Main take-aways from a wonderful
article:
1) The contemporary self wants to be recognized, connected, to be visible. By being seen by others, we become real to ourselves. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.
2)We are letting technology take away our privacy, concentration and our ability to be alone - solitude.
3)Solitude is essential for listening to one's own voice and for spiritual growth.
4)The concept and practice of solitude changed through the thinking ages - Reformation (self with god), Romanticism (self with nature, the self is validated by a congruity of public appearance and private essence - one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others), Modernism (harsher, more isolated, heroic self-discovery) and post-modernism (Internet is a blessing but has become too much of a good thing, we have lost the ability to be alone) - moulding to the conditions and zeitgeist prevalent in those periods.
5)Young people today seem to have no desire for solitude and can't imagine why it would be worth having. Technology is helping stave off the possibility of solitude.
6) Boredom is the negative experience of having nothing to do while loneliness is the grief over the absence of company. The Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom, both ironically being touted as the solution for those maladies. The consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.
7) Solitude gives us introspection (which is at the center of spiritual life) of wisdom and conduct, and the ability of sustained reading.
8) Losing solitude has come with a change in the way of creating and communicating one's sense of self. Such communication is now made to the world rather than to oneself, graphically rather than verbally, performatively rather than narratively or analytically, and it is believed that it can be made completely. Young people feel that can make themselves fully known to one another - they seem to lack a sense of their own depths and the value of keeping them hidden.
9) Solitude enables us to secure the integrity of the self as well as to explore it.
10) We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, solitary, alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.
11) Solitude is disappearing as a social value and a social idea. Solitude isn't easy, isn't for everyone and can make one unpopular and impolite. Friendship may be slipping from our grasp but friendliness is universal; partly because we have made of geniality - a weak smile, fake invitation, polite interest - a cardinal virtue. But securing one's self-possession is worth a few wounded feelings. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.
