Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living

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We have therapists and counsellors who talk to people about relationships and loneliness - find them here You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. While he doesn't doubt that "you can live a very fulfilled life without a romantic partner; I do and so do others I know", he is also very honest about loneliness. This is something that most of us see as shameful, and we even shy away from others in that state. The acute psychological sense of loneliness during the pandemic encouraged many of us to start talking about loneliness, perhaps for the first time. Schreiber now senses that as we move further from that time, the conversation has quietened. But he notices that, amid the crisis, these friends instinctively prioritise their family “nesting” zones, leaving him feeling bereft. He begins to wonder: is a life like his sustainable, especially after a certain age? Has he been fooling himself? What does it really mean to live alone? Seeking perspectives on these questions, he roves from the TV series Friends to Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, from Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s pioneering 1959 psychological study Loneliness to Hannah Arendt’s philosophical thoughts on friendship. Donnish history teacher Alif is forever drawn to the past, but as a Muslim in Modi’s India, even he is finding it hard to ignore an increasingly intolerant present. When a Hindu student goads him about his faith on a school trip to a Mughal monument, Alif impulsively reaches out to twist the boy’s ear, setting in motion a calamitous sequence of events. With violence spreading across Delhi, Anjum Hasan deploys pathos and Urdu poetry – itself a product of India’s multifaith heritage – to illuminate his heartbreak. It’s a beautiful novel, timely and elegiac. Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living

Also dieses Buch ging sowas von am Thema vorbei, das Buch verdient einen Rant/Aufregerpost. Vermeintlich soll dieses Buch Einsamkeit und alleine sein entstigmatisieren und normalisieren. Ich habe so viele positive Stimmen vorab gelesen, dass ich mir doch einiges erwartet habe. Stattdessen bekommen wir eine absolut selbstbeweihräuchernde Erzählung eines sehr privilegierten Menschen. The fact that this was written by a single gay man of my age gave this book an extra dimension for me. But to say that this book is only relevant to gay men would be a disservice. I think that many people can relate to the thoughts, feelings and experiences shared in this book. Daniel Schreiber is a Berlin-based essayist and biographer of Susan Sontag. These philosophical reflections on solitude and loneliness, coinciding with the first year of the pandemic, reveal his ambivalence about living alone and his frustration that the idea of the couple so defines society that anyone who does not fall in line is considered aberrant.Due out next month, this novel follows an unnamed girl who flees from a colonial settlement in 1600s Virginia to make her way through the forests and rivers of North America. Groff turns the ideological underpinnings of classic Robinsonades deftly on their head. During her fight for survival the girl comes to an understanding of the natural world and her life within it which is a rare testament to the spiritual upsides of loneliness that we can only experience when we are alone. People have always been lonely. They have experienced this feeling always and everywhere, and they have used all their strength to try to evade it. Loneliness is not a modern or even a contemporary phenomenon. No matter what our beliefs are about earlier eras and cultures, no matter what pastoral, religious and social idylls we project onto the past, loneliness is something that has always been recored in philosophy and literature.”

In 1990, 27 percent of Americans surveyed reported having three or fewer close friends. By 2021, it was up to 49 percent. Between 2003 and 2020, the average amount of time spent socially engaged with friends (whatever their quantity or degree of closeness) fell by 20 hours per month; the decline was especially steep for people between ages 15 and 24. The surgeon general did not venture any predictions about how the aging of the population might influence such trends, or vice versa. But news from the frontier between robotics and gerontology suggests that help—of a sort—is on the way. Drawing on his own experiences, philosophical and sociological ideas, Daniel Schreiber explores the tension between the desire for retreat and freedom, and that for closeness, love and community. In doing so, he illuminates the role that friendships play in this way of life. Can they be a response to the loss of meaning in a world in crisis? A profoundly enlightening book on how we want to live. PDF / EPUB File Name: Alone_Reflections_on_Solitary_Living_-_Daniel_Schreiber.pdf, Alone_Reflections_on_Solitary_Living_-_Daniel_Schreiber.epub Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam), UK/USA (Reaktion Books), Italy (ADD Editore), South Korea (Bada Books) Loneliness is bad for us: the US surgeon general has suggested it can cause a person as much damage as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It has increased alarmingly in many societies, especially following the pandemic and its regimes of isolation. Yet there is no shortage online of inspirational quotes about the creative and restorative powers of solitude, ranging from Edward Gibbon’s wry “I was never less alone than when by myself” to the catchy, unattributed “Sometimes you’ve got to disconnect to introspect”. For a more hard-boiled existential take, we have Orson Welles: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”Also, Schreiber, a gay man himself, writes poignantly about queer peoples’ experience of loneliness; as sadly this is all too often a huge, and sometimes devastating aspect of daily life for many queer people. He talks about how, throughout the 20th century, before the very recent liberations in western countries for LGBTQ+ communities, due to most societies oppression of queer people, the shame this caused led many to feel that they did not deserve to be loved, were unloveable. And sadly, how gay/queer shame is still very much a destructive force that affects all areas of the LGBTQ+ community worldwide. But can you really live a good life alone, without a romantic relationship? How sustainable is a model like that? And how do you learn to live with being alone without it hurting, without lying to yourself? These were the questions that I didn’t know the answers to when I started writing my book, Alone. But I knew that I needed to find them. Some of the answers I found in literature – in a wide array of essays and novels, it turned out. This is a small selection. Dieses Buch wurde in meiner Bubble hochgelobt und verehrt. Ich hatte hohe Erwartungen an den Essay von Daniel Schreiber. Allerdings konnte mich das Buch nicht so richtig überzeugen. Zum einen lag das sicherlich an dem teilweise sehr umständlichen Satzbau. Am Ende eines Satzes angekommen, konnte ich mich nicht mehr an seinen Anfang erinnern. Ich versuchte, die Worte aufzusaugen, sehr bewusst zu lesen, weil mich die Thematik persönlich beschäftigt. Mir war klar, dass ich einen Essay und keinen Roman lese. Trotzdem hätte ich mir oft einen Punkt anstelle eines Kommas gewünscht. Dazu kam, dass ich bei manchen Anekdoten die Pointe vermisst habe oder sich mir der Sinn dieser nicht erschloss. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.