Alone Time

 The latest episode of The Argument podcast tackles the great debate over the alleged "loneliness" crisis, with Derek Thompson plumping firmly for the view that Americans are spending too much time alone and it's making us miserable—and the other two co-hosts taking a more ambivalent stance. 

I am in a somewhat odd position on this issue since, intellectually, I've been convinced by the Robert Putnam arguments about declining social capital for years. The fall of in-person "community" was a major topic of discussion in divinity school ten years ago, and probably is still.

On the other hand, my personal experience of adult life has never been that I need more social connection than I'm getting. Rather, the omnipresent struggle seems to be to try to wrest more alone time out of a world that does not often want to bestow it. 

Not a lack, but a surfeit of other people is the great dilemma of adult life, it has always seemed to me. With no insult intended to anyone specifically—and tongue somewhat in cheek, I swear—I know exactly what Henry Miller means in that passage in Tropic of Cancer, where he says that people are like an infestation of lice you can't get rid of no matter how many times you move. 

The importuning needs of others will always find you, wherever you flee. 

...the people when they came
so cultured, even bringing little gifts,
so they pecked a shred of my life, and flew off with a croak
of sneaking exultance,

—as D.H. Lawrence once put it. Which is why he writes, in another poem: 

the best of all
is to be alone, to possess one's soul in silence.

That was generally my conclusion too. After initially trying to put my Putnam-esque theories about "in-person community" into practice, after graduating from divinity school—I became convinced that actually I couldn't stand in-person community and everyone had actually made the right choice to quit their bowling leagues and run away to solitude. 

Derek Thompson talks a lot about the "economy of regret" in the podcast episode, and says that people are spending too much of their leisure time on activities that they later say they regret doing or feel guilty about—such as endlessly scrolling through short-form video on social media. 

Whereas, Thompson says, no one ever regrets spending an evening out with friends and acquaintances. (They don't?)

But Edmund White quotes an observation of Proust's (in White's short life of the author) that has a quite different theory of regret: "The artist who renounces one hour of work for an hour of chatting with a friend knows that he has sacrificed a reality for something that doesn't exist." 

Again, no insult intended to any friends—but I kind of get exactly what Proust was talking about. To sacrifice an hour that could have been spent writing or reading for the sake of social interaction feels, in some ways, like one has swapped something ephemeral for what could have been eternal. 

Obviously, a lot of this reaction is shaped by the fact that the things I love most are reading and writing—and these are two activities that both take a lot of time to do well and require near-perfect solitude. No wonder, then, that I am always trying to carve out more time to myself!

Thompson, Demsas, and Yglesias, as writers, are all personally acquainted with this aspect of the phenomenon. And Thompson indeed admits early in the episode that many Americans are spending more time alone not because they are forced to, but by choice. 

Jerusalem Demsas then asks the valid question: if people are seeking out more solitude because they want it, then how do we know that this is a bad thing? 

Thompson replies to the effect that people might be making choices that feel good in the short run but that are bad for them over the long term. 

And this is the point in the debate where the "loneliness crisis" discourse always starts to seem to me dangerously proximate to a right-wing or paternalistic cultural project. Because, as Demsas points out, Thompson's argument does seem to rest on the idea that even if people are doing things that they think they want, these things are actually leaving them unfulfilled. 

Which tends to imply that people are not themselves the best judge of what's good for them, and they need some other social or religious authority to come in and instruct them—or possibly coerce them into making different choices through public policy. 

I recall the words of that great arch-reactionary Baudelaire, from the Isherwood translation of his Intimate Journals: 

"If, when a man has fallen into habits of idleness, of day-dreaming and of sloth, of putting off his most important duties continually until the morrow, another man were to wake him up one morning with heavy blows of a whip and were to whip him unmercifully, until he who was unable to work for pleasure worked now for fear—would not that man, the chastiser, be his benefactor and truest friend?"

Some people do actually seem to yearn for just such a coercive external authority because they distrust their own capacity for choice. They install blockers on their phone that lock them out of certain apps after a period of time, or other devices that force them to stop scrolling. 

To all of which I can only say: "well, not me!" I have never really understood what other people find so enthralling about instagram reels that they can't look away. 

And so, to the architects of the "loneliness epidemic" discourse, I still protest: "But I swear, I like being alone. I want more of it! I need more solitude. And what's more, I think I make good use of it when I have it!"

To which the answer always seems to be: No, it's not possible. You may think you like it, but you really don't. You're lying to yourself. 

"No, I really do, I promise!"

Lies! Lies!

I am like the character in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: "gathering a desperate courage [to] urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself"—but no, the iron matriarchs of the older generation respond. It's not possible. You can only be unintentionally deceiving yourself or willfully others. 

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
[...] How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no Solitude? (Yeats)

But Derek Thompson ticks through his statistics remorselessly. 

He says people that are married and cohabit are happier; he says men are spending more time with TV instead of outside the house; he says "the typical female pet owner now spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species" (Thompson admits that this last finding from an outside survey is particularly "controversial"—since it's giving J.D. Vance vibes)... 

But so what? I protest; what is it to you? Why can't you let people be alone with their pets or do whatever it is that they want to? 

To quote A.E. Housman:

... if my ways are not as theirs

Let them mind their own affairs. [...]

Please yourselves, say I, and they

Need only look the other way.

But no, they will not; they must still

Wrest their neighbour to their will—

That's what I'm really objecting to here in this paternalistic, Baudelairean approach—why must we wrest people away from their dogs or their cats if that's in fact what they prefer to be doing?

Here's where Thompson would say: well, it's not like everyone is doing fine and describing themselves as happy. In fact, the statistics show a marked increase in self-reporting unhappiness in the English-speaking world. And since this trend correlates so strongly with a decline in social capital and in-person community and a rise in the amount of time we are spending alone, might not the two phenomena be linked? 

But Thompson himself in the course of the discussion provides at least two alternative explanations that might account for the phenomenon of self-reported unhappiness—and they have nothing to do with people having too many pets or reading too many books or writing too many blogs. 

One possibility is that alone time is not the problem per se, but the fact that people are spending their alone time on social media, short-form video, doomscrolling, "brain rotting," etc. 

As said above, I don't really understand the compulsion other people seem to experience around social media, but sure, maybe this is a problem. 

I do object, though, to the insinuation that people need to spend less time thinking about politics and the state of our society. 

"In a world where young people are [...] going onto TikTok or instagram and seeing other people make the case that America in the 2020s is just this rolling dumpster fire of fascism and hell, well then they're just going to feel terrible no matter where they look," says Thompson.

A friend of mine was saying to me the other day: "You're part of the problem! You just go on your blog every day and write about how terrible Trump is and how many people he's deporting to secret prisons overseas and it's just a big bummer!"

Okay, but does that make it not true? 

Is our current government not in fact a "rolling dumpster fire of fascism and hell" that is actively seeking to subvert our constitutional rights? 

Thompson says at one point that we have "unusually high levels of negativity in our news coverage." If we were talking about another country going through a quasi-authoritarian takeover and the narrowing of civil society, with widespread arbitrary detention and deprivations of human rights and human liberty—would we be talking about the news coverage of these things being too negative—or would we be talking about the events the news was trying to describe? 

If the hosts of this episode were looking at similar statistics about the mood of young Russians during the period of Putin's rise, say, they probably wouldn't be framing it as: "wow these people seem really upset about something; it's quite mysterious what it might be; they are probably spending too much time stewing in baseless pessimism and negativity and just need to go out and touch grass."

As Arthur Koestler once pointed out in an essay, it's always fun to blame the "Cassandras" and the "screamers" for telling everyone what's happening before their eyes. They are a bummer, because they try to hold us on the tragic plane of life, whereas all we want is to descend by natural gravitation back to the mundane, which requires normalizing what should be unthinkable. 

But that doesn't mean—Koestler's point was—that the "screamers" are wrong. 

Moreover, as mentioned above, Thompson himself offers still another potential explanation for why people might be self-reporting so much misery. "I think a lot of things are happening here," he says later in the episode; "I think the U.S. has a culture of [...] diagnostic inflation, which is a fancy way of saying I think we pathologize a lot of fairly normal behavior; we encourage people to think that normal modes of thought or intrusive thoughts are signs of anxiety disorders [....]"

Okay, great, so maybe what's really happening when people self-report being unhappy is that we have developed a much richer vocabulary over the years for describing how unhappy we are, and one of our current favorite hobbies as a culture is talking with one another about all the varieties of unhappiness we experience. And we are probably having a great time doing it. 

A character in Caroline Blackwood's Great Granny Webster says at one point that the best reason to read Shakespeare is that "when I grow up and become very unhappy I would find every kind of human unhappiness perfectly expressed there." 

Our age has perhaps outdone even the bard in multiplying permutations of misery. And I think we're getting as much enjoyment out of the task as prior generations could extract from Shakespeare.

This is the other guilty truth that I'm not always sure I should admit to people, when they start talking about too much doomscrolling and negativity and depression in our time. Do I dare to confess it? I'm having the time of my life!

Tom Wolfe once noted that the intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century were delighted by the existence of the atomic bomb, because it gave them something to wring their hands over in the midst of what would otherwise be a landscape of unremitting prosperity and optimism. Whenever he heard the pundits maundering about the crisis and depression and alienation of our time, he fired back:

What are you talking about? We're in the midst of a "happiness explosion"!

So too, that's part of what I want to say whenever I hear the commentators talk about the "loneliness epidemic." Are you kidding? This is how I always wanted it to be!

__

P.S.

Okay, well that post may have seemed like a work of unrelieved misanthropy. I take none of it back. But I do want to make a note here that I do actually care about other people. 

In fact, I think you have to care about other people and their needs in order to feel burdened by them. 

The people who have the ability to not notice or care about the needs of others are the ones who never find the presence of others to demand much of their time, effort, or attention. 

These are often also the people who then wander around complaining about how lonely they are. 

Because they keep wondering why other people aren't paying more attention to them. They don't realize that if they paid more attention to other people, they wouldn't feel so lonely. 

Instead, they would soon find they had the opposite problem. People would desire their company, because they noticed that they paid attention to them. 

Here again, D.H. Lawrence explained all this best: "Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness [...;] only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it."