The Pros and Cons of Solitude

“All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you'll be quite a lot.”

-        Dr. Suess, from Oh, The Places You’ll Go

I just took an on-line quiz to determine once and for all if I’m an introvert, an extrovert or somewhere in between (what’s sometimes called an ambivert). For people who know me, I can appear to be an extrovert, but I recall taking the Myers-Briggs personality test in grad school as part of a broader class discussion, and my classmates responding with shock when my test results labeled me as an introvert. To them, I was an active and willing participant in the social life of our close-knit group: I even co-chaired our social committee that led to activities like baseball games, scavenger hunts, and other escapades. To them, that didn’t jibe with the label introvert at all.

But I knew better. I knew that while I indeed craved a social outlet every day – even today, I get anxious if my calendar is lacking pre-planned activities – I also needed alone time, and that without it I’d be one unhappy camper. This is why big gatherings for weekend getaways fill me with anxiety, even if I’m the one who planned the activity! By contrast, sometimes all the interaction I need in a day is a quick conversation with a neighbor and a hello from a cashier.

So, while I think of myself as an ambivert, the test I just took says quite unequivocally that I’m an introvert. Fair enough. I’ll embrace the label.

Which leads me to solitude, from which all my creativity flows.

I think back to being a child in the 70s with two older siblings who went to school while I was left to fill my day with my mother whose parenting style was fairly hands-off. Sure, I played with friends from time to time, but a good chunk of my day was spent as a solo act: I dug up ant hills in the back yard, copied maps, built houses with Lincoln Logs, created abstract pictures with a Spirograph, and collected shotgun shells in the field behind our house (I shit you not – my parents let me wander around a field by myself with a paper grocery bag, collecting yellow, red, orange and green shotgun shells. What could possibly go wrong?).

And I wrote songs. Even before my family inherited my maternal grandparents’ piano, I was composing songs in my head, sometimes sharing them with my classmates in the back of the bus – funny songs about smoking cigarettes (quite edgy for a 6 year-old!) and one about Ohio that sounded oddly like George Baker Selection’s “Paloma Blanca,” one of those AM radio hits that shaped my early ear.

The songwriting never stopped. Shortly after the spinet was delivered to our door and placed in our living room, I was composing tunes, including two that my father painstakingly wrote out on manuscript paper for me. I still have them. One really isn’t a tune at all, but just an organized discovery of triads, but the other is, I must say, kind of impressive. I was no Mozart, that’s for sure, but the song has a good melody and cleverly transitions from a major key to its relative minor – not bad for an 8-year-old.

But all of this was happening because I was alone. Because there was nothing good to watch on TV. Because my older siblings had better things to do than entertain their baby brother. Because my parents weren’t ones to fill up my time. Because my next-door neighbor traveled to Florida for weeks at a time and there was no one to hang with. And because there was no such thing as the internet, smart phones and home computers.

Solitude. I’ve often stated that the two ingredients required for creativity are boredom and silence. This isn’t entirely true – musicians, actors and writers can be extremely creative in group settings – but it rings true for me. As a teenager I worked in retail, and it drove me crazy when my inner songwriting jukebox was unusable because of the Muzak pumping through the speakers overhead. My Orwellian nightmare would undoubtedly include my being exposed to continuous streams of music. Even good music for long periods of time exhausts me the same way conversing at a party for three or four hours can.

I wrote about my need for solitude in my song, “Falling by Degrees.”

I need silence
I need space around me
And it’s okay
It’s got nothing in the world to do with you

And this lyric alludes to the downside of solitude. My need for solitude has probably been misconstrued by some as being standoffish, and I know it’s kept me from exploring fun activities at times because they seemed like too big of a hassle. I’ve said no to outings – especially ones for multiple nights – because I feared I wouldn’t have a way to escape and recharge my batteries. And saying no to activities can snowball; when invitations are rejected, they eventually stop coming. Over the years, I’ve learned to be more careful to say yes to the right things and no to the wrong things, but it’s a tricky balancing act.

These days, as an empty nester whose wife travels quite a lot for work, I am careful to try to plan something social every day. Not ALL day, but a lunch, a phone call or two, a hang with the neighbors…something, just enough to get me out of my head.

And that’s probably the biggest con of being an introvert – being unable to get out of one’s own head. I’ve been there, and it’s not always a pretty place.

The Absence of Physical Engagement

I have a vivid recollection from my teenage years of observing a neighborhood couple seated on their front yard, using weed pullers to extract dandelions from their lawn. I remember looking at them with contempt and thinking, “If I ever consider weeding my lawn a day’s accomplishment, shoot me.” If I had flashed forward thirty years, I would have observed the 50-something version of me happily pulling weeds from his yard. In fact, I’m pretty sure if the fifteen-year-old me could see me today, he’d probably blow his brains out. But the thing is, I’m happy being the fifty something version of me, and tinkering in the yard or in my workshop is – for me – one of life’s simple pleasures. Sure, by the middle of August I want autumn to arrive and cajole my yard into dormancy, but the joys of spring are undeniable.

But a little yard work is a far cry from mankind’s roots. For most of us, the days of hunting, gathering, farming, cutting, chiseling and building are long gone. For the past several hundred years, we’ve done everything we can to delegate our active engagement with our natural surroundings to machines or to other people. I think of the stereotypical commercials from the 1950s geared toward housewives, touting the benefits of a vacuum cleaner or dishwasher and how much time will be freed up as a result, but of course the trend to free our time started long before the post-war years, and we’re all active participants.

Few of us grow our own food. Even fewer of us create our own fabric and sew our own clothing. Not many of us can build our own homes or the furniture and household items in it. And so what, right? Mankind has flourished largely as a result of the increased efficiency of specialization. If experts take care of many of our day-to-day activities, then we can become experts in some other activity, and society as a whole benefits.

But I do wonder what’s been lost along the way, and I wonder if there is any limit to our avoidance of manual and mental labor. Those of us with yards may no longer cut our lawns, plant flowers, lay down mulch, rake leaves or shovel our driveways or sidewalks. Others may have a cleaning service for their home’s interior. Some of us no longer shop for food or other items, having them delivered to our doors instead, and most of us outsource cooking to restaurants on a regular basis. Some hire nannies or daycares to look after their children and hire tutors to manage their kids’ homework or to prepare them for college entrance exams. We may have someone else managing our finances and preparing our taxes. We may also outsource teaching things like driving, playing an instrument, playing sports, etc. And while it might make great sense to hire a company to, say, pour concrete for our driveways or rewire our homes, many of us can’t install a ceiling fan, outlet, toilet or faucet. Even the easiest of activities like painting a room are often outsourced.

And billions of people are now living in urban environments that bear no resemblance to the natural environments that our ancestors tended to. Is there something innate in humans, some connection with the Earth that’s been lost as a result?

I imagine there are loads of anthropological studies on this subject, but I’ll be damned if I know the correct key words to search for them. I couldn’t find anything relevant when I searched for articles that apply to this blog entry. But here’s my hunch:

I believe that man’s evolution away from physical engagement results in a disengagement from and a loss of empathy for our fellow human beings, the environment, and Earth itself. I think there’s some primal need we have to engage with the ground we walk upon, the air we breathe, and the waters we sail, and in foregoing engagement with our environment, we are likely denying ourselves our most meaningful existence.

I know, I sound like fricking Henry David Thoreau from Walden, a book I tried to read three times as a young adult and hated it, never getting past more than a few chapters. I wonder now if it might speak to me.

Nevertheless, those of us who can afford to write and read this blog entry have likely achieved the goal that mankind set out centuries ago: loads of free time so that we can achieve great ends. I’ve always claimed that creativity required two things: time and silence. Agatha Christie once said, "I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.” After all, we probably don’t get Monet, Beethoven, Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hemingway, Martin Luther King, and The Beatles if they are busily tilling their farms for survival. 

On the other hand, long before Agatha Christie, the Bible’s book of Proverbs stated, “Idleness is the devil’s workshop,” and I think there’s something to this as well. Would an 18-year-old ever consider gunning down people in a Buffalo grocery store if he was tending to his crops?

Fortunately, most of us don’t go to such wicked lengths to fill our time. Instead, we play Wordl, watch gameshows and sports, read blogs, drink, snort and inject foreign substances, watch porn, get spoon-fed soundbites on social media, and happily believe whatever lies we’re told with nary a glimmer of critical thinking.

It just might be that using weed pullers to extract dandelions from your yard could be the cure that ails you.

Freedom and Creativity

In Frank Capra’s film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the idealistic young senator says to Miss Saunders:

Men should hold (liberty) up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: "I'm free... to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn't - I can... and my children will."

Liberty has taken on an expanded meaning these days as we have access to virtually any piece of knowledge ever conceived of by the human race – good, bad or otherwise.  And it begs the question: can you have too much freedom?  Can having the freedom to do everything keep you from doing anything?

I thought of this while listening a while back to the podcast Unspooled, a fine series in which actor Paul Scheer and film critic Amy Nicholson spend an hour discussing each film of the AFI’s top 100 movies compiled in 2007.  It isn’t a perfect podcast, but I like that the two hosts lack pretension and are often watching movies for the first time, enabling them to see through some of the hype. 

Scheer and Nicholson also make astute observations about society from time to time, and no more so than during their podcast for the film Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Near the end of the episode, Nicholson reveals her concerns about human creativity, and whether its been stunted since this movie’s release, when VHS tapes allowed for cheap home viewing.  She says: “What changed in our generation when we were able to make Raiders the number one VHS tape and watch Raiders non-stop…are we stunting our imagination?  It worries me not because I don’t like this movie, it just worries me on my larger scale of somebody who wants more random creativity in the world.”  She goes on to share a story about Quentin Tarantino coming of age just before the VCR became ubiquitous, when after seeing a movie he’d buy the film score on LP and imagine the scenes while the music played, eventually coming up with his own scenes, reimagining the movie over and over again.  Similarly, Scheer said that after watching Return of the Jedi, he’d go back home and write down everything he could remember in chronological order so he could read it back and get to experience the movie again.  Viewing it at home wasn’t an option. Had Tarantino and Scheer grown up in the home movie era, perhaps they wouldn’t have become filmmakers or actors.

Does having immediate access to so much information at our fingertips hamper creativity?  Do we – in effect – have too much freedom?  Freedom to see almost any movie at any time at any place.  Freedom to look up almost any fact about science or human history with a few keystrokes.  To read any piece of junk written by morons.  To watch gangs of people fornicating.   In the Age of the Internet and constant connectivity, do we have the ability to say no to what’s available to us and proactively pursue an original thought?

In the aforementioned Unspooled episode, Scheer concludes, rightly so, that “we’re always living in a culture that adapts to what we have.”  After all, were it not for recorded music, we’d have to rely on performances or hearing music in our own mental jukeboxes.  Were it not for the written word, we’d have to remember stories our grandparents told us so that we could then tell them to our children and grandchildren.  The written word has given us much, but it would be foolish to say that it hasn’t hampered some of our capacity to tell stories verbally.  Likewise, being able to look up facts on Google at any time has probably hampered some of our ability to remember, and studies have shown that the Internet has most assuredly shortened our attention span.

Nicholson concludes, “I feel like something in us is just stuck because we’re not using our imagination anymore, we’re just hitting rewind.”

Next week I’d like to look at films in particular and how it’s not all doom and gloom. Creativity survives.

Stay tuned…