One can be lonely in the middle of a crowd.
Or one can choose to be alone.
I had a teacher in high school, Mrs. Miller, who was on vacation and saw a man eating alone, much like the photograph above. It bothered her so much that she invited him to come join her family at their table. It was the feeling of being alone, she said, that bothered her. We are created as social beings — so much so that we don’t want others to be lonely.
But loneliness is different from solitude. There is an entire group of philosophers who believe that solitude is not only healthy, but necessary for the development of the self. Ideas are a little different when you are alone. It is easier to explore, and there are fewer interruptions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
Another benefit is pointed out by Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor who notes, “By withdrawing from the world into solitude, you separate yourself from others. By isolating yourself, you can see more clearly what distinguishes you from other people. Standing out in this way serves to affirm your existence (ex-[out] + sistere [stand]). Liberated from social pressures and constraints, solitude can help you understand better what kind of person you are and what your life is for. In this way you become independent of others. You find your own path, your own voice.”
I don’t always like being alone, but I do find that I get a lot more done when I don’t have other people around. It’s also a little easier for me to think, and I identify more clearly what it is that I care about.
Loneliness
It’s important, though, to enter into solitude voluntarily, and not through isolation or loneliness. Despite all our social media and electronic connections, we are currently struggling with an epidemic of loneliness.
Until his untimely death in 2018, Dr. John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago was the leading researcher in the field of loneliness. In a 2015 article, Cacioppo wrote, “From a prevalence estimated to be 11–17% in the 1970s, loneliness has increased to over 40% in middle aged and older adults.” For the entire population, he estimates that 26% of people regularly feel lonely. (Cacioppo, J. (2015), Loneliness: Clinical Import and Interventions.)
Loneliness can contribute to depression, suicidal thoughts, alcoholism, aggressive behaviors, cognitive decline, elevated blood pressure, obesity, and increases the odds of an early death by 20 percent. And it makes one feel lousy.
Reducing Loneliness
John Cocioppo was interviewed about loneliness by Tim Adams. He noted that there has been a lot of work done to try to determine how best to alleviate loneliness. Researchers have tried the common sense approach — just put people in situations where there are more connections with others. But social engagement like this doesn’t seem to work. You can still be quite lonely in a group. Other studies have tried providing social skills training, on the theory that the individual just needs to get better at connecting with others. This doesn’t work either. Improving social support through providing assistance doesn’t work, because one-way connections don’t improve the feeling of loneliness. People need reciprocal connections — relationships that go both ways — in order to reduce the feeling of loneliness. This is why just going to therapy doesn’t immediately reduce loneliness. The feeling of belonging is richer than that — it includes feeling wanted and included by others.
The one treatment that seems to have a positive effect on loneliness is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT helps individuals to examine their own thoughts and feelings, and then begin to change them. In this kind of therapy, people learned to identify the beginning feelings of loneliness and shift their thinking at the same time that they changed their behaviors to help foster connections.
Back to Solitude
True solitude is found in the wild places, where … one’s inner voices become audible.
Wendell Berry
Can it be as easy as flipping a switch? Cacioppo talked about the perception of loneliness in isolation. He said, “the brain is the organ for creating, monitoring, nurturing and retaining these social connections, so it didn’t matter whether you actually had these connections, what was important was whether you felt that you had them. There is a big difference between objective isolation and perceived isolation, and very quickly we learned that perceived isolation was loneliness …”
We’ve all had the experience of being in a large group of people and still feeling lonely. It doesn’t take much, though — maybe just one positive interaction with another individual — and that lonely feeling goes away. It may be possible to simply think differently to shift the internal feeling from loneliness to solitude.
I have spent much of the last seven years living by myself (for work, or to focus on Spanish classes), and I’ve found that there are times when I slip into a feeling of loneliness. For me, just recognizing that my thoughts are moving in that direction moves me to connect in some way — take a walk, talk to a clerk at a store, make a phone call. But there is another way that I move away from this feeling, too — it is in intentionally seeking a feeling of awe. If I look at the sky, or a field of green plants, or a big body of water, or think about how an old church was built, those thoughts can bring me to a connection with something greater than myself. When that happens, I feel less alone.
