Alone != Lonely.
"Lonely people have been found, for example, to focus more on internal thoughts, perhaps to compensate for their lack of actual social experiences."
Well, for me, I daydream and live in my head a lot but I don't think I've ever really felt lonely in the last 10 years at least. So my brain probably looks like this but I would've responded to their survey with "not lonely". Maybe from their point of view I've been coping so long I don't even realise it?
I think a better study would have segmented out people who have limited social contact but don't feel lonely.
Post-apocalyptic movies with a small cast have a strange appeal to me, like it's the ideal small unit of society. We sort of got to experience that earlier this year in Sydney, with few cars on the road, no one walking around outside, and times when I didn't leave the house for days on end except to walk the dog. It was bliss. I had my dog and my wife and a few people on chat, and that's all I needed.
Many felt, many times, totally alone and alienated in a group of friends.
Stalker / Solaris director Andrei Tarkovsky's advice to young people and being alone (video):
https://www.openculture.com/2015/03/andrei-tarkovskys-messag...
I don’t know… I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.