The Psychology of Solitude: Being Alone Can Maximize Productivity, with Scott Barry Kaufman

A lot of people fear solitude, yet the great psychiatrist Winnicott said that the capacity for solitude is one of the greatest markers of psychological health. So, if you can develop your capacity for solitude, that means that you are okay being alone with yourself.

As Cal Newport, who wrote the book Deep Work, notes, some of the most meaningful things we do in our life add unique value to the world that are not replicable, as he puts it. They are operated under the conditions that are completely distraction-free, where we try to eliminate as much as possible that ringing, you know, from our phone that we have a new text or we have a new email or looking on Facebook and checking the likes.

Disconnecting from the outside world as much as possible and getting in a situation where we’re in complete solitude allows us to really get completely immersed and follow through to completion something in a very deep way. He argues that this is very conducive to a good life as well as a meaningful life.

It doesn’t mean that because you’ve developed your capacity for solitude, you’re a misanthrope, is what I want to say. It doesn’t mean that. That’s a false dichotomy. You can develop your capacity fully for optimal deep work, but you can also develop your capacity to collaborate with others so that once you come up with ideas or generate things that are deep, you can then share and get feedback and then go back.

It’s a constant process, a constant cyclical process where you go back and forth between getting feedback from the world and seeing what your sense of audience is. It’s very important to know what your sense of audience is and to get a sense of your audience when you’re producing a creative work. But it’s also very important to have moments where you go into solitude and embrace the beauty of silence.