What Silence and Solitude Teach Us
The demand for human connection
Have you ever felt alone?
Like…truly alone, as if the only person that existed in the entire world was yourself, as a knowing, active, autonomous agent? While you may initially think that you have felt and experienced flickering moments of loneliness in your life, identity (the goals and beliefs a person consistently binds themselves to throughout time) is crafted through the incorporating of other’s knowledge, skills, sociological customs, and ideologies of varying subjects. Individuals rely on assimilating knowledge through others’ actuation of their abilities for everyday survival and flourishing. Humans perpetually collaborate through their own production of goods, services, and trade. These social elements formulate our sense of self as a functional part of society. Hence, the lack of external support detrimentally affecting people naturally is unsurprising. Unless you are a special case who does not contribute to society in any way, (e.g., someone who lives off the grid years on end etc.….) major chunks of most people’s time and energy are spent in the process of integrating and cooperating in the social sphere.
Why is it then that at times we feel alone?
This subject may seem trivial at a glance since it seems unnecessary to delve into why we are socially wired. It seems as if expressing cogitations on such an everyday thing is useless. However, many people fail to consider what would happen if socialization was completely taken away from them. Usually because the feelings that arise when experiencing aloneness, particularly when it serves no purpose, are discomfort, an itch to escape that state of solitude. My questions then are: What can silence, and seclusion teach us? What function does it serve, and what are we to make of it? I do not claim to have any profound or novel answers concerning this feeling of aloneness, the state of solitude or why feeling alone, a social-cognitive phenomenon, is such a negative feeling that many individuals have experienced at least one point in their lives. I do not endorse an individual to separate themselves from others. Nevertheless, in this article I want to explore with the reader some interesting things both silence and solitude teach us socially wired humans.
Back to the original question: Have you ever felt alone? What did it feel like for you, and why do you think this feeling was the case? If I were to answer my own question, it would vary. Of course, there have been times when silence and solitude benefitted my focus or health, yet there were also times when it was painful, the lack of external pressure to motivate or excite me. Because the integration of socialization serves such an important purpose in our lives, we end up talking more about the noise, the externalities, the events we attended and the people we had met.
“Silence is the only phenomenon today that is useless. It does not fit into the world of profit and utility. It simply is. It seems to have no other purpose. It cannot be exploited. All the other great phenomena have been appropriated by the world of profit and utility. Even the space between Heaven and Earth has become a mere cavity for airplanes to travel through. Water and fire have been absorbed by the world of profit. They are only noticed insofar as they are parts of this world. They have lost their independent existence. silence however stands outside the world of profit and utility. It cannot be exploited by profit. You cannot get anything out of it. It is unproductive. Therefore, it is regarded as valueless.” ~ Max Picard
In Max Picard’s book “The World of Silence”, he implores his readers to consider what silence is and what its simplicity teaches us. While his array of fanciful descriptions and examples of silence and linguistics are quite idiosyncratic, his fundamental point is that silence transforms or re-creates individuals, and in today’s accelerating and ultra-connected society, we can but only develop, which requires the back and forth of speech and energy, invested in that which is materially profitable alone. Individuals in this noisy world are constantly contesting with the uncontrollable and unconscious forces that warp their perspectives and fragment their perceptions. To find truth and understand the meaning of things, there must be silence and concentration. When people cut themselves off from other distractions, silence elucidates and organizes the jumble of ideas and conceptualizations into coherent points. It is in silence that we find the words to speak.
What else does silence and solitude teach us?
During the times I felt lonely and numb, I remember realizing the importance of human connection. Besides the acculturation of a singular person with the rest of the world for survival purposes, authentic connection is an essential for well-being, (the frequency and intensity of emotional experiences). Humans are undeniably socially wired, having unique ways in how they conceptualize processed information. Each person maps out the image they capture. With their peculiar and particular stance on personal experiences or concepts that evolve, they help others evaluate and understand the meaning of things with more nuance, clarity, and precision through the tool of communication.
Language is not the only means by which we communicate. The Common Coding theory is a cognitive psychology theory describing how perceptual representations and motor representations are linked. Perception, which is the identification of sensory and abstract information, is what prompts action (performance), and the energy of action is what prompts perception. We of course, are wired to transform sensory patterns into intentional energy via patterns of motor coordination. Seeing an event activates an individual to schematically map out associations and prospective outcomes of the perceptual events, which largely allows us to integrate well and develop a complex society with intentional hierarchies and goals. Along the same lines, neuroscientists have been studying a plausible theory for a few decades on how subjects (certain animals and humans) mentally copy each other’s motor patterns, and the psychophysical properties and functions that occur throughout this vicariousness. “Logically related” neurons are brain cells that fire when an animal acts and when an animal observes a functionally related action performed by another. In rats watching other subjects experience certain things such as pain, neural activity appeared as if they had experienced a similar circumstance. In short, we are subconsciously there for one another, feeding off each other’s movements and reacting accordingly.
With this mirroring, individuals have the ability to empathize one another, challenge ideas, and fight for what they think is right.
In contrast, when we are taken away from all of that energetic movement, and we are distant from the noise, we stand alone. In moments of solitude, we dim down the sense that we must prove or secure ourselves from harm, so on and so forth. We embody our singularity, and in these moments, what we think or fail to think reflects our core values. Therefore, we are given a choice. Do we pause to reflect and relocate our vision or maintain what was secured in the past? The quality time we had spent with ourselves is what gives us the space and opportunity to get outside of our comfort zone to reflect, revise, and find the words to speak when the time comes.
