Why Being Alone Terrifies Us (and Why That's Revealing)

In 2014, a team of psychologists at the University of Virginia ran a simple experiment. They put participants alone in a room for 15 minutes with nothing to do except sit quietly with their thoughts. They also left a button participants could press to give themselves a mild electric shock. Most people, when tested separately, said they would pay money to avoid receiving this shock.

Then they were left alone in the room.

Sixty-seven percent of men and 25 percent of women chose to shock themselves rather than just sit quietly.

Philosophers have been trying to explain this for centuries. Blaise Pascal got there in the 17th century: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." He was not joking. Pascal argued that distraction is not laziness but a kind of existential strategy. If you sit quietly long enough, you will eventually confront the things you have been running from: your mortality, the emptiness behind your ambitions, the unresolved questions about what your life is actually for. Distraction is the drug we take to avoid that confrontation.

The word "solitude" comes from the Latin solus (alone) and has two quite different cultural meanings that are worth separating. There is loneliness, which is involuntary isolation felt as deprivation. And there is solitude, which is chosen aloneness experienced as a condition for something else: for thinking, for creating, for spiritual practice, for simply being without performing. The distinction matters enormously. Lonely people and solitary people can be in identical physical circumstances, but their experiences are almost opposite.

The modern world has developed a systematic hostility to solitude that goes beyond Pascal's era. Open-plan offices eliminate the physical possibility of alone-ness at work. Smartphones ensure that the moment of potential solitude on a commute or in a waiting room is immediately filled. Social media creates a constant ambient audience for one's thoughts, which changes the nature of thinking itself. When every half-formed thought can immediately become a post, the condition of sitting with a thought long enough for it to develop fully becomes rare.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt identified what she called the "two-in-one" quality of thinking: genuine thought is always a kind of internal dialogue, a conversation with yourself. Socrates described the same thing: thinking is the soul talking to itself. If this is right, solitude is not the absence of conversation but a particular kind of conversation, with yourself as the interlocutor. You cannot have that conversation if you are constantly in contact with external interlocutors who demand real-time response.

None of this means that society or connection is bad. The argument is more specific: certain kinds of mental activity require a condition that our current cultural arrangement makes very hard to access. The question is which activities those are, why they require solitude, and what we lose when we can't get there.