It’s a quarter past midnight, and the feeling has come to me again. It’s the same feeling that has haunted me since I started living alone: loneliness.

I picked up my phone. I want to talk to someone. But who? It’s past midnight, and I don’t want my parents to know I’m sleeping late. How about texting a friend? What should I say? I am lonely? That would be so weird. I would feel more comfortable talking about nerd topics, but that wouldn’t cure my loneliness.

How about some entertainment: short-form videos, games, live streams, pornography, social media…? Trust me, they don’t relieve loneliness. They only help me forget it until it’s late enough that sleep becomes the only option. As for long-form videos, films, and books, I don’t feel I have that much time to allocate to them right now, even though short videos often end up consuming far more time.

With the advent of technology, I can also find people online to talk to, for example on dating apps. But over time, I’ve found that exhausting too. Not everyone is friendly, and many people aren’t interested in talking to me. It’s rare to have a fulfilling conversation with strangers, whether online or in person. The conversations can be fun or informative, but they rarely help with my loneliness.

There is another option now: the AI chatbot. The benefit of talking to an LLM is that I can say whatever I want without being judged and still get an intelligent, supportive response. I totally love that. But something is still missing. I find myself missing the imperfection and unpredictability of human responses, much like how people prefer live concerts over studio recordings.

It seems as if the best solution is to find a girlfriend. Of course it is! That might solve all my problems—or it might create new problems that I don’t yet know about. I’ve stayed single for most of my life, and I’ve been quite picky. Now that I’m thinking about potential future marriage, I’ve become even pickier. And I may well stay single for the next five years.

So how to cope with this excruciating loneliness?

Continuity of Life

I’ve come to realize that the continuity of memory may be the essence of life. Depending on the level of abstraction, the answer to the philosophical question “Who am I?” might be:

1. My brain.
2. The topology and weights of neurons in my brain.
3. The collection of all past events in my memory.

I don’t know how 30 years of personal history can be compressed into such a compact space, but it certainly feels continuous, flowing like a river. An LLM in 2026 doesn’t have its own story. It can memorize many people’s stories or be fed a persona document within its context window, but such fragmented narratives feel nowhere near as real as my own. That difference between stored text and lived continuity may be why AI conversations comfort me without fully curing loneliness.

In this light, loneliness may well be the natural state of life. If I am the only one in the world experiencing this continuous flow of events and storing them in a low-entropy state in my brain, I would be lonely for sure. Loneliness decreases only when someone else, who can also feel the continuity, crosses paths with me, so that our continuities share a segment of the same story. And loneliness is minimized when we experience that shared story in similar ways, or when they are as important in my story as I am in theirs.

As a civilization, our collective life may be infinite. Perhaps loneliness matters less if the continuity of memory can extend indefinitely. Or perhaps infinite time offers infinite hope of meeting infinitely many other civilizations in the universe.

As an individual, my life is finite, and loneliness does become a concern, because my time with people I love will be limited. There is an urgency to maximize such overlaps in continuity.

Hierarchy of Experiences

As an individual with finite time, living among other individuals with finite time, I yearn for some form of eternity for my loved ones and for myself, much like how ancient Egyptians preserved bodies in pyramids. Whether by building something that lasts, making recorded achievements, taking photographs, or writing blog posts, we try to leave an indelible mark on history. It’s as if we are speaking to someone in the future, forming an intertemporal connection that alleviates loneliness. And I often wish that my favorite bygone authors and artists could know how much I love their work.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that in practice, after I die, my continuity of life stops. The future will unfold in infinitely many ways, none of which I can influence anymore.

So now I want to experience my finite life in a way that feels desirable. There are many ways to play the game of life, and the only real failure is playing it as if it were about winning. I don’t want to optimize for money, fame, power, or sex. I don’t want to run endlessly on a hedonic treadmill (think The Wolf of Wall Street). What kind of life do I truly want?

It seems to me that the meaning of life—the ultimate philosophical question—is closely tied to loneliness. Conquering loneliness appears to be a goal of life, if not the goal. There is something profoundly human about co-authoring a narrative with another sentient being in the stream of space-time.

But not all narratives feel equal. Their value depends on depth, continuity, and reciprocity. I like to think of my life experiences and interactions in five tiers:

• Tier 1: Irreplaceable, identity-forming bonds with unconditional care (e.g., parents, children, an ideal spouse)
• Tier 2: Non-transactional companionship where both can laugh together wholeheartedly (e.g., genuine friends, close relatives)
• Tier 3: Intrapersonal exploration that refines perception and brings warmth and resonance to solitude (e.g., books, movies, music, art, science; interacting with kind people around the world; talking to AI)
• Tier 4: Transactional relationships, fame, money, and power that are tools for survival and for enhancing experiences in Tiers 1 through 3
• Tier 5: Fleeting dopamine escapes (e.g., drugs, gambling, impulsive sexual encounters, uninformative doomscrolling)

The higher the tier, the more nourishing the experience, and the more it increases happiness while reducing loneliness.

What Next

Understanding life, happiness, and loneliness is a lifelong process of exploration and introspection. I don’t know how the world and my life will unfold, but it’s clear to me that I should protect my Tier 1 experiences, maintain consistent Tier 2 experiences, and use Tier 3 experiences to fill the gaps.

When I’m single and far away from my parents, and my friends are busy (or I have a busy schedule of my own), Tier 3 experiences become my way of coping with solitude. Blog writing belongs in this category.

Today, I’m writing this post to myself as a snapshot of my life. I’m talking to my greatest listener, the one whose continuity overlaps with mine completely. (And perhaps also to my future self, who may find this post super naive.) I feel a sense of catharsis now, as if I’m not lonely anymore. For now, this is one way I’m learning to be self-sufficient.