Why Solitude Changes With Age

The Argument in Brief

Solitude is not one thing with a fixed value. It is a state whose character is conferred by conditions: whether it was chosen or imposed, whether it stands out against a social background or has become the background itself, what fills it, and the state of the self one is alone with. Several of these conditions shift at once in later life. Solitude moves from chosen to default, from a restorative exception to the standing ground, from a container of anticipation to one of retrospection, and into the company of a self that aging has changed. Whether the altered solitude is rich or ruinous is an audit of whether the capacity to be alone was ever built. Solitude changes with age because everything that had given it its character changes, disclosing that its value was always structural rather than intrinsic.

Solitude feels different in later life. The same external state, being alone, that had been restful or chosen or unremarkable in youth becomes something else with age, sometimes heavier and sometimes richer, but rarely the same. This is puzzling if solitude is taken to be a fixed condition, since a person is either alone or not, and the bare fact would seem to carry the same value whenever it occurs. Yet the felt character of being alone plainly shifts across a life. The question is why a state that appears fixed should change its meaning, and the answer is that solitude was never fixed in the way it appears, because its character was never carried by the bare state at all.

Examined through Psychological Architecture, which treats human experience as organized across the interdependent domains of mind, emotion, identity, and meaning, solitude has no value of its own. Its character is conferred by structural conditions: whether the solitude was chosen, whether it contrasts with a surrounding sociality or has become the standing background, what contents fill it, the state of the self that occupies it, and the capacity of that self to be alone at all. Several of these conditions shift together in later life, and the change in solitude is the change in them. What feels like a change in being alone is a change in everything that had been giving being alone its meaning.

What follows distinguishes solitude from loneliness and isolation; traces the shift from chosen solitude to default solitude; describes the inversion by which solitude turns from figure to ground; examines the change in what fills solitude; considers the changed self one is alone with; takes up the capacity to be alone and what its presence or absence settles; and draws out what solitude discloses.

Solitude, Loneliness, Isolation

Three things are run together under the language of being alone, and they need to be separated. Isolation is an external fact: the objective absence of contact with others. Loneliness is an internal state: the painful felt deficit of connection, the experience of wanting more contact than one has. Solitude is the state of being alone as such, which is neither necessarily painful nor necessarily chosen, and onto which loneliness or contentment or indifference may fall as colorings. A person can be isolated without being lonely, and lonely without being isolated, because isolation is a fact about contact and loneliness is a fact about felt deficit, and neither is identical to the bare state of being alone. This essay concerns solitude, that bare state, and the question of why something seemingly so fixed, a person is alone or is not, should change its character across the course of a life.

From Chosen to Default

Much of the solitude of youth is chosen and reversible. A person is alone because they have elected to be, against a background of available company they could summon at will, and the reversibility is part of the experience. Chosen solitude is rest taken from an available social world, and it is restful in part because it is elected and in part because the world remains on call, so that the solitude is bounded by the certainty that it can be ended whenever the person wishes. In later life, solitude tends to become imposed and far less reversible. The social field has contracted, company is less available to be summoned, and being alone becomes less an elected respite than the default condition that obtains when nothing else does.

The same external state means something different when it is freely chosen against abundant company than when it is the residue of a field that has thinned. A solitude elected against plenty is not the solitude that remains once the plenty is gone, though from outside the two are indistinguishable, both being simply a person alone. The shift from chosen to default is the first reason solitude changes with age. It is not that the person has come to dislike being alone; it is that being alone has ceased to be something they are doing and become something that is the case, and a state one elects and a state one is left with are different states however identical they appear.

From Figure to Ground

The restorative power of solitude depends on its being the exception. In youth, against a dense social field, solitude is figure: a bounded interval that stands out against a social ground, and it restores precisely because it contrasts with the surrounding sociality, offering recovery from a social load that resumes when the interval ends. As the social field thins with age, solitude ceases to be figure and becomes ground. It is no longer a bounded interval against a social background but the standing background itself, while sociality becomes the figure, the occasional event that stands out against a solitary ground.

This inversion changes what solitude does. While it was figure, it restored, because there was a contrasting social load for it to be relief from. Once it becomes ground, it no longer restores, because there is no longer a surrounding sociality for it to relieve; one cannot recover, in solitude, from a sociality that is no longer there. Solitude in this condition does not become worse in quality so much as it changes in function, losing the restorative role that had depended entirely on its being the exception and becoming instead the medium in which life is now conducted. Much of the reported heaviness of late solitude is this loss of function: a state that had always returned a person to themselves now has nothing to return them from.

What Fills the Solitude

Solitude is never empty. It is filled by the contents of the mind, and its character depends on what fills it. In youth, solitude is populated largely by anticipation: plans, imagined futures, the rehearsal of possibilities, together with the internalized presence of a living and available social world that the solitary person carries inward. In later life the contents change. Anticipation thins as the forward horizon contracts, leaving less future to populate solitude with; the internalized others who fill it are increasingly the dead; and the projects that had occupied solitary hours may have wound down. Solitude comes to be filled more with retrospection than with anticipation, more with the absent than with the present, more with review than with rehearsal.

The state is unchanged; its contents are not, and because solitude takes its character from what fills it, the change in contents is itself a change in the solitude. The container has not altered. What age pours into it has, and a solitude filled with the review of what is over is a different experience from a solitude filled with the rehearsal of what is to come, even though both are simply a person alone with their own mind. To find late solitude changed is in part to find that the company one keeps in it, the remembered, the absent, the finished, is not the company one used to keep there.

The Self One Is Alone With

To be in solitude is to be alone with oneself, so the character of solitude depends on the state of the self one is alone with. In youth that self is forming, occupied, and projected forward, and solitude with it is a busy condition, full of the work of becoming. In later life the self one is alone with carries the disclosures that aging brings: the contracted horizon, the reversed testimony of the body, the dimmed charge of desire. Solitude becomes the condition in which these are met without the distraction that company and occupation had supplied, and the distractions thin at the same time as the company, so that solitude in age is more fully an encounter with the self than it had been, and the self it encounters has more to contend with.

Part of why solitude grows heavier with age is therefore simply that the self one meets in it is heavier, and is met more directly. The occupations and relationships that had stood between a person and their own company have thinned, and what remains is a more undiluted exposure to a self that aging has changed. This is not in itself a misfortune; an undistracted encounter with the self can be the most valuable condition a life affords. But it is a more demanding encounter than the solitude of youth, because there is both more self to meet and less between the person and the meeting.

The Capacity to Be Alone

Solitude that does not collapse into loneliness or disorganization requires a structural capacity: the ability to be alone without the self destabilizing, to supply from within the regulation and the confirmation that the presence of others had supplied from without. This capacity is built, or left unbuilt, across a life, largely during the years when company is abundant enough to make its development feel optional. Age tests it far more severely than youth ever did, because there is more solitude to be borne and fewer external supports to lean on while bearing it. The capacity is, in effect, the internalization of the offices that witnesses had performed, and whether it was developed determines what the increased solitude of age becomes.

Where the capacity was built, the greater solitude of later life can be rich and even deepening: the self has, at last, adequate time for its own company, and the regulation and confirmation that others had provided are now provided from within. Where it was not built, the same increase collapses solitude into loneliness, or into the ungoverned disorganization the framework calls existential drift, as a solitary self that can neither regulate nor confirm itself, and is no longer regulated or confirmed by others, loses its structure. Whether the changed solitude of age is a gift or an affliction is in large part an audit of whether the capacity to be alone was developed when it could still be developed at leisure. The coherent course, where the capacity exists, is to let solitude become the medium of an undistracted relation to the self; where it does not, solitude exposes its absence with nothing left to compensate.

What Solitude Discloses

Solitude changes with age because everything that had given it its character changes at once. It passes from chosen to default, from figure to ground, from a container of anticipation to one of retrospection, and into the company of a self that aging has altered, while the capacity required to bear it is tested as it never was before. What the change discloses is that solitude was never one thing with a value of its own. Its restfulness, its richness, or its desolation had always been conferred by conditions, by whether it was chosen, whether it contrasted with company, what filled it, what self it enclosed, and whether the capacity to be alone had been built, rather than residing in the bare state of being alone. Aging changes the conditions and so changes the solitude, revealing that its character had been structural throughout. As elsewhere in this series, what had seemed an intrinsic property is disclosed, by its change, to have been a structural product.

Solitude in age is, in the end, the same state it always was, a person alone, and an entirely different thing, because the conditions that gave being alone its meaning have all shifted. The person who finds late solitude unbearable and the person who finds it the richest condition of their life are not differing in temperament about a fixed state; they are in structurally different solitudes, made different by whether the solitude was chosen, whether it still contrasts with company, what fills it, what self it encloses, and whether the capacity to be alone was ever built. What solitude finally discloses is that being alone had never carried its own value, that the value had always been on loan from conditions, and that aging, by changing the conditions, calls the loan and leaves the bare state behind, which is neither good nor bad in itself but only what its conditions make it.