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Video Description
Why are so many of us afraid of a quiet room and our own company? This lecture from Academy of Ideas looks that fear straight in the face. Many thinkers believe the dread of solitude is really the dread of ourselves — because when the noise stops, the thoughts we have been running from finally surface. But used well, solitude is where we become who we are, away from the constant demands of others. Dostoevsky called it as necessary to the mind as food is to the body — difficult, yes, and that is one more reason to do it.
Full Video Transcript
The fear of finding oneself alone. That is what they suffer from, and so they don’t find themselves at all.
Human beings are social by nature and unfit to endure extreme cases of isolation.
If we are alone for too long, our mental faculties can degrade, leading to states of insanity and deep despair.
The use of solitary confinement and exile are practices with ancient roots,
indicating that people have long understood just how deeply the fear of isolation runs through our veins.
But in the modern day, our fears are not restricted to extreme forms of isolation.
Rather, many of us fear being alone for any extended period of time.
In this video, we’ll investigate this fear, explain the detrimental effects it can have on one’s relationships,
and explore the benefits of overcoming this fear and learning to find solace in solitude.
Many thinkers have suggested that the fear of solitude is at root a fear of oneself.
In our normal daily routines, busied with work and chores and most often in the presence of others,
our social persona comes to the fore and frightening thoughts and emotions are pushed outside of our awareness.
But when away from the restricting confines of others,
these darker aspects of ourselves tend to rise to the surface and make their presence known.
It is what one takes into solitude that grows there, wrote Nietzsche, the beast within included.
Hence, there is a danger in spending a significant amount of time isolated from others,
as there will come a time when, broken down by the beast within,
solitude will weigh us down and become a great curse.
There are some who can endure this crisis of solitude,
and through a heroic effort tame and integrate the darkness within.
But most would be destroyed by such a confrontation,
which is why Nietzsche thought many should be dissuaded from solitude.
The default response for those for whom solitariness is too heavy a weight to bear
is to cling to others to ensure they never feel alone.
One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself,
and another because he wants to lose himself.
Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.
Those who lose themselves in others may be saved from their solitude,
but they always turn out to be crippled versions of the person they could have become.
In order for us to actualize our potential, we need to fulfill what the
psychologist Abraham Maslow called our meta needs, or highest needs, which
include the drive for truth, beauty, and goodness. These needs, as Ernest Becker
noted in his book The Denial of Death, cannot be completely fulfilled by other
people. It is impossible to get blood from a stone, he wrote, to get
spirituality from a physical being. Any attempt to fulfill the totality of our
If the partner becomes God, they can just as easily become the devil, wrote Becker.
The reason is not far to seek.
If you find the ideal love and try to make it the sole judge of good and bad in yourself,
the measure of your strivings, you become simply the reflex of another person.
You lose yourself in the other.
just as obedient children lose themselves in the family.
No wonder that dependency, whether of the god or the slave in the relationship,
carries with it so much underlying resentment.
To ensure we don’t, like many individuals today,
fall victim to dependence-driven relationships,
we must develop what the 20th century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called
the capacity to be alone.
When the fear of solitude makes us dependent on others,
We become overly compliant out of a fear of abandonment and thus build up what Winnicott called a false self
That is our personality becomes a mere reflex of how we believe others want us to be
It is in developing the capacity to be alone that the false self can be broken down thought Winnicott
Rendering us able to rediscover our true self or in other words our
authentic feelings and needs in the modern day most are oblivious to the benefits of solitude instead many
unknowingly adhere to what is called object relations theory, which is based on two key assumptions that the
maturation of one’s personality can only be facilitated through interpersonal relationships and that these
relationships are the primary if not sole source of meaning in life. In his influential work
Attachment and Loss, John Bowlby, an adherent of this view, wrote
Intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves
Not only when he is an infant or toddler or school child, but throughout his adolescence and his years of maturity as well, and on into old age.
Taken to their extreme, the assumptions held by object relations theorists imply that the individual’s life has no meaning apart from interpersonal relationships,
thus overlooking the well-established fact that meaning can be found and personal growth stimulated when we cultivate, in solitude,
a relationship with some form of creative work that consumes our attention.
As the 20th century psychiatrist Anthony Storr argued in his book Solitude, A Return to the Self,
it is in the struggle to give form and order to an external creative work that we also,
often without knowing it, are imposing form and order on our mind.
Maturation and integration can take place within the isolated individual to a greater extent than I had allowed for.
Introverted creators are able to define identity and achieve self-realization by self-reference,
that is, by interacting with their work rather than by interacting with other people.
It is this ability to achieve self-realization by developing a relationship with our work
that led the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky to claim solitude for the mind to be as essential
as food is for the body.
In solitude we can forge our character away from the often constricting external demands
of others, and maintain our independence in the relationships we do cultivate, thus ensuring
we do not, like many today, lose our identity in them.
Yet as we learn to flourish in solitude, we must not dismiss the dangers of it which Nietzsche
spoke of, dangers which led Goethe to write, there is nothing more dangerous than solitude.
We can increase our capacity to deal with these dangers, however, if we consider the
possibility that the benefits of solitude are embedded in its dangers,
meaning that it is only by voluntarily seeking out solitude and confronting the
darkness within that we can extract the benefits of being alone and perhaps even
eventually attain the rare self-confidence of one who has gained
sovereignty over himself. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,
We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us.
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult.
That something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
Source: Academy of Ideas