The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

98 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 3 According to Deresiewicz, Modernism “decoupled this dialectic” (2) and the great thinkers and poets of that time distrusted strong friends. People were now a threat to one’s self, and solitude was the way to maintain your selfhood and identity. The greatest fear was “submersion by the mass” (3), and the cultural heroes were those who retained their selfhood against the mob. Then, according to Deresiewicz, our views on solitude morphed. We grew increasingly urbanized, living farther and farther apart, in more space and isolation from each other. The streets became more dangerous, so children no longer played together, but rather stayed inside and watched television. So, the internet came in as a needed tool to bring everyone closer together socially and not be so lost in space. But with the rise of the internet, people have changed their focus to making themselves “miniature celebrities” (3) according to Deresiewicz. Now our goal is to be visible and our fear is “isolation from the herd”(3). Thus according to Deresiewicz, we are replacing both sides of the Romantic Dialectic with lesser goals. We don’t have good friendships because social media prevents real connection. We also have become afraid of being alone, of solitude. We feel lonely if we are not visible and connected with people. Thus we don’t appreciate solitude, and our friendships are shallow. Deresiewicz likens my generation’s fear of being alone to his generation’s development of the attribute of boredom. According to him, the television taught people that being idle was wrong, and that you always had to be doing something. Now, if you were sitting around with nothing to do, you were bored and thus needed to be watching television. And so the television taught everyone to be terrified of being idle. Similarly, with the “increased connectivity” that social media has allowed us, we are now afraid of loneliness, which the author pointed out, is not absence of people but rather “a grief over that absence” (4). Our culture has given us a false picture of what connectivity is like and thus we are more lonely than we need to be because our idea of loneliness is based on a false ideal anyways. Because we are unable to be in solitude we have lost the “propensity for introspection”(5) according to Deresiewicz. And related, we have lost the ability for “sustained reading”(5). This is because when we read, we read in solitude, interacting with our soul,