Learning to Be Lonely

1

In 2013, users shared 16,425,000 photographs on Instagram. That’s 45,000 pictures a day. During the same year, 90% of the Americans between 18 and 29 who used the Internet visited social networking sites. This number doesn’t include the people who used social networks on their smart phones.

2

We stay electronically connected to other people except during sleep. And I’m convinced that soon someone will invent a device that will enable friends to invade our dreams.

3

We feel that an experience isn’t real or complete unless it’s shared. And so we “share” while riding the bus, watching movies or TV, and visiting stores or restaurants; on dates; during exercise, births, funerals, and weddings; and while we work or attend school. We can even share from 30,000 feet in the air as we fly over America's most beautiful landscapes, looking through a viewfinder.

4

Researchers studying the way technology affects academic performance assigned a group of students a fifteen-minute task. After only two minutes, the students stopped working and turned to their smart phones. In the end, they devoted only 10 of the 15 minutes allotted to their work.

5

While you might believe that multitasking is effective, scientists studying our brains found that we cannot engage in two tasks at the same time. Instead we switch back and forth, weakening attention and interrupting the processing of ideas. To paraphrase writer May Sarton, we lose our centers, become scattered, and are dispersed.

6

Writer C. S. Lewis lived in an era when telephones were stupid and the Internet hadn’t been invented. Yet he said, “We live in a world … starved for solitude [and] silence.” His life offered more opportunities for silence and solitude than ours does now. Perhaps the quieter and lonelier world in which he lived explains in part how Lewis could write almost fifty books.

7

We must feed our need for solitude. We need to control the constant urge to check in. We need more self-consciousness and less other-consciousness.

8

We need to learn how to be lonely. I mean lonely in its original sense—alone in a good way, not sad or depressed. The poet William Wordsworth uses it this way when he begins his poem with “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Wordsworth’s “lonely” means “free.”

9

“Lonely” comes from the Middle English aloonly or alonly (spelling was loose in those days), which was just “alone” plus the suffix “ly.” So by learning to be lonely (alonely), I mean that we should learn to experience a beneficial aloneness. Loneliness means looking within, or as Wordsworth says in the same poem, a joyful seeing with an “inward eye.”

10

When I campaign for loneliness, I advocate enjoying one’s own company, taking the time to hatch an idea, and then nurturing it until it takes wing. Only when we’re alone can we ask ourselves questions that must be answered if we want to become our true selves. We need to hear ourselves think.

11

If you’re not sold on introspection, know that loneliness is good for us. Psychologists found that solitude sharpens thinking and focus, improves concentration, increases productivity, helps us solve problems, and “enhances the quality of … relationships with others.” Maybe we must know ourselves before we can know others.

12

Do you want to learn to be lonely? First establish a regular place and a time in which to enjoy your aloneness. If you have a cat and your cat is anything like mine, you can be truly alone when your cat is near. A fish or two won’t compromise your solitude either. But if you have a dog, it depends on the dog.

13

Then, as if you’re on an airplane about to take off for an exciting and beautiful destination, turn off all electronic devices.

14

Does the quiet seem strange? That’s good. Scientists have found that noise causes stress. The fewer sounds you hear, the less anxiety you’re feeling.

15

Now listen to your own inner voice and, as Norton Juster describes it in The Phantom Tollbooth, to “the wonderful silence just before the dawn,” or “the quiet … just as a storm ends,” or “the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone.”

Read this sentence from paragraph 11 of the text.

If you’re not sold on introspection, know that loneliness is good
for us.

Evaluate whether the author adequately supports the claim that loneliness is beneficial. Explain your answer using specific details from the text.