alternate title: Morgan can connect almost any topic back to cows
I grew up with cattle, a herd animal. You can’t keep a single cow by themselves – not if you want it to be happy. As a farm kid, summers were cattle show season, and while most went off to green pastures the show stock always had a few others stick around in the small pasture off the farmyard to keep them company (and to prevent escape artists). While humans have adapted to independence more than our bovine brethren – probably because of our positions as predators – we are still meant to live with other humans. We do live in a society, after all. We are completely reliant on our caregivers for much of our childhood, and we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t admit that it carries into our adulthood as well. Solitary confinement (a misnomer if there ever was one) is considered cruel and unusual punishment.
To me, the difference between solitude and loneliness, must be the product of the quiet, forced contemplation of the hunter – a time to gather one’s thoughts and sit in the silence required to hunt large prey – so that you can come back to your people with both food and as a better member of your society. Solitude centres us. The voice of loneliness is one of failure though. Being cast away has been a traditional societal punishment, from Greek ostracism to the British penal colony of Australia and the Gulags of Stalinist Russia, or the LGBT child exiled from their homes or sent to conversion therapy. The message? Others don’t want you around. You have no value. Others are better off in your absence.
Solitude is empowering. Loneliness is not.
One of the most interesting things about the time we live in is how our technological structure enforces loneliness, but not solitude. The very real fear we have of judgement means that the things we would not be willing to express in a classroom or work conversation, many of us will say through the distance of our device screens. Thus, we both feel not alone, and tear up the social contract of being a member of a group of people at the same time. And if the only place we can be our true selves is removed from the people themselves, that strikes me as the loneliest thing of all.
A note on this post
Sometimes I like to mess around with LLMs, just to see what it will give me. Today, I gave Claude the following prompt, and went back and forth a few times to test out what I would come up with, and what it would have to say about what I had to say:
“I am worried about my use of AI as replacing my creative and critical thinking skills. Can you ask me some questions for me to free ball answers to in short paragraphs? And rate my answers based on their novelty, and other stereotypical things like grammar and word choice? Ideally, you’ll have plotted your answer to the question as well, but not reveal it to me before you answer.”
I was a bit vague on my criteria, but what it came up with is novelty, specificity, word choice and structure on a scale out of 10 (whatever that means). A couple of them are actually, maybe even probably, worth fleshing out into something more. And since you, dear blog, have been a bit abandoned by my lack of grad school assignments – perhaps this is a good home for them. They were interesting exercises for drafting and brainstorming and seeing where a random question takes me.
The fourth question was the following: What is the difference between loneliness and solitude? I have taken my initial flow of consciousness draft and developed it into something more polished above