Comment by notepad0x90
3 days ago
Highly recommend this book on the subject: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99746.An_Island_to_Onese... (An Island to Oneself by Tom Neale). The guy spent years on an island in the middle of the pacific all alone (almost, he has pets and animals).
On the subject, I'll say that voluntary solitude is amazing, loneliness sucks. However, the number of people you interact with has nothing to do with either.
What matters isn't the number of people you meet or the amount of human interaction you have, but the amount of intimacy you desire and how much of that is fulfilled. With that said, the road less traveled is always harsh, humans are social animals; fighting nature is a tumultuous affair.
In the old Superman comic books he had a "Fortress of Solitude" that only he could get to.
It was way different than what eventually appeared in the movies.
One of the major differences was not the visuals, but the thought process he was going through before, during and after his visit or stay.
Since it was a comic book, there was a smooth transition between the normal text dialog bubbles when talking to people back & forth, to where they only related his thoughts while he was by himself.
Maybe lots more people could use a refuge of some kind more than they think.
Thanks - I read this like 20 years ago back to back with We, the Drowned, and they really put a south pacific bug in me which I retain to this day.
I couldn't remember the name the few times I tried searching for it. Of course, now that there's AI I found it quite easily with the few specific details I remembered but you take the prize for reminding me first.