How to Be Alone (School of Life) (3 page)

Given that you are obviously a person without natural affections and a grudging attitude towards others it is probably good for the rest of us that you should withdraw into your own egocentric and selfish little world; but you should at least be honest about it.

And yet it is not clear why it is so morally reprehensible to choose to live alone. It seems at first sight a great deal less offensive than the blatant aggression which the choice seems to provoke in so many people. It is very hard to pin down exactly what people mean by the various charges they make, probably because they do not know themselves. For example, the ‘sad’ charge is irrefutable – not because it is true but because it is always based on the assumption that the person announcing that you are, in fact, deeply unhappy has some insider knowledge of your emotional state greater than your own. If you say, ‘Well, no actually; I am very happy’, the denial is held to prove the case. Recently someone trying to condole with me in my misery said, when I assured them I was in fact happy, ‘You may think you are.’ But happiness is a feeling. I do not think it – I feel it. I may, of course, be living in a fool’s paradise and the whole edifice of joy and contentment is going to crash around my ears sometime soon, but at the moment I am either lying or reporting the truth. My happiness
cannot,
by the very nature of happiness, be something I think I feel but don’t
really
feel. There is no possible response that does not descend almost immediately to the school-playground level of ‘Did, didn’t; did, didn’t.’

But the charges of being mad or bad have more arguability.

However, before we look at these arguments, the first thing to establish is how much solitude the critics of the practice consider ‘too much’. At what point do we feel that someone is developing into a dangerous lunatic or a wicked sinner? Because clearly there is a difference between someone who prefers to bath alone and someone who goes off to live on an uninhabited island which can only be reached during the spring tides; between someone who tells a friend on the telephone that they think they’ll give tonight’s group get-together a miss because they fancy an evening to themselves, and someone who cancels all social engagements for the next four months in order to stay in alone. Age and circumstance are, or can be, factors, and so is what someone is doing in their solitude: there is a difference between a teenager who has not left their bedroom for four months and an adult who decides to walk the whole Pennine Way alone for their holiday. If you are writing great books or accomplishing notable feats, we are more likely to admire than criticize your ‘bravery’ and ‘commitment’. Most of us did not find Ellen MacArthur sad, mad or bad when she broke the single-handed sailing circumnavigation record in 2005, even though it meant being entirely alone for 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes and 33 seconds.

There are no statistics for this, but my impression is that we do not mind anyone being alone for one-off occasions – particularly if they are demonstrably sociable the rest of the time – or for a distinct and interesting purpose; what seems to bother us are those individuals who make solitude a significant part of their life and their ideal of happiness.

It is all relative anyway. I live a solitary life, but the postman comes most days. Neil, the cheerful young farmer who works the sheep on my hill, roars by on his quad bike at least three or four days a week, passing with a cheerful wave. I have a phone; I go to church every Sunday. I have friends and children and sometimes they even come and visit me. Small rural communities are inevitably, oddly, social – I know the names and something of the circumstances of every single person who lives within five miles of me. (There is nothing in the world more sociable than a single-track road with passing places.) And even if I lived in deeper solitude I would live with a web of social dependencies: I read books that are written by people; I buy food which is produced by people and sold to me by people; I flick on the light switch and a nationwide, highly technical, constantly maintained, laboriously manufactured grid delivers electricity and my lights come on. It would be both mad and bad not to acknowledge and give thanks for all this not-aloneness.

Most of us did not find Ellen MacArthur sad, mad or bad.

So it is useful to ask oneself how much solitude it takes to tip over into supposed madness or badness. It is certainly useful to ask those who are being critical or accusatory of anyone who seems to enjoy more aloneness than they themselves feel comfortable with. After all, Jim Friel in the earlier quote is
at a dinner party,
hardly an activity of the classic antisocial loner.

In his book
Solitude,
Philip Koch attempts to break down the accusations into something resembling logical and coherent arguments, so as to challenge them: he suggests that the critics of silence find the desire for it ‘mad’ (or tending towards madness) because:

Solitude is unnatural. Homo sapiens
is genetically and evolutionarily a herd or pack animal. We all have a basic biosocial drive: ‘sharing experience, close contiguity of comradeship and face-to-face cooperative effort have always been a fundamental and vital need of man (
sic
) … the individual of a gregarious species can never be truly independent and self-sufficient … Natural selection has ensured that as an individual he must have an abiding sense of incompleteness.’ People who do not share this ‘force of phylic cohesion’ are obviously either deviant or ill.

Solitude is pathological.
Psychology, psychiatry and particularly psychoanalysis are all insistent that personal relationships, ideally both intimate and sexually fulfilled, are necessary to health and happiness. Freud originated this idea and it has been consistently maintained and developed by attachment theorists (like John Bowlby) and particularly object relation theorists (like Melanie Klein) – and is generally held and taught throughout the discipline. (This may also underpin the idea that you are not ‘really’ happy on your own. Since you need other people to be mentally well, then thinking you are happy alone is necessarily deluded.)

Solitude is dangerous (so enjoying it is masochistic).
It is physically more dangerous, because if you have even quite a mild accident on your own there will be no one to rescue you; and it is psychically dangerous because you have no ordinary reality checks; no one will notice the early warning signs.

These three arguments do have a kind of coherence. They are based on assumptions that – were they correct for all people at all times – would indeed need to be answered. I personally think (and I’m not alone) that they are not correct in themselves and do not adequately allow for individual difference. I hope to demonstrate this as we go through the book.

The ‘moral’ arguments, however, at least as Koch defines them, are rather more absurd. This second group of objections to solitude tend to be exactly the opposite of the first group. Solitude is morally bad because:

Solitude is self-indulgent.
The implication here is that it is hedonist, egotistic and seeking its own easy pleasure – that somehow life alone is automatically happier, easier, more fun and less nitty-gritty than serious social engagement, and that everyone in the pub is exercising, comparatively at least, noble self-discipline and fortitude, and spending twenty-six hours a day in the unselfish miserable labour of serving their neighbours’ needs.

Solitude is escapist.
People who like being alone are running away from ‘reality’, refusing to make the effort to ‘commit’ to real life and live instead in a half-dream fantasy world. They should ‘man up’, get real, get a grip. But if social life is so natural, healthy and joyous as contemporary society insists, why would anyone be ‘escaping’ from it?

Solitude is antisocial.
Well of course it is – that’s the point. This argument is tautological. But ‘antisocial’ is a term that carries implicit rather than explicit moral condemnation; it is clearly a ‘bad thing’ without it being at all clear what it might mean. All this actually says is ‘solitude is preferring to be alone rather than with others/me [the speaker] and I am hurt.’ It is true, but is based on the assumption that being alone is self-evidently a bad thing, and being social is equally self-evidently a good thing.

Solitude evades social responsibility.
This implies that all of us have something called a ‘social responsibility’, without defining what that might be or consist of; but whatever it is, for some unexpressed reason it cannot be done by a person who is – for however much of their time – alone.

Now clearly, even here, there are some interesting discussions to be had.

What exactly do personal relationships provide that nothing else can offer? Could, for example, Anthony Storr be right and creative work offers compensatory alternative or even better gratification? Or a sense of meaningfulness? Could some people’s peaceful happy solitude function as an antidote, or even a balance, to the frenetic social activity of others? What, exactly, is our social responsibility in a society where most people feel powerless? How does multiculturalism work in terms of individuals as opposed to groups? Why does other people’s claim to be happy in a different way from oneself provoke so much anxiety – and why is that anxiety so commonly expressed as judgement, condemnation, rather than genuine concern? How does a society choose which issues it allows itself to be judgemental about, if it has no clear idea of the ultimate good?

And above all, why are these conversations not happening?

I believe they are not happening because of fear. Fear famously paralyses creativity, stultifies the imagination, reduces problem-solving ability, damages health, depletes energy, saps intelligence and destroys hope. And also it does not feel good.

Fear muddles things up; it is difficult to think clearly when you are scared. When we are frightened we tend to project this onto other people, often as anger: anyone who seems different starts to feel threatening. And one problem with this is that these projections ‘stick’. As Jim Friel put it in his article, ‘single people can also feel this way about other single people, and about themselves’. Of course they can – if you tell people enough times that they are unhappy, incomplete, possibly insane and definitely selfish there is bound to come a grey morning when they wake up with the beginning of a nasty cold and wonder if they are lonely rather than simply ‘alone’.

In addition there is a contemporary phenomenon which adds to the problem: the mass media make money out of fear.

You may have noticed that the UK experiences waves of grim killer diseases – even though proportionately very few people actually get these illnesses. A successful ‘media illness’ has to meet quite particular criteria – among other things, it has to have a very complex official name and a very vivid popular one:
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(and its human counterpart,
variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease
) aka mad cow disease was perfect. The illness should also be terminal but rare (CJD only occurs in one in one million people per year, worldwide, and the majority of these cases have no link whatsoever with contaminated beef products) so that it is most unlikely that any readers will actually contract it; and if possible it has to be caused by the greed and stupidity of someone else (the food industry and farmers in this case).

Diseases are quite easy to manipulate in order to rack up the right sort of fear – the sort that sells papers. And there are other fears to play on. At the moment a very popular media-inspired terror is the threat of the ‘loner’.

Once upon a time, and not very long ago, the word ‘lone’ had rather heroic and adventurous connotations: the Lone Ranger was not sad, mad or bad; Texas freely and proudly adopted its nickname: The Lone Star State. But recently ‘loner’ has become media shorthand for ‘psychotic mass murderer or sex fiend’. If you look up ‘loner’ on Wikipedia you will find this alphabetical list of related terms:

Avoidant personality disorder

Autism

Byronic hero

Dysfunctional family

Hermit

Hikikomori

Introversion

Loneliness

Lone wolf (trait)

Major depressive disorder

Misanthropy

Recluse

Schizoid personality disorder

Social phobia

Social rejection

Solitude

Tragic Hero

I have put into italics the four terms which do not directly correlate with ‘sad, mad or bad’, although the context of the list raises questions about even them – is it okay to be ‘introverted’? Are hermits actually crazed? Is solitude like Major Depressive Disorder? Are Byronic heroes lonely? But what are more interesting are the absences: adventurer, sensitive, mystic, creative genius, bereaved, castaway/Crusoe, victim of solitary confinement, wanderer.