A couple of weeks ago, an article written by William Deresiewicz for the Chronicle Review made a bit of noise over various social networks: The End of Solitude. It’s a pretty dense essay, too long to be read on the screen, so I printed it and finally got around to reading it. Yes, I could have read it on my iPhone and saved some paper, but sometimes you just have to get away from connectivity… especially when you are reading about its implications!
It’s one of the smartest and most pertinent thing I’ve read about the societal implications of the constant connectivity we surround ourselves with. I strongly suggest that you take the time to read it if, like me, you question all this time you spend online.
Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone. […]
If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn’t call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn’t always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn’t always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.
And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing « in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures, » « bait[ing our] hooks with darkness. » Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.
I cannot think properly – or at least concentrate deeply – when I’m around people. I do my best thinking, the most creative part of it, when I’m alone. I suspect it’s true of most people, even if they are not aware of it. The hive mind is great for brainstorming and the presence of others is necessary for inspiration and motivation, but too much of a good thing is, well, too much. We’ll see more and more of these types of plans and self-imposed schedules show up as people realize, me included, that the noise they surround themselves with is interfering not only with their daily productivity, but also with their sense of self.
If you read French, Josée Blanchette just published a great column on the subject of solitude in Le Devoir. Ça se résume en ceci:
Supprimer l’état de solitude, c’est empêcher l’être humain de penser.
