Metadata
- Author: Elizabeth Weingarten
- Full Title:: The Art of Balancing Solitude and Connection
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://behavioralscientist.org/the-art-of-balancing-solitude-and-connection/
- Read date:: 2025-09-04
Highlights
Rainer Maria Rilke recounted one of our most enduring human tensions. “In addition to my voice which points beyond me, there is still the sound of that small longing which originates in my solitude and which I have not entirely mastered,” he writes. “It is a whistling-woeful tone that blows through a crack in this leaky solitude—it calls out, alas, and summons others to me!” (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-05
As an introvert and a writer, I crave time to be alone with my thoughts, to better understand what I’m thinking and feeling. (View Highlight)
But too much alone time makes me feel like I’m losing part of myself, too—the part of me that comes alive when I’m with other people. (View Highlight)
Solitude, Merolla points out, gives us a kind of illusion of control that isn’t present in our social relationships, which can be variable and messy. (View Highlight)
How much does our desire to be alone come from a genuine desire to be with ourselves and how much is about avoiding the unknown? (View Highlight)
In a commencement address, the writer Kurt Vonnegut once pointed out that many of the interpersonal conflicts we have in our marriages stem from wanting one person to be an entire community. To paraphrase him: We cannot be “whole societies” to each other. Instead, he advises, “everybody here [should] join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.” (View Highlight)
On loneliness. This is close to what I expect.
“A lot of us have very high expectations for ourselves and other people, which is a really good thing, but that can also raise expectations in a way that is unrealistic,” Merolla told me. That can make us unwilling to engage in a social situation unless we’re confident of meeting those expectations. (View Highlight)
we can ask ourselves questions to “come to terms with the challenges of connection” and the patience required to realize the benefits of relationships. These are questions like: What do I need and want out of my relationships? How can I come to terms with the imperfections of others and my own (View Highlight)
“Sometimes we think people don’t want to connect with us as much as they do, and we can feel like the time for certain relationships has passed (View Highlight)