Never Letting Anyone In Has Its Cost
Finding the silver lining is a genuinely useful skill. A good attitude in a bad stretch is often the difference between getting through it and being flattened by it.
But you can take it too far. Look hard enough for the upside of a bad situation and you can talk yourself into believing the situation is good.
I keep thinking about a TikTok I came across. Bright yellow text over a candid video — the format that somehow gets more honest than a diary:
I was somewhere between admiring it and worrying about it.
There's real resilience in making the best of things. But it's one thing to be glad of a quiet evening after a brutal week. It's another to be grateful for the loneliness itself.
Being comfortable alone is a skill worth having. Cutting yourself off from people entirely is something else, and it comes for you eventually. We're not built to run solo.
What that post sounds like to me isn't a love of solitude. It's a fear of being vulnerable — of getting close, depending on someone, and having it go badly.
And it loops. Keeping people at a distance leaves you alone. Being alone long enough becomes lonely. So you decide you prefer the loneliness. And now there's no reason to risk anyone again.
Another one:
Maybe the fear was never loneliness. Maybe it's needing someone.
I understand it, honestly. Alone can look like the lesser evil — better alone than in bad company. The problem is what happens when that hardens into a whole worldview.
Protecting yourself is normal. Guard everything, though, and yes, nothing bad gets in. Not much good does either.
Why this matters beyond one person
Because it feeds something bigger.
The WHO Commission on Social Connection reported in 2025 that around 15.8% of the world's population was lonely between 2014 and 2023.
Young adults and teenagers are carrying the most of it — roughly 17.45% and 20.9%.
We're slowly losing the ability to build and hold on to each other. And it costs more than it feels like it does at the time — including healthy years of your actual life.
There's no shortage of things to blame. Jobs that eat you. Remote work. The pandemic. Graduating and scattering. Having kids. The disappearance of anywhere to go that isn't a shop. Social media.
But some of it is inward, and worth being honest about. Are we willing to open up enough to build something with someone? Sometimes not. And settling for loneliness keeps the whole thing turning.
The vulnerability paradox
The way out of loneliness is meaningful relationships. The way you build meaningful relationships is by telling people true things about yourself. Which is the exact thing that's frightening.
Social psychology calls the mechanism Social Penetration Theory: closeness deepens through self-disclosure. You reveal something, you get an accepting response, they offer something back. Round and round, and that's intimacy. Over time the care other people show you starts shaping the care you show yourself.
Which means closeness is built out of interdependence and exposure — two genuinely scary things to hand someone. You are giving another person the ability to hurt you. You are volunteering to be judged.
Feeling that is not a personal defect. It's common enough to have a name: the vulnerability paradox, from Brené Brown, a researcher at the University of Houston who studies vulnerability, shame and empathy. The strange part is that vulnerability is the first thing we look for in other people and the first thing we hide in ourselves. She writes about it in Daring Greatly.
Relationships come with risk, like most things worth having. The risk is worth it — for your health, your head, your years. Isolation is expensive. It'll keep out the judgement and the disappointment and the betrayal. It also keeps out everything else.
Where to start letting people in
Being vulnerable doesn't mean telling everyone everything. A few small ways in:
Listen, and match it. When someone tells you something — funny, sad, frightening — say you've felt that too.
Say something true about yourself. It can be small. Your dog. What your weekend actually looked like, not the edited version.
Admit when you're wrong or don't know. Nothing disarms people faster. It quietly says I trust you with this.
Remember whose opinion counts. Judgement only lands when you rate it above your own read on yourself.
And it's completely fine to protect yourself from people who've hurt you. Just don't let
them cost you everyone else.
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