Solitude Is Addictive Quotes

People who smile while they are alone used to be called insane, until we invented smartphones and social media.

One who will not accept solitude, stillness and quiet recurring moments...is caught up in the wilderness of addictions; far removed from an original state of being and awareness. This is 'dis-ease.

Solitude is addictive. Once you discover how peaceful it is, you no longer want or need to deal with people anymore.

Solitude is dangerous. It’s very addictive. It becomes a habit after you realise how peaceful and calm it is. It’s like you don’t want to deal with people anymore because they drain your energy.” – Jim Carrey

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts [...] That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed and accepted this fact, often rather early on [...] That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused [...] That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer [...] That loneliness is not a function of solitude [...] That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt [...] That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness [...] That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating [...] That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it's almost its own form of intoxicating buzz. That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused [...] That it is permissible to want [...] That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.

For an addict there is one pleasure of which no one can deprive him—his ability to spend his time in absolute solitude. And solitude means deep, significant thought; it means, calm, contemplation—and wisdom.

Who are we without our addictions; without our media-induced hungers? So often the voices we hear echoing in our mind are not our own but that of our influencers. Isolation, while arguably going against human nature, is essential for mental and emotional health. Solitude is a detoxification of all that distorts our personality and misguides our path in life. It allows us to filter out the foreign opinions and hear our own voice—reach our authentic character—and practice fidelity to self.

We all need a technological detox; we need to throw away our phones and computers instead of using them as our pseudo-defence system for anything that comes our way. We need to be bored and not have anything to use to shield the boredom away from us. We need to be lonely and see what it is we really feel when we are. If we continue to distract ourselves so we never have to face the realities in front of us, when the time comes and you are faced with something bigger than what your phone, food, or friends can fix, you will be in big trouble.

I have always been considerably addicted to my own company.

Solitude is addictive. Being alone, but not lonely, is peaceful and inspiring. It gives you the strength to go back and deal with all the nonsense.

A morphine addict has one piece of good fortune, which nobody can take away from him—the capacity to spend his life in total solitude. And solitude means important, significant ideas, it means contemplation, tranquillity, wisdom...

Man does not really love social media; he merely hates boredom and loneliness.

She day-dreams just as I do. She is addicted to her solitude just as I am. She loves watching the rain-drops fall slowly on to the green leaves of an old guava tree just as I do. She loves drifting in time and time travel just as I do. She loves looking at the waves dashing against the rocks just as I do.

Are there things about yourself which you have never told anyone? Way back upon the creaky floors of your childhood, in your solitude, the shadows of your private mind, the things you’ve done and said and thought that compound and contain you: shameful things, sexual things, often solitary acts, but sometimes not, sometimes agonizing stabs of cruelty you’ve inflicted on people you love, or the moments where reality itself seemed to tear as they looked into your eyes and told you ‘you are nothing’. And for a moment you stand there adjusting to the pain, the pain that someone could say that to you, and what that must mean about who you are.

Solitude makes me feel calm. The rain affects me differently. Books never make me feel lonely. I love hugging trees, and sleeping on grass. Can't help being addicted to coffee and writing. What about you?

The consequence of all this is terrifying and inescapable: You have become incapable of loving anyone or anything. If you wish to love you must learn to see again. And if you wish to see you must give up your drug. You must tear away from your being the roots of society that have penetrated to the marrow. You must drop out. Externally everything will go on as before, you will continue to be in the world, but no longer of it. And in your heart you will now be free at last and utterly alone. It is only in this aloneness, this utter solitude, that dependence and desire will die, and the capacity to love is born. For one no longer sees others as means to satisfy one’s addiction.

Solitude, at first is scary. All you have is yourself. After a while its comforting, it knows the real you and cant judge you for it. If you live it long enough it becomes an addiction, like all things, too much of it and you will go insane but not enough of it will also send you there.n

A hand-rolled cigarette to smoke, Another one bought from the store. If he lights one, his mind's lit up Another one burns a hole..

But now, I am addicted to the peace and calm of being alone. There is something so soothing about solitude that I have no urgent wish to give it up and connect with people.

Children who cannot tolerate boredom and solitude become stimulus addicts, choosing the quick filler over the richness of possibility

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal—will steal things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away — at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low‐IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high‐IQ people.

It’s easy to put the links between the increases in mental illness, depression, ADHD, and the like, with the speed of the modern world. People never get the chance to do nothing, or when they do, they lack the control to prevent their mind from racing off in a thousand different directions. So much so that their doing nothing becomes a thousand different things and the thousand different things becomes stress, anxiety, worry and fear. Left untreated these simple everyday things become well entrenched in our psyches and start to dominate our lives. We have a chronic addiction with doing and we love to use our busyness as a stamp of our hard work and hectic lives and we get stuck in this busy trap of always doing.

We shouldn’t underestimate how desperate a chronically lonely person is to escape the prison of solitude. It’s not a matter here of common shyness but of a deep psychological sense of isolation experienced from early childhood by people who felt rejected by everyone, beginning with their caregivers.

Are there things about yourself which you have never told anyone? Way back upon the creaky floors of your childhood, in your solitude, the shadows of your private mind, the things you’ve done and said and thought that compound and contain you: shameful things, sexual things, often solitary acts, but sometimes not, sometimes agonizing stabs of cruelty you’ve inflicted on people you love, or the moments where reality itself seemed to tear as they looked into your eyes and told you ‘you are nothing’. And for a moment you stand there adjusting to the pain, the pain that someone could say that to you, and what that must mean about who you are. Or what it means to be cruel, to have hurt someone, to feel the cords of love that bind, split and flail and to fall away, into yourself, engulfed but absolutely alone. And you do what humans do: you accept and you adapt. You build the pain into the story of who you are until it isn’t pain anymore, it’s just another piece of who you are.

Every morning he would go to sleep telling himself that he had had enough, that there would be no more of it, and every afternoon he would wake up with the same desire, the same irresistible urge to crawl back into the car. He wanted that solitude again, that nightlong rush through the emptiness, that rumbling of the road along his skin.

For an addict there is one pleasure of which no one can deprive him—his ability to spend his time in absolute solitude. And solitude means deep, significant thought; it means, calm, contemplation—and wisdom. The night flows on, black and silent. Somewhere out there is the bare leafless forest, beyond it the river, the chill air of autumn. Far away lies the strife-torn, restless city of Moscow. Nothing concerns me, I need nothing and there is nowhere for me to go.

Dear solitude, how I missed you in the times I was so attached to the illusion of loneliness, how I secretly longed for you in times of distraction with music and addiction, how I desired to dive into the creativity of your silent whispers.. oh solitude, I remember you there when I wrote my first book, I recall your inspiring voice when that pen hit the paper.. When I was no longer by your side, oh solitude, how you silently tried to draw me back to you, by showing me the continuous struggle to feel full among unfulfilling relationships or restless nights of loneliness.. Oh solitude, if it wasn't for you, where would I find all that you could provide, only you..

What happens when insatiability dominates a person's emotional functioning? The process of maturation is preempted by an obsession or an addiction, in this case for peer connection. Peer contact whets the appetite without nourishing. It titillates without satisfying. The end result of peer contact is usually an urgent desire for more. The more the child gets, the more he craves. The mother of an eight-year-old girl mused, “I don't get it — the more time my daughter spends with her friends, the more demanding she becomes to get together with them. How much time does she really need for social interaction, anyway?” Likewise, the parents of a young adolescent complained that “as soon as our son comes home from camp, he gets on the phone right away to call the kids he's just been with. Yet it's the family he hasn't seen for two weeks.” The obsession with peer contact is always worse after exposure to peers, whether it is at school or in playtimes, sleepovers, class retreats, outings, or camps. If peer contact satiated, times of peer interaction would lead automatically to increased self-generated play, creative solitude, or individual reflection. Many parents confuse this insatiable behavior with a valid need for peer interaction. Over and over I hear some variation of “but my child is absolutely obsessed with getting together with friends. It would be cruel to deprive him.” Actually, it would be more cruel and irresponsible to indulge what so clearly fuels the obsession. The only attachment that children truly need is the kind that nurtures and satisfies them and can bring them to rest. The more demanding the child is, the more he is indicating a runaway obsession. It is not strength that the child manifests but the desperation of a hunger that only increases with more peer contact.

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal—will steal things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away—at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low‐IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high‐IQ people.

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Now perhaps this fury against me, which had abated as soon as she saw how sad I was, was only a relapse. Indeed, even those people whom, her eyes sparkling with rage, she had threatened with disgrace, death and imprisonment, using false witness if need be, as soon as she thought they were unhappy and humiliated, she wished them no ill and was ready to shower them with favors. For she was not basically wicked and if, below the surface, her slightly deeper, rather surprising nature did not confirm the kindness that her first delicate attentions had led people to suppose but rather envy and pride, yet, at an even deeper level, her third-degree, that is, her true nature, even if never quite fully realized, tended toward goodness and love of her neighbor. Only, like all people who live in a state which they wish were better, but know no more of this than their desire for it and do not understand that the first condition is to break with their present state—like neurasthenics or morphine addicts who would like to be cured but only as long as no one deprives them of their tics or their morphine, like certain rather worldly religious souls or artistic minds, aspiring to solitude yet prepared to imagine it only in so far as it does not imply absolutely renouncing their former life—Andrée was ready to love all God’s creatures but only as long as she had first managed to see them failing to triumph and, in order to do so, had humiliated them in advance. She did not understand that one should love even the proud and conquer their pride through love rather than more overweening pride. But the fact is that she was like those invalids who want to be cured by the same much-loved means as sustain their illness and which they would immediately cease to love if they abandoned these means. But one may learn to swim and still prefer to keep one’s feet dry.

By refusing to enter the call of solitude, so many people get stuck in the addictive patterns of desire.

In order to escape their lives, many men and women enjoy the stimulation of courting other people. Who cares about the kids, or the family and its stability? Desire has an addictive quality that causes a lot of pain.

Pornography did not serve him either. Andrei used to have his personal kinks and fetishes, but after a while, nothing could get him off. For a long time, the only videos he would search were the ones titled: “Who is she?” The only thing that vitalized his self-play was the prospect of some woman on the earth no one knew of and could not find. There was something infinite to these tapes, not the appearance of the girls, but the agitating dissatisfaction and momentary access of a not-so-innocent stranger who men innocently lost forever. It consisted of poorly recorded videos, posted from a smartphone or webcam, and a desperate number of melancholy comments trying to search for the mystery woman. There were plenty of these recordings. But it broke Andrei even more when eventually he knew all the girls no one knew.

Its not easy to Love someone, it makes your heart addicted and your soul craving !!

Solitude is an addiction

Not unlike alcoholism, the cycle of OCD continues in solitude and isolation … Even in therapy it never occurred to me to talk about plucking out my eyelashes and eyebrows. Not once did I bring it up – not once did it occur to me bring it up, the shame was so deep and ingrained. Fortunately, over the years alcoholism has gotten more and more screen time and does not carry quite the cloak of shame it once did. You won’t necessarily find us shouting it from the rooftops, but then again there are support groups in high schools these days. Hopefully OCD will one day find a similar degree of understanding in the general audience, because that understanding and dialogue are what we need to break not necessarily the cycle of repetitive behavior - because sometimes we can and sometimes we can’t - but to break the cycle of shame. Because I can tell you from experience . . . the shame is a killer.

She day-dreams just as I do. She is addicted to her solitude just as I am. She loves watching the rain-drops fall slowly on to the green leaves of an old tree just as I do. She loves drifting in time and time travel just as I do. She loves looking at the waves dashing against the rocks just as I do.

If we have some good teachers, we will learn to develop a conscious nondual mind, a choiceful contemplation, some spiritual practices or disciplines that can return us to unitive consciousness on an ongoing and daily basis. Whatever practice it is, it must become our ‘daily bread.’ That is the consensus of spiritual masters through the ages. The general words for these many forms of practice (‘rewiring’) are ‘meditation,’ ‘contemplation,’ any ‘prayer of quiet,’ ‘centering prayer,’ ‘chosen solitude,’ but it is always some form of inner silence, symbolized by the Jewish Sabbath rest. Every world religion-at the mature levels-discovers some forms of practice to free us from our addictive mind, which we take as normal. No fast-food religion, or upward-bound Christianity, ever goes there and thus provides little real nutrition to sustain people through the hard times, infatuations, trials, idolatries, darkness, and obsessions that always eventually show themselves. Some of us call today’s form of climbing religion the ‘prosperity gospel,’ which is quite common among those who avoid great love and great suffering. It normally does not know what to do with darkness, and so it always projects darkness elsewhere.

Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit—these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me. I was no longer myself. I was man. I was no longer a young girl, part of a radical movement seeking justice for those oppressed, I was the oppressed. I was that drug addict, screaming and tossing in her cell, beating her head against the wall. I was that shoplifter who for rebellion was sentenced to solitary. I was that woman who had killed her children, who had murdered her lover.

That is why throughout history and across disciplines, the best problem solvers, the big beasts of creativity who conjure earthshaking breakthroughs, have cherished solitude. Einstein spent hours staring into space in his office at Princeton University. William Wordsworth described Newton as “a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” Every major religion has prophets—Buddha, Muhammad, Moses—who went out into the wilderness to grapple with the big questions on their own.

Every moment of attention we spend scrolling through social media is attention spent making money for someone else. The numbers are staggering: a New York Times analysis calculated that as of 20414, Facebook users were spending a collective 39,757 years' worth of attention on the site, every single day. It's attention that we didn't spend on our families, or our friends, or ourselves. And just like time, once we've spent attention, we can never get it back. This is a really big deal, because our attention is the most valuable thing we have. We experience only what we pay attention to. We remember only what we pay attention to. When we decide what to pay attention to in the moment, we are making a broader decision about how we want to spend our lives.

إنَّ أخطرَ ما يهدِّدُ حياةَ الإنسانِ هو الإدمانُ، الإدمانُ على كلِّ شيءٍ؛ على الحبِّ، على الوحدةِ، على الصداقةِ، على الكحولِ، على القراءةِ؛ لأنَّ في الإدمانِ التصاقًا مهولًا بالذَّاتِ تلبيةً لرغائبها؛ وإذا اقتربتَ من أيّ شيءٍ أكثرَ من اللَّازمِ، لن يكونَ هناكَ مجالٌ لرؤيتِه! قرِّب يدَكَ من عينيكَ وأخبرني ماذا ترى! The most dangerous threat to a person’s life is an addiction, addiction to everything; addiction to love, to loneliness, to friendship, to alcohol; Because addiction has a tremendous attachment to the self in response to its desires, And if you get too close to anything, there is no way to see it! Hold your hand close to your eyes and tell me what you see! La menace la plus dangereuse pour la vie d’une personne est la dépendance, la dépendance à tout; dépendance à l'amour, à la solitude, à l'amitié, à l'alcool; Parce que la dépendance a un énorme attachement à soi en réponse à ses désirs, Et si vous vous approchez trop de quoi que ce soit, il n'y a aucun moyen de le voir! Tenez votre main près de vos yeux et dites-moi ce que vous voyez!

The Pythagoreans had been instructed to ‘never do anything without previous deliberation: in the morning forming a plan of what was to be done later, and at night to review the day’s actions’.13 Certainly, we can imagine that if we were to be bothered to practise both these morning previews and evening reviews, considering best approaches ahead of time and later holding ourselves to account, we would live and breathe these Stoic principles more effectively than a person who merely brings them half-remembered to mind when it is too late to fully benefit from them. It sounds, though, like a lot of work. It might, however, start with a thirty-second reminder to be the best person we can be, to not attach our emotional well-being to things outside of us, to watch out for known trouble spots; likewise, we can round up the day with as brief a look back at how we behaved, whether we let ourselves down, if there’s anything we should change tomorrow. It should be neither prescriptive nor arduous. A regular period of quiet solitude helps create a bedrock of self-sufficiency that accompanies us into the social hours ahead. As the addictive pleasures and miseries of electronic communication and phone-browsing offer themselves to us every minute of the day and night, we forget the benefits of time spent calmly with and within ourselves. If we are able to find time and space each day to redress the balance, and if we use it to remind ourselves that so much of our life has nothing to do with us, and that it is only with our thoughts and actions that we need to concern ourselves, we will soon find that our centre of gravity returns to its correct place.

But my sister has created her own hell. I know all the elements in our lives—the addicted, abusive father; the struggling working mom; the overbearing sister—formed the gaping wounds in my sister, the burning ache that pushed her from guy to guy, party to party, drug to drug. I’m not going to make excuses for my own strong will. Somehow, against the torn backdrop of my own upbringing, my anger and bullheadedness fueled me to keep my grades up and enabled me to push myself to go to college even though I never felt like I belonged there. It was the fire that drove me to overcome the temptations that my sister fell prey to so easily. My mom and I tried to help her in the way every concerned family member tries—spending way too much money (mostly mine) to get her help that didn’t stick.