Solitude

In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

St. Martin's Press

Contents

All Together Now

My partner, Kenny, maintains a kind of detached interest in whatever I'm writing. ("Detached" because he knows better than to encourage a writer at the dinner table.) But when I told him Dr. Bone's story and said I'd like to write something about solitude, he put down his beer and looked at me. "Have you even been alone before? For longer than — I don't know — a day? Really alone?" Now my own glass was down and I frowned into middle distance. "I must have been...." But of course I hadn't, not really. He suggested, with annoying saneness, that I might want to try it.

I pivoted the conversation, but it was impossible to ignore that a gauntlet had been tossed. My eyes narrowed. Kenny would be away the following week, and I silently pledged to spend a day entirely alone — with neither people nor their digital avatars making any contact.

When the day arrived, however, a text came at 9 a.m., and I checked it as though fulfilling some Pavlovian law. An offer to drink in the park with friends from out of town. Disaster!

I cheated. And then I cheated again. I went to the café. I answered a call from my mom. I went on a jog and stopped to pet a puppy. By bedtime I counted up a dozen interactions in all. I couldn't even be alone for one day.

I might have the wherewithal to leave the phone at home sometimes, to slightly curb my media gluttony, but real removal from the demands of society? This was a sensation — barely remembered — from childhood, from a time I could go hiking into the woods with my Polaroid camera and forget, for hours, about the existence of other humans.

I had changed — just grown older — and I'd acquired the webs and wires that tie adults to each other. I woke one day to find that those empty spaces had been filled in with nervous worries about the development of my friends' children, about the happiness of far-flung relatives, about the security of my peers in a precarious economy — and to this was added more selfish worries about my reputation (my sketchy "brand"), which could be bruised at any point by a crude remark online or a gossipy insinuation. In short, I had become enmeshed.

Then again, maybe it was the world that had changed; perhaps it no longer made allowances for solitude in the same way. Or perhaps, more likely, it was a combination of the two forces — my own growing older and the world's self-tethering to online things. It had all changed, within and without, so that now, in a haze of social anxiety, I woke each morning thinking, "What did I miss?" and went to bed thinking, "What did I say?"

The crowd, that smorgasbord of perpetual connection, left me hungry. In fact, I realized, I'd been hungry for years. But now that hunger was putting me to work. A little reading — and a hero in Dr. Bone — had turned a malaise into a mission. I wanted to become acquainted again with the still night, with my own hapless daydreaming, with the bare self I had (for how long?) been running from. I kept asking myself: why am I so afraid of my own quiet company? This book is the closest I've come to an answer.

To be clear: none of what follows is a pining for Thoreau's old cabin in the woods. I don't want to run away from the world — I want to rediscover myself within it. I want to know what happens if we again take doses of solitude from inside our crowded days, along our crowded streets.

It's not so easy. I step outside, intent on a solitary ramble, and I compulsively observe the social exchanges of others. A forlorn teenaged couple coos on the sidewalk, performing their morning farewell; on the nearby grass, a mother plays peekaboo with her eternally delighted infant; a rabbi gets in his Audi while managing someone on the phone; a woman leans out the window of a coffee van and passes a macchiato to her customer, chirping, "Beautiful coffee for a beautiful lady." Everywhere and anywhere, we groom each other. Indeed, it's with these soft but persistent offerings that we ensure the survival of our culture and our species.

* * *

Living in large groups, we have learned, puts a major tax on any animal's brain — in particular on its neocortex. In fact, all the markers of social complexity among primates — their group size, grooming cliques, mating strategies, tactical deception, and social play — are strongly correlated with the relative size of that primate's neocortex. The bigger the neocortex, the more social the primate. The more social the primate, the larger the group they can live in without having that group implode with violence and fractious behaviour.

The data bears this out. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, in developing his "social brain" theory in the 1990s, found that the relative size of a simian's neocortex was directly related to how large their groups became: night monkeys and tamarins, for example, have small neocortices relative to their brain size and hang out in numbers less than ten; chimpanzees and baboons have relatively large neocortices and have groups of fifty-plus. Humans, for the vast majority of our history, have hung out in groups of around 150 — and we also (no surprise) have the largest proportionate neocortex of any primate. Dunbar argues that our big brains may well have helped us become tool users, but the real advantage was that we became able to increase the size of the communities we live in. More peers means more safety, more strength, more chances to pass on wisdom, and, ultimately, more chances for survival.

Something else Dunbar discovered was that the larger a primate group becomes, the more time it devotes to social grooming. All those affections, frustrations, and aggressions need to be perpetually monitored and managed. Surviving in a large group of primates is a sophisticated bit of work. Depending on group size, the amount of time primates spend grooming each other can reach 20 per cent of a given day. Dunbar was struck by the fact that, given our enormous social groups, today's human animal should be forced to "groom" for enormous portions of each day. So how did we get around Dunbar's rule? How did we manage to grow our social groups without being forced to spend all our time picking proverbial lice out of each other's hair?

The answer lies in the game-changing emergence of language, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. The preverbal primate must lay hands on a friend or foe in order to groom them. A primate that can speak, that can make complex social suggestions beyond raw vocalization, can in effect "groom" several members of his or her social group at once. This is a powerful bit of multiplication. What's more, a talking ape is not stuck squatting in the weeds while grooming; the talking ape can groom while out on a walk or while foraging for berries. This is a powerful bit of multitasking. The birth of language made grooming highly efficient and viral. With language, our ancestors could export complex thoughts from one mind to another, enabling the coordination of hunting and foraging, and eventually farming. With language we could maintain the stability (and thus the rewards) of larger and larger social groups.

And we didn't stop there. We continued to discover new ways to expand and highlight our social grooming; and so the human animal (toting that mammoth-sized neocortex) was able to live in larger and larger groups while keeping some semblance of structure and safety intact. By this reckoning, every piece of communication technology — from papyrus to the printing press to Pinterest — has hijacked an elemental part of our minds. These technologies, in turn, magnify our ability to groom each other, enabling us to develop enormous cities, and eventually "the global village." We experience empathy or hatred for humans on the other side of the planet — refugees and terrorists that we'll never even meet. As I write this sentence there are an estimated 7,401,858,841 living humans, and, for the first time in history, each is potentially connected to all the others; that makes 27,393,757,147,344,002,220 possible connections.* So, as I sit here, alone in my little office — my cell — the world outside buzzes with more than 27 quintillion possible greetings.

This change is, of course, not yet spread uniformly across the planet. As William Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Indeed, many iPhone junkies are surprised when informed that less than half of the world's population has access to the Internet. That said, the change comes fast, and neither poverty nor rural isolation will keep populations offline for long: in 2006, 18 per cent of the world was online; by 2009, 25 per cent were; and by 2014, the number had climbed to 41 per cent. Such a growth rate is phenomenal. Consider how messaging systems, which dominate this new reality and represent our most direct act of online social grooming, so quickly propagate: WhatsApp, a kingpin of instant message platforms, reached one billion users in 2016.

* * *

Aristotle defined humans as social animals and he was only too right. Making sure other people have positive impressions of us is one of our central motivations. And when we use screen-based social media instead of face-to-face interactions to groom each other, we're able to be more strategic about that self-presentation. For example, when confronted with a Facebook post about someone's new job, my lovely but nervous friend Jocelyn may write and rewrite her comment for several minutes before finally landing on the tapioca-scale inoffensiveness of "So happy for you!!!" (If she's feeling crazy, Jocelyn may add a martini glass emoji.) Unsurprisingly, a 2015 study found that, of the roughly 1.5 billion regular Facebook users, usage spikes among those with social anxiety — in particular, those who have a high need for social assurance. The technology becomes a salve, a way to calm our worries about fitting in or belonging. And, with astonishing speed, the compulsion to groom online has been absorbed into our idea of the natural: Only 8 per cent of adults in the United States used social networking sites in 2005; that number blew up to 73 per cent by 2013. Meanwhile, nearly half of Americans now sleep with their phones on their bedside tables, using them as surrogate teddy bears. To be human is to be social; to be human in the age of screens is to be massively social.

And yet. ... In the same way that many people are forced to engineer healthy diets for themselves in a world overflowing with the salts and sugars and fats we're designed to hoard, it's possible that we're such compulsive social groomers that we now must keep ourselves from gobbling the fast-food equivalent. Has social media made us socially obese — gorged on constant connection but never properly nourished?

Has the neocortex — the very thing that made us human, the thing that kickstarted our cities and our politics, our religions and our art — been hijacked one too many times?

* * *

When did the online grooming impulse really get scary, though? It's a parlour game to mark these things, but here's a shot: 9:49 a.m. on July 14, 2004. That was the moment a fellow logged onto a site devoted to advice about digital video files and launched a new chat forum with the words, "i am lonely will anyone speak to me." A decade later, Salon crowned the string of commentary that resulted "the saddest thread on the Internet." But even a few days after the initial posting, anyone who typed "I am lonely" into Google's search engine was taken there; folks left posts about their own crushing loneliness and earned some small commiseration. It turns out that many people, a couple of glasses of solo Shiraz into the night, will find themselves casting the words "I am lonely" into the Internet's waters. But what do they expect to reel back? We are all losers and need lives, typed one visitor. It's as if no one is real anymore, wrote another. Nobody asked about psychiatrists and medication, nor were they searching for a boyfriend or non-smoker housemate. This was, instead, just a digital howl.

It's not so odd to ask the Internet to solve the problem of human loneliness. I've grown accustomed to phrasing Google searches as helpless questions. I might type, "What time is it in Paris?" Or, "How many ounces are in a litre?" These are called oracular searches (as in "ask the oracle"). It's a simple slip to then submit a more emotional query to such an authority. Why aren't I happy? Why does nobody love me?

9:49 a.m., July 14, 2004. A dull Wednesday morning. Perhaps that was the moment the online grooming impulse got out of hand. An anonymous guy — let's call him Eddie — felt lonely and it occurred to him he might turn to the Internet for company. It was easy. And the oracle was inviting. "I am lonely will anyone speak to me." There was nothing terribly new about Eddie's desire to bolt from his own company; what was new was the ease, the technology's soft promise that he never needed to feel lonely again. If the Internet had become a demolisher of solitude, then it wasn't an uninvited one. We had already learned to be grateful for its little intrusions, its smiling impositions.

* * *

By 2020, anywhere from thirty billion to fifty billion objects — cars, toasters, shampoo bottles — will be connected to the Internet; that is triple the number of online things available as of this writing, in 2016. Once insensate items in your bedroom, your local park, the airplane toilet, will be sparked with an animating force that would have caused previous generations to marvel. (Certain members of the MIT Media Lab have taken to calling these things "enchanted objects" — which calls up Arthur C. Clarke's remark that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") This burgeoning Internet of Everything, wherein disconnection becomes a kind of sin, will rely on ties of constant connection and feedback — a permanent social vibe. Our environments, in other words, will be built less out of bricks and plastic and more out of cloud-based infrastructure. These digital environments will balk at disconnection, seeing it as a breed of malfunction; the result will be a mental ecosystem that does likewise.

The beginnings of the Internet of Everything are already here. We build it by imbuing our parking meters, power grids, currency, automobiles, documents, pantries, clothing, and jewellery with an online intelligence that was unthinkable twenty years ago. Meanwhile, Google Now prompts me with an endless supply of cheerful, location-specific advice. Amazon's voice-activated Echo manages household tasks like a cloud-based servant, reordering supplies, maintaining shopping lists, and reading out recipes. Amazon Prime Air is desperate to deliver packages via drones. And self-learning home appliances track the activities of humans, syncing their behaviour in an attempt to make their functionality as invisible as possible. We're often not aware of our position in this spiral of connections, but we have daily proof (if we look for it) that the bias of our hours has swung away from solitude and toward enmeshment.

Nor is such cyborg glory the domain of human habitats alone. We shall make over the animal kingdom in our image. Some Swiss dairy cows, for instance, send text messages to their farmers via sensors and SIM cards that are implanted in the animals' necks. These devices can tell when the cows are in heat. The message, more or less, reads: "I am ready to be inseminated." Eat your heart out, Tinder.

I cannot speak for the cows, but humans easily accept the bias toward connecting everything and everyone. As Dunbar's research made clear, this urge is built into our most basic nature. Of course, we're not alone in this; many species are social. But humans are one of a select few that qualify as eusocial (eu meaning "true"). It's a term the great entomologist E. O. Wilson uses to describe a self-sacrificing, multigenerational network of animals. Like the ants that Wilson studies, we humans are super-cooperators. We're designed to constantly give way to the needs of the larger community. We're certainly capable of selfishness, too, but it's astounding how often we set aside our I-minded drive to sacrifice ourselves in service to the military conquests of others; how often we serve at the altar of collective projects as humble as an elementary school choir or as awe-inspiring as the creation of the Large Hadron Collider. To Wilson, the evolution of eusocial culture is "one of the major innovations in the history of life" (up there with the emergence of wings and flowers).

Those intense social ties then conceal other modes of being: we humans now crowd out solitude at every opportunity. A 2013 survey of nearly 7,500 American smartphone users found that 80 per cent were on their phones within fifteen minutes of waking up. The number rises to 89 per cent among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds (most of whom reach for the phone immediately upon waking). In fact, one out of four respondents could not recall a time in the day when their phone was not in arm's reach. This is a eusocial commitment if ever there was one. Our extension into massive social networks stretches far beyond practicality; it's utterly compulsive and compulsory, a phantom umbilical cord. Type "fear of being" into Google and it auto-completes to "fear of eing alone."