Embracing the Joys of Solitude in the New Year

During the New Year holiday, I took my kids camping in Joshua Tree National Park. This is the closest national park to our city, also in Southern California. We stayed in the camper for two nights, went hiking during the day, and built a campfire at night to cook dinner and roast marshmallows. There was no Internet in most parts of the national park, which meant I wasn't online or on my phone for nearly three days.

In recent years, I have often taken my children on vacation to places without Internet access. Last year, we went to Death Valley National Park during spring break and Yosemite during Thanksgiving. The truth is, I've reached the age where I dare not turn off my cell phone, always fearing there will be emergencies at work or with my children at school. But secretly, I often long to unplug and retreat into my own space, away from other people's thoughts and demands.

Since the advent of the smartphone and social media era, popular culture has begun to portray being alone as something negative, even unbearable. Back in 2009, former Yale professor William Deresiewicz wrote a prescient article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describing how the Internet's instant, ubiquitous communications had created a generation that has "lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude."

"The more we keep aloneness at bay," he wrote, "the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets."

In fact, loneliness is a feeling that each of use experiences from time to time, and it is not a bad thing. Everyone should be able to be alone, especially in this age of social media.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic. The physical and mental health problems caused by prolonged social isolation--especially among elders and teenagers--are certainly a public health crisis, but temporary feelings of loneliness are completely normal. The fear of being alone and the lack of the ability to be alone are actually more terrifying than loneliness itself.

Last year, when I wrote about why AI can't solve loneliness for a magazine that I contributed to, I cited the work of NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, "Loneliness is our bodies’ signal to us that we need better, more satisfying connections with other people." Temporary loneliness is healthy; it motivates us to get off the couch, interact with the world, and get what we need from it. When we stay on our coaches all day long, scrolling through useless messages on social media or finding temporary comfort in chatbots, we may think our loneliness is being alleviated, but our isolation it not being truly addressed. In this process, we lose the ability to be alone while actually become more isolated from the society. This vicious cycle is the most terrifying. Surveys show that the number of people feeling lonely has increased rather than decreased since the advent of social media era. This is why.

In fact, the best way to respond to loneliness is to learn to be alone. Some people confuse social isolation and loneliness, but they are actually different things "Social isolation" is a subjective state that depends on whether you have regular interactions with others. On the other hand, "loneliness" is an objective feeling. You can be surrounded by a large group of people at a dance party and still feel lonely. Loneliness is caused by the fact that your existing relationships do not meet your expectations or needs. The fundamental way to solve loneliness is to establish meaningful interpersonal relationships, starting with learning to get along with yourself.

So, this new year, I'm looking forward to more opportunities to be alone. This does not mean living in isolation, but being able to switch freely between being with yourself and being with others. I also hope that my children will learn this ability: to live in the midst of the hustle and bustle of social media, but also know how to enjoy the pleasure of being alone.