Loneliness is not the absence of people. It is the absence of connection while surrounded by the infrastructure of connection: the group chats, the open-plan offices, the coffee shops full of strangers who will not speak to you, the phone in your pocket that could ring but doesn’t. This distinction sounds obvious when you write it down. Living it is something else entirely.
My first full winter in Copenhagen, 2016 into 2017, taught me this in a way no article or podcast could have. I’d moved from Melbourne that autumn, and by December the city had become a study in contrasts: warm interiors, cold air, early darkness, the particular quiet of a Nordic city that has decided to turn inward. I had a job, a flat in Nørrebro, colleagues who were friendly in that specifically Danish way that takes months to decode. And I was, by most measures, alone.
But I wasn’t always lonely. That was the confusing part.
The vocabulary problem
English gives us “loneliness” and “solitude” as if they’re cousins. They aren’t. One is a state of deprivation. The other can be a state of restoration. The trouble is that from the outside, they look identical: a person sitting by themselves in a window, a single plate on the table, a walk taken without company.
Some people find solitude therapeutic and enriching, savouring their time alone. Others experience solitude as anxiety and restlessness, arranging their lives to avoid it at all costs. The difference isn’t circumstantial. It’s internal.
I spent that first winter toggling between the two states, sometimes within the same hour. A Sunday morning reading at my kitchen table: solitude. The same Sunday evening, scrolling through Instagram stories of friends in Melbourne going to the beach together: loneliness. Same apartment. Same person. Completely different experience.
The Friday night and the Saturday night
The evening I remember most clearly from that December was a Friday. I’d spent the week deep in a long feature for the culture desk, the kind of work that uses every part of your brain and leaves you pleasantly emptied. I walked home through Nørrebro in the dark, bought groceries at the Irma on Elmegade, and made pasta with anchovies and lemon. I ate it at my kitchen table with a glass of wine and a novel I’d been rationing. Outside, the street was quiet, the windows across the courtyard glowing in that particular amber that Danish apartments produce in winter. I didn’t speak to anyone for five hours. I felt completely, richly fed.
The next night was different. Saturday. No plans, which hadn’t been a choice so much as an absence of options. I hadn’t yet built the kind of friendships in Copenhagen where someone texts you casually, the way my friends in Melbourne would have — “we’re at the pub, come.” I made dinner again. Sat at the same table. Opened the same novel. But the silence had changed shape. It pressed inward. I checked my phone eleven times in an hour, not because I expected anything but because the checking itself was a kind of reaching. I went to bed at nine-thirty feeling like something had been taken from me, though nothing had changed except the thing happening inside my chest.
Same apartment. Same woman. Same table, same quiet street. But Friday had been solitude and Saturday had been loneliness, and until that weekend I don’t think I understood that those were two entirely different languages.
What Nordic darkness actually does
People who haven’t lived through a Scandinavian winter tend to romanticise the candles and the blankets, or they catastrophise about seasonal depression. The reality sits between those poles. The darkness doesn’t cause loneliness. But it strips away the distractions that normally prevent you from noticing it.
In Melbourne, if I felt restless on a Saturday, I could wander to a beach, run into someone I knew at a bar, fill the hours with ambient sociality. Copenhagen in January offers fewer escape routes. The sun sets before four. The streets empty early. You’re left with what’s actually inside your head, and some winters, that company isn’t great.
There’s a reason Ingmar Bergman’s films land differently once you’ve lived through Nordic winter. The silences, the interiors, the characters trapped with their own psychology. We’ve explored Bergman’s essential films on this site before, but what strikes me now is how well he understood that being alone in a room and being lonely in a room are dramatically different cinematic propositions. His characters often have company. They’re lonely anyway.
The coffee shop and the harbour
By late January I’d started, without quite naming it, running experiments on myself. One morning I took my laptop to a café on Jægersborggade, ordered a flat white, and sat there for three hours. I wasn’t meeting anyone. I wasn’t even working, really — reading more than writing, looking up occasionally at the other people hunched over their own screens and books. When I left I felt restored in a way I couldn’t fully explain. I’d been alone the entire time, but the presence of other humans, their ambient warmth and noise, had done something.
The next week I tried the opposite. A long walk along the harbour on a Sunday, phone on airplane mode, no podcast, just the cold and the water and the sound of my own footsteps on the boardwalk. I thought this would be the deeper, more meaningful solitude — the kind you’re supposed to crave. It wasn’t. I lasted forty minutes before the silence started to feel confrontational rather than restorative, and I turned my phone back on like someone coming up for air.
This surprised me enough that I started reading about it, and what I found matched my experience exactly. Research on what some have called the solitude spectrum suggests that lighter forms of solitude — simply not interacting with others while still being around them — can be more restorative than the deep-wilderness, phone-off variety. The quiet coffee shop might actually recharge you more than the solo cabin retreat.
My best winter days were never the ones where I locked myself in the apartment and “leaned into” being alone. They were the café days. The existing-near-other-humans-without-needing-anything-from-them days.
When solitude becomes involuntary
The key variable, in both the research and in life, is choice. Chosen solitude tends to be beneficial. Unchosen solitude tends to corrode.
I felt this acutely during a stretch in February when a bad cold kept me home for a week. The first two days felt like a gift — enforced rest, the kind my body needed. By day four, the walls had tightened. I wasn’t choosing to be alone anymore; I was stuck. The same flat that had felt like a sanctuary on Friday night felt like a cell by Tuesday afternoon. Nothing had changed except the element of volition, and it changed everything.
The stakes of this distinction aren’t trivial. Research has found that social isolation is a bigger risk factor for premature death than cigarette smoking or heavy alcohol use. That’s not a metaphor. That’s physiology. And it’s not evenly distributed — young men, in particular, face a loneliness epidemic shaped partly by masculine stereotypes that discourage naming the problem. If admitting you’re lonely feels like weakness, you simply won’t do it. The loneliness stays, unnamed and unaddressed.
I recognised this dynamic watching male friends in Copenhagen navigate their social lives. The ones who struggled most weren’t the most isolated. They were the ones who couldn’t say what they needed.
The intentionality tax
One thing nobody warns you about when you move to a new country in your late twenties is how much energy friendship requires. In Melbourne, my social life had built itself over years of shared classes, jobs, mutual friends, neighbourhood proximity. In Copenhagen, every friendship needed to be actively constructed.
I think of this as the intentionality tax. It’s real, and you pay it every week. A monthly video call with my closest friend from university, who moved back to Melbourne a few years ago, doesn’t happen unless someone puts it in the calendar. Neither does dinner with colleagues, or the kind of casual weekend plans that used to materialise organically in my twenties.
Danes have a reputation for being difficult to befriend, and there’s some truth in it. But the deeper issue isn’t cultural coldness. It’s that Danish social networks are built early and run deep, and there isn’t always obvious space for a newcomer. Understanding this didn’t make it easier, but it did make it less personal.
Virginia Satir, the family therapist, reportedly said that contact is the appreciation of differences. I think about that sometimes. The friendships I’ve built here, including with a Norwegian architect whose practice is hours outside Oslo and who I collaborate with occasionally on stories, are richer for having required effort. But the effort is real. Maintaining friendships across time zones and professional worlds is a skill, not a personality trait.
The phone in your pocket
Something that winter taught me is how fundamentally phones have changed our relationship to being alone. If your phone is on and connected, you are never truly in deep solitude. You are always, at least theoretically, reachable. This is both a comfort and a trap.
Psychologist Thuy-vy Nguyen has argued that solitude offers genuine psychological benefits that get lost in the current panic about a loneliness epidemic. She’s not dismissing the epidemic. She’s asking whether the conversation has become so focused on the dangers of being alone that we’ve forgotten what being alone can give us.
I think this is right, and I think it’s particularly relevant in Scandinavia, where solitude has always been culturally legible. The Nordic tradition of the cabin in the woods, the long solo walk, the quiet afternoon with a book: these are not symptoms of social failure. They’re practices. They’re valued.
What’s changed is the phone. The cabin still exists, but now you bring WiFi to it. The solo walk happens with a podcast in your ears. The quiet afternoon is interrupted by notifications. We’re rarely in deep solitude anymore. We just want to be left alone in the proximity of others, scrolling gently.
Whether that’s a loss depends on what you think solitude is for.
Two languages, one fluency
I’ve been in Copenhagen for nearly ten years now. The winters still arrive early and stay long. My relationship to being alone has shifted in ways that feel tectonic, even if they look, from the outside, like nothing much has changed.
I still eat dinner alone sometimes. I still walk the lakes by myself on Sunday mornings. My partner, who is an architect, works long hours, and our schedules don’t always align. These are not problems. They’re the texture of an adult life that includes both solitude and togetherness, and knowing which one you’re in makes all the difference.
Some evenings he’ll show me work-in-progress sketches, and we’ll argue about whether a building is honest or just performing honesty. Those conversations are the opposite of loneliness. They’re a different kind of solitude, broken. Other evenings we sit in the same room reading different things, and that silence is its own language too.
The confusion I had that first winter was not about being alone too much. It was about not knowing which version of alone I was in. Once I learned to tell the difference, the city opened up. The darkness was still dark. But I could see in it.
Loneliness is a signal. It means something is missing and something needs to change. Solitude is a resource. It means you have space to think, to rest, to come back to other people with something to offer. They feel the same from the outside. From the inside, they’re two completely different languages.
Fluency in both doesn’t mean you stop feeling lonely. It means you recognise the feeling when it arrives — in your body before your mind, that restless reaching — and you know it’s not the same thing as the quiet that nourishes you. You learn to answer loneliness with connection, not distraction. You learn to protect solitude from the noise that wants to fill it. And some Friday nights, in a Nørrebro apartment with a novel and a glass of wine and the amber glow of the courtyard windows, you sit in the silence and understand exactly which language it’s speaking.
Photo by Kristine Bruzite on Pexels