On Solitude | Hacker News Reader

On Solitude

eriktorenberg.substack.com

199 pointsimartin2k43 comments

Just wanted to share Deresiewicz’s classic on the subject, for those who haven’t stumbled on it before: https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/

thanks for sharing this. This is from 2009 and as I listen to it for the first time, seems just as applicable today.

Thank you for sharing. What a beautiful talk.

I love this essay. I had read it once before, but was so glad I stumbled on it today via your comment, as it hit me with perfect timing today. I enjoyed the audio reading, as well.

Amazing essay, thanks for making me discover it. This passage here is one of the many gems:

> Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it.

Of all the writings on solitude that I’ve come across, almost all are from the male perspective. Anybody know of some good female/other writings on the subject? I have daughters, and I’d like to be able to better relate to them on this.

Carson McCullers?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_Is_a_Lonely_Hunter to start

I'm not sure that anything in this piece was gender influenced. The author could have a female name and I wouldn't have been surprised.

I think there are a lot of things that men take for granted that are not equally available to women. To me, the thought of going into the woods for a weekend with no connection to the outside world sounds peaceful and rather wonderful. But to my wife, it would sound downright alarming. I think it's hard to focus on connecting with one's true self while also worrying about one's physical safety. So I'd like to read more female perspectives on actively seeking out solitude (as opposed to just experiencing loneliness).

Somewhat unrelated to your point but something I always found kind of hilarious is the fact that Thoreau had his laundry and food shopping/prep done by some local women while he was living his 'spartan' life in the woods.

And went into massive debt to fund his sabbatical.

This seems like such a strange thing to say. Why does your wife find having no connection to civilisation "downright alarming"? If women are supposed to find outdoor solitude frightening or something, nobody's told me! I'm hoping this doesn't come across as angry, it just feels like a bizarre thing to read.

I think it is interesting to ask about cognitive bias w.r.t. attitudes towards certain threats. Consider a bear. Neither a man nor a woman is likely to win a fight with a bear (though the man has a slightly better shot). Both men and women could probably learn to scare off most bears rather easily, and bear mace works the same for everyone. We might consider on this basis that the actual risk from bears is similar regardless of gender. But is it perceived that way? Is the comparative risk assessment accurate? And whose attitude is irrational - men, women, both or neither?

I don't think this is the reason.

I think it might be more to do with a woman coming across some weird men in the woods and being unable to lean on civilisation to keep the men from being psychologically or physically abusive.

The danger isn't nature. That's the same for men and women

(though you might argue a case that women are more susceptible to hypothermia... but I highly doubt anyone thinks about that).

This is going to be controversial but I think the reality is that society caters to women a bit more than men; so the woods and going back to nature, for men, is an escape. But for women (and speaking very generally) it's more a feeling of removing of safety and comfort.

> society caters to women a bit more than men

It's more that women constantly negotiate environments to keep the number of friendly men greater than the number of sketchy men, so they don't get raped and murdered.

In the woods, you get what you get. Even worse, both you and the man you run into know that if he rapes and murders you, he'll get away clean. She's got to rely on the stranger not wanting to rape and murder her, even if there are no consequences. I'd say you're safe with about 80% of men with that, but the other 20% would leave you in a shallow grave. With the kind of men or groups of men that wander around in isolated wilderness, I'd bet that you're moving into a 60%/40% expectation.

Did I read correctly ? You barely estimate murderers and rappers to be 20% of the male population ? What are your sources for those figures ?

My wife and I are not particularly outdoorsy, having both grown up in cities/suburbs in the US. So actually both of us probably should be at least somewhat wary of being alone in semi-wilderness. But maybe it's an example of male overconfidence that the suggestion calls up images of Walden for me, but probably Unsolved Mysteries for her. I'm certainly not saying women should be afraid of being alone outdoors, but there is a pretty pervasive cultural perception that lone women are more vulnerable than lone men in many situations. It doesn't help that, for the majority of people, the most famous female "adventurer" they've heard of is Amelia Earhart, whose disappearance overshadowed all her pioneering achievements.

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Solitude", from the collection "The Birthday of the World". Speculative story about a society whose adults spent the majority of their lives alone. Told from a female perspective. One of my favourites, to say the least.

I'm not sure to what degree her perspective is specifically feminine, but Sara Maitland has written two books on solitude and silence: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20518977-how-to-be-alone https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4437202-a-book-of-silenc...

Check out the writings of Clarice Lispector, especially The Passion According to G.H.

Yes, such a good recommendation. Reminds me of Bernard Berenson's epigraph for that particular book: "A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die."

- Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

- Dulce María Loynaz, Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems

- Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries

- Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972

Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction.

Don’t force it, though. Not everyone gets so much from solitude.

St Teresa of Avila’s writings cover the topic indirectly at least.

Interesting that he notes Wallace there.

Wallace was a lonely dude. I still really admire the things he said about leadership and his fiction is truly unique....loneliness is a theme throughout. I think I related to him partially because of that. I recently came across an article about him where he basically couldn't accept that fixing his loneliness wasn't someone else' job.

This seems relevant but it also bothered me and I think he should be cited in the future with this huge caveat in mind. If he wasn't a famous author he would've been known as a creepy stalker.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/th...

https://twitter.com/marykarrlit/status/992735594060148737

I wonder if one day as a society we'll be able to accept again that humans are flawed, and often the most popular are the most flawed. That's not to excuse what he's done or anything like that, but we can still find some interesting things or a bit of peace in his words. The "huge caveat" you talk about applies to pretty much everyone.

I don't think the world refuses to believe that humans can be flawed. That's the opposite of the problem with hero-worship. The problem with hero worship is that we disregard and apologize for our heroes' flaws when we wouldn't do that for the person sitting next to us.

> The problem with hero worship is that we disregard and apologize for our heroes' flaws when we wouldn't do that for the person sitting next to us.

Isn't that basically "refusing to believe that humans can be flawed"? We apply different standards to "heroes" and to regular human beings, while they are both regular human beings.

A lot of commentary here describing what he’s doing as meditation, but it really just seems like cutting out electronic social distractions for a while. A simple reduction of stimuli. While like meditation or Stoicism, that practice is also in the process of being packaged for commodification and cargo culting (“digital detox”, “dopamine fasts”), I genuinely think that the future will consist of such stimulus dieting to manage with a rapidly overstimulating, over-complicating world. In the same way that actual dieting has been a way to deal with a world awash in cheap carbs and calories.

Makes me wonder if there are further rules to add. I’ve always thought that abstaining from mobile devices is not enough- anything distracting and anxiety-inducing can be done bigger and better on a full-sized monitor.

Should other forms of media be avoided as well? Interactive games, passive videos? Music? Even books? Everyone’s threshold is different, but just wondering what people think is a reasonable delimiter.

Josef Pieper has written a couple of books ("Leisure: the Basis of Culture" and "Happiness and Contemplation") about solitude and contemplation that are worth a look.

The author mentions that his technique is not meditation, but his description is very similar to zen meditation ; just sitting in a state of awareness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza

There is definitely something in common with zazen but it is worth not externalizing it for two reasons.

1. I was formerly a Buddhist and I find it unserious, maybe even cringey or appropriative? People who are doing Buddhism are actually on a larger journey which their meditation is a component of, they want to train their attention to be able to truly be present and free of the bullshit of this world... the endless co-opting of mindfulness and meditation to "go out and be a more productive paper-pusher" just seems kind of... I don't know. Profane. Take something holy and put it into an unholy context. Same like I don't make it a point to describe it now as "bathing in the Holy Spirit without any other things to direct yourself to other than your belovedness as an adopted Child of God." You can describe it that way, but if someone's not on that journey that is a rather profane and unsettling thing to do, no?

2. By making it internal, for example by describing it as "doing nothing," I think it makes it easier? If you are setting up for zazen then you might go out and buy a good mat, buy a zafu, clear out a room so that you can stare at a blank wall, listen to many podcasts about the goals and aims of meditation. Like I said, this was an important part of my religious journey and if you're on one yourself, great! But the goal of doing nothing is much simpler than that and does not require special preparation.

I might have chosen an article more along the lines of (2), for example https://www.insidethetravellab.com/the-importance-of-doing-n... , where it's like "no we have seen this in a neuroscience context, here are some resources about what this is called in, say, athletic training contexts etc." Doesn't matter where you do it, it matters what your responsibilities are while you're doing it (namely, that you don't have any).

One of the best documented "Solitary" lives was that of Richard Proenneke (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke) who lived by himself for 30 years in Alaska's Twin Lakes Park.

His self-documentaries Alone in the Wilderness (Parts I & II) and The Frozen North are some of the best and most soothing videos i have ever seen. See also his book One Man's Wilderness.

You don't need Religion/Mysticism/Higher Calling to love Solitude and want to live in an Natural Environment.

I was not aware of the fact that he written a book. I will have to check that one out - because I agree those videos are so calm and soothing to watch.

I'm believing into this more and more...

I am reposting here a link that you might find relevant (I constantly update the original piece, especially the "bibliography", and I will add this entry to it asap).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17794060

> Then the ideas come. Compliments (& apologies) you should give people. Ideas for hangouts. Lists of things I should start or stop doing.

I have plenty of these as it is, so many I can’t capture and follow through on them all. I need to prioritize the ideas that create capacity.

I just listened to this yesterday, very similar themes.

https://onbeing.org/programs/stephen-batchelor-finding-ease-...

This piece reads like some westerner that hasn't practiced meditation in any way before. Which imo, leads to the stupid trap that a lot of westerners like to believe in meditation and make an effort to do it as some sort of "healthy" lifestyle choice (a la Sam Harris; although I do admire his work). Just because you did a retreat for a few weeks by no means opened the stars in your eyes and changed the world. You're not special, we all die. The fact that you came to some profound conclusion on your own is not any more special than someone else going to lunch at McDonalds for the day. Solitude for some reason is championed as some sort of virtuous among westerners, but seen as a weird thing if it's done too much, thus canceling out it's positive aspect. Why? Because you become a self centered asshole that's why.

Jim Carey has a quote on it and I 100% wholly agree with it:"Solitude is dangerous. It’s very addictive. It becomes a habit after you realize how peaceful and calm it is. It’s like you don’t want to deal with people anymore because they drain your energy."

I bring this up because I myself have been a borderline schizoid through middle school through college. All it did was made the world flat and filled with pessimism for myself. You begin to really see and understand the world for what it is...except you have no power to influence it to work for you. You get stuck in a rut that makes you go back and hide in your solitude of misery. You realize it's a safe space for any thinking and engagement. But you forget to interact with people.

From 10-21, I said a rosary, various other prayers, and read the bible, and then reflected on that piece of scripture in my life or just let my mind wander while I read it. Every. Single. Day. If I missed for whatever weird reason, I made up for it by doing it twice that next day, which was extremely rare. What you learn in solitude, you ignore in real life. What you don't know in real life, increases your anxieties in solitude. Leading to a viscous cycle of self centered cynicism.

The biggest irony about all these western revelations about solitude are the exact things religions that exist have been preaching for centuries. Praying to god or going "ohm" for 2 hours at the end of the day achieves the same objective in that you pretend like what you're doing is beneficial when in reality it's not and it's just a waste of time.

That’s an uncharitable reading of the piece, particularly because TFA says that it isn’t intended as meditation and allows his mind to wander. It certainly seems like a much looser practice than most meditation-mindfulness wellness remedies. All it is is transporting the self fifteen years in time to the pre-smartphone era.

“ Which imo, leads to the stupid trap that a lot of westerners like to believe in meditation and make an effort to do it as some sort of "healthy" lifestyle choice (a la Sam Harris; although I do admire his work)”

Sounds to me like a total misrepresentation of Sam Harris’ work and stance in this field. He’s definitely more in the “you are not special, we all die” camp.

Have you tried his Waking Up app?

He's not, but he certainly has a perception of meditation can be helpful. The trap most westerners fall into is that meditation is some sort of fantastical way of helping your psyche when all the drugs you've taken failed. It's not and never has been. It's just a form of willing self restraint and discipline. The whole healing aspect never existed until marketing gurus realized they could make money off it. Like when Hinduism took off in the 70's. Stripping away the religious aspect of spirituality is almost even dumber because now it becomes a religion of the self. And if you have no confidence in yourself or are bouncing back from a major failure in life, the last thing you need is introspection in how you know it all or don't. I'm not advocating religion, but it would do you a lot more help to use that as a stepping stone versus on your own seeing as people have developed these ideas with worse problems than you. Whether it's about vishnu, god, or a prohpet of some kind is irrelevant seeing as their thoughts can help spur new thoughts in your own mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com