solitude vs. loneliness

I don’t consider myself a particularly social person. I’m not a fan of large parties or gatherings, am generally bad about keeping in touch with folks, and the idea of meeting and chatting up with complete strangers continues to both mystify and terrify me. And more often than not, I find myself greatly looking forward to or even craving periods of solitude - be it having the house to myself while my sister travels somewhere on vacation (or just goes up to SF for the weekend) - or preferring to stay at a hotel while visiting other cities even though I may have friends who can accommodate me. The ability to be in full control of my own schedule, what I’m going to eat, and what I’m going to do without having to worry about the needs of anybody else is liberating.*

Part of the problem here, I think, is that I generally exert way too much attention and effort to make sure whoever I’m with - if I care about them at all - is happy. Which usually means trying to figure out what it is they want and doing that, even if it’s not necessarily what I want for myself. I also fully recognize this as not simply being nice or selfless by any means - my motive for pleasing others is generally entirely selfish, be it because I simply derive greater pleasure from making said person happy, or because some inexplicable sense of insecurity, or most likely, some combination of both. But I digress...

The fact of the matter is that I occasionally have the want or need for self-indulgence (be a bum at the computer all day! go eat at favorite restaurant #103! watch this horrible chick flick!), but only allow myself to do so when it doesn’t affect anybody else. And while I certainly have plenty of such opportunities and generally take advantage of and relish every single one, the loneliness invariably creeps in the midst of all this, and I find myself craving for another human presence and for company. This eventually leads to a downward spiral of depression, especially when I realize that there’s nothing I can do about it.**

Which leads me to the conclusion that the fundamental difference between solitude and loneliness is that you can do something about one but not the other. It’s fairly possible (and perhaps even easy) to find solitude amidst a crowded room, but it’s certainly not so possible to find human company, comfort, and presence in an empty one. The tricky thing about all this is that solitude - be it physical or merely mental/emotional - eventually leads one down the path of loneliness. Or at least it does to me.

I’ve definitely had plenty of experience with both, but then I also realize that there are a subset of people I know with whom I’ve never found myself looking for solitude. They are the people who make me feel loneliness rather than solitude in their absence, and perhaps it is their presence that I truly seek in moments of trying to find solitude among others. Naturally, these are generally the people I find myself caring most about and seek most to please.***

I really don’t have anywhere to go with all this. It’s just something that’s been bouncing back and forth in my mind for the past several weeks, perhaps because the moments of solitude and the consequent moments of loneliness have become more frequent of late. In fact, I'm fairly certain that I'm just stating something that's extremely obvious to everybody, and thus am once again writing about something that really isn't worth writing about anyway. Boy, I am good at that. Maybe I should rename this blog to if-i-were-stating-the-obvious.blogspot.com.


* Milan Kundera characterizes this feeling as “lightness” - a freedom from anything that binds us - which is contrasted with, unsurprisingly, “heaviness” - the weight of our relationships, our worries, and pretty much everything else that comes with being a social human being. He similarly writes that we all yearn for lightness, but once we have it, it becomes quite unbearable - thus, “the unbearable lightness of being.”
** And somewhere even further down that spiral, I start having suicidal thoughts of finding a random bar to see if I can get myself to meet random strangers. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), San Jose has no such places for such self-destructive activity.
*** It remains unclear to me whether I care about them because of this, or if it’s because of this that I care about them so much. I suspect it’s a bit of both, and that this cycle is the source of Calvin-hypersensitivity-of-exponential-proportions.