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?

“On one hand, it’s not so different; every advance in communication technology is an extension of that primal need to socially groom as many people as we can. We have that built into us. But social media is where quantitative change begins to look like qualitative change. It’s become so enormous, so all-engulfing, we’ve sacrificed that ability to ever detach. We have this superabundance of social connection and I think we’re at a tipping point. In the same way we look at a healthy diet when it comes to food, we need to think about developing a healthy media diet.” Harris says that while some people may think he is overreacting, the numbers don’t lie.

“This year, Nielsen released new stats showing the typical American spends 10 hours of their waking life every day looking at screens. If you factor in eight hours of sleep, we’re now spending more of lives looking at simulacra than at what we might call authentic things. When we wake up we don’t say ‘what shall I do today?’, we say ‘what did I miss?’ and grab our phones. So that last refuge of solitude, in unconsciousness, becomes something you want to run away from as quickly as possible. That is an awful shame, because it’s in the hours between sleep and wakefulness, those dim morning hours, when we have revelations and those little eureka moments.”

Harris also refers to the fact we should consider solitude a precious resource, as our personal space is increasingly encroached on and harvested by commercial entities. On social media platforms, we may think we are ‘sharing’ but we are in fact doing unpaid labour — such ‘user-generated content’ is making other people a lot of money.

“We need to think of our media environment the same way we think of our landscape and oceans — that our solitude and public discourse are actual resources that people are making money from, and which we are giving up without even thinking about it. In the same way we have sex education, we need media education in schools,” says Harris.

Constant connection also has implications on our mental health.

“We see anxiety rates going up, and to the degree they can measure such things, there has been a huge drop in empathy and the ability to connect among college students. Studies have shown young people especially are terrified of face-to-face contact or confrontation. This is because the phone is text-oriented, you can edit it, while a face-to-face conversation has an element of chaos or uncertainty. That’s part of why when you get used to communicating with your friends by text it gets very difficult to go back. There was a study recently where people were put in a room and told they could sit there alone or they could give themselves an electric shock, and most people couldn’t last longer than five or 10 minutes in their own company. That’s how much we long for external stimulus.”

How do parents who have grown up in a more analogue world help their children to switch off for the sake of their mental health?

“It’s our duty as parents to give our children access to the richest interior life they can develop. It’s only when you have a strong sense of self and an ability to be with yourself that you can then connect in a healthy way with other people. Ultimately, if you build that rich interior life inside yourself, nobody can take that away. That’s the biggest gift you can give a child, to shift where they get their approval from. Instead of constantly being desperate for likes or retweets, an external apparatus of approval, there should be a well inside of them they should be drawing from. That doesn’t mean discouraging them from becoming Google engineers or Silicon Valley geniuses of the future. They will be people who master both worlds, who understand connection and disconnection. Because frankly there has never been a human who proposed brave new or revolutionary ideas who wasn’t a master of their own solitude.”

• Solitude: In Pursuit of A Singular Life in a Crowded World (Random House Books) is out now.