Leaders and Solitude
I don’t really have the time to fully parse out “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz at The American Scholar, but holy cow are there some good quotes in there. I’ll follow one of his trains of thought:
Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
So, is this just an old guy offering the stereotypical reaction to these new technologies? I think, no:
It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?
Is our technology-driven distraction truly a bad thing? How are we to understand its impact on our lives? What does Deresiewicz think we are missing out on? He’s quite clear:
Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.”
Now, look—I’m not really interested in piling on Twitter along with everyone else. I do think its a truly useful service, but in the context of this argument—the bombardment of other’s ideas—I do understand Deresiewicz’s point: to truly lead, we need a little space to think for ourselves… to form our own ideas. And finally, as a person who tends to value a few close connections over many looser connections with others, this point really made sense:
This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.
Comments
Sis Meech
I love Desresiewicz’s articles because they’re so thought-provoking. Another good one by him is “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.”
Alexander Micek
Totally agree! I find him thoughtful, yet engaging. By contrast, the Stanley Fish blog at the New York Times can sometimes be so difficult to read, I can’t quite figure out what his main point is.