O solitude, my sweetest choice. Places devoted to the night, remote from tumult and from noise, how ye my restless thoughts delight! This wonderful song was co

O solitude, my sweetest choice. Places devoted to the night, remote from tumult and from noise, how ye my restless thoughts delight! This wonderful song was composed by Purcell on a translation of a French poem which was popular across all Europe in the XVIIth century. If you excuse the anachronism, solitude was already romantic. -- After reading these summaries of the chapters of "A Philosophy of Loneliness", I'm not at all convinced of the quality of the book. Here is a sample of critic that I hope will be judged constructive. 1. First of all, this definition of loneliness is too convoluted. Being alone is objective, while being lonely is subjective, it is a feeling. That talk of "quality" of relationships and "life meaning" may have some truth in some cases, but it is not a generic principe: for example, I remember discussing with someone who avoided deep bonds and openly thrived for quantity. Some persons will never feel lonely as long as they know they have people they can chat with. I also feel it is rather pointless to introduce categories for something that has no clear boundaries, and varies so much across societies and individuals. The "devastating effects that Loneliness can have on health" are a tautology, since loneliness is defined as the negative feeling of solitude. Any extended negative feeling may have a bad impact on the health. But, as far as I know, there is no proven correlation between chosen solitude and health problems. Considering the intrinsic experimental difficulties (how to measure "chosen solitude"? etc) I doubt anything conclusive can emerge. 6. Maybe the rejection of living with a partner is increasing, but the numbers of single persons and solo households are very misleading. Detailed investigations rule out that chosen solitude could be the main factor in their evolution. For example, in France (INSEE 2014), 16% of the households are made of a single person. But these 16% are the sum of 9% for people aged less than 65 and 7% for those above 65. It looks like the main factor for solo households is the raise of widowhood caused by longer lives. -- I was much more interested by the personal comments in the right column. Some resonated with me: I looked for total solitude during most of these summer holidays, to the point my own voice surprised me when I had to speak again. Now that I'm back to work, I'll have to endure "the psychic costs of being around other humans". These past years, I've told my friends and family that I am more and more reluctant to endure that cost. But I don't feel really concerned by the rest of the quote: "They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly." Like the OP, I'm interested in the artefacts that have been used to fight loneliness. Rituals are one of those, as pointed by the excellent novel "Friday, or the other island" (M. Tournier) where Robinson Crusoe uses work, rituals and religion to keep his mind occupied and avoid loneliness or questions on the meaning of life.