Most people have the human need to socialise at some level. In the book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick), the authors draw a comparison with food/hunger: under this conceptualisation, loneliness is nothing more complicated than your body telling you that you need to get more of this particular resource (social connection).

But social connection doesn’t need to be social.

In the field of autism and neurodivergent studies, there’s this idea that neurodivergent people often get deep enjoyment from connecting with things that aren’t necessarily other people. Therefore, for these people (which includes me, though obviously autism is no monolith), “loneliness” can be a sign that you need to connect with whatever is deeply meaningful for you. You can get the deep satisfaction of connection without having to actually spend time with another person.

(I’m not sure where this idea originates from specifically—my therapist has promised to tell me if they remember!)

Examples that seem to do it for me:

  1. Cuddling my dogs
  2. Watching videos about old houses
  3. Baking fresh bread
  4. Contemplating spiritual/religious stuff
  5. Working on a stimulating programming project

Of course, I do enjoy spending time with people I like! But this isn’t necessary for exploring these deep connections, which gives me many more options and immense freedom in when and how I choose to use these options.

Update 2024-11-23: My therapist told me that they found some discussion to this effect in the podcast IFS Talks (episode “IFS and Autism with Sarah Bergenfeld - Part 1”):

You may not need relationships in the same way. You may feel connected to something other than humans. And a lot of the time, that’s certainly my personal experience. I’m extremely connected to my dog. I feel connected to things. I have a blanket I take everywhere with me that I feel very connected to. And I think we need to get better at expanding the language of connection and what does connectivity look like and feel like. And for us, connectivity is a way for us to feel grounded and anchored. And we don’t necessarily need a human to human interaction in order to feel that. There are more beings in the world than human beings, right? Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. And it’s not always a trauma response to not want to have connection to humans, right? And it’s not misanthropic to not want to have a connection to humans. It can be that you just simply don’t need it or need much less of it.