How to be alone

I was once told that aloneness is not  the same thing as loneliness. That I should learn to embrace aloneness.

I saw this today and that made me think about this again.

“The worker who sleeps with BlackBerry within touching distance, the girl sitting alone in the cafe but texting furiously while waiting for a friend, the woman on the bus on her mobile telling a friend that the test was negative for chlamydia, the solo traveller who Skypes home most nights from the hostel in Borneo, and the TV personality who tells you via Twitter that right now he is running a bath.

These are all symptoms of the death of our ability to be alone

…

We are not just relinquishing our alone time, but we are gleefully sacrificing it, and doing so for multiple data streams, and even so our employer can contact us around the clock. Is the 11pm call from the boss better than nothing, silence, being disconnected – and perhaps missing out?”

Source

Then almost by coincidence this fell into one of my RSS feeds.

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This is my food for thought today.