Solitude - Michael Harris
In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World
[bq] “A certain practice, or alchemy, that turns loneliness into solitude, blank days into blank canvases.”
I. The Uses of Solitude
1. All Together Now
A primate’s social complexity is strongly correlated with the size of its neocortex.
Language allowed us to build and stabilize much larger groups.
[bq] “Making sure other people have positive impressions of us is one of our central motivations.”
[bq] “Has social media made us socially obese - gorged on constant connection but never properly nourished?”
[bq] “We humans now crowd out solitude at every opportunity.”
2013 survey: 80% of American adults on phone within 15 min of making up. Even higher for teens.
[bq] “Its utterly compulsive and compulsory, a phantom umbilical cord.”
About our phone addiction:
[bq] “It’s this adolescent urge to be needed, connected, loved - and, yes, groomed - all poured into a shining totem.”
Have seen a huge rise of platform companies, where users create the actual value.
[bq] “There’s a real taboo involved in solitude.”
Get negative remarks from friends if we don’t immediately reply to messages or turn down invitations for no good reason other than preferring to stay in.
[bq] “Solitude has become a resource.”
[bq] “True solitude - as opposed to the failed solitude we call loneliness - is a fertile state, yet one we have a hard time accessing.”
2. What Is Solitude For?
Even newborns need to be alone and without stimuli at times, but adults are often worried about that and immediately give them a flashy toy. These kids actually tend to be more lonely adults, since they are so used to constant attention but don’t get it anymore.
Constant online “companions” don’t fill inner void, and we even get “crowd-sickness”.
[bq] “But the alternative to solitude was never companionship. The alternative to solitude is loneliness.”
[bq] “The common cure for loneliness is more connections, yet exercising our solitude is another option.”
Psychiatrist Anthony Storr in 1980s analyses many great artists and realized that solitude played a large role in their creative process.
Mihali Csiksgentmihalyi found in 1994 that teenagers who can’t stand being alone have lower creative abilities.
[bq] “Only in solitude could those youths develop the creative habits - journaling, doodling, daydreaming - that lead to original work.”
[bq] “Knowledge of the self - or even self-therapy - is another gain.”
[bq] “Solitude enhances one’s mental freedom, unshackling us by minimizing the intrusive self-consciousness that the presence of others inevitably produces.”
Solitude does not have to be anti-social. Have the concept of “indirect engagement”. Stepping away from a group or person allows us much more to reflect on this interaction, and appreciate it and process gratitude to people.
[bq] “Eric Klingenberg. In Going Solo, argues that our ability to be happily alone is actually a sign of strong social ties, not a lack thereof.”
Get this sense that with real friends even if you’re apart for a long time and don’t really talk, nothing has changed when you meet again.
Solitude’s uses:
New ideas
Understanding of self
Closeness to others
[q] “I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude”
- Henry David Thoreau
[bq] “Writing a book is about the most solitary activity a person can opt for.”
II. Bolt from the Blue
[q] “One can be instructed in society, one is inspired in solitude.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3. The Wandering Mind
Many of us are now afraid of being alone and of daydreaming.
Might be remnant from Puritan thinking. Not just idle hands, but also idle minds are sinful.
[q] “The power of the wandering mind is precisely the fact that it censors nothing. It can make connections you would never otherwise make.”
- Karina Christoff
Even in science, which so heavily relies on the insight generated by mind wandering and solitude, see more and more encouragement of collaboration, even in the design of new research institutes mirroring the idea of open offices, despite all the evidence speaking against them.
[bq] “Peter Higgs […] backs [this] up, saying his trailblazing work would be impossible today because the peace and solitude he enjoyed in the 1960s has vanished.”
[NFW: From “The Power of Silence” by Felicity Mellor; Check!]
[bq] “A frantic, distracted mind may be broadly characterized as ‘wandering’, but one requires a luxury of empty time before the mind can be expected to engender fresh insights. True wandering requires a long leash.”
[q] “Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
- Franz Kafka
[q] “Perhaps you can judge the inner health of a land by the capacity of its people to do nothing […], because whoever can do nothing, letting his thoughts go where they may, must be at peace with himself.”
- Sebastian de Grazia
4. Daydream Destroyers
[bq] “Apps like Candy Crush are […] an invasive species, dominating the ground where solitude would otherwise grow."
[bq] “We weld the isolated human mind to technologies designed to shepherd us towards more productive pastures while forgetting that disconnected thinking has its own merits.”
III. Who Do You Think You Are?
5. Style
Without solitude we lose individual thought and style.
6. You Have to Taste This
We base more and more of our decisions on aggregated critic scores, e.g. Rotten Tomatoes for movies, Yelp for restaurants, Amazon reviews for shopping and use less and less of our own genuine choice/taste.
These aggregators more and more shape our choices and us as a society at large. This gets even worse as AI and recommender technologies amplify these patterns, including our own past choices, and puts us in a filter bubble.
[bq] “We need to build new and stronger weirdo cocoons, in which to entertain our private selves."
7. Stranger in a Strange Land
[bq] About Google Maps: “We have engineered a constant guide that undoes the solitary traveler’s ability to be lost at all.”
The more we rely on these external tools, the more we numb our own awareness.
We are never lost, always comfortable and at ease. But with that, we lose something important, a sense for wonder and growth.
[bq] “This wizardry represents what naturalist Robert Michael Pyle calls ’the extinction of experience’.”
8. A Walk in the Wilds
These days when someone goes on a solo trip into nature, many, often including his friends and family, think he’s weird, or worse.
We are now trying to keep nature largely out of our lives, or at least allow it in in only very controlled ways.
At risk of suffering from “nature deficit disorder”, which leads to impoverished sensory experience. Might suffer from shorter attention span and diminished sense of contentment.
Cites a study by Karina Linnell and others:
[bq] “Linnell even proposes that employers, were they looking to design the best workforces, consider stationing employees who need to concentrate outside the city.”
Stanford study [p. 143]” More rumination while walking in busy city compared to in nature.
We lose a sense of agency and control when stepping out into nature, but exactly that is valuable. Gives way to wonder.
IV. Knowing Others
[q] “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
9. Social Stories
Virginia Wolf in a letter to Ethel Smyth:
[q] “The state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego.”
- Virginia Wolf
We become one with the characters and the story. Through the solitude of reading, we develop empathy, and live other’s experiences.
[bq] “The solitary reader rehearses the lives of others.”
Worries that reading experience too will become more and more social and personal (e.g. details of story changing to reflect personal taste), and we will as a result practice less and less empathy.
[bq] “Today, platform technologies undo the solitude once intrinsic to literary storytelling, and we must teach to see if they undo our empathy, too.”
The reading experience might get more social too, people are pushing for digital books where readers can comment in the margins for everyone else to see and respond to.
10. Love Letters
Our new ways of dating and communicating with lovers leaves us in a shallow safe zone that’s neither solitude nor true connection.
Even desire is best enjoyed in solitude because only there can we truly experience it, as well as think through our own as well as our lover’s complex feelings.
11. The Failing Body
[bq] “Death is, of course, the final and inviolate solitude.”
We now even try to solve the “problem” of death, by venting our life span or even making us semi-immortal.
Also a culture where death is not really talked about.
12. The Cabin in the Woods
[q] “I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now, what X represents I don’t really know, it might be two and seven-eights or seven and two-eights, but it’s a substantial ratio.”
- Glenn Gould
[bq] “Mornings are the best chance we get, every day, to recall our solitude. They are brief glimpses into a default mindset that arises before the world pours too much noise into our eyes and ears.”
Most people immediately reach for their phone, though. But this can be stretched out.
[bq] “Solitude is a resource that we can either nurture or allow to be depleted."