
On Loneliness and Solitude - Pamar
https://www.pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/Solitude.html
======
alexpetralia
As this essay does, it always helps to dig deeper into what a word such as
loneliness actually means.

I've written about this a bit below[1,2]. I'm interested in what the
ingredients of these deep relationships are, both emotionally (eg. interests,
vulnerability) and logistically (eg. time, proximity) so that we can better
create and maintain them. I think that if we can influence these factors, we
can have better control of our natural degree of loneliness (and to emphasize,
some amount is completely natural).

\---

 _I think the word “loneliness” is loaded with a ton of baggage, so maybe a
better way to frame it is as “a lack of deep relationships.” I have a couple
of thoughts here.

First, defined in this way, you can have one close friend and not be lonely.
You can have a ton of “friends” and still be lonely. This seems much more
intuitively correct.

Second, deep relationships are hard, and things which are hard are generally
rare. It’s hard to get out of the house, leave what is comfortable and go meet
strangers. On top of that, we’ve all had times where we meet new people, have
a lot in common - and yet, nothing “deeper” materializes. And on top of that,
strengthening and maintaining a relationship takes a lot of work. Without
investment of time or effort, relationships atrophy. Deep relationships should
necessarily be uncommon._

[1]
[https://alexpetralia.github.io/2018/04/02/NL-2018-04-02.html](https://alexpetralia.github.io/2018/04/02/NL-2018-04-02.html)

[2]
[https://alexpetralia.github.io/2018/03/19/NL-2018-03-19.html](https://alexpetralia.github.io/2018/03/19/NL-2018-03-19.html)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Interesting thought, which seems logical, but I'm not sure it's enough. People
can still be lonely around family or close friends, so to some degree it is
seems situational. How do we explain the apparently inexorable rise of
loneliness across the globe? Have deep relationships become less common or
more difficult to achieve in the last half century? If it were that simple
wouldn't we find it easier to resolve?

> Deep relationships should necessarily be uncommon

I don't think this follows. It's not _that_ long ago that people most often
lived in a small town or village and had deeper relationships with just about
everyone. Partly because life and work constrained numbers and proximity and
you knew most for much of your life.

~~~
chongli
I think it needs more than a close friendship. The true solution to loneliness
is a lasting and intimate relationship with a romantic partner. That is
something I believe has become truly hard to find.

------
alexashka
I don't know that picking apart a single word is a worthwhile pursuit.
Clearly, the author of the book seems to think that it is.

I get the impression, from looking at what else Lars Svendsen has written
about - that he chooses a word with strong cultural baggage and yet no clear
definition, and spends a great deal of time, viewing the word through many
different lens.

The interest and need to do this falls away, as you gain a strong enough sense
of what your life is about, as you divorce yourself from cultural (including
parental) expectations and start to figure out what works, and doesn't work,
for you.

Once you're on the path of deciding what works for you, loneliness, boredom,
fear, work, freedom etc - they're just not that interesting. You're simply
living out your life. You cease being so incredibly insecure, because either
you find a small group of people who share your values and that's enough, or
you find that living with minimal human contact is actually quite alright :)

ps. most people fit within society's expectations and embrace them and are not
bothered by them too much to begin with, and hence don't have this problem.
This is for those who feel like they don't belong on some level.

------
factsaresacred
Interesting read.

When I was in my twenties, loneliness, when it came, felt like the absence of
another. Nobody specific, just a gap where _somebody_ should be when you're
travelling alone etc.

Now in my thirties, loneliness rarely surfaces. Company is great but there's
never a need for it. I guess as you get older you become more replete and that
'gap' disappears.

It also seems that a feeling of _saudade_ replaces loneliness as one ages - a
longing for a place or a person that perhaps cannot be satiated. But unlike
loneliness which you describe as "a specific type of sadness", saudade is less
sad than it is bittersweet. Beautiful even.

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade)

~~~
sonofblah
It's an unpopular notion in these times, but it might even be said that this
arises from a deep-seated awareness that one is separated from one's true
source or even (gasp) "God."

~~~
ionised
That's how cults get their claws into you.

~~~
sonofblah
Don't drive, you'll die on the road.

------
tinderliker
I think loneliness gets worse when we see "perfect friendships" on TV that
last for years, like in Harry Potter or Scrubs. It makes us feel that we are
missing something very important to human feelings - complete or near complete
trust on another human being.

~~~
trukterious
Movies and TV shows are naturally biased towards social relationships and
friendships because it's hard to present a first person point of view. Yet I
assume that's where the future of entertainment lies, in first person virtual
reality. _Peep Show_ with David Mitchell and Robert Webb is the only exception
I can recall but the humour there is fairly dark and nihilistic so it's hardly
an endorsement for solitude (besides, they're flatmates). A counterexample
from literature I can recall is _Robinson Crusoe_ , who is alone on the island
for the first time in his life but not lonely because of a new-found
relationship with God.

------
fizixer
Roughly speaking, loneliness and solitude are the negative and positive
aspects of 'being alone'. So I guess 'being alone' is a much bigger topic than
either loneliness or solitude or both.

Second, I'm much more interested in the topic of being alone in the internet
era. And what I mean by that is that you're not being alone in the pre-
technology sense, which would resemble going out into the woods and living
there, or stuck on an island. Instead, you live in your home, don't have
roommates, or an SO, etc. But you have access to internet!

You might think it's worse to be alone and see people on the internet hanging
out and having fun. I'd say you're looking at it the wrong way. If you see
people hanging out, you're in a sense hanging out with them (you're living
vicariously through those people). If you watch a serious of videos of people
having fun, people talking in podcasts, interviews, you had a pretty
stimulating social experience. It's not physically social, but it's social
nonetheless. But maybe you want interaction. Well, you can interact in online
forums, chat rooms.

So, in my opinion, being (physically) alone in the internet era is a lot more
self-sustaining and a doable lifestyle than being along without internet.

------
Pamar
Author here - I had submitted this a couple months ago and HN's asked me to
resubmit to see if it fared a bit better.

 _" Ask me anything..."_

~~~
pdfernhout
Thanks for putting together this summary of the book "A Philosophy of
Loneliness" by Lard Svendsen and adding your reflections on it. Lots to think
about there. I especially liked the picture of the person with the guitar by
the seashore.

And the David Foster Wallace quote you requoted was insightful: "Lonely people
tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of
being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too
strongly."

You write near the end of your review: "The book clarified for me an important
point, though: Solitude is something that we actively seek, while Loneliness
is something that we try to escape. Apart from that, they are exactly the same
thing: being alone (which in turn is something that happens quite often - in
fact, humans are "alone" most of the time)."

Given that, what are your thoughts then on the phrase "alone in a crowd"? For
example: [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-introverts-
corne...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-introverts-
corner/201211/introverts-and-the-loneliness-loop) "We know loneliness may or
may not be related to being alone. Introverts can be perfectly happy alone, or
terribly lonely in a crowd. But if introverts are at any particular risk for
loneliness, it could be because we set a high bar for friendship. We desire
and require deep connections and would rather be lonely alone than in a crowd.
But realistically, those deep connections are not easy to find, and if we get
caught short and our only choice is superficial socializing or nothing, we can
get lonely."

Also, you say the book suggests: "Another of the prevalent journalism theories
(internet and social media will result in an increase of individualism and
loneliness) seems not to be supported by empirical studies: those who use
social media report having a more active social life and more frequent
personal interaction with other (outside of social media itself, of course)."

I wonder about that, given the notion of narrowly focused "supernormal
stimuli" and how super-fascinating (anti-)social media can potentially
displace more holistic human interactions especially over meals. But websites
that arrange meetings of people with common interests can counter that trend,
so obviously that's not a black and white thing. A related book on that if you
are looking for something to summarize next:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli)

~~~
Pamar
"alone in a crowd": the book's author argues that actually this is the most
natural human experience - we are "always alone", even with loved ones, even
while having passionate sex, because our own concept of self is not shareable
(barring some sci-fi trope): what I am feeling now while composing this answer
is different from what the person sitting to my side (I'm on a bus) is
experiencing. Same with me towards her, of course. There are maybe 50 people
in this bus, and we are fifty individuals travelling _alone_ towards a
specific German town... everyone has different stories and different reasons
and probably different hopes or expectations about what happens when we get
there. And trying to make an info dump to another person to make him/her
understand my situation so that I am not _alone_ anymore would take hours if
not days... and probably further distance each other, because the girl sitting
to my side would then be unable to share how it feels to get a stranger twice
her age to start describing his feelings about this trips, in English, too,
which is not mine or her native tongue. ;)

~~~
muxator
Lots of crossroads on that bus.

When I was on one, in the exact same situation, it was impossibile not to
think about the staggering quantity of humans in this world, each of them
separated by language, culture, beliefs, needs, space. Suddenly, communication
and building bridges becomes one of the really important questions.

------
Pamar
Coincidentally, Charles Chu just posted his own take on the same book:
[https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/loneliness-is-not-
ab...](https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/loneliness-is-not-about-being-
alone-343d2be67643)

(The person who suggested it to him was ... me, just like I did with my
I-Ching piece: [https://www.pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html](https://www.pa-
mar.net/Lifestyle/I-Ching.html) )

------
8bitsrule
" I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a
bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than
the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an
April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house."
(Thoreau)

------
idoubtit
O solitude, my sweetest choice. Places devoted to the night, remote from
tumult and from noise, how ye my restless thoughts delight!

This wonderful song was composed by Purcell on a translation of a French poem
which was popular across all Europe in the XVIIth century. If you excuse the
anachronism, solitude was already romantic.

\--

After reading these summaries of the chapters of "A Philosophy of Loneliness",
I'm not at all convinced of the quality of the book. Here is a sample of
critic that I hope will be judged constructive.

1\. First of all, this definition of loneliness is too convoluted. Being alone
is objective, while being lonely is subjective, it is a feeling. That talk of
"quality" of relationships and "life meaning" may have some truth in some
cases, but it is not a generic principe: for example, I remember discussing
with someone who avoided deep bonds and openly thrived for quantity. Some
persons will never feel lonely as long as they know they have people they can
chat with. I also feel it is rather pointless to introduce categories for
something that has no clear boundaries, and varies so much across societies
and individuals.

The "devastating effects that Loneliness can have on health" are a tautology,
since loneliness is defined as the negative feeling of solitude. Any extended
negative feeling may have a bad impact on the health. But, as far as I know,
there is no proven correlation between chosen solitude and health problems.
Considering the intrinsic experimental difficulties (how to measure "chosen
solitude"? etc) I doubt anything conclusive can emerge.

6\. Maybe the rejection of living with a partner is increasing, but the
numbers of single persons and solo households are very misleading. Detailed
investigations rule out that chosen solitude could be the main factor in their
evolution. For example, in France (INSEE 2014), 16% of the households are made
of a single person. But these 16% are the sum of 9% for people aged less than
65 and 7% for those above 65. It looks like the main factor for solo
households is the raise of widowhood caused by longer lives.

\--

I was much more interested by the personal comments in the right column. Some
resonated with me: I looked for total solitude during most of these summer
holidays, to the point my own voice surprised me when I had to speak again.
Now that I'm back to work, I'll have to endure "the psychic costs of being
around other humans". These past years, I've told my friends and family that I
am more and more reluctant to endure that cost. But I don't feel really
concerned by the rest of the quote: "They are allergic to people. People
affect them too strongly."

Like the OP, I'm interested in the artefacts that have been used to fight
loneliness. Rituals are one of those, as pointed by the excellent novel
"Friday, or the other island" (M. Tournier) where Robinson Crusoe uses work,
rituals and religion to keep his mind occupied and avoid loneliness or
questions on the meaning of life.

------
GorgeRonde
it burns really bad now

------
zmix
When I saw the title and when I saw "1 comment" below it, I had to just chime
in. Now we are 2 comments.

~~~
Pamar
I must admit I was counting on someone to do this, but I am happy this is
actually igniting some interesting discussion, I will update my piece later
and link to this thread.

