Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living

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There are times in life we all encounter crushing loneliness, regardless of how many friends we have and whether we’re in a romantic relationship or not. One of these times comes when somebody we love dies. In her autofictional novella, Norwegian writer Ørstavik tries to come to terms with the loneliness of anticipatory grief. She has moved to Milan to be with the man she loves, only to find out he has cancer and less than a year to live. Ti amo chronicles the daily life of someone who can’t talk about what’s going on inside her to anyone. It’s a gripping book, and impossible to forget. Thoughtful, inclusive, and at times poetic, this is a quietly beautiful book that I can imagine many people, alone or coupled, relishing for its insights. Schreiber’s essays have what I can only describe as a lived-in feel. A few quotations here won’t suffice to convey how many shades of experience—of contentment and gloom and everything in between—show through. But the introspection always feeds on ideas as well as situations. A commitment to close friends of decades’ standing makes him attentive to Aristotle’s notion of the friend as “a second self,” but also increasingly dissatisfied with it. Calling loneliness an epidemic now has more tangible connotations than it once might have. But as the German essayist and cultural critic Daniel Schreiber points out in his newly translated essay collection, Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living ( Reaktion Books), a sort of rolling moral panic over the implications of living alone has been underway for quite a while.

Also, Schreiber, a gay man himself, writes poignantly about queer peoples’ experience of loneliness; as sadly this is all too often a huge, and sometimes devastating aspect of daily life for many queer people. He talks about how, throughout the 20th century, before the very recent liberations in western countries for LGBTQ+ communities, due to most societies oppression of queer people, the shame this caused led many to feel that they did not deserve to be loved, were unloveable. And sadly, how gay/queer shame is still very much a destructive force that affects all areas of the LGBTQ+ community worldwide. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. For most of us, the idea of romantic love has lost hardly any of its allure. It continues to be the focus of our collective fantasies. It is, perhaps, the most essential component of what most people understand happiness to be. But more people live alone now than at any other time in history. People like me. Many of us, willingly or not, have said goodbye to the grand idea of love. Even if some of us still believe in it. Alone by Daniel Schreiber review – me, myself and I

Loneliness is bad for us: the US surgeon general has suggested it can cause a person as much damage as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It has increased alarmingly in many societies, especially following the pandemic and its regimes of isolation. Yet there is no shortage online of inspirational quotes about the creative and restorative powers of solitude, ranging from Edward Gibbon’s wry “I was never less alone than when by myself” to the catchy, unattributed “Sometimes you’ve got to disconnect to introspect”. For a more hard-boiled existential take, we have Orson Welles: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.” People have always been lonely. They have experienced this feeling always and everywhere, and they have used all their strength to try to evade it. Loneliness is not a modern or even a contemporary phenomenon. No matter what our beliefs are about earlier eras and cultures, no matter what pastoral, religious and social idylls we project onto the past, loneliness is something that has always been recored in philosophy and literature.”

Daniel Schreiber trägt viele philosophische Betrachtungen zum Thema Freundschaft und zum Alleinsein zusammen, die definitiv zum Nachdenken anregen. Auch beschreibt er, mit welchen Methoden er gegen seine Einsamkeit ankämpft. Diese sind aber sicherlich nicht auf jeden Menschen übertragbar. PDF / EPUB File Name: Alone_Reflections_on_Solitary_Living_-_Daniel_Schreiber.pdf, Alone_Reflections_on_Solitary_Living_-_Daniel_Schreiber.epubMeiner Meinung nach, ging es in diesem Buch gar nicht so sehr ums Alleinsein. Eher um Gärten, Freundschaften, die Abwesenheit von romantischer Liebe und Corona. Ja, es war die Pandemie, die dazu geführt hat, dass sich Daniel Schreiber so allein gefühlt hat. Er war immer nur im Home Office, hat andere nur auf Spaziergängen mit Abstand getroffen und ewig niemanden umarmt. Natürlich fühlt er sich da einsam. Weiters führt der Autor aus, wie viele Probleme das Queersein mit sich bringt, was zwar an sich interessant ist, aber das hat eben in diesem Buch nichts verloren. Vor allem dann nicht, wenn das Conclusio dann obendrein auch noch ist, dass der Autor ohne Partnerschaft und Freunde dann doch wieder sehr einsam ist. Ja, you don't say. Researchers are also working on a new metric, the Companion Robot Impact Scale, to quantify the benefits for seniors’ health and well-being. Whether CRIS will be used in-house or as a rating system for consumers is not clear. In any event, the most important number to keep in mind at this point is the 70percent of doctors surveyed who thought companion robots should be covered by insurance. In 1990, 27 percent of Americans surveyed reported having three or fewer close friends. By 2021, it was up to 49 percent. Between 2003 and 2020, the average amount of time spent socially engaged with friends (whatever their quantity or degree of closeness) fell by 20 hours per month; the decline was especially steep for people between ages 15 and 24. The surgeon general did not venture any predictions about how the aging of the population might influence such trends, or vice versa. But news from the frontier between robotics and gerontology suggests that help—of a sort—is on the way.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. It is so easy to succumb to the temptation to understand friends as part of and as an extension of oneself,” Schreiber writes, “to love them because of their supposed similarity to one’s own self. But the calculation of sameness and the narcissistic appropriation that it entails ultimately constitute a form of involuntary violence. You necessarily misjudge the other. You miss the chance to find out who this person you are close to really is.” Shifting between philosophical essay and personal memoir, Schreiber explores existential questions that have become submerged in the flood of books about relationships and friendship. (…) With insightful excursions into queer, pandemic and suicidal loneliness, Schreiber focuses on the special problem of “ambiguous loss”. This is a cheerful-slash-melancholic protest against the relentless optimism propagated by the personal coaching craze, which claims that we can achieve anything. But what if we can’t? That’s what Schreiber asks – in words so honest that they hurt and heal at the same time.” The fact that this was written by a single gay man of my age gave this book an extra dimension for me. But to say that this book is only relevant to gay men would be a disservice. I think that many people can relate to the thoughts, feelings and experiences shared in this book. In this candid and moving essay, German writer Daniel Schreiber explores what it means to be alone in a society that idealizes romantic relationships. Schreiber shares his own fears and experiences as a long-term single gay man and links them to some of the world’s foremost writers and thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, Annie Ernaux, Audre Lorde and Maggie Nelson. He also examines the role that friendships play in our lives and whether they can replace a need for romantic love.Es werden einige Aspekte der Einsamkeit und des Alleinlebens aufgezeigt, die mir teilweise nur unterbewusst oder gar nicht bekannt waren. Das Buch regt definitiv zum Nachdenken an und ist eine Lobrede an die Freundschaft. Dadurch wird das Buch sicherlich nicht nur für Menschen interessant, die mit ihrem Single-Leben hadern, sondern auch für solche, die in einer Partnerschaft leben und ihre alleinstehenden Freund*innen besser verstehen möchten. The pandemic put Schreiber’s carefully maintained balance of life, work and extended family of choice under tremendous strain, of course, as it did everyone. In particular it stirred up fear and anger over the gulf between expectations about happiness (others’ and his own) and the difficulty of getting from day to day under conditions of extreme isolation. Schreiber has previously written a biography of Susan Sontag and several volumes of essays, and this is a work suffused with the essayistic sensibility. It blends passages of memoir with scholarly and literary references to explore the author’s existence as a single gay man who often feels he is living outside standard social models. In place of a primary romantic or domestic partnership, he has a wide network of friends. Whether or not they are in couples themselves, they provide him with all the human connection, fellowship, support and sense of meaning that he needs.