How Existentially Isolated Are You?
Feeling like nobody sees the world quite the way you do, even in a crowd
There is a kind of aloneness that has nothing to do with how many people are around you. You can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel that nobody quite sees the world the way you see it - the private, particular way a moment lands on you. Researchers gave this feeling its own name and its own scale, separate from loneliness, because it turned out to behave differently and predict different things.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about your everyday sense of being understood, not about one specific relationship.
What it measures
The core feeling measured by the Existential Isolation Scale - that your subjective experience of the world is fundamentally your own, unshared by anyone else - plus two related ideas from the same research: how much you seek and enjoy moments of feeling that someone sees things exactly as you do (I-sharing), and how much you assume the people close to you actually grasp your inner experience. It differs from the loneliness (UCLA) test on this site: loneliness is about lacking contact and closeness; existential isolation can sit right next to a full address book and a good marriage.
Based on: Existential Isolation Scale (Pinel, Long, Murdoch & Helm, 2017)
Possible results
Existential isolation
The sense that your inner experience of things is yours alone.
Craving shared experience
How much you seek and enjoy moments of feeling someone sees it exactly as you do.
Assumed understanding
Whether you assume the people close to you really grasp your inner experience.
Common questions
Is existential isolation the same as loneliness?
No, and the research treats them as separate. Loneliness is about lacking the contact or closeness you want. Existential isolation is about feeling that your particular experience of things is not shared, even by people you are close to. You can score high on one and low on the other.
Can two people ever really share the same experience?
Not perfectly, and that is not really the question the research asks. What seems to matter for wellbeing is not a perfect match but the feeling, even briefly, that someone's reaction landed close enough to yours to feel seen. Those moments do not have to last to count.
Does existential isolation get better with age?
The research on this specific scale is still recent and does not give a clear answer on age trends. What it does show is that the feeling fluctuates with context - it tends to ease around people who share your specific interests or background, and sharpen in situations where your experience is clearly out of step with everyone else's.
Sources
- Pinel, E. C., Long, A. E., Murdoch, E. Q., & Helm, P. (2017). A prisoner of one's own mind: Identifying and understanding existential isolation. Personality and Individual Differences. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2016.09.024
- Pinel, E. C., Long, A. E., Landau, M. J., Alexander, K., & Pyszczynski, T. (2006). Seeing I to I: A pathway to interpersonal connectedness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.90.2.243
An honest note These statements are Quinthea's own wording, inspired by the Existential Isolation Scale and the I-sharing research, so scores are not comparable to the published instruments' norms. Only the first bar corresponds to a validated scale; the other two are related ideas from the same research area, not confirmed factors of it. This is not a measure of how many friends you have - it is a specific kind of aloneness that can exist inside a full life, and it is not a mood or health screening.