Netta Weinstein

There aren't any hard and fast rules for spending too much time or too little time alone, but we do tend to have these expectations that others who really prefer to be alone must not be liking it very much, must be having a hard time, or there's something wrong with them.

Hi, thanks for having me on.

When I hear you say that, I just can't help but think about how true that is, really.

You know, when we look at this, the way we talk about solitude in society and the worries we have about solitude time, I think it does...

have a bad reputation.

And when we've talked about it in the past in the English language, we have used the word solitude in the same way as we do loneliness, so interchangeably with loneliness.

So our language set us up to think about solitude and loneliness in the same way.

And we know loneliness is a very difficult feeling.

It's a feeling that...

All of us can kind of think back, gosh, when I felt lonely, like that was not a great experience.

That's not an experience that I want to have again.

And if I'm lonely, there's something that's not right in my life.

And loneliness definitionally means there are not enough social connections in the way that we need.

So we feel that we are less connected than we want to be.

So loneliness inherently is something that's not right about our lives.

But when solitude and loneliness are used interchangeably, we're set up to think about them in the same way.

And it's because in our history and up until recently, when somebody was in solitude, that was another way of saying, I am lonely.

I'm feeling isolated.

I'm feeling disconnected.

Yeah.