachers point toward alonetude as a practice of survival.
When loneliness is imposed, solitude must be cultivated. When isolation is structural, transforming it into something generative becomes an act of resistance.
In digital academic and organizational contexts, solitude is increasingly rendered impossible by surveillance infrastructures: learning analytics, productivity metrics, email expectations, and algorithmic visibility regimes. These systems blur the boundary between connection and extraction, making withdrawal appear as deviance rather than necessity. A right to solitude, therefore, intersects with critiques of surveillance capitalism and institutional time extraction.
Should We Have to Be So Resilient?
This is what troubles me.
Should the capacity to transmute loneliness into solitude be a survival skill that the marginalised must develop because institutions refuse to stop producing isolation?
A human rights framework asks different questions.
It asks what conditions would make the choice between loneliness and solitude genuinely available, rather than asking how individuals can cope with loneliness after it has been inflicted. It asks what structures produce isolation and who benefits from that production. It asks whether belonging is offered as a right or withheld as a privilege. It asks whether the architecture of our institutions is designed to connect or to extract.
The Political Economy of Being Alone
The right to solitude would mean the right to be alone without being abandoned.
The right to withdraw without being punished.
The right to rest without being surveilled.
The right to enough economic security so that being alone carries no threat of danger.
The right to enough social infrastructure means that being with others remains possible when we want it.
These are human rights claims, even if they rarely appear in declarations. While international human rights instruments rarely articulate a right to solitude, related protections appear in rights to privacy, dignity, rest, housing, social security, and family life (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966). A right to solitude without abandonment can be understood as an emergent synthesis of these rights, grounded in the principle that human dignity requires both connection and the capacity for withdrawal without harm.
Solitude Without Abandonment: Toward a Human Rights Framework for Alonetude
Alonetude names the in-between.
The place where we do the work of turning imposed isolation into chosen presence. It honours the agency of those who find ways to be well even when systems are designed to make them unwell.
Yet it also refuses to let those systems escape accountability.
The goal is to become so skilled at alonetude that we forget we deserve justice. The goal is a world where solitude is available to everyone, and loneliness is inflicted on no one.
Until then, we practise.
We find our benches behind old buildings. We learn the names of the birds outside our windows. We sit with what is, until it becomes bearable, and then, sometimes, beautiful.
This is survival while we work to end what makes survival necessary.
Reframing solitude as a human rights concern invites institutional redesign: policies that protect digital disconnection, labour structures that align schedules with community rhythms, housing and immigration policies that reduce forced separation, and pedagogical architectures that prioritise relationality over throughput. Justice, in this sense, is infrastructural.
The goal is a world where solitude is available to everyone, and loneliness is inflicted on no one.
Alonetude is both a practice and a demand.
A way of being and a horizon of justice.
The quiet place where, alone, we remember that we deserve to be.
Image: The Quiet Place Where We Deserve to Be
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Note. Bare feet at the water’s edge, where land meets sea, mark a moment of grounded presence. The image evokes solitude as an embodied encounter rather than absence, being alone while held by place, rhythm, and movement. It gestures toward alonetude as a practice of standing with oneself at the threshold between isolation and connection, presence and belonging, survival and becoming.
Alonetude thus operates as both method and mandate: a practice of surviving within unjust architectures and a theoretical lens for imagining their transformation.
References
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Berry, W. (2012). It all turns on affection: The Jefferson lecture and other essays. Counterpoint.
Chödrön, P. (2000). When things fall apart: Heart advice for difficult times. Shambhala.
Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press.
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), Article e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Office of the Surgeon General. (2023). Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Mackenzie, C., & Stoljar, N. (Eds.). (2000). Relational autonomy: Feminist perspectives on autonomy, agency, and the social self. Oxford University Press.
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. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217733073
Perlman, D., & Peplau, L. A. (1981). Toward a social psychology of loneliness. In S. Duck & R. Gilmour (Eds.), Personal relationships 3: Personal relationships in disorder (pp. 31–56). Academic Press.
Storr, A. (1988). Solitude: A return to the self. Free Press.
Tillich, P. (1963). The eternal now. Charles Scribner’s Sons.World Health Organization. (2023, November 15). WHO launches commission to foster social connection. https://www.who.int/news/item/15-11-2023-who-launches-commission-to-foster-social-connection
World Health Organization. (2025). From loneliness to social connection: Charting a path to healthier societies. Report of the WHO Commission on Social Connection. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240112360
The quiet place where, alone, we remember that we deserve to be.
Note: Tillich’s distinction between loneliness and solitude emerges from Western Christian existential theology and reflects Euro-American philosophical traditions that centre individual subjectivity and spiritual interiority. While this study draws on Tillich to establish a conceptual genealogy for being-alone, the concept of alonetude extends beyond this tradition by foregrounding colonial, institutional, and political-economic structures that differentially produce isolation. Rather than treating solitude as a universal existential condition, alonetude situates being-alone within histories of dispossession, migration, academic precarity, and governance, aligning with decolonial and relational epistemologies that understand solitude as socially and materially mediated.1
Translation note. Spanish language passages in this post were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Translations are intended to convey general meaning and are intended as guides to meaning rather than certified linguistic interpretations.