Choosing Solitude

How misery is not necessary in a time of isolation

Humans evolved to live in small kin groups, eating together, sharing stories, and gossiping about Brad’s dirty little extra-marital affair with Lisa in accounting. We aren’t meant to be alone. Yet here we are, shut in. Unsurprisingly, the COVID crisis has so many of us feeling the sting of solitude.

It’s no coincidence that humans have used enforced solitude as punishment for millennia. In ancient Greece and Rome, crimes were often punished with years of exile on remote islands. Some Romans believed this was worse than being thrown off the Tarpeian rock to suffer a gruesome death on jagged rocks below. Personally, I’d take exile if given the choice, but I’m crazy that way. The point is, isolation is painful.

Social isolation is literally dangerous. It’s legitimately more deadly than obesity, smoking, or sitting through five straight episodes of the Big Bang Theory.

Under the strain of enforced isolation, it’s easy to see the negative impacts on our lives. Look how much we’re missing. We’re not only feeling lonesome, we’re literally dying right here in our living rooms, with Netflix running 24/7 and an endless supply of Kit Kat chocolate accidently falling into our mouths. Happiness is gone, gone forever. It’s the stuff of nightmares. Right?

Maybe not.

The stoics believed that friendship was not necessary for being happy. Yes, friendship was necessary for the successful living of daily life. It helped one practice virtue. It’s not that we need a friend to be with us when we’re sick. It’s the other way around. We need a friend to be with when they are sick. In either case, satisfaction is not found in friendship but found within.

That’s why context is so important here. Solitude is renewing and relaxing when we are the ones who choose it. But when it’s forced on us, it’s an intolerable burden. Likewise, solitude is liberating when it’s temporary. But when it’s indefinite, it’s a special kind of hell reserved for people on couches covered in chip crumbs.

For those of us sick with solitude, contextualisation may be the antidote. So let’s try telling ourselves a different story.

Remember how many times you complained about modern life being too fast, confusing, and stressful? I remember.

It was a perfectly legitimate complaint. So much of our modern lives were concerned with being constantly busy, experiencing every possible experience, not a second to waste. We could never sit still, never be silent. Our phone was with us every waking hour. When we went for a walk, or cooked dinner, or exercised, we listened to music, podcasts, and audiobooks. We had developed the attention span of a legume.

The hustle and bustle wasn’t all that satisfying, or that natural. Humans evolved in a relatively distraction-free environment, and yet we had saturated ourselves with never-ending distractions.

Strange as it may seem, socialising was just another one of these distractions. Bored? Have a drink with a friend. Lonely? Grab a coffee with a friend. Horny? Well… you get the idea. Now you have no choice. You have to be bored and alone.

So why not use this time to practice the long-lost art of silence? Let yourself think your thoughts for a while, listen to them and accept them, the dark ones too. Be friends with yourself. You might discover that you’re a pretty rad human.

We rarely think of socialising as potentially toxic or diminishing. But these terms apply more often than we might like to admit.

Entertaining social interactions create dopamine spikes. It’s a hell of a drug, dopamine. It’s what links our positive emotional responses to experiences in the world, so that we’ll seek those experiences again and again. Sex, television, and the million hamburgers I eat weekly, all spike dopamine.

Modern life has made it excessively available and it’s making it difficult for us to slow down and simplify. Fun with friends, as wonderful as it might be, is yet another source of dopamine dependence. So you aren’t trapped without friends right now. You’re on a dopamine detox.

There’s an even darker side to relationships that many of us would not like to admit. They are often used as a means of validation and distraction from pain.

Why address my problems with low self-esteem when I can cover them up with the validation of others? They can tell me I’m hot, or laugh at my jokes, or comment on the beautiful symmetry of my eyebrows. Sure, it means that I never correct the behaviours that serve me most poorly. But who Cares? I’ll feel better.

Do you use socialisation as medication? Most of us probably do from time to time. Not so easy now though is it? But that’s totally fine. We’ve been gifted the opportunity to come down from that friendship high and learn to validate ourselves. Methadone for the soul.

Perhaps all of this positive contextualisation can be summed up by knowing one simple fact: chasing happiness actually makes us unhappy.

This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the hedonic paradox. We usually associate hedonism with excessive pleasure, bestial orgies, gluttonous feasts, and Austin Powers’ glorious hairy chest. But hedonism in the psychological sense simply refers to the pursuit of pleasure and aversion to displeasure, and it’s a formula we all follow. Turns out though, chasing happiness gets you, well, less happiness.

Happiness it seems is not achieved directly, but as a by-product of a life lived meaningfully.

What fantastic news this is. Now you get to be a little bit miserable and figure out how to find meaning, how to develop your value system, and how to strengthen your identity. Doesn’t matter that you’re a little bit miserable, it’s not your goal to avoid misery anyway. No harm done.

Of course, some pain is so bitter that it’s beyond the reach of even the most hilarious and humble writers. But a little bit of perspective can go a long way.

With every loss, there is something gained. It’s very easy to focus on the loss, humans love to dwell on the negative. But let’s not do that here. Let’s do what’s best for us, and focus on opportunities. And if that doesn’t help you feel better about being socially isolated, just become a miserable grump. Hey, it worked for Scrooge.

Related posts:

15 Borderline Creepy Ways to Show Her You Love Her This Holiday Season. Because what is Christmas really, without some borderline creepiness?.

Your strengths are what provide you an area over your competitors. You would possibly desire to be the center of attention on enhancing your operation or supplying gorgeous providers to customers, as…

Have you ever remained in an indecisive state for days, months even years? Unable to feel sure about any option on the table, humming and hawing about the pros and cons and swaying back and forth…