In Defence of Solitude
Isolation is a term often associated with loneliness, anxiety, or fear of being perceived — and in most cases, the association is justified. This is not meant in terms of isolation when it comes to COVID (though it does apply), but self-imposed stretches of weeks, or even months of gapping yourself off from society. Harmful self-isolation comes with consequences not limited to loneliness. This gap causes people to lose jobs, fall into addiction traps, and forego social responsibility resulting in the loss of relationships.
Feeling part of a whole is a fundamental human necessity, and your mental health suffers when you choose to soothe underlying problems by shutting yourself off from people totally. If you are not happy with yourself when you’re alone, something isn’t right — and it’s important that you do the complete opposite and seek out your inner circle (and/or a therapist) for help.
This article is not in defense of the isolation that results in transforming you into a lower-functioning version of yourself. Rather, it’s to propose that under the right circumstances and with deliberation, choosing to spend time alone can be a huge psychological tool. Where the former is characterized by becoming fearful and saddened by the world, productive solitude can help us relearn its beauty.
Making Time to Have Time
If you’ve been reading the last few entries up until this point, you might notice this word pops up quite a lot in my articles — time. You could say I’ve always had a subconscious fixation on the subject, at least conceptually. Time is the most valuable commodity in our lives, it is the one consistency — no beginning and no end. You never know how much of it you have left, so learning how to make the most of it is not only a skill but an art.
You can’t hold it in your hands and measure it, but you can waste it. You can save time but you can’t get time back. When our time runs out, we all hope to have affected the people around us positively and left them with a net benefit. However, while time doesn’t owe us anything, we should hope to look back knowing that we used what little time we had even half-decently.
Brent Crane, a writer for The Atlantic recounts the adventure of Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani in the foreign Ibaraki Prefecture in 80s Japan.
After decades of reporting across Asia, he holed himself up in a cabin he found in the beautiful district. When Terzani first started on his way to Asia, he was already disillusioned with the ways of the capitalist west, and he sought refuge in Asian communism. He was drawn to the traditions of Asia as a kind of antidote to the lifestyle of “rush” popular in the west, and slowly, his appreciation shifted from political to cultural. While housed in his cabin, Terzani wrote:
“For a month, I had no one to talk to except my dog Baoli” —observing nature is how Terzani passed his days — “Listening to the winds in the trees, watching butterflies, and enjoying silence. At last, I had time to have time.”
Terzani’s welcome to this state of seclusion was relieving to him, but confusing to others. Modern neurologists who study loneliness state that, beyond damaging our faculty, isolation can even harm us physically. However, scientists have begun to reframe solitude as something that, when pursued with deliberation, can prove beautiful and refreshing.
The Social Context
We find ourselves in specific circumstances that develop and frame our social network and build the foundation for our individual interpersonal behaviors. These environments often influence not only what we do and how we act around other people, but typically how we think: these are the effects of the social context. How someone reacts to something can vary depending on their immediate social environment. For example, if you’re trying out a new restaurant, but you’re in boring or harsh company, it might be the worst thing you’ve ever tasted and unlikely to have it in the future. However, if you’d been in a fun and welcoming environment, you might have perceived the meal differently and ended up enjoying it.
In other words, our understanding and perception of things, words, emotions, and everything in between differs depending on where we are and who we’re with — especially our perception of ourselves.
Over time, the social context can overrule how you perceive yourself and everything else in your life, and the overload makes it difficult to take the time to deal with any thoughts that require your full attention. When you temporarily remove yourself from the social context of your life, you give yourself the ability to see how you’ve been shaped by that context.
How much of yourself have you really been last time you checked? Solitude gives us the chance many of us so desperately need in order to get back in touch with ourselves.
Much of this self-reconfiguring can only happen through what sociologist Jack Fong calls “existentializing moments”, or moments of clarity and consciousness that arise from deliberate and inward-focused solitude.
Our world is more socially connected than it has ever been, making solitude increasingly devalued. In a recent study carried out at the University of Virginia, several participants — a quarter of the female participants and two-thirds of the males — volunteered to give themselves an electric shock when the alternative was spending time with their thoughts for fifteen minutes.
Mistrust of Solitude
What is seen as fear of solitude, can also be seen as mistrust. Psychoanalytic political theorist Matthew Bowker remarks that the “deep internal processing” that happens when we’re left alone to our own devices can be uncanny and uncomfortable.
It might take a little bit of work before it turns into a pleasant experience. But once it does it becomes maybe the most important relationship anybody ever has, the relationship you have with yourself.
In a world where we’re magnetized to groups that act as identity markers, moments of deliberate solitude might just be the answer. As an example, productive isolation can help us from succumbing to thoughts of victimization and hatred by looking inwards at the real problem. Andrew Tate, a former professional kickboxer, is an online personality with a huge fanbase. He also runs multiple courses in “modern wealth development”. Here’s a great introduction to the majority of his content:
“Women have been exchanging sex for opportunity for a very long time. Some did this. Weren’t abused. […] If you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bare some responsibility.”
A lot of his content is tailored toward the radicalization of the gender divide and monetary focus, especially amongst teen-to-young adult males. I’m not going to go into gender respect/politics, but I hope my readers can understand how a lonely and disgruntled person may seek out the materialist community that creators like Andrew Tate foster.
Separating from the group, I would argue, is one thing that universities should be facilitating more.
— David Levine, A Dangerous Place to Be: Identity, Conflict, and Trauma in Higher Education
The Practice
As mentioned, for the beneficial effects of solitude to take place, you must not enter it with fear, hatred, and anxiety. For solitude to be effective, certain pre-conditions have to be established. Developmental psychologist Kenneth Rubin labels these preconditions as ifs. Solitude can be restorative,
- If it is voluntary and you can choose to join any social group when you’re ready again.
- If you can regulate your emotions. Spending time with yourself strengthens this skill further, making it clear which mechanisms to keep or leave behind.
- If you can maintain close relationships and responsibilities that exist outside of your solitude.
When these conditions aren’t met, solitude can be harmful. Consider the widely-felt negative mental distress of isolation during COVID lockdowns — even the Hikikomori phenomenon in Japan where troubled youths lock themselves away from society for years, often requiring reintegration therapy to carry on. The key difference between solitude as a restorative tool and solitude as suffering is your ability to self-reflect and remind yourself of what matters to you, before returning to socializing whenever you desire.
Conclusion
Let’s briefly revisit the findings of Terzani on his seclusion in Japan. Lasting a month, he remarks that he, and he alone, put himself back together. Already a well-known reporter, he went on to pursue a successful career as an author. He gained an almost religious following, as many people looked to him as a guru — to the chagrin of the more intellectual of them.
They believed looking to him as a figure of guidance was a disservice to all he really ever wanted to say:
“The only real teacher is not in a forest, or a hut or an ice cave in the Himalayas. It is within us.”
He reached that conclusion alone.
Thanks for reading!
