Quirkyalone

Zeitgeist Alert: The End of Aloneness?

Feb 08, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Solitude, technology

Apparently I am not alone in asking if we are experiencing the end of aloneness. A few days after publishing this blog post, “Are our phones robbing us of solitude?”, I heard KQED’s Forum, our local public radio civic affairs program, take on this very question.

The guest was William Deresiewicz, an English professor who taught at Yale between 1998 and 2008 and recently published a beautiful essay called “The End of Solitude” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I can’t remember ever being so riveted by a program. I was getting ready for work, but found myself unable to leave, obsessively dialing to join the conversation.

Deresiewicz raised provocative questions: What do we lose when we deprive ourselves of solitude? What happens to college students if they never disconnect enough to sink into aloneness? Or the girl who receives 3,000 daily text messages, which means, on average, she is never alone for longer than 10 minutes? What if they have no desire for solitude at all? How is solitude related to friendship? He shared an enigmatic Emerson quotation: “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.”

Check out the radio show here. Listen for me at the end. My question: Is this an addiction to constant connectivity, and if so, what do we do to rehabilitate ourselves?

Nancy in Boston forwarded me this similarly themed piece from the Boston Globe, “The End of Alone.”

Lately I find myself taking “power solitude,” like “power naps.” I’m training for longer periods without checking emails or texts. Though I still feel addicted, I’m comforted to know that others are wondering what we are overly connected. I know I’m not alone.

Are our phones robbing us of solitude?

Jan 25, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Solitude, technology

Profound thought while walking across the street on a beautiful, sunny afternoon in San Francisco, checking my email on my iPhone: Are we ever really alone anymore?

Taking long walks alone is something that I cherished in my pre-cell phone days, and something I lauded in Quirkyalone as a source of creative inspiration. Long walks alone are when we allow thoughts to form, to see where thoughts lead us. Before I even uttered “quirkyalone,”  I had the image of a woman walking alone, a mix of pride, melancholy, and contentment.

Now my walks alone are punctuated by my thumb punching “check email” on my phone, when suddenly, though no one is physically present, they may as well be. Mobile technology can be so seductive and addictive, the ability to constantly check messages and feel the presence of the world swarming around us in a million little missives. But at the end of the day, we don’t feel nearly as much alone. And I think in many ways that can also harm our ability to be together.

Granted, there are, gasp, people who don’t own cell phones. But we are going mobile, where everything will be checkable. In this era of “ambient knowledge” (everything my 362 Facebook friends “know” about me that I don’t remember sharing)  and camera phones (where every moment is sharable), cutting the cord from the Internets–and being alone–takes ever more willpower.  Of course, I am the one who hits “check email” directly after a movie, when I could be luxuriating in the closing music over the credits. There’s no question that I’m addicted to the “new,” to the sense that someone cares enough to reach out and touch me, whether through email, text, voice, tagged note!

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