Last week, I wrote about William Deresiewicz’s article The End of Solitude. In it, William argues that with Facebook, texting, Twitter, and other ways to stay connected, we’ve lost our capacity for solitude.
Nora interviewed William earlier this week. A shorter version of that interview will air on the March 4 episode of Spark, but you can listen to the whole thing now, or download the MP3.
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[Original image by Vaidy Krishnan]
Full transcript after the jump
Full Transcript
Nora Young: Hi, Bill!
William Deresiewicz: Hi, Nora!
Nora: So you taught English at Yale for 10 years, and early on in your article, you talk about asking your students about the role of solitude in their lives. What did they tell you?
William: Right. It was really very interesting. I suppose, I expected them to tell me a little bit about the role of solitude in their lives, and instead one of them said, “Well, actually, solitude freaks me out a little bit, and even when I have to write a paper, I won’t sit in my room by myself and do it. I’ll go and sit with a friend and do it there,” which I thought was a little sad actually. But what really was interesting was the second student who spoke, who said, “Why would anyone ever want to be alone? What can you get out of being alone that you can’t get by being with someone else?” So I tried to talk to them a little bit about introspection and the value of it, and how you need to be alone in order to do it.
Nora: Were you surprised by their reaction?
William: I was surprised by their reaction. That was maybe three or four years ago. In the years since that happened, as I’ve thought about this more and the technology itself has changed, I’ve become less surprised because I’ve discovered that, in fact, it’s a perfectly normal reaction for people in their generation. Because, they really don’t seem to value solitude very much and the way they live their lives, doesn’t seem to make any room for it.
Nora: So how do you see the difference between solitude and loneliness?
William: Well, that’s a great question. Obviously, they’re emotions that are based on the same state, which is being by yourself. The real question is how do we feel about being by ourselves? Does it make us feel bad? Does it make us feel a sense of grief, which is what I think we call “loneliness,” or does it put us in greater touch with ourselves? Does it enable us to listen to things in ourselves that we wouldn’t normally be able to hear, in the din of the social world? That’s what I think we all call “solitude.” It’s what Thoreau was looking for at Walden, right? Yeah.
Nora: Can we explore that a bit more?
William: Sure.
Nora: I mean, what’s the effect of losing the ability to be alone? Why does that matter?
William: Well, I think it matters. First of all, this is something that Emerson says that I quote in the article. He says that you need to not travel all the time in other people’s opinions. If you want to be able to think for yourself, if you want to be able to have original thoughts, which is not only good for you, but good for all of us, that we have people who are thinking creatively, you need to get away from other people’s opinions, other people’s values also, so you can chart your own direction. I think that’s the first value of solitude.
I also think we live such connected lives, such networked lives, that in a way, that’s a little harder to define. We lose a sense of our own integrity or our own selfhood. In the article, where I quote a passage or refer to a passage from Mrs. Dalloway from Virginia Woolf’s novel.
The heroine, Mrs. Dalloway, goes up into her room in the middle of this very busy day of hers and just looks in the mirror and gathers herself together and remember who she is apart from her husband and the friend she’s inviting to her party and the busy London streets that she’s just been walking through, and very happily walking through.
But she needs that time to, as I say, gather herself into herself. I think that’s another thing we lose when we lose solitude.
Nora: At a more sort of maybe prosaic level, I noticed in my own experience that I read a lot for work, but I find now that when I sit down just with a novel with no music playing and no one around me, it almost makes me anxious, and that anxiety in turn makes me anxious. So I’ve wondered whether there’s something going on there, in virtue of the fact that I’m so used to having all this stimulation coming at me from all these different places that when it’s just me and a book, it almost flips me out.
William: Yeah. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I more or less read for a living and I find it difficult to sit with a book for more than half an hour at a time, say without jumping up and checking my email again.
Nora: Yeah.
William: I’ve tried to eliminate. I mean, I don’t have a handheld device. You say just even the initial act of sitting down makes you anxious? I understand that. Look, I think that – and I mean this in a serious and literal way. I think that we are training our nervous systems to expect a certain and a certain kind of stimulation and I think it’s a kind of addiction, and I say I’m not using that as a metaphor.
Every time I check my email, I ‘m looking for a little packet of pleasure that gets delivered when I get an email. I feel like I’m a rat with an electrode planted in my brain, stimulating myself. They did those experiments. Rats will do that 2, 000 times an hour if this stimulus is pleasurable.
That’s sort of the equivalent of the Blackberry or the text message. I know people call them “Crackberry,” right?
It’s because it’s this kind of addiction and I think that when it’s withdrawn, we become anxious. But I think you’re right to be anxious about your anxiety because it suggests that we’re – my God! We’re losing the ability to do, or at least comfortably do all kinds of things that really should be normal and natural and comfortable for us, like reading.
Nora: When it comes to younger generations – I mean, on the one hand, you could say this is more pronounced with them because this is something that they grew up, but I wonder also, haven’t we always said the same kinds of things about younger generations? That they travel in packs, that they overdose on the latest technology, that they’re not very introspective, or is there something that’s fundamentally different that’s going on now?
William: That’s a good question, and people have been asking me that about this article. I think I need to give two answers. One is that, yes, on the one hand, we are just a couple of out of touch oldsters, sitting around and complaining about young people, “Oh, they don’t know how to live, they don’t know how to think…” and people have been always doing that. I mean, generational conflict is a universal part of human society.
But I also think that there is some truth to it. Yes, people who are older at the time that television was beginning to pervade society were complaining about television. It doesn’t mean their complaints were wrong.
I think it’s clear 50 years or 60 years into the age of television that television has indeed rewired our nervous system, rewired our society and robbed us of a lot of important abilities, mental abilities and emotional abilities.
I think the same is true of the new technology. There’s no question that there are great things about the new networked technology, but I also think – and we can talk about this. But I also think that there are real drawbacks, and the fact that old people are complaining about the new technology, it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong.
Nora: Right.
William: And, also, the fact that kids can’t see their deprivations, because they’ve grown up in this environment doesn’t mean that those deprivations aren’t real.
Nora: In fact, you actually make the comparison to the TV generation. Can you spell that out a little bit?
William: Oh, absolutely. I did this partly because I didn’t want to – I wanted to make it very clear that I was equally implicated in the…
Nora: Right.
William: I mean, I grew up in the 70s. So I was part of the first real television generation and I watched about five or six hours a day, which is amazing to me to think about it, but I guess it’s really quite normal. But I think it did things to me, and specifically what I talk about is cultivating this habit of boredom, of being bored, of being easily bored. When you have a television at your disposal to relieve your boredom, it actually makes you much more inclined to be bored. Just the way you were talking of being anxious when you read. If you can scratch the itch all the time, it actually makes the itch worse, right? I mean, I think that’s the easiest analogy.
So I realized, and this is something that I’ve really disliked about myself for a long time, that I’m really incapable of sitting still. Not so much because I’m checking my handheld device because I don’t have one, but I need some kind of constant stimulation that I think was trained into me by the television.
I’m incapable of what I call “idleness.” Walt Whitman’s idea of being able to sit still and let the world come to you, being passively receptive to the world, letting the world take you by surprise.
So as I say, I think that the age of television was the great age of boredom, because we could always relieve our boredom, therefore, we became terrified of it and unable to deal with not having anything to do.
Today’s generation is the age of loneliness. We’re always able to connect with other people. Therefore, that fear of not being able to connect with other people gets worse, because you can always alleviate it and you don’t know how to turn loneliness into solitude, into a positive thing. Does that make sense?
Nora: Yes, yeah. Absolutely! Bill, aware of the irony of doing so, we actually wrote about your argument on our blog and Megan left a comment. She wrote, “I will often be studying for about 20 minutes, and then all of a sudden I have to check Facebook and then my email. No one calls or texts. It’s all online. I’d like to be away from everyone else, but then I wonder what’s going on in my online world and think that maybe I’m missing out on things. Then I have to check.”
Now, in your article, you talk about this idea of missing out, and you say that our great fear is isolation from the herd. Can you expand on that a little bit?
William: It’s really interesting because I have heard that from a lot of people from this article, that fear of something’s going on that I’m not a part of. I’m not really sure what to say about that, why are we so afraid of missing out. It seems that we really define ourselves more and more by the fact of being connected, by the fact of being visible. I guess that’s what I start the article with.
I said our fear is loneliness, but I also think that our related fear is anonymity. We want to be visible to other people and somehow we feel like we don’t exist if we’re not visible to other people.
This is one of the big differences between my generation’s technology, television, which just came to you, and the new technology, which you also originate, which you have your own personal presence in. You put yourself out there.
So the difference is that we all – we want to amass as many Facebook friends as we have. A related fear I’ve heard from young people is that if I don’t have enough Facebook friends, if I don’t have as many as my friends do, people will think that I’m not popular. So we need to be known. We need to broadcast ourselves.
So to turn ourselves into kind of miniature celebrities with blogs, with Facebook, with constant contact. I suspect that that’s a lot of what lies behind this need to not miss out.
Nora: Just before this interview, I searched Facebook for “William Deresiewicz.” Is that you on Facebook?
William: Yeah, that’s me. There’s only one with that name. Yes.
Nora: So do you feel that same impulse as well?
William: I joined Facebook, because an old student from a few years ago friended me and I thought, I’m not going to be churlish. I’ll play along. I don’t actively participate in Facebook. I don’t post cute little updates about myself. I don’t check what my friends are doing.
Nora: You don’t throw sheep at people or anything like that?
William: I don’t even know what you mean.
Nora: OK. I guess then you really don’t use Facebook that much [laughs]
William: But it sounds interesting. I’ll have to look into that. [laughter]
William: But I just want to say, because I don’t want this to be all one-sided and grouchy. It does enable people to find me. In fact, some of the people who responded to my article were able to find me in Facebook. That’s a good thing. I have friends who’ve talked about what a great thing it is, especially for people in their 30s and 40s, not teens and 20s. Those of us who made our important friends a long time ago, but lost touch with some of them and can now get back in touch with them. That this is a tremendous blessing of Facebook, and I don’t want to go without saying that.
Nora: In fact, you say that in the early days, the Internet was an incalculable blessing, but that today we have too much of a good thing. So how do we know how much connectivity is enough of a good thing and not too much of a good thing?
William: Well, I think, if we start to feel negative effects in our own lives. I feel anxious about reading a book, I can’t go half an hour without the sense that I’m missing out on things. Then that tells us that maybe we need to cut back. I mean, I think this is an individual decision for everyone. I certainly don’t think this is a matter of social policy. We’re not going to regulate our band. Once a technology is in place, we never do away with it unless it’s superseded by something even more efficient.
So I think this is something that everyone has to work out for themselves, and maybe the model of addiction is appropriate because when new things are introduced, either in society or personally, we tend to go overboard, and I think we tend to need to find our own level with them.
I think when you know it’s not making you happy, you need to do something about it or ought to do something about it.
Nora: So if we’re losing our capacity for solitude, what’s the answer? How do we either keep from losing it or get it back?
William: Let me say that I’m wary of trying to come off as this wise man who has all the answers, and I also don’t want to be glib about it. I mean, people say just say no about a different form of addiction, and that is seen as kind of glib, in facile and too easy. But I also think, and I do say this in my article, that ultimately this is a personal choice and you do have the power to turn things off, to regulate your own technology, to decide to watch less television or make some rules for yourself about your Blackberry.
Just yesterday, I decided that I was going to turn my computer off at night, and it was really about energy use. It was actually a couple of days ago. It was about energy use, but I also realized, you know what? I don’t get any email, past about dinnertime. I check my email 10 times at night and I never get anything. So why not just turn it off?
In the last couple of evenings when checking my email hasn’t been an option, I felt much more relaxed. I felt this tremendous sense of relief.
I think people can do that, just do that for themselves and I hope that they will begin to discover that they are letting solitude back in their lives or allowing themselves to hear themselves think, maybe in a way that they haven’t been able to do in a little while.
Nora: One last question, Bill. What’s the role of solitude in your life?
William: Solitude is incredibly important to me. I generate most of my ideas by thinking, sitting in my armchair and just thinking about things, thinking about what I’ve been reading, thinking about what I’ve been hearing. The interactive part is very important. I talk to friends about things. People write to me about things I’ve written. I do read things online and not online. But I need a lot of time to be able to process all these and to be able to think about it, and to be able to remember also what it is that’s important and what it is that I want to do.
So solitude is very important to me, and I do guard it jealously and that’s why I don’t have even have a cell phone. I really want not to be constantly interrupted.
Nora: Thanks so much for talking to us.
William: Thank you. Thank you very much.
What used to be diaries or personal journals has become blogs and twitter streams. Our inner lives have literally turned inside out. What does it mean to have our stream of consciousness published in this way? In darker moments, I think of Ray Kurzweil's futuristic idea that we need to reverse engineer the brain to invent super intelligence. Perhaps Web 2.0 is a mechanism for doing so. More likely not, I'm sure.
Boy! can I relate to this. I belong to 3 professional associations. Each has magazines, websites and conferences. There are my to hobbies, geocaching and astronomy. Then there is my avocation network security. I get literally hundreds of emails every day, due to all the speciality mailing lists I'm on. Did I forget the 20 or so RSS feeds I subscribe to? Oh, then there is my podcast list each dealing with the above, there has to 20 of those including the Spark podcast. I work long days don't get home until 6:45pm every evening. Then I've got to find time for a wife. And still after all that I still feel that I just don't have enough time to read, or listen too all the subjects that tickle my fancy. Time! Time! What I do for more Time!
Yes, I really saw myself in this too. I can't help but think Bill is right that maybe we're actually creating some deeper change in ourselves, and that maybe it's hard to turn the clock back.
Haven't heard the interview yet, but it's an interesting topic. Having just joined Facebook, I'm finding that when I go online it's for about twice as long, now. The main thing I'm finding is that my real interactions with people now seem slightly less intense, that Facebook interactions, due to the human brain's sensitivity to images, have dulled the real ones a bit. As for solitude, I went cross-country skiing yesterday on my own, and Facebook thoughts were definitely swarming in my head, and impacting my connection with the immediate natural beauty around me. Ok, time to get out of town and away from "it all" for a few days! I've always found that a solitary retreat in nature leaves me feeling cleansed and refreshed, mentally and physically.
I found this interview – and the essay that kicked it off – to be one of the most thought provoking comments on the continuously connected Web 2.0 world.
It’s good to remember that solitude and reflection are required for us to knit our experiences into a coherent and useful set of views and cognitive tools.
I think that another Web 2.0 tool could be an invaluable aid to this: blogging. However, this would require that we write critically and analytically, and not just stream-of-consiousness: more essays and less “I had eggs for breakfast” blog posts.
Also, I think the addition of text transcripts is a wonderful idea! I read a lot of online material on my smartphone, and it is much easier and faster to read through the transcript than to download and listen to the podcast. It is a trade off however: audio and voices are more nuanced and “human”.
Thanks for continuing these fascinating encounters. One of my favorite Emerson quotes is "I hate quotes. Tell me what you know."
Just listened to the interview, found it great. One think I'd like to ask is whether the "connection" that he talks about that we're "overdosing" on is really connection? I.e. are we really connecting with others on Facebook, or is it just a virtual connection? To me it often seems like a role-playing game. The few times I get a handwritten letter, it seems so much more real and tangible. We think that we're really connecting with people on Facebook though, and thus I think that most of us are living in a fantasy world to some degree, actually disconnected from reality and each other and ourselves. I don't mean to seem pessimistic – I believe it's very easy to reverse this trend if we wake up and show a bit of discipline in our use of technology, and fight for our solitude.
What happens to identity for a person without solitude? Who are they when they are alone? Could this have something to do with the anxiety these new generations feel when they are not talking, texting, facebooking or tweeting? It seems that our society may be evolving into a sort of group mind.
I remember times when I felt trapped by the identity I had in certain social groups. I wanted to grow out of it and was delighted to find that I was able to relax more and be who I want to be when I stepped away from my social group for a while. It allowed me to be who I was becoming without the old relationship patterns dragging me back in. But how can people step out of their role into one of their choice if they are constantly interacting with their social group in person and electronically?