Mathew Davis, writing in The Big Think, says:
“While he was scraping out a life in the woods by Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’
Many would disagree — living in solitude can be seriously taxing for social animals like human beings. Even Thoreau, famous for his self-imposed solitude, needed people in his life; Thoreau’s mother made weekly visits to give him food and do his laundry for him.
Although he may not have been a perfect representation of his own philosophy of self-reliance and solitude, Thoreau was an innovative thinker and better equipped to tolerate solitude than your average man. Now, new research has helped clarify the connection between wisdom and the ability to withstand loneliness. On December 18, Dr. Dilip Jeste at the University of California, San Diego, along with his colleagues, published a study in International Psychogeriatrics in which they found that the wiser one gets, the less lonely one feels. …”
Read more here.
