“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life,” wrote Marina Keegan upon graduating Yale in 2012.
Is it even possible to be alone anymore? Certainly not with a cell phone or Internet. At least the possibility of instant connection is always there.
Connection is our zeitgeist.
Some time ago we discovered we were better together. We discovered trade, specialized and the togetherness became irreversible.
Thoreau writes in Walden: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
He also writes: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Thoreau thought that the cost of things was less for a man alone in nature, and that man was richer for it.
In a 2016 film called Captain Fantastic: Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) raises his six children “off the grid” in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, teaching them survival skills and philosophy; he trains them to be self-reliant, physically fit and athletic, relying on classic literature and music without technology, demonstrating the beauty of life in nature.
Like a modern-day Swiss Family Robinson—Thoreau’s solitude rendered to a family. Not one man alone but one family alone, one unit of the fundamental building block of society singled out—in some ways still interdependent, but in a smaller way than society at large.
“Man’s habits,” the historian Charles Coulston Gillespie once wrote, “change more rapidly than his instincts.” We have habits of an advanced age: texting, swiping, clicking, grocery shopping. Yet it seems our instincts of natural survival are still leftover—these are what Thoreau and Emerson must have felt.
But our economies now stand between man and nature. We do more with less and man specializes in order to participate in the economy rather than mind all his necessaries alone in nature.
The successful man is no longer one who controls nature, but one who best navigates networks and markets. Yet the fundamental motivation of networks and markets is still to control nature.
The great man is social, with a memory for how societies are motivated by solitude.
Emerson says this another way: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”