The Virtues of Solitude
In the opening of his recent special, Lonely Flowers, comedian Roy Wood Jr. flatly declares, “We ain’t going to make it.” The reason is social disconnection in the United States, which the special dissects, skewering everything from the indignities of self-checkout to the way we’ve stopped using our phones to actually call people. Wood’s caustic pronouncement crystallizes the despair swirling around the tattered social fabric of American life, where so many people are “lonely flowers” without a bouquet.
In 2023, the Office of the Surgeon General declared that the United States is enduring an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately half of U.S. adults reported experiencing loneliness. The number of close friendships has dropped, as have levels of community involvement and trust in fellow citizens. We might not make it: these levels of loneliness are lethal. They increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia, infectious diseases, anxiety, depression, and self-harm—they significantly increase the risk of premature death. Former surgeon general Vivek Murthy compared loneliness to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
Loneliness also imperils the health of the body politic. As Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam warned twenty-five years ago in his modern-day classic, Bowling Alone, runaway isolation threatens democracy itself. Decades earlier, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt characterizes loneliness as “the experience of not belonging to the world at all.” According to her, loneliness leaves us vulnerable to totalitarian power, which exploits this “radical and desperate” human experience to coerce and control people.
Overwhelmingly, friendship and group activities are touted as the solution to the crisis. We must socialize ourselves out of this epidemic, we’re told. We are admonished to get our bottoms off the couch and our eyes off our phones, to host potlucks and parties, start book clubs, go to church, make small talk, volunteer, and attend public forums. At a seminar I recently organized on “solo aging,” the enthusiastic facilitator, herself a proud solo ager, concluded the program with her best advice: “Get out there! Don’t be shy! Say ‘yes’!” Kate Leaver’s The Friendship Cure urges people to put more effort into making and keeping friends as the key to remedying the loneliness epidemic. The Project Gather initiative promotes food-focused gatherings as a path out of loneliness. Articles in The New York Times encourage “surrounding yourself with friends and family” as a low-cost longevity “hack” and even suggest turning in-laws into friends. The message is clear: we must fill the void with neighbors, family, friends, acquaintances—anyone. The title of a 2023 documentary perfectly sums up the prevailing solution: Join or Die.
On the surface, this push to gather and join makes good sense: if being alone is the problem, being with others is the solution. Less solitude, more sociality. As a small-church pastor—and a former nursing-home chaplain and a minister to older adults—I have devoted my professional life to nurturing connections among people. I have seen the powerful effects of life lived together. I have also worked closely with populations at risk of social exclusion, including those with dementia, who were the subject of my book On Vanishing.
But I am troubled by the growing consensus on how to redress loneliness. Too often, the conventional wisdom touts togetherness while subtly (or not-so-subtly) maligning solitude. Deeper involvement with others is critical, but amid the drumbeat of “joining,” we risk neglecting the virtues of solitude. When construed either as the enemy of sociality or an instrumental state during which we recharge ourselves for the “real” work of being together, solitude is misunderstood.
The assumption that solitude is the antithesis of sociality underwrites journalist Derek Thompson’s January 2025 cover story for The Atlantic, which pronounces ours an “anti-social century.” Thompson documents how the increased time Americans are choosing to spend alone—they reported having more alone time in 2023 than during the height of the pandemic—is warping our personalities, relationships, and the larger political environment. But he points out that loneliness itself (the distress people report about their perceived social deficits) may now be steady or even declining in the United States, even as “solitude levels,” buttressed by online habits, continue to soar. In other words, we’re starting to prefer being alone. Our “self-chosen solitude,” he argues, drives us apart from each other, ensconcing us more deeply into the comfortable company of close intimates and online echo chambers, and away from “the village”: those who are familiar but not close, who make us practice the tolerance democracy depends on. To reverse the trend and “bring about a social century,” an opposite cascade is needed to override what Thompson calls our “mistaken” preference for solitude.
In a 2022 paper analyzing Americans’ time usage, economist Enghin Atalay uses “time alone” and “solitude” interchangeably. Americans who spend the most time alone report lower subjective well-being, Atalay reveals, which implicates solitude as a source of unhappiness for us “social animals.” In a 2023 column for The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof also equates solitude with antisociality: “One of the paradoxes of humanity is that while we (along with other primates) evolved to be social creatures, wealth drives us toward solitude.” Kristof associates solitude with a highly atomized, self-isolating existence induced by wealth. Large homes, for example, afford their inhabitants private bedrooms and bathrooms. Solitude, for commentators like these, is not merely undesirable, but unnatural, an affront to our fundamental makeup as social creatures. We have met the enemy and it is us, alone.
The Surgeon General’s report defines solitude as a “state of aloneness by choice that does not involve feeling lonely.” In other words, if time alone is self-chosen and free of loneliness, it is by definition solitude, no matter how that time is spent. There is no difference between, say, a soul-numbing session of social media schadenfreude and a soul-plumbing period of journaling, between a stupor of online gambling and a slow afternoon of gardening. Such thin conceptions of solitude help explain why it is often treated as a threat to togetherness, why it is held responsible for so many of our problems. According to this view, even if this kind of solitude has its place in small doses—the notion of “restorative solitude” has gained some traction, for example—we are overdosing on it, destroying ourselves and our politics.
But a fuller, more generous conception of solitude shows that it can serve as the foundation of community, not its foil. Solitude is neither a toxic source of isolation nor a state of contented aloneness. It is not even a refueling station off the highway of sociality, at least not primarily. Solitude is an integral part of the belonging Arendt identified as loneliness’s opposite. When time alone is used to cultivate solitude, it becomes a pillar of belonging—an indispensable basis for our life together. Contrary to popular prescriptions, the antidote to the loneliness epidemic involves moresolitude, not less. Healing our antisocial century means treating a deficiency in solitude, not reversing an overdose.
Dutch priest and professor Henri Nouwen, through his own struggle with loneliness, came to see solitude as the foundation of belonging. Despite having many friends, colleagues, students, and admirers, Nouwen—one of the most prolific spiritual writers of the twentieth century—suffered bouts of intense loneliness, including a midlife breakdown when a friendship ended. Nouwen clung to certain relationships, hoping they could ease his anguish, only to experience pain and disappointment when they fell short. He came to understand solitude as the prescription for loneliness, creating the space necessary for authentic connection with ourselves and others.
In his 1975 book, Reaching Out, Nouwen describes the passage from loneliness to solitude as the first essential movement of the spiritual life. Solitude is the capacity “to perceive and understand this world from a quiet inner center.” In solitude, we “pay attention to our inner self” and “become present to ourselves.” Rather than egocentric navel-gazing, solitude allows us to “become present to others by reaching out to them, not greedy for attention and affection but offering our own selves to help build a community of love.” This reaching into our inner self makes reaching out to others possible, an insight that gets lost when we praise sociality while denigrating solitude.
Nouwen was deeply influenced by Trappist monk Thomas Merton, perhaps solitude’s best-known apologist. In 1941, Merton left a bohemian life in New York City to join a monastery in Kentucky, where he lived both in community with other monks and in a hermitage alone. Solitude involves “a living and vigilant silence,” he writes—not just noiselessness. A cultivated practice, it allows one to be in “the grip of the present.” Merton extols solitude as a bulwark against the rootless dissipation of modern life, making way for deep communion with the world. “We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them,” he writes. Merton, like Nouwen, insists solitude is not a retreat from responsibility, but a gift to others. Solitude teaches Merton to “find God alone in everything,” rather than relying on others for the joy and fulfillment he desires. This rootedness in sacred aloneness frees him to find the sacred in others, even in those brothers, he confesses, who “ordinarily rub me the wrong way.”
German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer valued solitude in the same way. A decade before he was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp for his participation in an assassination plot against Hitler, he led an underground seminary of clergy dissenting from the state church. In Life Together, a small treatise on the character of Christian community, Bonhoeffer reflects on the common life that he and his seminarians shared before the Gestapo shuttered the seminary in 1937. Readers might expect Bonhoeffer to commend being together above all else, especially given the moment’s need for collective resistance, but Bonhoeffer devotes a fifth of the book to solitude as an integral part of communal life. In a chapter titled “The Day Alone,” Bonhoeffer regards time alone—marked by “spiritual stillness,” “listening silence,” and “humble stillness”—not as a matter of recharging for the real work of community; rather, time alone is the work of life together. Scriptural meditation, prayer, and intercession structure the solitude and nurture the community. “The day together will be unfruitful without the day alone,” he writes, “both for the fellowship and for the individual.”
Nouwen, Merton, and Bonhoeffer help us understand solitude not as empty time alone but as self-nourishment that both leads us deeper within and points us toward communion with the larger world and God. They all created greater belonging out of their solitude, not despite it. In 1985, Nouwen left a prestigious post at Harvard to live and work among people with profound disabilities at L’Arche Daybreak community near Toronto. Nouwen’s tender writing about L’Arche helped promote communities like it throughout the world. Merton, whose indelible vision of belonging came to him at a bustling Louisville intersection amid a life of thoroughgoing solitude, testifies to the fruits of solitude: “[I]n the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” Bonhoeffer, who said a refusal of solitude is a rejection of Christ’s call, sacrificed his life for others.
Of course, most of us are not monks or priests living in intentional community, nor are we leaders of an underground seminary resisting a genocidal regime. Such lofty ideals of solitude may seem untranslatable to our contemporary lives. Yet we live in a strained era that, as most of us sense, requires a counterweight in some kind of humble stillness. The point is not to inflict our lives with yet another self-improvement regimen, turning solitude into another life hack, a tedious addition to already overstretched days. Solitude requires patient cultivation, not merciless striving. Merton describes it as a “source of peace and joy”; for Nouwen, it “roots us in our own hearts.” Being so rooted allows for greater spaciousness, stillness, and attentiveness. When Merton describes reading in a cemetery or beholding the afternoon’s falling light as holy, he is not prescribing a checklist of activities to summarily accomplish; rather, he is pointing to a disposition involving attention to and immersion in being, a foundational beauty and love.
This definition of solitude is clearly more than time alone not felt as loneliness. Solitude is plainly inconsistent with doomscrolling, mindless shopping, or retreating entirely into a digital world. Of course, we all need small pleasures that demand little from us: word games, TV shows, cat videos. Converting every ounce of time alone into solitude is not the point. Rather, the aim should be to prioritize solitude in our lives—to pursue the kind of high-quality alone time that allows us to tune into the self, the natural world, and the transcendent, leading us back to one another strengthened.
Ordinary people also sense that our epidemic is about more than excessive time spent alone or lack of sociality. A 2024 survey conducted by Harvard’s Making Caring Common Initiative found that 80 percent of respondents thought “learning to love myself” was an important personal solution for reducing their loneliness—second only to “reach[ing] out to a friend or family member” (83 percent). Learning to love oneself does not fit the typical slate of “joiner” solutions for combating the loneliness epidemic. While being around loving people can help foster self-love, it can only be fully realized through solitude—becoming rooted in our hearts.
In his essay “Life Without Principle,” Henry David Thoreau laments the person who makes frequent trips to the post office, loaded down with correspondence, yet has “not heard from himself” in a long while. Given near-instant present-day communication, Thoreau’s worry over excessive letter-writing seems remarkably quaint. Nevertheless, he speaks to the incessant grasp for affirmation and stimulation from others, which diminishes both the inward life—one hones no distinct voice—and the outward life—one has little or nothing to communicate to others. How to love the self, let alone others, if we refuse to hear from ourselves? And how to hear from ourselves if we possess no solitude? Hearing from ourselves is not always an easy or pleasant experience; we are a mess of memories, desires, and emotions. But not to listen is to forgo love.
Some years ago, I toured the home of Emily Dickinson, a great lover of self and solitude. When my tour group stepped into the bedroom, our guide told a story about a visit from Dickinson’s niece Martha. When Martha entered the room where her aunt lived and worked, Dickinson pretended to lock the door with an imaginary key, turned to her niece, and said, “Matty, here’s freedom.” This is solitude as liberation, not insularity. Despite being branded a recluse, Dickinson had friends, visitors, and correspondents. But she understood the solitude she needed to create and thrive, for her soul to expand and select its own society. Out of her solitude, she wrote more than 1,800 poems, gifting the world their beauty, insight, and strangeness. Although most of us are not poetic geniuses requiring Dickinson’s level of solitude, we all have inner lives that regularly require us to “close the valves of attention,” in Dickinson’s words. We owe this to ourselves and others.
In his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology, William James notes that attention “implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” If we are never able to withdraw fully from anything, to “close the valves,” how can we “deal effectively” with other things, especially our inner lives? This withdrawal is harder when work, school, current events, family, friends, and advertisers follow us everywhere we go, even when we are alone. The quasi-sociality of social media, podcasts, reality TV, and more crowds our time alone. Meanwhile, quasi-solitude—namely, the private world of our phones—intrudes on our time together. As Thompson observes, “[O]ur social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.” Scolding people, especially the young, for their digital habits has become as ubiquitous as it is trite. Of course, I hope people will make personal choices that lead to more solitude, but sheer willpower can go only so far in overcoming these habits. Given the sophisticated psychological tricks tech companies use to create what psychologist Adam Altar calls “behavioral addictions,” claiming solitude is not simply a matter of just saying no.
No sweeping mandate or pat program can legislate this kind of inner work, either. We need more significant shifts in our environment that encourage and support quality alone time. Renewed support for public institutions, organizations, and spaces that foster social connection—parks, libraries, and community centers—has emerged in the effort to combat the loneliness epidemic. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, in his Palaces for the People, touts “social infrastructure”—those places “where all kinds of people can gather”—as “the best way to repair the fractured societies we live in today.” I am struck by how the same infrastructure can also support quality alone time. Rather than pitting solitude and sociality against each other, we should promote “solitude infrastructure” as a vital part of social infrastructure. Public libraries provide not only group gathering spaces but also cozy corners and an array of materials to feed one’s inner life. Public parks support both sports teams and solitary walkers, birthday parties and birdwatchers. Something as small and simple as preserving or adding public benches simultaneously encourages solitude and slowing down, as well as togetherness and sharing space.
Beyond creating physical spaces, we can also advance policies that unburden people of incessant work and financial stress, freeing them for both more sociality and more solitude. Curtailing the predatory practices of social-media companies and advertisers that splinter our attention and manipulate our brains (and pocketbooks) would also open more space for quality time together and alone. Cellphone bans at schools and other strategies to reduce phone usage give young people a better chance to interact face-to-face and find their “quiet inner center.” Public-school music programs offer children of every background the opportunity to learn an instrument—to practice in solitude and play in ensembles together.
Spiritual and religious communities can also support solitude alongside their usual communal services. They can teach and incorporate contemplative practices and open sacred spaces to the public for quiet reflection. Faith groups such as the Society of Friends, Contemplative Outreach, and the Center for Action and Contemplation already help community members tap into rich, living traditions of solitude in their most robust, communitarian forms. If religious groups are diligent about it, they can foster solitude as fruitfully as they foster togetherness.
Whole industries have emerged to sell us fixes to our frenetic lives, promising inner peace that is only a retreat, an app, a spa day, or a lifestyle hack away. If we can periodically disengage from others to “recharge” (the word all but suggests we are phones ourselves), then we can return to our “networked” lives with renewed vigor. This cycle of depletion and restoration depends upon solitude remaining a periodic luxury, not a fundamental part of life. But solitude is more than self-help; it is a transgressive politics. When we become rooted in our own hearts, we become less susceptible to the false identity and security that advertisers, scammers, and tyrants offer. Merton speaks of solitude as an antidote to illusion; no one seeking the “liberation and light” of solitude, he writes, “can afford to yield passively to all the appeals of a society of salesmen, advertisers, and consumers.” In the present hall of mirrors—where bombast can bestow power, scapegoating masquerades as security, and connectivity simulates community—commitment to solitude promotes a culture of greater belonging and staves off the illusions and lies that keep us spinning in our own separate worlds.
Bonhoeffer understood that living under duress could lead dissenting Christians to abandon their inner lives for hypervigilance against external threats, a temptation they must resist. Equally untenable is retreating into the inner life to avoid responsibility to others. “Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone,” writes Bonhoeffer. We must preserve the integrity of our inner and outer lives, even—if not especially—under dire circumstances. Martin Luther King Jr. also understood this dynamic: midnight kitchen-table prayers and mass protests with arms linked are two sides of the same coin.
Tyrannical power destroys community by degrading our time together and our time alone; we must protect and nourish both. Ending our epidemic requires not only reaching out but also reaching in. Both transformations are integral to beloved community. If we “lonely flowers” can find a way to join a bouquet and nurture our individual beauty, maybe we can make it after all.
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