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The virtue and terror of being alone

October 26, 2023   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Said a mother to me of her teenage daughter, “She is never alone.”

She was commenting on the young woman’s preoccupation with her online social media life. Goodness knows there are a myriad of choices as to what platform anyone might choose to be constantly with someone else.

There are so many opinions about social media. One thing we can probably all agree on is that it is very cluttered, a mish-mash of opinions by the most famous and the least known about the value of so much interaction. Funny to think of the consternation versus the praise over the content of social internet. Like a large family stewing over its incestuous relationships, one uncle at a time.

Yet, I am not here this time to condemn the unnumbered to and fro on social media. To note, Patricia uses X (formerly Twitter) partly as a tool of research and academia. She and economists, professors, authors and so on, follow each other and spend some of their time on issues relating to economics (basic income, poverty, the wealth parity and how to fix it), law and medicine. These relationships are not a matter of flowers and barbs. Those are other aspects of X that constitute my picture of hell.

This is about being alone. Again, the contradictions of our modern times are ponderous. So many individuals are alone, seniors packed away by their relatives in “homes” where the food is often actually inedible. They may well have only limited access to technology to reach their loved ones at a distance, but they are no less welcomed with their stories for all that. Perhaps such hugs-free encounters are few, too few to be company.

So many people in distress suffer those agonies on their own, too. Even if they have cell phones, I know of souls who live alone and are alone. People disabled with the “supplement programs” that exist to keep such people “in their place,” a payment figure of four digits but, for sure, not enough to actually live at all well, eating minimally in order to pay their rent to landlords. Landlords: as history comes full circle again from Victorian times, are the scourge of society – ravening monsters, looking to evict their last tenant, no matter the hardships that tenant will suffer, including being (back) on the streets because everywhere we look, there is another landlord gouging and evicting, in order to double the rent of his basic shelter for the sake of a pretense at so-called renovations. Here are no safeguards entrenched in our laws since rent controls were abolished for the sake of what? Freedom of the market?

It is hard to achieve being alone. Except to leave technology at home and wander at will in the woods, a park or a cemetery, away from unending calls on our devices to buy, to watch the inane conflicts within tenuous and changeable friendships.

Whereas enforced and painful solitude is unhappy, harmful to mental and physical health, an emotional wear, tending to depression, a time of choosing to be alone, reflective and free can be wonderful. 

Time by ourselves to let reflection drift is where it will give rise to ideas that were buried beneath the clamour. Being alone gives time for thinking about nothing, which is very restful for its lack of commitment.

As an only child myself, ideas were people imaged and pictures of places that don’t exist. For any child, it can be a time to read and have an individual’s ideas, without necessarily, as nowadays, being directed by eight billion opinions.

As we lose our independence, so do we steal the independence of our children, as though we have to guide their every thought, as though seeing the world as they do internally instinctively will harm them – or do we fear their singular thinking will differ from our own and dethrone us from the seats of influence we long to maintain?

Our children need to play without us, by themselves or with others of their approximate age and let them imagine as they will without misguided guidance – the sort we have come to seek from our thousands of “friends” online. 

We need to take a break from the constant, clinging, and even damaging intercourse on social media, and we should give our children space and time to be their own creative selves, well away from screens of any kind. Time outside, time indoors looking at the rain and thinking, drawing, laughing at immature jokes with their youthful friends.

In my opinion, each of us needs to keep track of the news, local and international. Democracy depends absolutely on a well-informed electorate. Look at recent events here in Ontario and Dufferin, where an election with record low turnout gave Doug Ford control of the province. Not until we were awakened and stirred to care and act against him was he halted from ruining many thousands of acres of the Green Belt under the pressure of unnecessary development. This was a time of excellent communication in real-time and online. No question, social media has its benefits.

In life, balance is everything, and as part of that, we all need some time to ourselves.

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