The fine art of being alone

In our constantly connected world, we are becoming increasingly uncomfortable in our own company. The author of a new book tells Marjorie Brennan how we need to reclaim our solitude

Many of us no longer know what it is like to be truly alone. We scroll through our social media feeds until we retire to bed, wake up to our smartphone alarms, wearing watches that track our heart-rate as we sleep. As Michael Harris writes in Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World: “Our extension into massive social networks stretches far beyond practicality — it is utterly compulsive and compulsory, a phantom umbilical cord.”

Harris’s previous book, The End of Absence, was an examination of what it means to be the last generation which remembers life before the internet, and he sees Solitude as a natural progression. “I became more interested in a specific part of what that first book was about — how to be alone. Our world is constantly begging us to not be alone, and we’ve become addicted to connection. Why are we so afraid of ourselves, of time with ourselves?” He writes that every piece of communications technology, from Papyrus to the printing press, has hijacked an elemental part of our minds, so what’s different about technology and social media?