How To Be Alone

When we broach the concept of obsolescence, what first comes to mind are fast-disappearing objects, faded relics of another age: mix tapes and vinyl records, quill pens and love letters, penny-farthings and Polaroid cameras. Obsolete objects, of course, never die: they’re turfed out of our houses as trash, only to turn up in antique stores, priced well and truly out of reach.

What we rarely consider is how many of our behaviours and ideas are rapidly becoming obsoleted.

When I was younger, family holidays were an exercise in misdirection. Freeway turnoffs were invariably missed, and my mother would use my father’s inability to read maps to make a point about his side’s patently inferior genetic makeup. I once got lost in a Westfield shopping town, another time in the stairwell of a sprawling London hotel. “You’ve got your father’s genes,” my mother would say, throwing me a look of utter disappointment. Even though I wasn’t training to become a cartographer or anything, it still stung.

It’s impossible to get lost now. Upon visiting a new city, we fire up our phones and hook straight into Google Maps. A friend told me she felt her dependence on technology had ruined her travel experience. Getting lost, she considered, was the entire point of travelling. Now she couldn’t get lost anywhere, no matter how hard she tried. (You say you could always turn off your phone, but who has the willpower?).

I think we’ve also lost the ability to be alone. Ten years ago, travel offered that opportunity – you’d nestle a chunky aeroplane novel at the top of your suitcase, and off you’d head: destination-bound, unreachable, incommunicado. “See you in a month,” you’d say. “I’ll send a postcard.” Today, the entire concept of ‘travel’ is fraught, because, wherever we go, a vuvuzela-buzz of endless chatter follows directly behind. In place of the aeroplane novel, we now have our phone or netbook or iPad – tools that bring endless streams of content along for the journey, everywhere the faintest trace of a WiFi signal becomes available.

It is no longer acceptable to go ‘off the grid’ for a fortnight. To not log into Facebook for a week comes across as intentionally antisocial: equivalent to flipping the bird at five hundred of your closest friends. When I didn’t check my personal email for just over twenty-four hours, I recently received an irate and expletive-laden message from a colleague, asking why I was intentionally ignoring his important correspondence. SMS messages generally require a response within the half-hour – any less and you’re branded criminally unreliable.

All this social babble is draining. We feel committed to spending more and more time cultivating our online personas, and staying on top of the stream of content produced by those around us. It’s no longer much fun. It feels like an obligation. And it’s made it difficult to step back for some quality one-on-one alone time with our thoughts.

It’s no longer acceptable to say, “I’d like to be alone for a while.” To want to step away from the babble for just a moment now seems vaguely sociopathic. Once it was that the librarian could place finger to pursed lips, hiss “Shh!”, and we’d all fall quiet. Now, when I look around the library’s reading room, half of us are staring at screens, frantically clicking ‘update’.

When was the last time you remember sitting still, and everything falling quiet?