The thing that really fascinates me about solitude is the need to talk about it. The contradiction seems lost on people. ‘I must tell you about the silent retreat I’ve just been on.’ ‘It was so nice to just sit with my thoughts for a bit.’ Solitude is the new wild swimming: if you don’t talk about it, did it even happen?
And I fear this habit is about to get a whole lot more irritating because the benefits of solitude – all fairly predictable – are increasingly being ‘studied’ and presented in quasi-scientific jargon. ‘It creates spiritual sustenance,’ writes entrepreneur and author Ari Weinzweig. ‘We need to recognise its benefits and see it as a positive choice – not something that happens to us,’ explains Dr Thuy-vy Nguyen, from Durham University’s department of psychology.
Last year, a book was published called Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone. One of the book’s co-authors, Professor Netta Weinstein, was interviewed on Woman’s Hour. I have listened to her words over and over again and still don’t really understand them. ‘With small periods of time alone, we can begin to get to know ourselves in solitude and get to know solitude itself.’ Or: ‘Reflect on the environment you want to put yourself into.’ Does the sofa count?
Two more books on the subject – The Joy of Solitude and The Joy of Sleeping Alone – are being published in November. In an article for the BBC, Flora Tsapovsky writes: ‘This new wave of books aims not only to destigmatise solitude, but also to make a case for its benefits and pleasures.’ Solitude is becoming a middle-class movement. Come and be alone… together.
It’s all quite weird and infantilising. We are talking here about being alone – not for days on end, just occasionally by ourselves with our thoughts. Is that really so scary? Do we need a book – maybe three or four books – to navigate it? Professor Weinstein thinks so: ‘[Solitude] could be sitting alone in your home, having some kind of self-care experience, taking the time to relax, having a bubble bath, baking a cake, or a lot of people talk about gardening as a hobby.’ Right. But isn’t that just, you know, living? It would be odd – or at least a different hobby altogether – to have a bubble bath in anything but solitude.
I like being on my own – just as I like swimming in cold water – but I don’t want to pathologise it and I definitely don’t need a social scientist to tell me it’s OK. I mean, the benefits of solitude are obvious. We know that socialising can be draining – ‘Hell is other people,’ as Sartre wrote – and solitude allows us to re-charge. Likewise, social media overstimulates our brains and can make us think our friends are busier and more fun than we are. But let me save you the price of a book: just put your phone away from time to time.
Is occasionally being alone with our thoughts really so scary? Do we need a book – maybe three or four books – to navigate it?
In 2023, the University of Reading actually bothered to track 178 adults in the UK and US over a period of 21 days and concluded, apparently with a straight face, that ‘spending more hours alone was linked with increased feelings of reduced stress, suggesting solitude’s calming effects’.
This new solitude economy – banal observations dressed up as self-help or worse, scientific insight – could even have a detrimental effect. For if you are genuinely anxious about solitude, thinking about it will undoubtedly make things worse. Imagine being alone and then telling yourself: ‘This is solitude. Solitude is good. Let me get to know solitude.’ It’s enough to send you mad.
To be clear, solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. There is no doubt that we are living through increasingly lonely times. In 2023, the US Surgeon General published a report titled ‘Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation’ in which he pointed out that only ‘39 per cent of adults in the US said that they felt very connected to others’. But this growing cult of solitude, which seeks to re-frame the mundane as radical, is unlikely to help: the lonely will not be reassured by books telling them it is OK to be alone. And the rest of us – the vast majority, in fact – should be, well, left alone to get on with our solitude in peace.
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