Solitude!

August 2nd, 2014| Topic: RaMbLeS | 8

Everyone says they crave a moment of solitude. “Leave me alone,” they beseech.

But a study by researchers from the University of Virginia and Harvard showed, in findings published in Science, that if you do leave them alone, they don’t like it.

One scientist commented:

I was surprised that people find themselves such bad company. It seems that the average person doesn’t seem to be capable of generating a sufficiently interesting train of thought to prevent them from being miserable with themselves.”

No clock. No reading material. No cell phone. And participants got anywhere from 6 to 15 minutes alone. In an undadorned room. To think. No dozing allowed. This alone time was graded as “not enjoyable”—a 5 on a scale of 0 to 9.

Could it have been the lab environment? So the researchers let people do the same thing at home. Guess what? The enjoyment was even lower! At least a third cheated, checking their phones or listening to music.

Wow! Then the scientists carried their experiments to a new level. If people found being alone with their thoughts so unpleasant, what lengths might they go to, in order to get away from their aloneness?

They left 55 subjects alone in rooms, with the option of jolting themselves on their ankles by pressing a button.

Said Dr. Timothy Wilson, psychology prof at U of V, and lead author on the study:

I have to tell you, with my other co-authors, there was a lot of debate: ‘Why are we going to do this? No one is going to shock themselves.’”

They were stunned (pun intended) by the results. Two-thirds of the men and a third of the women (the smarter gender, no doubt) chose to shock themselves. One individual (guess which gender) pressed the button 190 times!

People would rather shock themselves than freely cogitate on whatever they wanted.

Regardless of age, education, income, gender, gadget-addiction, social-media capabilities, folks (and they were recruited from a church and a farmer’s market!) hated being alone. No fun. Quite boring. Horrible.

I wonder if there’s a bigger lesson here. Everyone’s bemoaning the era of smartphones and attention-grabbing devices and facebook and stuff. Hey, maybe the problem isn’t these electronic things. Maybe—just, maybe—the problem is … us! We’ve forgotten what solitude and reflection mean.

The article in Science concluded:

Most people do not enjoy ‘just thinking’ and clearly prefer having something else to do.”

Solitude and silence. We’ve forgotten these spiritual disciplines. Choosing to be alone and being freed—at least for a while—from the normal course of day-to-day interactions locking us into patterns of thought, word, and deed that belong to a world set against God. Closing off our souls to sounds—the incessant noise, music, words, the whirring, buzzing, murmuring, chattering, and whining of the multiple contraptions that supposedly make life easier. All of this is shocking to a world because it feels like nothing is happening. Hey, what could be worse than that!

The truth is: God works even when things are silent, dark, and lonely.

“Cease striving and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
Psalm 46:10

Christ practiced solitude often.

After He had sent the crowds away,
He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray;
and when it was evening, He was there alone.
Matthew 14:23

If he needed solitude and silence—the Second Person of the Trinity!—how much more you and I?

Yup, time to reflect, pray, meditate!