A modern fear of solitude

 

 

Abstract

Solitude, being alone, can be individual, shared or both: e.g. respectively, Robinson Crusoe, a pair of lovers, and an enclosed and contemplative religious community, in which the members spend time each by themselves and also together as at meals and the cycles of liturgical offices, while the whole community has minimal contact with the world outside.

Attitudes towards solitude

1. Positive

1.1. Freedom from interference and distractions with what one desires to do.

1.2. Privacy.

1.3. Keeping oneself to oneself.

1. 4. Misanthropy.

2. Negative

2.1. Dislike or fear of loneliness and desire to avoid it or to escape from it.

2.2. Feeling isolated, ignored, neglected or shunned when alone among others.

Plus another and distinctively modern negative attitude:

2.3 Fear of being cut off from distractions, the exact opposite of (1.1.)

Ordinary distractions are from what we want to do or have to do, or from boredom and not having anything worthwhile to do. Prevalence of boredom, emotional deadness and emotional parasitism today. Hence (2.3): being alone and having to face meaninglessness of life, and so distraction via entertainment, immersion in work, drugs, etc.. Modern philosophical conclusions that life is meaningless or has only possibilities of finding one’s own meanings. Even revivals of metaphysics in contemporary Analytic philosophy tend to shy away from big questions and distract themselves with minutiae. Marx: Socialist man has no need to think —about meaning of life. Also, fear of losing ‘autonomy’ if any higher and transcendental power found when self alone and having to face these questions. But secularism, now the default would-and-life view, leads to loss of meaning and thus to (2.3) and fear of solitude.