Recently, I was at a party in a crowded room, talking with the people around me. I was participating in the conversation. No one was excluding me, and nothing had happened to upset me. Yet somehow, in the middle of all those people, I felt completely alone.

Has this happened to you? I am sure it has.

It was strange because it was not solved by talking to people. I was already talking. People were everywhere, but the feeling was still there.

Although this is something I am aware of, I had never given it much thought. Then I read an essay by Hannah Arendt that was not about parties or loneliness at all. It was about why Socrates believed it was better to suffer a wrong than to commit one.

Arendt's conclusion was that if you do something you believe is wrong, you must afterward live with the person who did it. You become your own uncomfortable companion, judging yourself. She did not describe this as conscience, although conscience seems to be part of what she meant, if we were to talk about it that way. She wrote about the self almost as if it were two people: the person who acts and the person within us who questions and reasons about those actions. But the second self is not just concerned with good and bad. It is the person we reason with about everything.

This is not the imagining of an angel sitting on your shoulder. It is the inner voice you talk with, the conversation you continually have with yourself.

But what does any of this have to do with feeling lonely in a crowd?

When we attend a party or somewhere where there are a lot of people, we quiet that inner conversation to make room for the conversation around us. The second voice does not disappear completely. It can try to reenter the conversation, but we keep quieting it so we can remain engaged with everyone else. Or at least we try.

Then, if the people around us do not engage with us as deeply as we would engage with ourselves, we can begin to feel lonely. The conversation around us does not reach the depth of the conversation we have within ourselves. We have quieted our usual engaged companion, yet even though we are being truly listened to, no one around us has taken our second self's place.

As an example, imagine arriving at a party with your best friend, your very best friend, the person who knows you better than anyone else. At some point, the two of you wander in different directions. Your friend becomes involved somewhere else, and you find yourself with people you barely know.

You are not alone, but suddenly you feel lonely because the person who made you feel connected is no longer beside you, even if the people you are talking to are super interesting. You still find yourself wondering where your friend is.

Something similar happens when we quiet the companion within ourselves. We enter a crowd and turn our attention outward, leaving that inner companion behind, the one who understands us the best. If the people around us fail to provide a meaningful connection or understanding, we suddenly find ourselves without either companion. We are disconnected from both the people around us and ourselves.

I know this is speculative. Hannah Arendt was a philosopher, not a scientist studying the brain. Still, her idea offers what I believe is a compelling explanation for why we can feel most alone when we are surrounded by other people.

In modern times, however, we rarely remain in that uncomfortable space for long. We reach for our phones. A phone has become a reasonably dependable companion. It entertains us, occupies our attention, and gives us somewhere familiar to retreat when the people around us cannot reach us and we wish to ignore our inner talk.

But distraction is not the same as companionship. The phone can conceal our loneliness without resolving it.

The next time I feel lonely in a crowd, I will probably still reach for my phone. Most of us probably will. But I want to remain aware of what that loneliness is telling me.

It is not necessarily that I need more people around me, or even that the people around me have failed me. Somewhere in the noise, I have lost contact with the person I brought with me.

So what's the answer?

It is not always to escape the crowd or distract ourselves from the loneliness. It is to be aware that we have quieted our own voice, and to know that it will be there again.