The book Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World by Michael Harris caught my eye months ago when I was at the library to pick up the book Singled Out. It was on the same shelf. The promise of this book was that it would show the reader how to be comfortable in solitude. I expected a kind of celebration of solitude. It even says in the flap description it is “about discovering stillness.”
Yet mostly it confirms what I already know. Society is a busy, busy place. In fact, the book is actually a warning against all of the solitude thieves waiting to pick our pockets of peace, tranquility, creativity, attention, and sanity. A heavy, dire alarm, almost, of impending doom.
I also want to point out the book caught my eye way before the current need to socially distance ourselves. I had long been feeling the introvert’s pull to nest and hide away on weekends. I felt torn between the wish for solitude and the push from society to “get out there and do stuff.” A voice was telling me that the temptation of solitude was unhealthy and it was, therefore, healthier to be Active and Doing Things and Connecting. Michael Harris has some things to say about that voice.
Harris begins by explaining his interest in finding stillness while being too overwhelmed by connection and myriad other obstacles. He holds up these obstacles, “technology, society, and commerce,” shining a harsh light on them. He does not provide any way to escape them or go anywhere – including within – to avoid them. The bad guy is “out there” and there’s no avoiding him, so just be miserable. Harris admits his first wish was to look for “the lost art of how to be alone.” I’m not sure if he ever finds it.
Maybe he is just generally busier, has more friends and living family, than I do. His description of his life sounds like an exhausting whirlwind of distractions. Early on he asks, “Why am I so afraid of my own quiet company?” And he says this book is the closest he’s come to the answer. So he admits he may not have found the answer. That’s important to remember.
He dives right in, describing the first and most obvious thief of our solitude, social media and its ability to highjack our minds and time, and its false promise to “cure” our loneliness. In quick order, Harris abandons the notion of a lost art, replacing it with the belief that solitude is a resource. And it is in danger of being squandered in the same way our oceans and forests are at risk of being depleted.
He does make a distinction between solitude and loneliness. Solitude is one possible cure for loneliness, he says. Plus, solitude is excellent for bringing us fresh ideas, self-knowledge, and for strengthening our bonds with others, or reinforcing that we care for others.
So Harris’s theory is that our solitude is stolen from us. And so, “the chapters that follow aim to identify those territories where solitude thrives. The mapped out fenceless places worth safeguarding.”
Here are some of the territories and the ways they are being exploited and attacked. Remember, these foes are preventing us from having fresh ideas, self-knowledge, and stronger connection with others.
- The wonders of daydreaming and a-ha moments.
- “Daydream destroyers” such as the machine zone, the state created by games like Candy Crush, that demolish solitude. In the machine zone, there is no engagement, no connection. This state of consciousness was first noticed in slot machine gamblers at casinos.
- In a chapter on Style, Harris rages against emoticons, mass media, and conformity in online behavior and thought.
- Harris moves on to lament the loss of individual taste and how our preferences can be manipulated through algorithms combining reviews, scores, and aggregations, rounding out these dangers with the negatives of filter bubbles, mass entertainment, and mass judgment.
- While the whole world is mapped and we are always tracked, we still get lost because we’ve become so dependent on e-maps. Fitbits track us physically, while Facebook and Google track our online travels.
- And yet, despite our reliance on e-maps, when we want to go into the wild alone, we can’t do that either. We’ve reached a culmination of our centuries-long desire to flee from the natural world into cities.
- I expected to enjoy the chapter on reading. What better solitary activity is there than reading? Ah, but remember, if solitude is a resource being hunted by others, your reading is also under attack. By what? Social stories – platform technologies providing crowd-sourced and AI written stories. Oh, and social reading and smart phones are also encroaching on our solitude and the empathy that “real reading” builds in us.
- Harris examines our descent from handwritten letters to typed letters to texting to dating apps requiring only a swipe. “Romantic connections benefit from solitude” and love letters bring the experience of “communion within our solitude.”
- Death, the ultimate solitude, inviolate. But there are many actually chasing immortality. Whole companies are moving beyond a search for good health towards the embodiment of “health” through avatars of our data so we are never forgotten. Harris examines the e-death industry based primarily in Silicon Valley where there are people searching for a kind of “silicon rapture.”
Finally, Harris puts all he has learned to the test and spends one week in a family cabin completely alone and disconnected. He’s looking for an epiphany, but after a couple days remembers that Thoreau was not the only one who enjoyed living alone in the woods. So did the Unabomber. Harris eventually comes to a place of dark questions, asking if it’s possible “to secure some isolation within the glory of all that connectivity.”
Quotes I liked:
Society simply refuses to let people be mateless.”
Michael Harris, page 31
The eureka moment does not occur at conference tables.”
Michael Harris, page 34
There is a heaviness and starkness about this book that I didn’t really enjoy. I kept hoping for a redeeming ending, a chapter showing the reader how to withstand or overcome all of these inexorable titanic shifts tugging us away from the comfort of solitude and forcing us into machine zone algorithmic avatar fogs.
I think Harris was also wearied by the weight of all he laid out. In just one five page section, I found the following heavy and dark words: menace, unbearable, shocked, mauled, chopped down, insidious, desperately in need of, frightening, monster. That gives you a peek into the tone of the book.
Harris is an author and journalist and I’m curious, from a writer’s standpoint, if this is just his voice and everything he writes has such dark and foreboding tones. His other books are along the same lines, books on connectivity and the “last generation in history to remember life before the internet.” Here he paints a dystopian-like world-view that, especially in the current moment, I’m not sure I want to read about. I’m all for knowing the facts, and I’m not advocating for a Pollyanna unicorns and pixie dust whitewash of reality. But the constant drumbeat of danger and darkness in this book is nearly paralyzing.
I wonder how Harris has been faring in the current reality. Some people are still overwhelmed, now by ever more digital connections, trying to replace the social face-to-face interactions that previously filled their days. Others are feeling completely cut off and too solitary. It’s an abrupt change on either end of the spectrum.
If you are looking for explanations for why our world feels so distracted and zany and frenetic, this book has your answers. If you’re looking for a book to show the beauty of solitude, the comfort it can bring, ways to enhance it or enjoy it more, that’s a different book. I was looking for the later, and Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World (emphasis on “crowded”) now makes me want to find it even more.
Finland bench by jacqueline macou from Pixabay / filtered from original