Jewels in Solitude

*This was a modification of my previous post entitled "The Value of Being Alone" and was submitted as my Philosophical paper.

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"No man is an island, entire of itself" was how John Donne (1624) saw human beings; for him, humans don’t thrive when isolated from others. Cliché it may seem, yet in the status quo, this concept of his still applies. In a recent study of Wilson et al. (2014), they found that participants typically did not enjoy spending even 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves rather than being left alone with their thoughts. This shows that most people prefer doing something rather than nothing at all, even if that something is negative.

One may ask what the reason behind this attitude is. It may be hard for others to admit but generally, we, human beings are afraid to be alone because in today's society, being alone is tantamount to being rejected, and as Croston (2012) said, rejection is what people fear more than death. We are not literally afraid to be alone, it’s the prospect of being cut off, demeaned, or isolated from the crowd that we are anxious about. We know how it feels like to be alone – unloved, unadmired, and disregarded, and because we already know how it feels, we don't want to experience it again; therefore, we will always look for ways not to be alone; be it in the company of people, a pile of books, a stack of DVDs or even a music playlist in their phones.

On the contrary, according to Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1991), there is an innate desire in every human being to be alone. It is a reality no one can escape no matter how one tries to surround himself/herself with human company, things, or tasks to be just "busy". We are fooling ourselves if we think that we can run away from the isolation we don't want to experience. Despite the deafening silence we don't want to hear, and the aching void in our hearts which we don't want to feel, being alone says Lindbergh, is necessary. Because it is only by being alone that we can be in a state of solitude. In solitude we acquire many values that we do not expect to obtain, and some of them will be presented in the following discussions.

1. New perspective

Nietzsche (1878) said: “There are great advantages in removing ourselves distinctly from our contemporary time,” that is, letting ourselves be taken away from the conforming and unquestioning society we have now. By being alone, we are freed in some way from our comfort zones, and our visions expand from merely seeing what 'one wants to see' to what 'one needs to see'. We can look again at the world with a view atop the rabbit’s fur, a perspective we once had, we get to survey it for the first time its entire shape with a questioning mind, and when we come closer at it again, we now have the advantage of understanding it better on the whole than those who have never dared to climb back at all.

2. Reflection

Solitude allows us to pause. As Gabriel Marcel (1950) said, a break from our daily chain of habit becomes the starting point of our reflection. Solitude grants us the opportunity to think and reflect. Being alone brings us back to the various happy and exciting moments, or even the sad ones that we have forgotten or tried to forget in our life. This allows us to pick different experiences from our memories and join them together to create a unified album of ourselves which might answer the most basic questions and essential questions we’ve been asking this whole time. This interlink helps explain the questions as to our origin and purpose that baffled our minds for days, or even a longer period.

3. The Self

It is in the company of no one but one’s own self that we can find our self. It is in solitude that we regain our free spirit who may have drifted away or has been entrapped by the slavish society. It is in silence and distance from the crowd that we begin to understand the interplay of our self. And when we find out about this truth, we cannot be a stranger to ourselves anymore. We get to know who we are, and when we begin to understand our self, we also learn to love our self, and as what Scott Peck pointed out, the capability to love our self also entails the capability of manifesting love for others.

Based on the aforementioned, one can see the necessity for a person to be alone. In today’s society, people have been giving too much by abiding to others’ dictates. Being alone and in a state of solitude cleanses a person from this poison of conformity and mediocrity and replenishes his/her self in the process.

As a whole, being alone is indeed an endeavor one despises because of the many labels (i.e. unsuccessful and unloved) it attaches to a person. Yet, it must not be hated because after all, we do thrive when isolated from others. It helps us grow and mature by viewing the world from a different perspective that we’ve limited before, by being more skeptical and dissenting from societal orders and lastly, by knowing and understanding who one’s self is. Think of these values that we can achieve through solitude.  Spending more time alone will be worth the experience.