The Value of Solitude - William Deresiewicz
Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence.
The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as
powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the
manufacture of boredom. 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.
But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume
and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model, and this should
come as no surprise, is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary
psychology tells us that our brains developed to interpret complex social
signals. According to David Brooks, that reliable index of the social-scientific
zeitgeist, cognitive scientists tell us that "our decision-making is powerfully
influenced by social context"; neuroscientists, that we have "permeable minds"
that function in part through a process of "deep imitation"; psychologists, that
"we are organized by our attachments"; sociologists, that our behavior is
affected by "the power of social networks." The ultimate implication is that
there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science
dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking
things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no
longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness." [...]
Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known
to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value
of keeping them hidden.
If they didn't, they would understand that solitude enables us to secure
the integrity of the self as well as to explore it.
About the Author: Excerpted from William Deresiewicz's article in The
Chronicle of Higher Education: The End of Solitude.
