The Capacity for
Successful Solitude - Sherry Turkle
The
capacity to be alone is the capacity to know enough about yourself and who you
are, and be comfortable enough with that. That way, when you are with another
person, you’re not trying to make that person into somebody you need them to be
in order to buttress a fragile sense of your own self. You can actually turn to
a person and see them as another person, and have a real relationship with
them.
Now,
the person who can’t do that is going to be one of these people who nobody
wants to be with, because when you see them coming, you know that they’re going
to use you to make themselves feel less terrifyingly alone. Those people are
very lonely, because they can’t form relationships. They’re using other people
as spare parts.
The
capacity to be in a relationship requires the capacity for a genuine solitude.
One of the gifts of a successful childhood is that you develop this capacity
for successful solitude. And you learn it, paradoxically, by a caretaker being
with you, but able to leave you a little bit of space.
I
remember walks with my grandmother to Macy’s in Brooklyn. And we were just
quiet together. Every once in a while there’d be a word, but we were just side
by side in our thoughts, and sharing a thought once in a while, and you knew
that there was someone there protecting you as you learned to think your own
thoughts. People have many different models of what that was: sitting together
sewing or reading or playing or giving a child a bath and letting them have the
privacy of their thoughts. These are the moments of childhood where children
are not abandoned, but they learn to be alone with. And that capacity means
that when they come to other relationships, they can form them successfully. If
instead of that, you put them in a baby bouncer that has a slot for an iPad or
an iPhone or a laptop, they’re always mirrored in some other outside thing and
they’re not brought back to their own self and their own resources and their
own mind and their own imagination.
There’s
a wonderful idea that you have to learn that the most interesting thing in the
environment is your own mind. And if you never learn that, it’s not good.
About the Author:
Excerpted from Sherry Turkle's blog post: Relearning how to talk in the age of
Smartphone addiction
