7 ms·

The power of lonely: What we do better without other people around

293 points by visopsys 12y ago

jqm 12y ago
I don't know about everyone else, but I do my best work alone. Of course, there does need to be a balance, and reference to others, and having others show up to confirm or criticize the work helps. Personally I think there is way to much "social" stuff going on in our society and this is detrimental to real work and innovation taking place. But then again, the choice between bad company and no company is often real the dilemma, and the logical pick is a no-brainer in my opinion.
- drbawb 12y ago
  >and having others show up to confirm or criticize the work helps. I actually had a rather interesting experience last night where an "outsider's perspective" ended up being the exact insight I needed. My roommate stepped outside to socialize with me while I was repairing my Mustang: which has been having intermittent ignition problems since we replaced the ignition control module 6 months ago. --- To set the stage: this module bolts to a plate on the intake manifold. One of the bolts is used as an electrical ground. Unfortunately we had broken this bolt in removing the original module. Furthermore the back of the unit uses the manifold as a sort of heatsink. So that missing bolt was preventing good thermal conductivity as well! We had come up with temporary measures to restore the ground -- but clearly these measures were inadequate. The factory mount is in a very inaccessible spot: there's simply not enough room to drill out the remains of an automotive grade bolt and re-tap the hole. A friend and I had fabricated a "mounting adapter" and were toying with the idea of remote mounting the module. However we couldn't find a suitable spot on the car that would provide a clean electrical ground. (Without stressing the factory wiring harness.) My roommate, a machinist and most certainly not a car guy, points to a flat surface and asks if it's "solid enough" to bolt the adapter plate to. What he had pointed to was the power steering pump. Which for obvious reasons we could not drill into. --- However that suggestion ended up being the catalyst I needed to solve the problem. It was as if the whole engine bay became a puzzle. You see: power steering pumps are made to be removed far more frequently than an intake manifold. Initially I had thought the only way to repair the factory mount was to remove the intake manifold, which is an arduous task that involves removing many delicate assemblies for emissions and fueling. Removing the power steering pump, though, was a considerably easier task! This would open up plenty of room in the engine bay; we could even use a typical cordless drill. --- Inspiration sometimes comes from the oddest places. How to act on the proper solution (repairing the factory mounting plate) had eluded me for six months. An absolutely bonkers suggestion ended up leading me down a much simpler path to success.
  - kleer001 12y ago
    Reminds me of the rubber duck debugging, only tangentially, but in the same spirit.
    - drbawb 12y ago
      I'm surprised how effective this sort of 'debugging' can be. I'd love to know more about the mechanisms which make this sort of "verbal problem solving" tick. I wonder if it's as simple as mapping the problem onto parts of your brain which aren't often tasked with this type of critical thinking.
casca 12y ago
Anecdotally, most people I know do better with a mix of social and alone time. Given that it's now possible to almost never be conscious and effectively alone, it will be interesting to see the long term mental health impact. Also, being alone is clearly so distressing to many people that they would rather shock themselves than be alone - http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/07/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/07/people-wou...
- precisioncoder 12y ago
  It's an interesting article but I feel like the study draws the completely wrong conclusion. I would draw the conclusion that humans when offered an experiment they have control of that offers a new or interesting experience will participate even if it causes them pain. If I participated in the experiment I would definitely shock myself since I've rarely been shocked in the situation, then I might spend the rest of the time analyzing my behavior and trying to see the influence of evolutionary drives as a motivator and enjoy that even more. It's basically the same thing as putting ANY button in a room with the warning "Do not press this button".
  - icebraining 12y ago
    It wasn't new by the time they sat in the room: they had already been shocked and all had said they were willing to pay money to avoid being shocked again.
alashley 12y ago
I think when people emphasize their ability to spend an inordinate amount of time alone, they are looking at it as a unique "quality," something that sets them apart from others. We all need our alone time, and a few aspects of personality development occur when we are reflecting on the social interactions, encounters and relationships we've had. But too much time alone, I think, eventually leads to feelings of despair and helplessness. Either that, or a numbness to the reality of the state of isolation.
- rimantas 12y ago
  A suprising number of people have real difficulty of being alone with their thoughts. There being alone I mean not being only physicall alone, bet being also free from other forms of disctraction and communication.
  - aestra 12y ago
    Which is probably the reason why when faced with a (say) 10 minute wait, people feel the need to be distracted. Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit... ANYTHING to DO. Even bringing a book or iPod on a train. Some people feel extremely uncomfortable just sitting doing nothing. Being "bored" so to speak. However boredom is GOOD for you, for adults and especially for children. It fosters creative thought as well as has other positive aspects. Introspective thought and sometimes problem solving comes from boredom. Think about it - where do your best ideas come to you? In the shower. That's why I get so depressed with how I see kids behaving these days. They have a zillion toys, DVDs, computers, iPods, tablets because (GOD FORBID) they don't have anything to do for a second. They bring their toys outside of the house. I never once in my life brought a toy with me outside of the house. If I had to wait someone I just (gasp!) waited. They are watching movies in the car (!!!) and this is considered a positive to keep them occupied (and presumably just quiet). I was at a (somewhat snoody) restaurant and I saw two kids who were like 8-10 years old who brought several coloring books and crayons with them and they were all splayed out on the table like it was a child's play place. The concept seemed to be HORRIBLE for them to not have something to do in the time frame between ordering and eating! A full 10-15 minutes! Well in my opinion it is setting the children up for failure. They aren't interacting with their environment, engaging in conversation, asking questions, or even just learning at some point you have to learn to sit down with nothing to do. Or even learning to find something to do when they are "bored." Kids used to be good at that. Games like "I spy," hand clapping games, pretend and make believe, doing each other's hair, inventing games, singing, trying to find license plates from every state, creating dance routines, cops and robbers (and the politically incorrect version - cowboys and Indians), etc, etc. My friends and I even wrote, memorized, and performed an entire play when were were children. I remember going to a really boring after school program for poor kids. There was basically nothing to do for hours other than a small playground that I was way way too old for. So I created a whole world in my head. I was out in the woods. I had to collect firewood and build a fire. I collected sticks, dug a small hole, arranged the sticks as I would if building a fire and arranged rocks around it. Bundled more sticks to make a torch, etc. I have preteen cousins. When they visit family they don't interact with the family at all. They are on their phones the ENTIRE time at Christmas. I don't even know them at all except for what their parents tell me. I didn't hear a single word from either of them. Nowadays distractions aren't even enough, people seem to be distracted from their distractions. Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) wrote a really good article about it. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCYQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424053111903454504576486412642177904&ei=2JW-U_6_ItOmyASQooDYDw&usg=AFQjCNEw68MHEZDy8bp9unUS0mA6iiZg3A&sig2=iM4N5rPKmEAsJux7elJ_2A&bvm=bv.70138588,d.aWw http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd... Might also be of interest http://www.the-exponent.com/in-defense-of-boredom/ http://www.the-exponent.com/in-defense-of-boredom/ I bring a book with my traveling sometimes but usually I don't even take it out, I just sit there with my thoughts and I feel no anxiety about it. I feel really sorry for those who seem to have anxiety about sitting around with nothing to do.
Xcelerate 12y ago
As someone who spends a good deal of time alone because I enjoy solitary pursuits, I disagree with the article when it claims that alone time is a form of "liberation", "freedom", and gaining "control". It's been my experience that people who use terms like these to describe their solitude don't actually really enjoy it much at all and tend to only seek this alone time as a manifestation of an avoidant personality. In other words, they don't feel happy during this time by themselves, but they seek it as a way to demonstrate autonomy within their life. They like the idea of being alone, but not the alone time itself. On the other hand, people who describe their alone time as "relaxing", "exciting", or "interesting" truly seem to enjoy that period without social interaction.
- Spearchucker 12y ago
  Dude I absolutely love being alone and "liberation", "freedom", and gaining "control" all resonate with me. No idea what "manifestation of an avoidant personality" means. "Relaxing", "exciting", and "interesting also apply. I do know that I'm terrible in a team and prefer working alone.
  - reinhardt 12y ago
    You sort of proved his point. Your preference for working alone is because you avoid being in a team.
    - jqm 12y ago
      A good team is better than being alone. A bad team... well, I'll take alone any day over that.
      - w0rd-driven 12y ago
        Exactly. A bad team just destroys productivity for the most part. You generally won't get any answers you seek in a reasonable fashion if the team is bad enough. In that instance you might as well work alone.
      - 12y ago
Sindrome 12y ago
It's really hard for me to stay motivated without other people around. But I am always more productive alone. A mix of with and without people is best for me.
cwt 12y ago
First, is there a tl;dr version of the article? To me it seems that the balance of social and alone should be to result in inner peace. This is to ultimately increase productivity in doing what you find satisfying in life. I write code a lot at work and we plan it out in a group then move our own ways to write it with occasional instant messaging about this or that. But sometimes when I am writing I can't focus or have trouble getting myself into the problem. And from there I find that reading or talking to someone at the office can help put me at peace and ultimately help me focus on the work I have to do. Like right now I am at work and writing this - I have a task to do to document some things but I hardly remember them and I need to do something that is going to interest me. Am I alone while doing this? Well, sure, I am available for other people to approach but I am not trying to talk to anyone. I think the term alone is relative to our sense of privacy. If I was in a room with the door closed would I feel more alone than if I am sitting in an open office? Probably. But if I can get to a peaceful state it will probably produce similar results in my work ethic/productivity.
monxxx 12y ago
from Grothendieck's Récoltes et Semailles: In those critical years I learned how to be alone. [But even] this formulation doesn’t really capture my meaning. I didn’t, in any literal sense, learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. It is a basic capacity in all of us from the day of our birth. However these three years of work in isolation [1945-1948], when I was thrown onto my own resources, following guidelines which I myself had spontaneously invented, instilled in me a strong degree of confidence, unassuming yet enduring in my ability to do mathematics, which owes nothing to any consensus or to the fashions which pass as law. By this I mean to say: to reach out in my own way to the things I wished to learn, rather than relying on the notions of the consensus, overt or tacit, coming from a more or less extended clan of which I found myself a member, or which for any other reason laid claim to be taken as an authority. This silent consensus had informed me both at the lycee and at the university, that one shouldn’t bother worrying about what was really meant when using a term like “volume” which was “obviously self-evident”, “generally known,” “in problematic” etc... it is in this gesture of ”going beyond to be in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one -- it is in this solitary act that one finds true creativity. All others things follow as a matter of course. Since then I’ve had the chance in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my “elders” and among young people in my general age group who were more brilliant, much more ‘gifted’ than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle -- while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things I had to learn (so I was assured) things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects. In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still from the perspective of thirty or thirty five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They’ve done all things, often beautiful things in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they’ve remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: The capacity to be alone.
jflowers45 12y ago
I enjoy plenty of 'me' time and found the comments about seeing a movie alone interesting - I don't mind at all being solo when I see a movie.
qwerta 12y ago
I think we should define 'being lonely' better. At age of internet, computer games and social network it is very relative. Perhaps better term is 'distraction free environment'.
- dm2 12y ago
  "solitude" might be more appropriate.
n00 12y ago
reminded me this ... "isolation is the gift" ? http://youtu.be/tlXJIawiPE0?t=1m30s http://youtu.be/tlXJIawiPE0?t=1m30s
sayemm 12y ago
"Without great solitude no serious work is possible." - Pablo Picasso, http://zenhabits.net/creative-habit http://zenhabits.net/creative-habit
- joeyspn 12y ago
  Nice site... Solitude is in fact a Zen habit... I've been introduced to Zen and practicing it lately and has been a great experience so far. I reckon solitude is good for both: creative work, and self-awareness...
themodelplumber 12y ago
Yo, I read HN. I got this.
rhema 12y ago
I'm going to plug my related research on Pinterest. http://ecologylab.net/research/publications/everyday_ideation_pinterest.pdf http://ecologylab.net/research/publications/everyday_ideatio... http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2557273 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2557273 One interesting thing about Pinterest users is that they feel "alone" and unwatched, even though actions are public. In Teresa Amabile's concept of creativity, anticipating an evaluation can be detrimental to creativity.
- nreece 12y ago
  I wonder if the same may hold true for other public networks like Twitter, Instagram etc., although [unlike Pinterest] they have a higher abandonment rate.
  - rhema 12y ago
    In the paper, Pinterest users say social networks like Twitter and Facebook are for promoting one's self to others.
    - mattgreenrocks 12y ago
      This is a taboo thing to say, because social media implies connection (however weak). I limit my use of Twitter/FB for this reason alone. It becomes nauseating to constantly consume a stream of self-promotional blurbs.
hnriot 12y ago
Another study that tells us what everybody already knows.
a_bonobo 12y ago
Interesting side note on the history of the US Forest Service and its interest in the study of loneliness: In the 1930s and 1940s (and probably later, too) the US Forest Service employed something like fire-watchers, men who would hike out on their own with little equipment into the forests to their station, which was a single fire lookout tower in the wilderness [1]. There they would sit on their own and scan the horizon for fires until their replacement arrived, usually after a few months. If they would see smoke, they had to walk (again, on their own) to the smoke and try to put out the fire with the little equipment they had. If they couldn't put out the fire they had to go get help - quite an undertaking since the towers often were not connected to any telephone network. Norman Borlaug, the father of the green revolution, did exactly that to support his BSc in forestry from 1935 to 1938, always sitting alone in the forest, usually not seeing anyone for months at a time. Source: Vietmeyer's 'Our Daily Bread, The Essential Norman Borlaug' [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_lookout_tower http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_lookout_tower
- a_bonobo 12y ago
  Well, today I learned that the US government rents out these fire lookout towers to campers: http://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r2/recreation/?cid=stelprdb5342115 http://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r2/recreation/?cid=stelprdb534... Now I want to travel to the US.
- arjie 12y ago
  In _The Dharma Bums_, Jack Kerouac actually describes one such time when he was in a fire lookout tower. It's a lovely part of the book, evocative of solitude and natural beauty but also informative of the pleasant things you give up being there. Loved it.
- dccoolgai 12y ago
  Author Edward Abbey ("The Monkeywrenh Gang", "The Brave Cowboy") also worked in the NPS fire lookout towers.
1587 12y ago
"social loafing"!
Kiro 12y ago
I have a lot of friends but really enjoy being alone. Unfortunately people can't accept that as a reason for not joining them on an activity so I constantly have to come up with excuses. I do like hanging out with people as well but being alone is just as fun and rewarding, and is never tiresome.
gregschlom 12y ago
> People make this error, thinking that being alone means being lonely, and not being alone means being with other people Loneliness isn't solitude, it's isolation. That's why one can feel so lonely sometimes even with thousands of people around.
- insky 12y ago
  Yeah, and you can feel isolated even with close friends and family.
insky 12y ago
Just a side note, as someone that works at home a lot, physically by myself. Others can treat you with suspicion. A few neighbours have colluded and perceive me to be a monster. I am male, and my partner (female) travels to work. I think they just don't get self-employment / working from home, and what looks like a role reversal. I'm quite a friendly guy but their hostility (they have been quite mean) is starting to make me feel isolated and quite unwelcome in my own house and garden. When I'm actually quite happy to be on my own (providing I have enough external stimulous).
fredsted 12y ago
>The leaders of the world’s great religions — Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses — all had crucial revelations during periods of solitude. They're fictional persons and stories. It doesn't make sense to reference them in a topic like this.
iheartramen 12y ago
Meanwhile.. http://www.iflscience.com/brain/people-would-rather-experience-electric-shock-be-alone-their-thoughts http://www.iflscience.com/brain/people-would-rather-experien...

293 points by visopsys 12y ago

jqm 12y ago

I don't know about everyone else, but I do my best work alone. Of course, there does need to be a balance, and reference to others, and having others show up to confirm or criticize the work helps. Personally I think there is way to much "social" stuff going on in our society and this is detrimental to real work and innovation taking place. But then again, the choice between bad company and no company is often real the dilemma, and the logical pick is a no-brainer in my opinion.

drbawb 12y ago
>and having others show up to confirm or criticize the work helps. I actually had a rather interesting experience last night where an "outsider's perspective" ended up being the exact insight I needed. My roommate stepped outside to socialize with me while I was repairing my Mustang: which has been having intermittent ignition problems since we replaced the ignition control module 6 months ago. --- To set the stage: this module bolts to a plate on the intake manifold. One of the bolts is used as an electrical ground. Unfortunately we had broken this bolt in removing the original module. Furthermore the back of the unit uses the manifold as a sort of heatsink. So that missing bolt was preventing good thermal conductivity as well! We had come up with temporary measures to restore the ground -- but clearly these measures were inadequate. The factory mount is in a very inaccessible spot: there's simply not enough room to drill out the remains of an automotive grade bolt and re-tap the hole. A friend and I had fabricated a "mounting adapter" and were toying with the idea of remote mounting the module. However we couldn't find a suitable spot on the car that would provide a clean electrical ground. (Without stressing the factory wiring harness.) My roommate, a machinist and most certainly not a car guy, points to a flat surface and asks if it's "solid enough" to bolt the adapter plate to. What he had pointed to was the power steering pump. Which for obvious reasons we could not drill into. --- However that suggestion ended up being the catalyst I needed to solve the problem. It was as if the whole engine bay became a puzzle. You see: power steering pumps are made to be removed far more frequently than an intake manifold. Initially I had thought the only way to repair the factory mount was to remove the intake manifold, which is an arduous task that involves removing many delicate assemblies for emissions and fueling. Removing the power steering pump, though, was a considerably easier task! This would open up plenty of room in the engine bay; we could even use a typical cordless drill. --- Inspiration sometimes comes from the oddest places. How to act on the proper solution (repairing the factory mounting plate) had eluded me for six months. An absolutely bonkers suggestion ended up leading me down a much simpler path to success.
- kleer001 12y ago
  Reminds me of the rubber duck debugging, only tangentially, but in the same spirit.
  - drbawb 12y ago
    I'm surprised how effective this sort of 'debugging' can be. I'd love to know more about the mechanisms which make this sort of "verbal problem solving" tick. I wonder if it's as simple as mapping the problem onto parts of your brain which aren't often tasked with this type of critical thinking.

casca 12y ago

Anecdotally, most people I know do better with a mix of social and alone time. Given that it's now possible to almost never be conscious and effectively alone, it will be interesting to see the long term mental health impact. Also, being alone is clearly so distressing to many people that they would rather shock themselves than be alone - http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/07/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/07/people-wou...

precisioncoder 12y ago
It's an interesting article but I feel like the study draws the completely wrong conclusion. I would draw the conclusion that humans when offered an experiment they have control of that offers a new or interesting experience will participate even if it causes them pain. If I participated in the experiment I would definitely shock myself since I've rarely been shocked in the situation, then I might spend the rest of the time analyzing my behavior and trying to see the influence of evolutionary drives as a motivator and enjoy that even more. It's basically the same thing as putting ANY button in a room with the warning "Do not press this button".
- icebraining 12y ago
  It wasn't new by the time they sat in the room: they had already been shocked and all had said they were willing to pay money to avoid being shocked again.

alashley 12y ago

I think when people emphasize their ability to spend an inordinate amount of time alone, they are looking at it as a unique "quality," something that sets them apart from others. We all need our alone time, and a few aspects of personality development occur when we are reflecting on the social interactions, encounters and relationships we've had. But too much time alone, I think, eventually leads to feelings of despair and helplessness. Either that, or a numbness to the reality of the state of isolation.

rimantas 12y ago
A suprising number of people have real difficulty of being alone with their thoughts. There being alone I mean not being only physicall alone, bet being also free from other forms of disctraction and communication.
- aestra 12y ago
  Which is probably the reason why when faced with a (say) 10 minute wait, people feel the need to be distracted. Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit... ANYTHING to DO. Even bringing a book or iPod on a train. Some people feel extremely uncomfortable just sitting doing nothing. Being "bored" so to speak. However boredom is GOOD for you, for adults and especially for children. It fosters creative thought as well as has other positive aspects. Introspective thought and sometimes problem solving comes from boredom. Think about it - where do your best ideas come to you? In the shower. That's why I get so depressed with how I see kids behaving these days. They have a zillion toys, DVDs, computers, iPods, tablets because (GOD FORBID) they don't have anything to do for a second. They bring their toys outside of the house. I never once in my life brought a toy with me outside of the house. If I had to wait someone I just (gasp!) waited. They are watching movies in the car (!!!) and this is considered a positive to keep them occupied (and presumably just quiet). I was at a (somewhat snoody) restaurant and I saw two kids who were like 8-10 years old who brought several coloring books and crayons with them and they were all splayed out on the table like it was a child's play place. The concept seemed to be HORRIBLE for them to not have something to do in the time frame between ordering and eating! A full 10-15 minutes! Well in my opinion it is setting the children up for failure. They aren't interacting with their environment, engaging in conversation, asking questions, or even just learning at some point you have to learn to sit down with nothing to do. Or even learning to find something to do when they are "bored." Kids used to be good at that. Games like "I spy," hand clapping games, pretend and make believe, doing each other's hair, inventing games, singing, trying to find license plates from every state, creating dance routines, cops and robbers (and the politically incorrect version - cowboys and Indians), etc, etc. My friends and I even wrote, memorized, and performed an entire play when were were children. I remember going to a really boring after school program for poor kids. There was basically nothing to do for hours other than a small playground that I was way way too old for. So I created a whole world in my head. I was out in the woods. I had to collect firewood and build a fire. I collected sticks, dug a small hole, arranged the sticks as I would if building a fire and arranged rocks around it. Bundled more sticks to make a torch, etc. I have preteen cousins. When they visit family they don't interact with the family at all. They are on their phones the ENTIRE time at Christmas. I don't even know them at all except for what their parents tell me. I didn't hear a single word from either of them. Nowadays distractions aren't even enough, people seem to be distracted from their distractions. Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) wrote a really good article about it. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCYQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424053111903454504576486412642177904&ei=2JW-U_6_ItOmyASQooDYDw&usg=AFQjCNEw68MHEZDy8bp9unUS0mA6iiZg3A&sig2=iM4N5rPKmEAsJux7elJ_2A&bvm=bv.70138588,d.aWw http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd... Might also be of interest http://www.the-exponent.com/in-defense-of-boredom/ http://www.the-exponent.com/in-defense-of-boredom/ I bring a book with my traveling sometimes but usually I don't even take it out, I just sit there with my thoughts and I feel no anxiety about it. I feel really sorry for those who seem to have anxiety about sitting around with nothing to do.

Xcelerate 12y ago

As someone who spends a good deal of time alone because I enjoy solitary pursuits, I disagree with the article when it claims that alone time is a form of "liberation", "freedom", and gaining "control". It's been my experience that people who use terms like these to describe their solitude don't actually really enjoy it much at all and tend to only seek this alone time as a manifestation of an avoidant personality. In other words, they don't feel happy during this time by themselves, but they seek it as a way to demonstrate autonomy within their life. They like the idea of being alone, but not the alone time itself. On the other hand, people who describe their alone time as "relaxing", "exciting", or "interesting" truly seem to enjoy that period without social interaction.

Spearchucker 12y ago
Dude I absolutely love being alone and "liberation", "freedom", and gaining "control" all resonate with me. No idea what "manifestation of an avoidant personality" means. "Relaxing", "exciting", and "interesting also apply. I do know that I'm terrible in a team and prefer working alone.
- reinhardt 12y ago
  You sort of proved his point. Your preference for working alone is because you avoid being in a team.
  - jqm 12y ago
    A good team is better than being alone. A bad team... well, I'll take alone any day over that.
    - w0rd-driven 12y ago
      Exactly. A bad team just destroys productivity for the most part. You generally won't get any answers you seek in a reasonable fashion if the team is bad enough. In that instance you might as well work alone.
    - 12y ago

Sindrome 12y ago

It's really hard for me to stay motivated without other people around. But I am always more productive alone. A mix of with and without people is best for me.

cwt 12y ago

First, is there a tl;dr version of the article? To me it seems that the balance of social and alone should be to result in inner peace. This is to ultimately increase productivity in doing what you find satisfying in life. I write code a lot at work and we plan it out in a group then move our own ways to write it with occasional instant messaging about this or that. But sometimes when I am writing I can't focus or have trouble getting myself into the problem. And from there I find that reading or talking to someone at the office can help put me at peace and ultimately help me focus on the work I have to do. Like right now I am at work and writing this - I have a task to do to document some things but I hardly remember them and I need to do something that is going to interest me. Am I alone while doing this? Well, sure, I am available for other people to approach but I am not trying to talk to anyone. I think the term alone is relative to our sense of privacy. If I was in a room with the door closed would I feel more alone than if I am sitting in an open office? Probably. But if I can get to a peaceful state it will probably produce similar results in my work ethic/productivity.

monxxx 12y ago

from Grothendieck's Récoltes et Semailles: In those critical years I learned how to be alone. [But even] this formulation doesn’t really capture my meaning. I didn’t, in any literal sense, learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. It is a basic capacity in all of us from the day of our birth. However these three years of work in isolation [1945-1948], when I was thrown onto my own resources, following guidelines which I myself had spontaneously invented, instilled in me a strong degree of confidence, unassuming yet enduring in my ability to do mathematics, which owes nothing to any consensus or to the fashions which pass as law. By this I mean to say: to reach out in my own way to the things I wished to learn, rather than relying on the notions of the consensus, overt or tacit, coming from a more or less extended clan of which I found myself a member, or which for any other reason laid claim to be taken as an authority. This silent consensus had informed me both at the lycee and at the university, that one shouldn’t bother worrying about what was really meant when using a term like “volume” which was “obviously self-evident”, “generally known,” “in problematic” etc... it is in this gesture of ”going beyond to be in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one -- it is in this solitary act that one finds true creativity. All others things follow as a matter of course. Since then I’ve had the chance in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my “elders” and among young people in my general age group who were more brilliant, much more ‘gifted’ than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle -- while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things I had to learn (so I was assured) things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects. In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still from the perspective of thirty or thirty five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They’ve done all things, often beautiful things in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they’ve remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: The capacity to be alone.

jflowers45 12y ago

I enjoy plenty of 'me' time and found the comments about seeing a movie alone interesting - I don't mind at all being solo when I see a movie.

qwerta 12y ago

I think we should define 'being lonely' better. At age of internet, computer games and social network it is very relative. Perhaps better term is 'distraction free environment'.

dm2 12y ago
"solitude" might be more appropriate.

n00 12y ago

reminded me this ... "isolation is the gift" ? http://youtu.be/tlXJIawiPE0?t=1m30s http://youtu.be/tlXJIawiPE0?t=1m30s

sayemm 12y ago

"Without great solitude no serious work is possible." - Pablo Picasso, http://zenhabits.net/creative-habit http://zenhabits.net/creative-habit

joeyspn 12y ago
Nice site... Solitude is in fact a Zen habit... I've been introduced to Zen and practicing it lately and has been a great experience so far. I reckon solitude is good for both: creative work, and self-awareness...

themodelplumber 12y ago

Yo, I read HN. I got this.

rhema 12y ago

I'm going to plug my related research on Pinterest. http://ecologylab.net/research/publications/everyday_ideation_pinterest.pdf http://ecologylab.net/research/publications/everyday_ideatio... http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2557273 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2557273 One interesting thing about Pinterest users is that they feel "alone" and unwatched, even though actions are public. In Teresa Amabile's concept of creativity, anticipating an evaluation can be detrimental to creativity.

nreece 12y ago
I wonder if the same may hold true for other public networks like Twitter, Instagram etc., although [unlike Pinterest] they have a higher abandonment rate.
- rhema 12y ago
  In the paper, Pinterest users say social networks like Twitter and Facebook are for promoting one's self to others.
  - mattgreenrocks 12y ago
    This is a taboo thing to say, because social media implies connection (however weak). I limit my use of Twitter/FB for this reason alone. It becomes nauseating to constantly consume a stream of self-promotional blurbs.

hnriot 12y ago

Another study that tells us what everybody already knows.

a_bonobo 12y ago

Interesting side note on the history of the US Forest Service and its interest in the study of loneliness: In the 1930s and 1940s (and probably later, too) the US Forest Service employed something like fire-watchers, men who would hike out on their own with little equipment into the forests to their station, which was a single fire lookout tower in the wilderness [1]. There they would sit on their own and scan the horizon for fires until their replacement arrived, usually after a few months. If they would see smoke, they had to walk (again, on their own) to the smoke and try to put out the fire with the little equipment they had. If they couldn't put out the fire they had to go get help - quite an undertaking since the towers often were not connected to any telephone network. Norman Borlaug, the father of the green revolution, did exactly that to support his BSc in forestry from 1935 to 1938, always sitting alone in the forest, usually not seeing anyone for months at a time. Source: Vietmeyer's 'Our Daily Bread, The Essential Norman Borlaug' [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_lookout_tower http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_lookout_tower

a_bonobo 12y ago
Well, today I learned that the US government rents out these fire lookout towers to campers: http://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r2/recreation/?cid=stelprdb5342115 http://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/r2/recreation/?cid=stelprdb534... Now I want to travel to the US.
arjie 12y ago
In _The Dharma Bums_, Jack Kerouac actually describes one such time when he was in a fire lookout tower. It's a lovely part of the book, evocative of solitude and natural beauty but also informative of the pleasant things you give up being there. Loved it.
dccoolgai 12y ago
Author Edward Abbey ("The Monkeywrenh Gang", "The Brave Cowboy") also worked in the NPS fire lookout towers.

1587 12y ago

"social loafing"!

Kiro 12y ago

I have a lot of friends but really enjoy being alone. Unfortunately people can't accept that as a reason for not joining them on an activity so I constantly have to come up with excuses. I do like hanging out with people as well but being alone is just as fun and rewarding, and is never tiresome.

gregschlom 12y ago

> People make this error, thinking that being alone means being lonely, and not being alone means being with other people Loneliness isn't solitude, it's isolation. That's why one can feel so lonely sometimes even with thousands of people around.

insky 12y ago
Yeah, and you can feel isolated even with close friends and family.

insky 12y ago

Just a side note, as someone that works at home a lot, physically by myself. Others can treat you with suspicion. A few neighbours have colluded and perceive me to be a monster. I am male, and my partner (female) travels to work. I think they just don't get self-employment / working from home, and what looks like a role reversal. I'm quite a friendly guy but their hostility (they have been quite mean) is starting to make me feel isolated and quite unwelcome in my own house and garden. When I'm actually quite happy to be on my own (providing I have enough external stimulous).

fredsted 12y ago

>The leaders of the world’s great religions — Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses — all had crucial revelations during periods of solitude. They're fictional persons and stories. It doesn't make sense to reference them in a topic like this.

iheartramen 12y ago

Meanwhile.. http://www.iflscience.com/brain/people-would-rather-experience-electric-shock-be-alone-their-thoughts http://www.iflscience.com/brain/people-would-rather-experien...