New York City, Loneliness, and Depression
Most newcomers to New York comment on how unusually easy it is to know a lot of people here without feeling particularly close to anyone. Next to burnout and overworking, loneliness is one of the most common feelings this city produces, but unlike the kind of loneliness that other areas breed, loneliness in New York is often more than sheer isolation. New York City is one of the most crowded places on earth so, love it or hate it, you're really rarely ever isolated. When people explain that they feel "lonely," they are usually referring to a constellation of feelings that the city generates particularly well: a feeling that no one really cares about you, that you're unimportant or unwanted, that life has become monotonous.
People can spend their day surrounded by coworkers or other students, exchanging messages with half a dozen friends, meet someone for drinks, go on a date, but then come home to the uncomfortable realization that in the moments that seem to really matter, they are alone. The strangest feature of this is that in order to feel this way, you don't even need to spend that much time alone.
As everyone from Nietzsche to Katy Perry has observed, one can be lonely but not alone and alone but not lonely. There is an important difference between having people to talk to and have a good time with on the one hand, and feeling connected to people who you know view you as an essential part of each others lives. In New York, where everyone makes plans and only a third actually follow through with them, you can have plenty of the former without much of the latter.
The relationship between loneliness and depression is complicated. Loneliness can be painful without being depression, and you can feel profoundly depressed without actually being lonely. Nevertheless, the two are often connected. In today's blog post, we examine the relationship between loneliness and depression, by coming at it from a few different angles - as a college student, as someone on the dating scene, and finally as someone who is more established in their life and career - and unpack what is going on in each case that connects loneliness and depression in NYC. We then discuss how psychotherapy in New York can help.
Feeling Lonely at College in NYC
The colleges and universities in New York City are among the best in the world, and people travel very long distances to come here to study. For undergrads, the move can be particularly scary. The caliber of student is extraordinarily high and many students who cannot resist the urge to compare themselves to others end up struggling with imposter syndrome. As well, unlike so many other places to study, there is no real "campus" which means that your fellow students simply pour out of classes and disperse into the city, rather than hang out in the quad or outside the dorms. College students in New York often seek a depression therapist in New York because it can feel like making friends at this stage in life requires a whole new set of skills than it did when they were in high school.
For graduate students, the experience is often somewhat different. Even those that are familiar with the pace of New York City and with academic life like grad students can come to feel isolated and alone very quickly. That is partly because people in Masters and PhD programs tend to be older and making friends as an adult is considerably harder and requires a different approach than when people are younger. With work, a partner, and a job, life can fill up with administrative tasks and people forget to make time for friends and self-care until they feel acutely bad. Grad students tend to try to keep their head down in their studies for a bit too long, allowing the isolation to turn to loneliness, and the loneliness to turn to depression, before they start therapy for depression.
Dating, Loneliness, and Depression
Dating in New York City can feel like both an obligation and a bloodsport. For many people, dating feels like a chore: you've worked out this morning, gone to work for nine hours, came back home to shower and change before heading out to meet someone you've been talking to for 2 days on Hinge for drinks. Are you excited about this the date? Not really, but if you don't date then it feels like you're doing something wrong. You'd rather stay home and watch Netflix, but your friends are dating and your coworker is getting married and... this is just something you're supposed to do.
With that kind of pressure, dating can feel supremely important and if nothing develops it can feel like it is a comment on who you are as a person. Once you get into that headspace, though, it can be hard to let yourself go and have fun. More and more, dating becomes characterized by anxiety, or depressive thoughts, or both. It is no longer "This person seems fun - I'd like to see them again" but, "I hope they like me because I hate being single."
The line between loneliness and depression can be very narrow. Because the feeling of loneliness is often a recognition that a certain kind of relationship is missing in your life, many people who have been dating for a while can start to ruminate: Maybe other people are more likable. Maybe you are difficult to get close to. Maybe everyone else learned how to build relationships and you somehow didn't.
These feelings tend to create self-sustaining patterns. A disappointing date is no longer just a disappointing date but it is another piece of evidence that you are unwanted, and that feeling of being unwanted creates a pressure that you carry with you into the next date. Loneliness and depression fit together like puzzle-pieces in dating: loneliness signals that something is missing from your life, and depression makes that absence a judgment about the value of that life.
New York I Love You... But You're Bringing Me Down
One of the most common reasons people seek psychotherapy for depression in NYC is not because of school, or work, or even dating per se, but because their relationships aren't where they thought they would be. You might be friendly with coworkers or classmates, you might have a partner who you love dearly, you have people you can invite to dinner, but you don't have the relationships you thought you would have by this point in your life. It's not that you thought your life would be like the show Friends, but you did think it would be more than working all day and then having a drink or two every weekend with some people you like but don't really care about.
This kind of feeling can be pretty scary - you've worked your whole life for this life and now you have it but it still feels... off. You're happy with your career, with your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse, you're happy with where you live, but something still feels incomplete and you don't know what it is. This can be particularly frustrating for very high-achieving and high-functioning people who feel that they have worked their whole life precisely not to feel this way. However, high-functioning depression is one of the more common reasons people start depression therapy in Manhattan.
Where Loneliness Meets Depression
Like boredom or anxiety, loneliness can be a normal, if unpleasant, part of a life; but like burnout, it can also be an early element of depression. In each of the cases we have discussed above, loneliness veers into depression when the feeling that something is missing from your life starts to determine how you evaluate your life itself. The college student isn't merely thinking "I haven't made friends yet", they think "What is wrong with me?"; the person dating isn't thinking "I want to date someone I feel connected to", they think "Everyone else has found someone - why doesn't anyone want me?"; the high-functioning professional doesn't think "Life is complicated and a moving target, there are still more things to do", they think "I got into the school I wanted to attend, moved to the city I wanted to live in, and I'm miserable. Why can't life feel good? "
The NYC psychotherapy community has seen these patterns for decades. There is a common structure to this: a belief that something that feels missing becomes a judgment about the person, and that judgment about the person becomes generalized to the person's life as a whole. Loneliness becomes entangled with depression, in other words, when the loneliness starts to work as evidence that there is something wrong with you, that life is hopeless or meaningless, that things will never change.
Therapy for Loneliness and Depression in NYC
We have focused on how loneliness can affect depression in teens and college students, high-functioning depression, and result from difficulties dating, but there are, obviously, other groups where loneliness can dovetail into depressive thoughts. This is especially true for new mothers who often feel left alone with a huge amount of expectations on them that can feel overwhelming and insurmountable. The feeling of loneliness as a new mother is one of the reasons why therapy for new moms and maternity therapy more broadly is so essential.
Loneliness and depression are intricately related, not only because loneliness can be a cause of depression, but because depression can make the changes a person needs to make to feel less lonely much harder to make. If you come to believe that other people do not really want you around, every ambiguous interaction can look like a confirmation; if you are convinced that dating will end badly, dates will feel less like an opportunity to have fun and meet someone, than a test of whether you are desirable.
A depression therapist in Manhattan can help with both sides of that problem. The goal is not to persuade you to settle or that you should be satisfied with relationships and a life that leave you unhappy, but to prevent the fact that something needs to change from becoming a conviction about who you are, or what your life needs to be.
At Lexington Park Psychotherapy, our team offers in-person depression therapy in Manhattan and online throughout New York. If loneliness has begun to affect how you see yourself, your relationships, or what you expect from your future, therapy can help you understand what is missing from your life, and what that absence has come to mean to you.
