Solitude
Paul Tillich made the most useful single distinction in 1959. Loneliness, he said, is the word for the pain of being alone. Solitude is the word for the glory of it. The two states can occur in identical physical conditions — the same room, the same Tuesday afternoon, the same absence of other people — and what determines which state you are in is not the conditions but a capacity that takes years to develop and is poorly transmitted by the surrounding culture, which has trouble distinguishing the two and tends to treat both as problems to be solved.
Anthony Storr’s Solitude: A Return to the Self (1988) made the structural argument that the contemporary therapeutic consensus had gotten the relationship between solitude and connection backward. The orthodoxy treated the capacity to be alone as a sign of avoidant attachment, a defense against intimacy, something to be worked through in the direction of more relationships. Storr, looking carefully at the lives of writers, scientists, contemplatives, and ordinary people who had managed to live well, observed that the opposite was closer to the truth. The capacity to be alone was the prerequisite for healthy relationships, not a substitute for them. People who could not be alone could not, paradoxically, fully be with others either, because every relationship had to do double duty — providing both the relationship and the relief from the unbearable solitude — and no relationship can sustainably perform both functions.
The capacity for solitude is not a personality trait. It can be observed in infants — Winnicott’s famous formulation was the capacity to be alone in the presence of the mother, which sounds paradoxical until you see a securely attached baby playing on the floor while the mother reads on the couch, neither of them attending to the other and both quietly aware of the other’s nearby existence. The baby has, in that moment, the foundation of every adult solitude: the felt presence of someone who cares without the demand that the someone be currently performing the care. This early experience of being alone-while-not-alone is, in Winnicott’s argument, what later allows the adult to be alone-by-themselves without the experience curdling into loneliness. Adults who never had it can sometimes build it later, but it is harder, and the building takes years.
What makes the modern relationship to solitude particularly difficult is that the technological environment has been engineered to make solitude almost structurally impossible. The phone in the pocket means that there is, at almost every moment, the option of not being alone — and the option, exercised reliably enough, is functionally equivalent to never being alone at all. The capacity for solitude, like any capacity, atrophies when not exercised. A person who has not spent a single hour in a decade without immediate access to other minds is not a person who chose connection over solitude. They are a person who lost the capacity for solitude as a side effect of a thousand small decisions that none of them looked, at the time, like decisions about that.
The artist who cannot be alone cannot do the work the artistic tradition calls for. The contemplative who cannot be alone has nothing to bring back from the contemplation. The friend who cannot be alone keeps making demands on the friendship that no friendship can sustainably meet. The capacity for solitude is also the capacity to come from somewhere when you arrive — to be a self that brings something to the encounter, rather than a self that shows up empty and hopes the encounter will fill it.
This is why solitude and loneliness can coexist with their opposites in surprising configurations. The person at a crowded party can be acutely lonely. The person on a long solo walk can be in unmistakable company — with the landscape, with their own thoughts, with the silent presence of the dead they are quietly thinking about. The states are not about other people’s literal presence. They are about a relationship with one’s own company that determines what other people’s presence is even capable of doing.
Spend, deliberately, an hour a week with no input. No phone, no podcast, no book, no conversation, no purpose. Walk without headphones. Sit on the porch. Cook dinner without the radio. Notice, in the first ten minutes, the strength of the urge to fill the space, and the specific anxiety the unfilled space produces. The anxiety is not pathology. It is the absence of a capacity that has gone unexercised for too long, that does not return on its own, and that — once recovered — turns out to be the substrate beneath every other capacity worth having, including the capacity to be a person worth spending time with.