Netta Weinstein

kind of set it directly against preferring to be with other people.

So participants are not asked, do you really enjoy solitude?

They're asked something like, would you prefer to be alone or prefer to be with other people?

And by creating this kind of forced choice, what we're really measuring are not people who prefer to be alone or like to be alone, but people who actually dislike being with others.

So what we're learning more and more in

but really recent research that is sort of thought more deeply about this is there's a lot of value that we can find in solitude and you can kind of love to be alone, but you can love to be alone and enjoy the company of others as well.

Yeah.

Oh, I wish I could prescribe more or less solitude time.

And I think it would be nice if we had a kind of ideal equation that we could follow or a set of guidelines.

But actually, the more we learn about solitude, the more it really seems that everybody has their own relationship.

And for some people, their relationship with solitude is such that just a little bit of it in a day is the right amount for them.

And they are actually wanting a lot of their social time.

And actually, we tend to find this in young adults, so late teens or early 20s.

they tend to really like to spend most of their time in social interactions.

And again, there are going to be individual differences that will be true for some people more than others.

But on the whole, that age range is a time in our lives when we learn about ourselves from our social interactions.

So people go out and they spend time with their friends and they're developing their independent identity that isn't

kind of their parents and their home identity.

So social interactions play a really important role.

And on the other hand, what we're seeing is parents, when they have babies and small children, start to value solitude a lot more than they have before.