It turns out different people mean different things by solitude. So let me put different words for the different ideas.

Firstly, there’s the idea where someone is both physically and virtually disconnected from other people, such as when people abandon their phones etc. and go to a far away isolated place. This sort of solitude tries to minimize social interaction with other people. We can call it external solitude.

In contrast to this, is the idea of internal solitude. In this type, one might be living among people in a seemingly usual way. He might be living in a hostel sharing room with his roommate, taking a bus, buying grocery, etc. So apparently, he is doing social interactions, however, none of these social interactions actually take space in his mind, because his mind is mostly occupied with his own ideas.

The more I am writing, the more it’s becoming apparent that these classification are not true classifications but rather loose attributes with blurry distinctions, but nonetheless, I’ll continue these thoughts and would later reprocess them to see if they make sense.

Then there’s this another distinction based on the perspective of the person in solitude. One is thought solitude where one tries to block out input of information or thoughts from external sources (save one when one is reading?) so that he can spend his time thinking about and refining the thoughts or ideas already accumulated in his mind.

While, the other form of this is poetic solitude where the person derives a poetic pleasure in spending his time in contemplation of beauty of the things around him. But it’s not just about contemplation, I think, it’s also about becoming more receptive of your surroundings, in order to see what is hidden in plain sight. And so, it does not necessarily have anything to do with writing poetry, but those who actually wrote good poetry did so by this means.

Both these forms are interesting, but important to note these are two distinct things. There’s also another offshoot which is loosely attached to this classification which is the meditative form of solitude. I don’t know much about it, but from what I have heard or read, it involves removing each and everything from your mind, whether ideas, thoughts or whatever. So, you are neither contemplating your surroundings, nor your own thoughts, nor others’ thoughts, but just trying to empty your mind, sort of like an F5 for your brain.

I guess these are all forms that come to my mind now. These forms although distinct are not permanent. There was a time when I used to spend some part of my day in poetic solitude and some part of my day in thought solitude, specially in my early university days, since I had come to a somewhat new social environment, I was being more perceptive of the new surrounding (and I also was being some sort of poetic about it), but after 2 years, the poetic part almost faded away, which sometimes feel strange to me because it was nice too, but these are the things for which there’s no point forcing yourself into.

Similarly, some people might spend most time in internal solitude, but sometimes they need external solitude as well to amplify the effect of internal solitude.

  I just noticed a very weird thing that atleast happens to me. I had known for long that this effect applied to me subconsciously, but recently, I just got note of a very concrete example rather than the previous abstract ones.

So, that thing is to read a kind of principle or advice or hack, then absolutely forget it, like you don’t even have the foggiest of notion about it. Then, the scenario where that advice is applicable comes up. You do exactly as said in advice. You are asked why you did that. You give some very sound explanation of why you felt you should have done that, but you have absolutely no idea that this was some advice you had read, and had you not read that thing, the chances of you doing that, would have been low. Well, I don’t have any evidence for what I would have done had I not read that thing would be not according to the advice, but it seems to me that the thing I did in that scenario is niche enough that it must have been influenced by some degree by the thing I had read.

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Much Later Edit: I think the following tweet by Anu Atluru explains this phenomenon:

the purpose of reading a book isn’t to retain information, it’s to refine your worldview just a little bit with each one

— anu (@anuatluru) January 2, 2024

While reading, we are subconsciously modifying our worldview or internal model in view of new areas of thought extended by the author, if they seem to be true. But from the tweet, it seems not all people do this.

 An interesting phenomenon I observed while I was updating list of books I’ve read on Goodreads, is that humans discount the rating of books they read later in their life. The reason is not so complicated. When a person develops a habit of reading, the marginal learning of each book is high, but as he gets on reading and has accumulated some concepts over time, the marginal learning starts plummeting. The problem is that this trend is not consistent. For instance, if a person ventures into a new domain, the marginal learning will once again be high, and if he returns to a field he has already explored, it will be low. Due to that, we cannot use a formula to discount the earlier ratings of books.

The phenomenon I described earlier applies when ratings are made at the time of reading. However, if you ask a person at any point in time, to rate all books he has read, he now might rate earlier read books lower than what he would had he rated it on time of reading. This is because when a reader rates a book in retrospect, the book’s learnings seem smaller relative to the accumulated learnings at the time of rating.

This leads to some interesting questions:-

• What is a more appropriate way of getting rating for books
• Does this phenomenon also applies to other things like grading. e.g. a teacher starts grading papers, and the earlier papers get graded higher than the last ones, given same quality of paper attempted?