Google translation of the original article in Portuguese:
https://the.ismaili/portugal/antes-ocup ... s%E2%80%9D
Busier than “poorly accompanied”
Loneliness is cunning and treacherous, it takes advantage of the moments when we are most vulnerable and most fragile. It starts by frightening and scaring us and then slowly settling in and imposing its schedules, changing our routines, stifling our interests and stealing our motivation. And then, we realized that it is our only company.
English
Sometimes we even realize it, but it tastes good. It gives us a feeling of rest, of some freedom, of no obligations and, therefore, we allow that false feeling to take over our daily lives.
In principle, it could even be beneficial to retire to solitude in certain circumstances because we need to reflect with ourselves, because we want to appease the pain, or because we simply want to breathe and walk. However, the risk of being trapped "in that" isolated place, where our thoughts and emotions keep ruminating and paralyze our walking, is too high.
When we realize that we have started to avoid noise, to become impatient with trivial conversations, to hide inside the house, to avoid communication with those around us and to lose interest in the tasks and activities that once gave us so much satisfaction , then you need to ask for help to combat loneliness.
Therefore, our full attention is needed. We are all co-responsible for the common well-being of our neighbors, our family, our friends and / or neighbors and the people of our community. Each of us can make a difference through small actions and attitudes: a phone call, an invitation to do a regular activity, an outing, or any other way that can help the other not to isolate.
But the decision has to be made by the person himself. Asking for help is an act of courage. It means that we want to fight and fight loneliness, that we have to shake up our day and occupy our time with routines and tasks that compel us to move, think and communicate. For example, going out on the street to do some shopping, taking an exercise class, reading a book or doing written exercises or mental challenges and talking with friends and family.
Loneliness can be lazy and tricky, but we are endowed with will and determination and can fight it by saying No, No and No!
Loneliness: Why is it inseperable from human existence?
How can one live 'alone and happy?
Living alone and by yourself is something everybody must practice once in a while.
Let me tell you one thing clearly. Nobody is permanent in your life except for your parents and your closest friends. So people come, people go and you have to be able to deal with it.
Coming to your question, here are somethings you can do to stay 'alone and happy' :
- Set short-term goals to improve yourself. Learn new things everyday and gain knowledge. KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.
- Try learning new languages. Trust me, you can flaunt it and it'll improve your confidence.
- Do things that make you feel proud about yourself. Like maybe a self-improvement week where you know more about yourself and develop on your strengths.
- Check out Quora every now and then.
- Watch your favorite videos on YouTube. (Tech videos or stand-up comedy)
- Last but not the least, keep hogging and stay fit. Trust me, the way people treat you when you're fit is totally different from how they treat you when you're fat and unattractive. I know this isn't fair and people shouldn't do that but that's how it is.
- Make your parents proud. The happiness you'll get is second to none.
So, I hope that helped. There's many more things you can do but I feel these are the most important ones.
https://www.quora.com/
Living alone and by yourself is something everybody must practice once in a while.
Let me tell you one thing clearly. Nobody is permanent in your life except for your parents and your closest friends. So people come, people go and you have to be able to deal with it.
Coming to your question, here are somethings you can do to stay 'alone and happy' :
- Set short-term goals to improve yourself. Learn new things everyday and gain knowledge. KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.
- Try learning new languages. Trust me, you can flaunt it and it'll improve your confidence.
- Do things that make you feel proud about yourself. Like maybe a self-improvement week where you know more about yourself and develop on your strengths.
- Check out Quora every now and then.
- Watch your favorite videos on YouTube. (Tech videos or stand-up comedy)
- Last but not the least, keep hogging and stay fit. Trust me, the way people treat you when you're fit is totally different from how they treat you when you're fat and unattractive. I know this isn't fair and people shouldn't do that but that's how it is.
- Make your parents proud. The happiness you'll get is second to none.
So, I hope that helped. There's many more things you can do but I feel these are the most important ones.
https://www.quora.com/
What are the advantages of being single?
I have been living now 10 years mostly by myself so i have some experience with Solitude.
One very important thing to understand is that just like we eat food, same way out mind is also constantly feeding.
Your Gender, Color, Religion, Ethnicity etc doesn't matter.
The mind is same.
So, when you have trained your mind or at least made it comfortable to stay with itself and not constantly look for other people and their ideas/interaction to feed on, what you do is that you become somewhat more self sufficient.
You may think this is being Anti-Social.
But it's the opposite!, i can talk to people about their lives and issues for a long time, because i usually don't want much out of them(most of the times).
Same way, all relationships would be better if people can be more self reliant and seek out less from others.
A person who is comfortable in his/her own company will always be fine living with others if needed.
These are the benefits of Solitude.
I will leave you with a quote from Pali Canon,
Blissful is solitude
for one who's content,
who has heard the Dhamma,
who sees.
Blissful is non-affliction
with regard for the world,
restraint for living beings.
Blissful is dispassion
with regard for the world,
the overcoming of sensuality.
But the subduing of the conceit "I am"
That is truly
the ultimate bliss.
https://www.quora.com/
I have been living now 10 years mostly by myself so i have some experience with Solitude.
One very important thing to understand is that just like we eat food, same way out mind is also constantly feeding.
Your Gender, Color, Religion, Ethnicity etc doesn't matter.
The mind is same.
So, when you have trained your mind or at least made it comfortable to stay with itself and not constantly look for other people and their ideas/interaction to feed on, what you do is that you become somewhat more self sufficient.
You may think this is being Anti-Social.
But it's the opposite!, i can talk to people about their lives and issues for a long time, because i usually don't want much out of them(most of the times).
Same way, all relationships would be better if people can be more self reliant and seek out less from others.
A person who is comfortable in his/her own company will always be fine living with others if needed.
These are the benefits of Solitude.
I will leave you with a quote from Pali Canon,
Blissful is solitude
for one who's content,
who has heard the Dhamma,
who sees.
Blissful is non-affliction
with regard for the world,
restraint for living beings.
Blissful is dispassion
with regard for the world,
the overcoming of sensuality.
But the subduing of the conceit "I am"
That is truly
the ultimate bliss.
https://www.quora.com/
Loneliness Is Not About Being Alone!
Loneliness is often defined as sadness, caused because one has no friends, company, or an intimate partner. The reality is that despite having those nurturing relationships, there are still strong feelings of being lonely, as we feel misunderstood, our expectations from these relationships are not realized, dreams and aspirations remain unsupported, the environment uncomfortable.
As social media has become the bane of our existence, people depend on “likes”, “comments” to validate their presence, using more and more social media accounts, communicating with emojis, joining different sites, to mask this empty darkness of being alone.
In reality, being “alone” reveling in your own presence is a liberating feeling of peace and contentment. Learning to grow from personal challenges, getting out of your comfort zone, exploring your own potential, being secure in your own skin and loving oneself is key to diminishing that feeling of loneliness.
Life expectancyspan has now increased to 90 years on average, depending on others to assuage this “loneliness” is an impractical expectation. Being comfortable in your own skin, liking your own company, enjoying your personal pleasures, letting your dreams become reality however big or small, and accepting that there will be times that you will feel lonely , but that too shall pass will make you more accepting of yourself.
Certain challenges - growing older, mental or physical disabilities, having limited mobility, living alone, low income, the loss of a partner or friend, language and cultural barriers can exacerbate these feelings of desolation and hopelessness.
Finding a healthy balance, socially, physically, emotionally, intellectually, artistically, spiritually, and seeking help, can alleviate loneliness.
“NEVER SEARCH FOR YOUR HAPPINESS IN OTHERS, IT WILL MAKE YOU FEEL ALONE. SEARCH IT IN YOURSELF, YOU WILL FEEL HAPPY, WHEN YOU ARE ALONE.”
Anonymous.
As social media has become the bane of our existence, people depend on “likes”, “comments” to validate their presence, using more and more social media accounts, communicating with emojis, joining different sites, to mask this empty darkness of being alone.
In reality, being “alone” reveling in your own presence is a liberating feeling of peace and contentment. Learning to grow from personal challenges, getting out of your comfort zone, exploring your own potential, being secure in your own skin and loving oneself is key to diminishing that feeling of loneliness.
Life expectancyspan has now increased to 90 years on average, depending on others to assuage this “loneliness” is an impractical expectation. Being comfortable in your own skin, liking your own company, enjoying your personal pleasures, letting your dreams become reality however big or small, and accepting that there will be times that you will feel lonely , but that too shall pass will make you more accepting of yourself.
Certain challenges - growing older, mental or physical disabilities, having limited mobility, living alone, low income, the loss of a partner or friend, language and cultural barriers can exacerbate these feelings of desolation and hopelessness.
Finding a healthy balance, socially, physically, emotionally, intellectually, artistically, spiritually, and seeking help, can alleviate loneliness.
“NEVER SEARCH FOR YOUR HAPPINESS IN OTHERS, IT WILL MAKE YOU FEEL ALONE. SEARCH IT IN YOURSELF, YOU WILL FEEL HAPPY, WHEN YOU ARE ALONE.”
Anonymous.
The Art of Being Alone
Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have. It’s just as possible to be painfully lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact. Some people need extended periods of time alone to recharge, others would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes with their thoughts. Here’s how we can change our perceptions by making and experiencing art.
***
At a moment in time when many people are facing unprecedented amounts of time alone, it’s a good idea for us to pause and consider what it takes to turn difficult loneliness into enriching solitude. We are social creatures, and a sustained lack of satisfying relationships carries heavy costs for our mental and physical health. But when we are forced to spend more time alone than we might wish, there are ways we can compensate and find a fruitful sense of connection and fulfillment. One way to achieve this is by using our loneliness as a springboard for creativity.
“Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed but simply that one is alive.”
— Olivia Laing
Loneliness as connection
One way people have always coped with loneliness is through creativity. By transmuting their experience into something beautiful, isolated individuals throughout history have managed to substitute the sense of community they might have otherwise found in relationships with their creative outputs.
In The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing tells the stories of a number of artists who led isolated lives and found meaning in their work even if their relationships couldn’t fulfill them. While she focuses specifically on visual artists in New York over the last seventy years, their methods of using their loneliness and transmitting it into their art carry wide resonance. These particular artists tapped into sentiments many of us will experience at least once in our lives. They found beauty in loneliness and showed it to be something worth considering, not just something to run from.
The artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is known for his paintings of American cityscapes inhabited by closed-off figures who seem to embody a vision of modern loneliness. Laing found herself drawn to his signature images of uneasy individuals in sparse surroundings, often separated from the viewer by a window or some other barrier.
Why, then, do we persist in ascribing loneliness to his work? The obvious answer is that his paintings tend to be populated by people alone, or in uneasy, uncommunicative groupings of twos and threes, fastened into poses that seem indicative of distress. But there’s something else too; something about the way he contrives his city streets . . . This viewpoint is often described as voyeuristic, but what Hopper’s urban scenes also replicate is one of the central experiences of being lonely: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with a sense of near unbearable exposure.
While Hopper intermittently denied that his paintings were about loneliness, he certainly experienced the sense of being walled off in a city. In 1910 he moved to Manhattan, after a few years spent mostly in Europe, and found himself struggling to get by. Not only were his paintings not selling, he also felt alienated by the city. Hopper worked on commissions and had few close relationships. Only in his forties did he marry, well past the window of acceptability for the time. Laing writes of his early time in New York:
This sense of separation, of being alone in a big city, soon began to surface in his art . . . He was determined to articulate the day-to-day experience of inhabiting the modern, electric city of New York. Working first with etchings and then in paint, Hopper began to produce a distinctive body of images that captured the cramped, sometimes alluring experience of urban living.
Hopper roamed the city at night, sketching scenes that caught his eye. This perspective meant that the viewer of his paintings finds themselves most often in the position of an observer detached from the scene in front of them. If loneliness can feel like being separated from the world, the windows Hopper painted are perhaps a physical manifestation of this.
By Laing’s description, Hopper transformed the isolation he may have experienced by depicting the experience of loneliness as a place in itself, inhabited by the many people sharing it despite their differences. She elaborates and states, “They aren’t sentimental, his pictures, but there is an extraordinary attentiveness to them. As if what he saw was as interesting as he kept insisting he needed it to be: worth the labor, the miserable effort of setting it down. As if loneliness was something worth looking at. More than that, as if looking itself was an antidote, a way to defeat loneliness’ strange, estranging spell.”
Hopper’s work shows us that one way to make friends with loneliness is to create work that explores and examines it. This not only offers a way to connect with those enduring the same experience but also turns isolation into creative material and robs it of some of its sting.
Loneliness as inspiration
A second figure Laing considers is Andy Warhol (1928–1987). Born Andrew Warhola, the artist has become an icon, his work widely known, someone whose fame renders him hard to relate to. When she began exploring his body of work, Laing found that “one of the interesting things about his work, once you stop to look, is the way the real, vulnerable human self remains stubbornly visible, exerting its own submerged pressure, its own mute appeal to the viewer.”
In particular, much of Warhol’s work pertains to the loneliness he felt throughout his life, no matter how surrounded he was by glittering friends and admirers.
Throughout Warhol’s oeuvre, we see his efforts to turn his own sense of being on the outside into art. A persistent theme in his work was speech. He made thousands of tapes of conversations, often using them as the basis for other works of art. For instance, Warhol’s book, a, A Novel, consists of transcribed tapes from between 1965 and 1967. The tape recorder was such an important part of his life, both a way of connecting with people and keeping them at a distance, that he referred to it as his wife. By listening to others and documenting the oddities of their speech, Warhol coped with feeling he couldn’t be heard. Laing writes, “he retained a typically perverse fondness for language errors. He was fascinated by empty or deformed language, by chatter and trash, by glitches and botches in conversation.” In his work, all speech mattered regardless of its content.
Warhol himself often struggled with speech, mumbling in interviews and being embarrassed by his heavy Pittsburgh accent, which rendered him easily misunderstood in school. Speech was just one factor that left him isolated at times. At age seven, Warhol was confined to his bed by illness for several months. He withdrew from his peers, focusing on making art with his mother, and never quite integrated into school again. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 1949, Warhol moved to New York and sought his footing in the art world. Despite his rapid rise to success and fame, he remained held back by an unshakeable belief in his own inferiority and exclusion from existing social circles.
Becoming a machine also meant having relationships with machines, using physical devices as a way of filling the uncomfortable, sometimes unbearable space between self and world. Warhol could not have achieved his blankness, his enviable detachment, without the use of these charismatic substitutes for intimacy and love.
Later in the book, Laing visits the Warhol museum to see his Time Capsules, 610 cardboard boxes filled with objects collected over the course of thirteen years: “postcards, letters, newspapers, magazines, photographs, invoices, slices of pizza, a piece of chocolate cake, even a mummified human foot.” He added objects until each box was full, then transferred them to a storage unit. Some objects have obvious value, while others seem like trash. There is no particular discernable order to the collection, yet Laing saw in the Time Capsules much the same impulse reflected in Warhol’s tape recordings:
What were the Capsules, really? Trash cans, coffins, vitrines, safes; ways of keeping the loved together, ways of never having to admit to loss or feel the pain of loneliness . . . What is left after the essence has departed? Rind and skin, things you want to throw away but can’t.
The loneliness Warhol felt when he created works like the Time Capsules was more a psychological one than a practical one. He was no longer alone, but his early experiences of feeling like an outsider, and the things he felt set him apart from others, like his speech, marred his ability to connect. Loneliness, for Warhol, was perhaps more a part of his personality than something he could overcome through relationships. Even so, he was able to turn it into fodder for the groundbreaking art we remember him for. Warhol’s art communicated what he struggled to say outright. It was also a way of him listening to and seeing other people—by photographing friends, taping them sleeping, or recording their conversations—when he perhaps felt he couldn’t be heard or seen.
Where creativity takes us
Towards the end of the book, Laing writes:
There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who have never met and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.
When we face loneliness in our lives, it is not always possible or even appropriate to deal with it by rushing to fill our lives with people. Sometimes we do not have that option; sometimes we’re not in the right space to connect deeply; sometimes we first just need to work through that feeling. One way we can embrace our loneliness is by turning to the art of others who have inhabited that same lonely city, drawing solace and inspiration from their creations. We can use that as inspiration in our own creative pursuits which can help us work through difficult, and lonely, times.
https://fs.blog/being-alone/
***
At a moment in time when many people are facing unprecedented amounts of time alone, it’s a good idea for us to pause and consider what it takes to turn difficult loneliness into enriching solitude. We are social creatures, and a sustained lack of satisfying relationships carries heavy costs for our mental and physical health. But when we are forced to spend more time alone than we might wish, there are ways we can compensate and find a fruitful sense of connection and fulfillment. One way to achieve this is by using our loneliness as a springboard for creativity.
“Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed but simply that one is alive.”
— Olivia Laing
Loneliness as connection
One way people have always coped with loneliness is through creativity. By transmuting their experience into something beautiful, isolated individuals throughout history have managed to substitute the sense of community they might have otherwise found in relationships with their creative outputs.
In The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing tells the stories of a number of artists who led isolated lives and found meaning in their work even if their relationships couldn’t fulfill them. While she focuses specifically on visual artists in New York over the last seventy years, their methods of using their loneliness and transmitting it into their art carry wide resonance. These particular artists tapped into sentiments many of us will experience at least once in our lives. They found beauty in loneliness and showed it to be something worth considering, not just something to run from.
The artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is known for his paintings of American cityscapes inhabited by closed-off figures who seem to embody a vision of modern loneliness. Laing found herself drawn to his signature images of uneasy individuals in sparse surroundings, often separated from the viewer by a window or some other barrier.
Why, then, do we persist in ascribing loneliness to his work? The obvious answer is that his paintings tend to be populated by people alone, or in uneasy, uncommunicative groupings of twos and threes, fastened into poses that seem indicative of distress. But there’s something else too; something about the way he contrives his city streets . . . This viewpoint is often described as voyeuristic, but what Hopper’s urban scenes also replicate is one of the central experiences of being lonely: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with a sense of near unbearable exposure.
While Hopper intermittently denied that his paintings were about loneliness, he certainly experienced the sense of being walled off in a city. In 1910 he moved to Manhattan, after a few years spent mostly in Europe, and found himself struggling to get by. Not only were his paintings not selling, he also felt alienated by the city. Hopper worked on commissions and had few close relationships. Only in his forties did he marry, well past the window of acceptability for the time. Laing writes of his early time in New York:
This sense of separation, of being alone in a big city, soon began to surface in his art . . . He was determined to articulate the day-to-day experience of inhabiting the modern, electric city of New York. Working first with etchings and then in paint, Hopper began to produce a distinctive body of images that captured the cramped, sometimes alluring experience of urban living.
Hopper roamed the city at night, sketching scenes that caught his eye. This perspective meant that the viewer of his paintings finds themselves most often in the position of an observer detached from the scene in front of them. If loneliness can feel like being separated from the world, the windows Hopper painted are perhaps a physical manifestation of this.
By Laing’s description, Hopper transformed the isolation he may have experienced by depicting the experience of loneliness as a place in itself, inhabited by the many people sharing it despite their differences. She elaborates and states, “They aren’t sentimental, his pictures, but there is an extraordinary attentiveness to them. As if what he saw was as interesting as he kept insisting he needed it to be: worth the labor, the miserable effort of setting it down. As if loneliness was something worth looking at. More than that, as if looking itself was an antidote, a way to defeat loneliness’ strange, estranging spell.”
Hopper’s work shows us that one way to make friends with loneliness is to create work that explores and examines it. This not only offers a way to connect with those enduring the same experience but also turns isolation into creative material and robs it of some of its sting.
Loneliness as inspiration
A second figure Laing considers is Andy Warhol (1928–1987). Born Andrew Warhola, the artist has become an icon, his work widely known, someone whose fame renders him hard to relate to. When she began exploring his body of work, Laing found that “one of the interesting things about his work, once you stop to look, is the way the real, vulnerable human self remains stubbornly visible, exerting its own submerged pressure, its own mute appeal to the viewer.”
In particular, much of Warhol’s work pertains to the loneliness he felt throughout his life, no matter how surrounded he was by glittering friends and admirers.
Throughout Warhol’s oeuvre, we see his efforts to turn his own sense of being on the outside into art. A persistent theme in his work was speech. He made thousands of tapes of conversations, often using them as the basis for other works of art. For instance, Warhol’s book, a, A Novel, consists of transcribed tapes from between 1965 and 1967. The tape recorder was such an important part of his life, both a way of connecting with people and keeping them at a distance, that he referred to it as his wife. By listening to others and documenting the oddities of their speech, Warhol coped with feeling he couldn’t be heard. Laing writes, “he retained a typically perverse fondness for language errors. He was fascinated by empty or deformed language, by chatter and trash, by glitches and botches in conversation.” In his work, all speech mattered regardless of its content.
Warhol himself often struggled with speech, mumbling in interviews and being embarrassed by his heavy Pittsburgh accent, which rendered him easily misunderstood in school. Speech was just one factor that left him isolated at times. At age seven, Warhol was confined to his bed by illness for several months. He withdrew from his peers, focusing on making art with his mother, and never quite integrated into school again. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 1949, Warhol moved to New York and sought his footing in the art world. Despite his rapid rise to success and fame, he remained held back by an unshakeable belief in his own inferiority and exclusion from existing social circles.
Becoming a machine also meant having relationships with machines, using physical devices as a way of filling the uncomfortable, sometimes unbearable space between self and world. Warhol could not have achieved his blankness, his enviable detachment, without the use of these charismatic substitutes for intimacy and love.
Later in the book, Laing visits the Warhol museum to see his Time Capsules, 610 cardboard boxes filled with objects collected over the course of thirteen years: “postcards, letters, newspapers, magazines, photographs, invoices, slices of pizza, a piece of chocolate cake, even a mummified human foot.” He added objects until each box was full, then transferred them to a storage unit. Some objects have obvious value, while others seem like trash. There is no particular discernable order to the collection, yet Laing saw in the Time Capsules much the same impulse reflected in Warhol’s tape recordings:
What were the Capsules, really? Trash cans, coffins, vitrines, safes; ways of keeping the loved together, ways of never having to admit to loss or feel the pain of loneliness . . . What is left after the essence has departed? Rind and skin, things you want to throw away but can’t.
The loneliness Warhol felt when he created works like the Time Capsules was more a psychological one than a practical one. He was no longer alone, but his early experiences of feeling like an outsider, and the things he felt set him apart from others, like his speech, marred his ability to connect. Loneliness, for Warhol, was perhaps more a part of his personality than something he could overcome through relationships. Even so, he was able to turn it into fodder for the groundbreaking art we remember him for. Warhol’s art communicated what he struggled to say outright. It was also a way of him listening to and seeing other people—by photographing friends, taping them sleeping, or recording their conversations—when he perhaps felt he couldn’t be heard or seen.
Where creativity takes us
Towards the end of the book, Laing writes:
There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who have never met and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.
When we face loneliness in our lives, it is not always possible or even appropriate to deal with it by rushing to fill our lives with people. Sometimes we do not have that option; sometimes we’re not in the right space to connect deeply; sometimes we first just need to work through that feeling. One way we can embrace our loneliness is by turning to the art of others who have inhabited that same lonely city, drawing solace and inspiration from their creations. We can use that as inspiration in our own creative pursuits which can help us work through difficult, and lonely, times.
https://fs.blog/being-alone/
This Is Your Brain on Silence
Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.
One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and since 2008, the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.
Over drinks at the Sea Horse, the experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone jokingly suggested that nudity could be named a national theme—it would emphasize the honesty of Finns. Someone else, less jokingly, proposed that perhaps quiet wasn’t such a bad thing. That got them thinking.
A few months later, the delegation issued a slick “Country Brand Report.” It highlighted a host of marketable themes, including Finland’s renowned educational system and school of functional design. One key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or wild mushrooms. “In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence.”
People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.
In 2011, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption “Silence, Please.” An international “country branding” consultant, Simon Anholt, proposed the playful tagline “No talking, but action.” And a Finnish watch company, Rönkkö, launched its own new slogan: “Handmade in Finnish silence.”
“We decided, instead of saying that it’s really empty and really quiet and nobody is talking about anything here, let’s embrace it and make it a good thing,” explains Eva Kiviranta, who manages social media for VisitFinland.com.
In a loud world, silence sells. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.
Silence is a peculiar starting point for a marketing campaign. After all, you can’t weigh, record, or export it. You can’t eat it, collect it, or give it away. The Finland campaign raises the question of just what the tangible effects of silence really are. Science has begun to pipe up on the subject. In recent years researchers have highlighted the peculiar power of silence to calm our bodies, turn up the volume on our inner thoughts, and attune our connection to the world. Their findings begin where we might expect: with noise.
The word “noise” comes from a Latin root meaning either queasiness or pain. According to the historian Hillel Schwartz, there’s even a Mesopotamian legend in which the gods grow so angry at the clamor of earthly humans that they go on a killing spree. (City-dwellers with loud neighbors may empathize, though hopefully not too closely.)
Dislike of noise has produced some of history’s most eager advocates of silence, as Schwartz explains in his book Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. In 1859, the British nurse and social reformer Florence Nightingale wrote, “Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on sick or well.” Every careless clatter or banal bit of banter, Nightingale argued, can be a source of alarm, distress, and loss of sleep for recovering patients. She even quoted a lecture that identified “sudden noises” as a cause of death among sick children.
THE QUIET SELL: Two wooden armchairs stand on a lake shore in Finland, where marketers have rebranded the Nordic country with a slogan, “Silence, Please.”veer.com
Surprisingly, recent research supports some of Nightingale’s zealous claims. In the mid 20th century, epidemiologists discovered correlations between high blood pressure and chronic noise sources like highways and airports. Later research seemed to link noise to increased rates of sleep loss, heart disease, and tinnitus. (It’s this line of research that hatched the 1960s-era notion of “noise pollution,” a name that implicitly refashions transitory noises as toxic and long-lasting.)
Studies of human physiology help explain how an invisible phenomenon can have such a pronounced physical effect. Sound waves vibrate the bones of the ear, which transmit movement to the snail-shaped cochlea. The cochlea converts physical vibrations into electrical signals that the brain receives. The body reacts immediately and powerfully to these signals, even in the middle of deep sleep. Neurophysiological research suggests that noises first activate the amygdalae, clusters of neurons located in the temporal lobes of the brain, associated with memory formation and emotion. The activation prompts an immediate release of stress hormones like cortisol. People who live in consistently loud environments often experience chronically elevated levels of stress hormones.
Just as the whooshing of a hundred individual cars accumulates into an irritating wall of background noise, the physical effects of noise add up. In 2011, the World Health Organization tried to quantify its health burden in Europe. It concluded that the 340 million residents of western Europe—roughly the same population as that of the United States—annually lost a million years of healthy life because of noise. It even argued that 3,000 heart disease deaths were, at their root, the result of excessive noise.
So we like silence for what it doesn’t do—it doesn’t wake, annoy, or kill us—but what does it do? When Florence Nightingale attacked noise as a “cruel absence of care,” she also insisted on the converse: Quiet is a part of care, as essential for patients as medication or sanitation. It’s a strange notion, but one that researchers have begun to bear out as true.
Two-minute silent pauses proved far more relaxing than either “relaxing” music or a longer silence played before the experiment started.
Silence first began to appear in scientific research as a control or baseline, against which scientists compare the effects of noise or music. Researchers have mainly studied it by accident, as physician Luciano Bernardi did in a 2006 study of the physiological effects of music. “We didn’t think about the effect of silence,” he says. “That was not meant to be studied specifically.”
He was in for a quiet surprise. Bernardi observed physiological metrics for two dozen test subjects while they listened to six musical tracks. He found that the impacts of music could be read directly in the bloodstream, via changes in blood pressure, carbon dioxide, and circulation in the brain. (Bernardi and his son are both amateur musicians, and they wanted to explore a shared interest.) “During almost all sorts of music, there was a physiological change compatible with a condition of arousal,” he explains.
This effect made sense, given that active listening requires alertness and attention. But the more striking finding appeared between musical tracks. Bernardi and his colleagues discovered that randomly inserted stretches of silence also had a drastic effect, but in the opposite direction. In fact, two-minute silent pauses proved far more relaxing than either “relaxing” music or a longer silence played before the experiment started.
The blank pauses that Bernardi considered irrelevant, in other words, became the most interesting object of study. Silence seemed to be heightened by contrasts, maybe because it gave test subjects a release from careful attention. “Perhaps the arousal is something that concentrates the mind in one direction, so that when there is nothing more arousing, then you have deeper relaxation,” he says.
In 2006, Bernardi’s paper on the physiological effects of silence was the most-downloaded research in the journal Heart. One of his key findings—that silence is heightened by contrasts—is reinforced by neurological research. In 2010, Michael Wehr, who studies sensory processing in the brain at the University of Oregon, observed the brains of mice during short bursts of sound. The onset of a sound prompts a specialized network of neurons in the auditory cortex to light up. But when sounds continue in a relatively constant manner, the neurons largely stop reacting. “What the neurons really do is signal whenever there’s a change,” Wehr says.
The sudden onset of silence is a type of change too, and this fact led Wehr to a surprise. Before his 2010 study, scientists knew that the brain reacts to the start of silences. (This ability helps us react to dangers, for example, or distinguish words in a sentence.) But Wehr’s research extended those findings by showing that, remarkably, the auditory cortex has a separate network of neurons that fire when silence begins. “When a sound suddenly stops, that’s an event just as surely as when a sound starts.”
Even though we usually think of silences as a lack of input, our brains are structured to recognize them, whenever they represent a sharp break from sounds. So the question is what happens after that moment—when silence continues, and the auditory cortex settles into a state of relative inactivity.
One of the researchers who’s examined this question is a Duke University regenerative biologist, Imke Kirste. Like Bernardi, Kirste wasn’t trying to study silence at all. In 2013, she was examining the effects of sounds in the brains of adult mice. Her experiment exposed four groups of mice to various auditory stimuli: music, baby mouse calls, white noise, and silence. She expected that baby mouse calls, as a form of communication, might prompt the development of new brain cells. Like Bernardi, she thought of silence as a control that wouldn’t produce an effect.
As it turned out, even though all the sounds had short-term neurological effects, not one of them had a lasting impact. Yet to her great surprise, Kirste found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory, involving the senses. This was deeply puzzling: The total absence of input was having a more pronounced effect than any sort of input tested.
Here’s how Kirste made sense of the results. She knew that “environmental enrichment,” like the introduction of toys or fellow mice, encouraged the development of neurons because they challenged the brains of mice. Perhaps the total absence of sound may have been so artificial, she reasoned—so alarming, even—that it prompted a higher level of sensitivity or alertness in the mice. Neurogenesis could be an adaptive response to uncanny quiet.
The growth of new cells in the brain doesn’t always have health benefits. But in this case, Kirste says that the cells seemed to become functioning neurons. “We saw that silence is really helping the new generated cells to differentiate into neurons, and integrate into the system.”
While Kirste emphasizes that her findings are preliminary, she wonders if this effect could have unexpected applications. Conditions like dementia and depression have been associated with decreasing rates of neurogenesis in the hippocampus. If a link between silence and neurogenesis could be established in humans, she says, perhaps neurologists could find a therapeutic use for silence.
To her great surprise, she found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus region of the brain.
While it’s clear that external silence can have tangible benefits, scientists are discovering that under the hoods of our skulls “there isn’t really such a thing as silence,” says Robert Zatorre, an expert on the neurology of sound. “In the absence of sound, the brain often tends to produce internal representations of sound.”
Imagine, for example, you’re listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” when the radio abruptly cuts out. Neurologists have found that if you know the song well, your brain’s auditory cortex remains active, as if the music is still playing. “What you’re ‘hearing’ is not being generated by the outside world,” says David Kraemer, who’s conducted these types of experiments in his Dartmouth College laboratory. “You’re retrieving a memory.” Sounds aren’t always responsible for sensations—sometimes our subjective sensations are responsible for the illusion of sound.
This is a reminder of the brain’s imaginative power: On the blank sensory slate of silence, the mind can conduct its own symphonies. But it’s also a reminder that even in the absence of a sensory input like sound, the brain remains active and dynamic.
In 1997, a team of neuroscientists at Washington University was collecting brain scan data from test subjects during various mental tasks, like arithmetic and word games. One of the scientists, Gordon Shulman, noticed that although intense cognition caused spikes in some parts of the brain, as you’d expect, it was also causing declines in the activity of other parts of the brain. There seemed to be a type of background brain activity that was most visible, paradoxically, when the test subject was in a quiet room, doing absolutely nothing.
The team’s lead scientist was Marcus Raichle, and he knew there were good reasons to look closer at the data. For decades, scientists had known that the brain’s “background” activity consumed the lion’s share of its energy. Difficult tasks like pattern recognition or arithmetic, in fact, only increased the brain’s energy consumption by a few percent. This suggested that by ignoring the background activity, neurologists might be overlooking something crucial. “When you do that,” Raichle explains, “most of the brain’s activities end up on the cutting room floor.”
In 2001, Raichle and his colleagues published a seminal paper that defined a “default mode” of brain function—situated in the prefrontal cortex, active in cognitive actions—implying a “resting” brain is perpetually active, gathering and evaluating information. Focused attention, in fact, curtails this scanning activity. The default mode, Raichle and company argued, has “rather obvious evolutionary significance.” Detecting predators, for example, should happen automatically, and not require additional intention and energy.
Follow-up research has shown the default mode is also enlisted in self-reflection. In 2013, in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Joseph Moran and colleagues wrote the brain’s default mode network “is observed most closely during the psychological task of reflecting on one’s personalities and characteristics (self-reflection), rather than during self-recognition, thinking of the self-concept, or thinking about self-esteem, for example.” During this time when the brain rests quietly, wrote Moran and colleagues, our brains integrate external and internal information into “a conscious workspace.”
Freedom from noise and goal-directed tasks, it appears, unites the quiet without and within, allowing our conscious workspace to do its thing, to weave ourselves into the world, to discover where we fit in. That’s the power of silence.
Noora Vikman, an ethnomusicologist, and a consultant on silence for Finland’s marketers, knows that power well. She lives in the eastern part of Finland, an area blanketed with quiet lakes and forests. In a remote and quiet place, Vikman says, she discovers thoughts and feelings that aren’t audible in her busy daily life. “If you want to know yourself you have to be with yourself, and discuss with yourself, be able to talk with yourself.”
“Silence, Please” has proven to be the most popular theme in Finland’s rebranding, and one of the most popular pages on VisitFinland.com. Maybe silence sells because, so often, we treat it as a tangible thing—something easily broken, like porcelain or crystal, and something delicate and valuable. Vikman remembers a time when she experienced the rarity of nearly complete silence. Standing in the Finnish wilderness, she strained her ears to pick out the faintest sounds of animals or wind. “It’s strange,” she says, “the way you change. You have all the power—you can break the silence with even with the smallest sounds. And then you don’t want to do it. You try to be as quiet as you can be.”
Daniel A. Gross is a freelance journalist and public radio producer who writes about history and science.
https://nautil.us/this-is-your-brain-on ... otmail.com
We Are Not Alone
Ghosts are, of course, a silly thing to believe in (Athenodorus’ ghost story notwithstanding https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ6kiJ71IZY ). Yet the Stoics would not have scoffed at Eleanor Roosevelt’s feeling of not being alone in the Lincoln bedroom. As the New York Times would write many years ago in an editorial about her claim, “The White House is built of memories…It will remain a haunted house as long as it stands, but only in the benign sense that unseen presences may still be watching the destiny of the Republic…What American, passing by that great pillared residence, in time of stress, could fail to feel reassured to sense the shadowy figure of Lincoln, just as Mrs. Roosevelt describes him, gazing thoughtfully from a window?”
And so the same feeling goes walking past the old stoa poikile. Or the Colosseum. Or picking up a yellowed and crumbling edition of Meditations. You feel not just the presence of the Stoics themselves…but all the people who followed since. The parade of people, as Marcus Aurelius himself wrote, doing what human beings have always done–people just like you, people with the same vices and virtues as you, teaching you, advising you, cautioning you with their example.
Whether spirits exist or not, none of us are alone. Lincoln gazes at us thoughtfully. Seneca keeps a light on for us at night, beckoning us to sit down and reflect on our day. Cato’s statue–or lack thereof, as we have discussed–stands up as an example to follow. The private thoughts and admonitions of Marcus are there to reassure us, guiding us toward our own destiny.
This is not a scary thing. It’s not a haunting thing. It is, as we talked about at Daily Dad (which you can sign up for here), the role that ancestors are supposed to play. They inspire us. They protect us. They reassure us. They give us company.
We are not alone, and never will be. Remember that. Act accordingly.
https://dailystoic.com/we-are-not-alone/
And so the same feeling goes walking past the old stoa poikile. Or the Colosseum. Or picking up a yellowed and crumbling edition of Meditations. You feel not just the presence of the Stoics themselves…but all the people who followed since. The parade of people, as Marcus Aurelius himself wrote, doing what human beings have always done–people just like you, people with the same vices and virtues as you, teaching you, advising you, cautioning you with their example.
Whether spirits exist or not, none of us are alone. Lincoln gazes at us thoughtfully. Seneca keeps a light on for us at night, beckoning us to sit down and reflect on our day. Cato’s statue–or lack thereof, as we have discussed–stands up as an example to follow. The private thoughts and admonitions of Marcus are there to reassure us, guiding us toward our own destiny.
This is not a scary thing. It’s not a haunting thing. It is, as we talked about at Daily Dad (which you can sign up for here), the role that ancestors are supposed to play. They inspire us. They protect us. They reassure us. They give us company.
We are not alone, and never will be. Remember that. Act accordingly.
https://dailystoic.com/we-are-not-alone/
Re: Loneliness: Why is it inseperable from human existence?
“A man once asked Rumi, "Why is it you talk so much about silence?" His answer: "The radiant one inside me has never said a word.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems
“Solitude is a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems
“Solitude is a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.”
― Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems
The surprising joy of being alone
I’m a person who craves regular alone time. At home, I take quick walks. At work, I sometimes disappear into the office supply closet, which is always deserted. I find the orderly stacks of notebooks soothing.
When I can’t grab these moments, I tend to get twitchy. Robert Coplan, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, describes this as “aloneliness”: the negative feeling that crops up when people get less solitude than they need.
And, most of us do require a balance of solo and social time, said Thuy-vy Nguyen, a social psychologist who runs the Solitude Lab at Durham University in Britain and is an author of the book “Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone.” Her research has found that spending time alone has physical and emotional benefits, such as stress reduction and mood regulation, and can lead to increased creativity and productivity.
With that in mind, I asked experts how to recognize when you need more solitude, and how to incorporate it into your life.
Take your “solitude pulse.”
Solitude is different from loneliness, said Virginia Thomas, an assistant professor of psychology at Middlebury College. The latter is the feeling that we’re not connected to others as much as we would like, which produces emotional distress. On the other hand, intentionally seeking out some time to spend alone, she said, is “almost always experienced positively.”
There’s no standard amount of time that people should be alone, Dr. Thomas said, so she recommends checking in with yourself and tracking your moods. Do you find yourself feeling irritable or depleted, and could you benefit from stepping away for a bit?
Then, she said, ask yourself: What nourishes and rejuvenates me when I’m alone? “For some people, it can be a learning curve to figure that out,” she said. Maybe it’s swimming, disappearing into the garage to do woodworking or gardening, she said.
No matter what you choose, set your phone aside, Dr. Thomas said. Scrolling through the headlines or social media, she said, “is not technically ‘in solitude,’ as we would describe it psychologically.”
It’s not you, it’s me.
If you have a partner, make it clear that taking alone time is not about escaping your significant other, Dr. Coplan suggested. “You can say ‘This has literally nothing to do with you — I’m doing this because it’s going to make me a better person, and I’m going to be easier to be around,’” he said.
If you routinely yearn for time by yourself, but don’t say anything, your relationship might suffer. Research on “aloneliness” in couples found that anger builds when people don’t take the alone time they crave.
But if you know a person who is OK with silence, you can try what Dr. Nguyen’s book calls “companionate solitude,” where you do something alone together.
When Dr. Coplan was young, he would go fishing with his father on a quiet lake. “We would sit there for hours at a time and wouldn’t say a word to each other,” he recalled. “It was like I was alone, but he was there, and that was comforting.”
You don’t have to leave civilization.
You can find moments of solitude at home, Dr. Nguyen said. She gets up early, a half-hour before her family, to have coffee.
Now I do the same. In my backyard, the hummingbirds have made their spring return to my feeders. They have breakfast at dawn, so lately I’ve been taking my coffee outside to watch them.
If you don’t like being completely alone, you can also try “public solitude,” somewhere like a park or coffee shop, said Dr. Nguyen. I just found out that a library near me has a “silent book club,” in which members gather to chat about books for a bit. Then they retreat to different corners to read for an hour. That’s my kind of book club.
If you’re at work, Dr. Coplan suggests what he calls micro-moments of solitude, like taking a quick lunch break by yourself.
Everyone should do solitude in the way that works best for them, he added. I told him that I occasionally take a micro-moment to pop out to the drugstore to inspect various candies and nail polish colors. My teen thinks that’s weird.
“Well, I happen to love that,” Dr. Coplan said.
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