The person who flees from freedom wholly accepts the personality that culture and society give them, becoming one among everyone else. With no distance remaining between “me” and those others in the outside world, they find a balm for their sense of loneliness.

A person who loses freedom and individual personality ultimately becomes one machine among millions of other machines that do not feel lonely. But the price paid for relief from the anxiety of loneliness is very high. That price is the destruction of the “self”.

— Erich Fromm —