Reclaiming Conversation

by Sherry Turkle

  One Chair

  Solitude

  I Share, Therefore I Am

  You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away. The ability to just sit there. That’s just being a person.

  —LOUIS C.K., ACTOR AND COMEDIAN

  In 2013, Louis C.K. brought the necessity for solitude, especially for children, to a late-night television audience. He began by telling Conan O’Brien how he explains to his two daughters why they can’t have cell phones. He set the stage by making clear that when it comes to his children, he takes the long view: “I’m not raising the children. I’m raising the grown-ups that they’re going to be.” For him, phones are “toxic, especially for kids.”

  They don’t look at people when they talk to them. And they don’t build the empathy. You know, kids are mean. And it’s because they’re trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, “You’re fat.” And then they see the kid’s face scrunch up and they go, “Ooh, that doesn’t feel good to make a person do that.” . . . But when they write “You’re fat,” then they just go, “Mmm, that was fun. I like that.” . . .

  You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away. The ability to just sit there. That’s just being a person. . . . Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty, forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone. It’s down there. And sometimes when things clear away and you’re not watching and you’re in your car and you start going, Ooh, here it comes that I’m alone, like it starts to visit on you just like this sadness. Life is tremendously sad. . . . That’s why we text and drive. Pretty much 100 percent of people driving are texting. And they’re killing and murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking their life and ruining another because they don’t want to be alone for a second. . . . I was alone in my car and a Bruce Springsteen song came on . . . and I heard it and it gave me a kind of fall, back-to-school-depression feeling and it made me feel really sad and so I went, “Okay, I’m getting really sad,” so I had to get the phone and write “Hi” to, like, fifty people. . . . Anyway, I started to get that sad feeling and reached for the phone and then I said, “You know what: Don’t. Just be sad. Just stand in the way of it and let it hit you like a truck.”

  So I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much and it was beautiful. . . . Sadness is poetic. . . . You are lucky to live sad moments. And then I had happy feelings because when you let yourself have sad feelings your body has like antibodies that come rushing in to meet the sad feelings. But because we don’t want that first feeling of sad, we push it away with our phones. So you never feel completely happy or completely sad. You just feel kind of satisfied with your products. And then . . . you die.

  So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.

  The Virtues of Solitude

  Solitude doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of activity. You know you are experiencing solitude when what you are doing brings you back to yourself. The writer Susan Cain has persuasively argued that solitude is important for introverts and that introverts are a significant number among us. Louis C.K. provides poetic support for an even broader argument. Solitude is important for everyone, including the most extroverted people. It’s the time you become familiar and comfortable with yourself. And developing the capacity for solitude is one of the most important tasks of childhood, every childhood.

  It’s the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent. You don’t need them to be anything other than who they are. This means you can listen to them and hear what they have to say. This makes the capacity for solitude essential to the development of empathy. And this is why solitude marks the beginning of conversation’s virtuous circle. If you are comfortable with yourself, you can put yourself in someone else’s place.

  In his soliloquy on solitude, Louis C.K. raises a concern that lies beneath the surface of so many anxious conversations about children and technology. What if children are so absorbed in their phones that the alchemy of solitude and the capacity for empathy doesn’t take place? Without empathy, the comedian points out, we don’t understand the impact we have when we bully others because we don’t see them as people like ourselves.

  Developmental psychology has long made the case for the importance of solitude. And now so does neuroscience. It is only when we are alone with our thoughts—not reacting to external stimuli—that we engage that part of the brain’s basic infrastructure devoted to building up a sense of our stable autobiographical past. This is the “default mode network.” So, without solitude, we can’t construct a stable sense of self. Yet children who grow up digital have always had something external to respond to. When they go online, their minds are not wandering but rather are captured and divided.

  These days, we may mistake time on the net for solitude. It isn’t. In fact, solitude is challenged by our habit of turning to our screens rather than inward. And it is challenged by our culture of continual sharing. People who grew up with social media will often say that they don’t feel like themselves; indeed, they sometimes can’t feel themselves, unless they are posting, messaging, or texting. Sometimes people say that they need to share a thought or feeling in order to think it, feel it. This is the sensibility of “I share, therefore I am.” Or otherwise put: “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”

  With this sensibility we risk building a false self, based on performances we think others will enjoy. In Thoreau’s terms, we live too “thickly,” responding to the world around rather than first learning to know ourselves.

  In recent years, psychologists have learned more about how creative ideas come from the reveries of solitude. When we let our minds wander, we set our brains free. Our brains are most productive when there is no demand that they be reactive. For some, this goes against cultural expectations. American culture tends to worship sociality. We have wanted to believe that we are our most creative during “brainstorming” and “groupthink” sessions. But this turns out not to be the case. New ideas are more likely to emerge from people thinking on their own. Solitude is where we learn to trust our imaginations.

  When children grow up with time alone with their thoughts, they feel a certain ground under their feet. Their imaginations bring them comfort. If children always have something outside of themselves to respond to, they don’t build up this resource. So it is not surprising that today young people become anxious if they are alone without a device. They are likely to say they are bored. From the youngest ages they have been diverted by structured play and the shiny objects of digital culture.

  Shiny Objects

  We have embarked on a giant experiment in which our children are the human subjects.

  Breast-feeding mothers, fathers pushing strollers—their phones are rarely out of sight. New studies correlate the growing number of cell phones and the rise of playground accidents because at the park, parents and caretakers are paying attention to phones.

  In every culture, young children want the objects of grown-up desire. So our children tell us they want phones and tablets, and, if they can afford it, very few parents say no. In parental slang, giving a smartphone to quiet your toddler in the rear seat of the car is known as the “passback.”

  In a moment of quiet, children have an alternative to turning within. And they are taken away from human faces and voices, because we let screens do jobs that people used to do—for example, reading to children and playing games with them. Checkers with your grandparents is an occasion to talk; checkers with a computer program is an occasion to strategize and perhaps be allowed to win. Screens serve up all kinds of educational, emotional, artistic, and erotic experiences, but they don’t encourage solitude and they don’t teach the richness of face-to-face conversation.


  A fourteen-year-old girl sums up her feelings about spending an hour on Facebook: “Even if it is just seeing the ‘likes’ on things I posted, I feel that I’ve accomplished something.” What has she accomplished? Time on Facebook makes a predictable outcome (if you post a likable photograph you will get “likes”) feel like an achievement. Online, we become accustomed to the idea of nearly guaranteed results, something that the ups and downs of solitude can’t promise. And, of course, time with people can’t promise it either.

  When children have experience in conversation, they learn that practice never leads to perfect but that perfect isn’t the point. But perfect can be the goal in a simulation—in a computer game, for example. If you are tutored by simulation, you may become fearful of not being in control even when control is not the point.

  An eight-year-old boy is in a park, his back against a large tree. He is engrossed in his shiny object—a small tablet computer, a recent present. He plays a treasure-hunt game that connects him with a network of players all over the world. The boy bites his lip in concentration as his fingers do their work. From the point of view of the other children in the park, the boy is carrying a DO NOT DISTURB sign. His focus marks him as unavailable to join in a round of Frisbee, maybe, or a race to climb the monkey bars. This is not a day he will accept such an invitation, or make one himself. This is not a day he will learn to ask questions of other children or listen to their answers. And most of the adults at the park are staring at screens; the eight-year-old is connected in the game, but in the park, he is very much alone.

  Yet unlike time in nature or with a book, where his mind might wander, the experience of his online game drives him back to the task at hand. He masters the rules of a virtual treasure hunt but doesn’t get to hang by his knees on a jungle gym, contemplating the patterns in an upside-down winter sky.

  Whereas screen activity tends to rev kids up, the concrete worlds of modeling clay, finger paints, and building blocks slow them down. The physicality of these materials—the sticky thickness of clay, the hard solidity of blocks—offers a very real resistance that gives children time to think, to use their imaginations, to make up their own worlds.

  The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, a specialist in adolescent development, wrote that children thrive when they are given time and stillness. The shiny objects of today’s childhood demand time and interrupt stillness.

  Of course, there are many ways to use the computer that encourage children to work creatively. One example is when children don’t simply play computer games but learn to program so that they can build their own games. But when we expect to see children at screens, that becomes the new normal and we stop noticing the details. We stop noticing exactly what is on our children’s screens. What we need to do is stop seeing child and screen as natural partners. Then, we can step back and notice what exactly is on those screens. Then, we can talk about what we want childhood to accomplish.

  “Alone With”

  How can the capacity for solitude be cultivated? With attention and respectful conversation.

  Children develop the capacity for solitude in the presence of an attentive other. Consider the silences that fall when you take a young boy on a quiet walk in nature. The child comes to feel increasingly aware of what it is to be alone in nature, supported by being “with” someone who is introducing him to this experience. Gradually, the child takes walks alone. Or imagine a mother giving her two-year-old daughter a bath, allowing the girl’s reverie with her bath toys as she makes up stories and learns to be alone with her thoughts, all the while knowing her mother is present and available to her. Gradually, the bath, taken alone, is a time when the child is comfortable with her imagination. Attachment enables solitude.

  So we practice being “alone with”—and, if successful, end up with a self peopled by those who have mattered most. Hannah Arendt talks about the solitary person as free to keep himself company. He is not lonely, but always accompanied, “together with himself.” For Arendt, “All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought.”

  Paul Tillich has a beautiful formulation: “Language . . . has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.” Loneliness is painful, emotionally and even physically, born from a “want of intimacy” when we need it most, in early childhood. Solitude—the capacity to be contentedly and constructively alone—is built from successful human connection at just that time. But if we don’t have experience with solitude—and this is often the case today—we start to equate loneliness and solitude. This reflects the impoverishment of our experience. If we don’t know the satisfactions of solitude, we only know the panic of loneliness.

  Recently, I was working on my computer during a train ride from Boston to New York, passing through a snowy Connecticut landscape. I wouldn’t have known this but for the fact that I looked up when I walked to the dining car to get a coffee. As I did, I noted that every other adult on the train was staring at a screen. We deny ourselves the benefits of solitude because we see the time it requires as a resource to exploit. Instead of using time alone to think (or not think), we think of filling it with digital connection.

  And we get our children to live the same way. The children on the Boston–New York train had their own devices—tablets and phones. I said that we use digital “passbacks” to placate young children who say they are bored. We are not teaching them that boredom can be recognized as your imagination calling you.

  Of course, any too-poetic picture of solitude needs correction. Solitude may be a touchstone for empathy and creativity, but it certainly does not always feel good. For the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.” And yet, in a way that Louis C.K. would have understood, Rilke confronted its difficulty: “And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.” Indeed, research shows that adolescents experience solitude as downtime that can feel bad in the short run. But in the long run it facilitates healthy development. Without solitude, in days and nights of continual connection, we may experience those “moments of more” but lives of less.

  When I ask children and teens about quiet time alone with their thoughts, most tell me that it is not something they seek. As soon as they are alone, they reach for their phones. No matter where they are. Most are already sleeping with their phones. So, if they wake up in the middle of the night, they check their messages. They never take a walk without their phones. Time alone is not, most say, something their parents taught them to value. If we care about solitude, we have to communicate this to our children. They are not going to pick it up on their own. And more than telling our children that we value solitude, we have to show them that we think it is important by finding some for ourselves.

  Disconnection Anxiety

  We have testimony about solitude from the most creative among us. For Mozart, “When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer—say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep—it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.” For Kafka, “You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.” For Thomas Mann, “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry.” For Picasso, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”

  Answering these warm poetic voices are the cool results of social science. Susan Cain, writing about the importance of privacy for creative work, cites a study known
as “The Coding War Games.” Here, researchers compared the work of more than six hundred programmers at ninety-two companies. Within companies, programmers performed at about the same level, but among different organizations, the performance gaps were striking. One thing characterized the programmers in the high-performing organizations: They had more privacy. The top performers “overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption.”

  It is not surprising that privacy allows for greater creativity. When we let our focus shift away from the people and things around us, we are better able to think critically about our own thoughts, a process psychologists call meta-cognition. Everyone has this potential. The important thing is to nurture it. The danger is that in a life of constant connection, we lose the capacity to do so.

  A vice-president of a Fortune 500 company tells me that he recently had to write an important presentation and asked his secretary to “protect” him from all interruptions for three hours.

  I wanted my email disabled. I asked her to take my cell phone away from me. I told her to let no calls through except for family emergencies. She did exactly as I wished. But three hours without connection were intolerable. I could barely concentrate on the presentation, I felt so anxious. I know this sounds crazy but I felt panicky. I felt that no one cared about me, loved me.