While I was away on my solitary holiday I felt (and wrote about) a certain unpleasant feeling. One could suppose it is a feeling of loneliness. I tried to write about it when I was there and had it most vividly in my memory. I will try to sum up the entire experience at a later point and drawing references to the original description of the experiment, but I wanted to isolate the description of this feeling, as I find it rather interesting and is the core of why I would not want to repeat the experiment in the same way.
It’s a strange feeling. Being alone in an unfamiliar environment. It’s something I’ve felt a number of times throughout my life. Going back to when I was a kid and going away for camp with school and things of that nature. It’s an unnerving feeling of anxiety that reminds me of the fragility of social contact, i.e. how easy it is to become completely desolate and alone. In this state I am actually scared that I might loose those who matter to me, and I become very sentimental about old friends and think very much of how I act toward them and they toward me.
Breaking off every single habit I have at once is, it turns out, a pain. Waking up in the morning I feel calm, sleeping restores my faith in my own capabilities. It restores my analytical thinking and makes me capable of analyzing the feeling. Trying to come to grips with it. When the dark comes back and the warming refreshing feeling of the sun is gone my reasoning turns into an active state of trying to remove the anxiety. Trying to think of ways to escape the loneliness rather than confronting the feeling and dealing with it. I am then like a drowning man flailing in the water.
As the days passed and I got some routine into the trip I found that the feeling mostly came to me while being in my room. This could very well be because there was nothing to do in the room, nothing to see, nothing new to experience, it was just a completely anonymous room. There was nothing to remind me that I was in a place I actually liked.
The feeling came very strongly with actions that reminded me of home and regular routine. The feeling would go away momentarily when using the computer but thinking about using the computer made in come even stronger. It was as if knowing what I was missing out on back home made it stronger, so not only was it a feeling of loneliness, it was a feeling of home-sickness.
Spending 500 words writing about a (I am sure) very common feeling is quite unlike me (I hope), but I really found it fascinating. And it’s a feeling I really don’t have that much, it’s not something I have ever experienced on previous travels with family and friends. No, this is something different, something fundamental in me, that I know have been there for very long. Something I wish to rid myself of, but doubtful about the possibilities of doing so.
Abstract
With this blog post I intend to argue for an hypothesis about the benefits of extended solitude. I will try to quantify these benefits and propose an experiment to test whether my argued hypothesis is true.
Definition
To be able to efficiently talk about solitude we must first define the word and its meaning. Solitude is obviously about being alone – but more is required than simply being alone in my definition of the word. One must be isolated from regular communication and daily routine. It is permissible to talk and communicate with ones close-standing friends and relatives, but not in a frequent manner and most of all, not at will. Communication with people you know can not be whenever you want, it has to be at some occasion where downtime is experienced. The reason behind this is that you should not be able to simply communicate your thoughts to someone else for a discussion about the subject, your thoughts must stay with yourself and you must you yourself go through the entire chain of thoughts and sort things out for yourself. So in summary; no frequent communication, no regular daily routine and physically separate from anyone you would know.
Hypothesis
I contend that putting yourself in a situation of extended solitude will have a much beneficial effect on your capability to have deep thoughts, relax to a greater extent and do things you would otherwise not deem yourself to have time to do.
Deep thought In every day life, I seem to dismiss a lot of thoughts because they are simply to large to think about. In a recent article from Pete Michaud, it is proposed that thinking large – and thereby deep, complex or otherwise more important and evolving – thoughts is impossible because of the restriction imposed by short-term memory. He suggests that to maintain a train of thought large enough to be important one must write it down. While I fully agree with his statement that large thoughts must be written down for us to have the capacity to process them, I do not agree that only large thoughts are important, this is however besides the point.
I suggest that putting oneself in complete solitude and with no clearly defined task ahead of you, one will have the possibility to explore these deep and large thoughts in a more thorough manner. One should of course bring a notepad to such a period of extended solitude because of the previously mentioned reasons.
The illusion of time While a daily routine is maintained and a person is in a familiar setting, I believe that we observe time differently than if we are in an unfamiliar setting doing things we would not normally do. I don’t think this argument would stand out as odd to anyone, it seems to be a well agreed upon statement. I suggest that the different view on time can in many cases be a much negative effect of daily life. We will think that we have much less time than we in fact do, we will easily make excuses to not to do something because we knows the schedule ahead very well and we are stuck in a mindset where we only see the next thing on the schedule as important. In a familiar setting, we might also easily fall into patterns of laziness – again a quite obvious statement.
In order to break all these “bad habits” – I as most others believe that we must go to an unfamiliar location and do things we would not normally do. While this change of setting and routine will counter many of the negative effects stated above, I believe that to gain true efficiency, as opposed to the statement that “you do not have time”, you must be in a state of previously defined solitude as well as have a loose unscheduled structure on your tasks. The words efficiency and unscheduled structure do not often coincide in the same sentence, for obvious reasons. But I am talking about efficiency within a very narrow set of tasks.
Relax I believe that relaxation comes from being able to do whatever you want. If you are in the act of performing a certain task like reading a book and get that kind of thought you want to explore, relaxation comes from being able to put down the book, pick up the notepad and explore that thought. This is opposed to the way I live my daily life where reading that book is most likely mandatory and I need to get it finished as soon as possible. I maintain that being in a state of solitude will make your brain work differently. Knowing that you are “allowed” to put the book down and explore a thought without any negative effects will make you more likely to have that thought. Another benefit of solitude would in this case be that it is the ultimate form of doing whatever you want. If you are not put in a state of solitude you might have to think about the effects of your behavior on others. This is also why there must be no regular communication in your solitude because it would impose a schedule on your time, making your brain less free to drift and more restrained in thinking about when and where it is.
The experiment
To test the hypothesis that solitude will make you more efficient, have deeper (and productive, not simply pointlessly introspective) thoughts and more relaxed there is nothing to do but try it out. To this end I have constructed an ultimate scenario in which to test this hypothesis, fulfilling all my conditions of solitude as well as facilities to heighten your relaxation as well as your ability be completely unconstrained in every way.
Figure 1: Hurghada
I propose that to have the perfect circumstances to test my hypothesis one should travel to Hurghada, as illustrated in Figure 1. I have specifically chosen the Shedwan Golden Beach hotel as the destination for this test. It lives up to the conditions of the definition of solitude while it has all the facilities to enhance your ability to relax. Facilities such as a heated pool, jacuzzi, several bars, a fitness center and a buffet restaurant. If one can not relax, focus on thinking and get loosely planned things like reading done here, I suggest it can not be done anywhere.
Possible flaws
As any hypothesis, I have simply constructed a model to the best of my experience. Naturally this model is an approximation of reality and as such it might approximate some aspects better than others. The possible flaws I see with this is the instinctively contradictive statement that one can be “absent-minded” and allow oneself to set things aside to explore a thought and still do your main task more efficiently. I contend that this effect can be attained by the fact that all your time is the time you spend doing this task, as opposed to the regular 8-12 hour workday where one will usually waste the rest of the time of the day. There needs to be some balance of thinking and reading if one is to get much reading done, but I suggest this balance is quite easily attainable. There is also a possible and probably great risk of the solitude leading to useless introspection, instead of productive introspection. Being alone for extended periods of time has a tendency with human beings to lead them into a false sense of “being right”. If exposed too much to your own world view without input from others, one can convince oneself that anything is true, no matter how crazy it really is. This is a bug in the function of the brain and I think it can easily be avoided by keeping the extended period of solitude to less than a week or two.
Do I intend to execute this experiment?
Yes, yes I do.
After the final exams for this period I will be going to Hurghada (as illustrated in Figure 1) and spend one week in the jacuzzi. With a book.
What I hope to attain My goal of this trip is threefold. Test the above hypothesis. Read the books listed below. Fill a couple of pages of my Moleskine with some thoughts I have been walking around with the last couple of months and hopefully get some coding done on a project that I will be doing in April next year (which I suppose is to be publicly announced pretty soon).
Appendix A – Books to read
I’ve already read about half of the first and third books, so the page-count totals at around 1500. It’s an absurdly high goal, but what the hey. If you’ve read this long; you’re probably not that adverse to reading anyway so you probably thinks it’s OK! ;P
December 15th,2009
Category | tags:
essay,
travels |
4 Comments
Yesterday I spend 10 hours in school, going from this:
to this:
after we were done walking around putting up posters it was time some of this (which was pretty sweet):
And today I’ve been hard at work with this:
November 26th,2009
Category | tags:
dh,
dhg,
travels |
1 Comment
I’m back from the UK. All in all it went pretty good! The game turned out pretty good and I think all the players thought it was good fun. Unfortunately, we didn’t get many players :/
Some comments on the trip, first of all: British food sucks.
For some reason they only seem to eat bacon and french fries (or “chips”). Now granted that the food experience from this trip might be a bit biased because the number of restaurants and in general the different kinds of food available at the venue were limited. We were unable to find anything that had not been deep-fried except “pot noodles”. So we ate noodles most of the time. One time I tried a chicken and mushroom pie, which is what you can see here to the right.
It didn’t suck horribly, but it was some sort of crusty pie filled with slime accompanied by luke-warm chips on which you could still taste the oil from the deep-fryer. We did manage to find some good food in the end though (read on to find out what :P)
The game was won on Sunday night, the winners were the same as last year and they were the team that usually plays at DreamHack. Since they have experience they kicked pretty much ass, but there was one team that had only played at the last i-Series event and they came pretty close too! New players are always fun.
The pic to the left here is of a Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 tournament, of which I think first prize was £800. Our prize-ceremony was right after this.
After the game was over we took the train into London and had two hours to spend there.
We ended up going to Harrods, which is a pretty cool place (although expensive).
They have several of these “ROOM OF LUXURY” deals, which is pretty fun :P
This is a picture of the “Egyptian hall”. Some Egyptian dude bought Harrods a while back and is now owned by an Egyptian family. It has these Egyptian influences here and there.
This was the Christmas room, bunch of decorations lights and cards!
This was one of the coolest things in the place. The orange text says Luxury Seatoys and it’s like a mini-waterjet-scooter-thingie that you hold on to and it drags you in the water. It can be used for cruising the surface or to dive and do all sorts of acrobatics under water. It’s pretty awesome, the most expensive model was £80,000 and the cheapest (in the picture) was £7,300 or something like that.
After Harrods we went back to the Tube and headed off to Heathrow. We intentionally headed to Heathrow pretty early because we have started a tradition in which we eat a nice good meal at the airport to talk and relax and put the trip behind us and prepare for the things to come when we get back home (like school 12 hours a day again).
This time we found a cool place called “Gordon Ramsay plane food”, they had an early supper menu in which you got a 3 course dinner for a discounted prize (because it was early) so we got that and it was some of the best food I’ve ever eaten! Especially the entrée pictured below.
This was beetroot with walnut and a pesto with goat cheese salad. The white stuff there is the goat cheese and it was incredibly awesome, best I’ve ever had with a myriad of flavors that melted in your mouth.
If you’re at Heathrow and want a really good meal – go to “Gordon Ramsays plane food”.
The main course was roast chicken with mashed potatoes for me and penne with tomatoes for Emanuel.
And for dessert we had an Apple and blueberry crumble with some sort of custard sauce.
And of course to top it all off we had a bottle of nice Italian red wine.
Perfect end to a trip and perfect start of a new shitload of work.
After this, we went home. I haven’t flown in the dark in a while and it was pretty cozy.
Do you see that green spot in the middle of the picture? That’s a football field, there were a lot of these, at one time I had three within my field of vision from one single window and they were all lit up to look like it was day on the field :P
All in all – it’s always nice to get a away for a while.
Yesterday I left home at 7.45 AM to get to the airport in Copenhagen. It’s time for another i-Series event!
When we landed we took the tube into London, where we were going to meet up with my sister (who lives there). Before she could come to meet us we had like 45 minutes to kill on Oxford street so we went around window-shopping and just looking around a bit.
First up was this place, I think I know someone that might have wanted to be there as well ;P
Walking by the HMV store I found this little gem. It certainly didn’t want to make me want to play Modern Warfare 2 less.
We found a MUJI store as well, selling real Japanese candy with the price-tags in Japanese still there. Awesome feeling to see some Japanese and to be in a “Japanese” store like that. Love it.
After all this window-shopping we had to confess our sins, so we headed over to church.
After we had eaten we left London pretty much right away, around 15:00 or so. The venue is Newbury Racecourse quite a bit outside London, it was really a bitch getting there because we were supposed to take the train from Paddington station, but when we got there, there was this dude we asked about with platform to be on that told us to take this-and-this train to Reading station. We did what he said because we thought it would save us time. Turns out we had to wait an hour at Reading station for the train to Newbury, that was like a local train so it stopped pretty much everywhere.
When we got the venue it was dark as shit and raining and we sort of had to follow some people that looked like gamers and hoped they were going the same place we were supposed to go.
It’s unfortunate to say and I can sort of understand it but – when we got here, we didn’t really get a nice welcoming, in fact we barely got any at all and we had to ask quite a lot of times to even get to know where we were supposed to sleep. It had turned out like 3 days earlier that we had to buy bedding because the beds here didn’t have sheets or anything. So we managed to get someone to drive us to a Tesco store so we could buy duvet covers and pillows and stuff. After that we were pretty beat so we just went to bed pretty much right away.
Today is sort of a bit better, we hope to be done with the game pretty quick and meet some players, meeting the players is always the most fun, no matter if it’s here or at DreamHack.
I just had breakfast and have read up on the stuff that happened on the Internet yesterday (we have no internet or cellular reception at the room we’re sleeping in).
Now I’m gonna get working on the tasks, we have a pretty clear outline but there’s still some work to be done.
