I have always had an introverted nature. As a child, I would immerse myself for hours reading a book or other solitary activity. When my parents sent me to my room for punishment, they found it didn't work as I would not be begging to come out.
But at different times of my life, I have been quite active socially. My college years especially were filled with social interactions that I grew to enjoy. It started out as friends and roommates dragging me to one thing or another, but after a while I instigated a lot of it.
But I naturally gravitated to a career in programming where I can spend 10 hours straight at the keyboard with almost no interaction. My hobby project is a major one that deals with a whole new way to manage data. It has consumed several years of my life as I spend a great deal of my 'free time' thinking about it, writing code, or optimizing something.
My introverted nature has affected my family life as I withdraw into my own little world. My wife sometimes wonders if I am depressed, unhappy, or stressed. Although I am perfectly content, I have to force myself to come out of my shell and interact much more with the wife and kids (and friends and neighbors). Many of my fellow programmers that I have worked with over the years also exhibit some of these tendencies.
I guess it is debatable whether this adds to or subtracts from actual creativity.
I feel very much the same regarding childhood and college, but I feel I came out the other side a different person.
In grade-school, my family moved often. I never had the experience of a friendship longer than about 3 years. Tech appealed to me - I always wanted to know how things worked and since no one took kids seriously, outside of it being a bonding experience with my dad occasionally, it was an activity I did alone, one where I spent large parts of my days learning about and experimenting with whatever I could get my hands on.
College was the first time I was exposed to people who shared a common interest. It wasn't a large campus, and somehow I ended up getting a reputation for being one of the more competent CS students on campus. People would approach me every day in the university's coffee shop to ask for help with class or pick my brain for ideas on hobby projects. I grew to seriously enjoy talking to people about what they're working on. I also grew to enjoy teaching and tutoring people - to the point where I'd give unofficial supplemental lectures in our ACM meetings about things I felt were missed in various classes. Computer graphics was a huge passion of mine at the time and a lot of people hated the class because it did a poor job of bridging theory to practice. I did so, so many OpenGL tutoring sessions.
After college I moved away from everyone I knew to take a job in another part of the state. I didn't really start to understand until then that I now craved socialization. I spent the next few years without anyone to (physically) spend time with. Much of my socialization was my Discord gaming group of everyone from back in college (still all together 6 years later).
After the main part of the pandemic I decided I was tired of being alone. I feel like I spent 6 years of my 20s locked up so I packed my life up and transferred to where all the people I was actually friends with were. Multiple social engagements a week for the past 3 months - I haven't been this happy in years. I even have people to go to the gym with!
I feel like being alone turned me into a more negative and reserved person as opposed to the "can't wait to share the cool things I know and or learned with everyone" person I was in school.
I don't know what to call myself. A shy extrovert? I'm horrible at starting a conversation but wow can I keep one going if someone else initiates.
I feel similarly, I find it a little difficult to start conversations and to ask people questions that get them to open up. Knowing what exactly to ask about is hard for me. But I thoroughly enjoy talking to people especially if they are leading the conversation and they are one of those people that can get others to open up.
It comes down to trying to have a little balance in your life. It's been said that programming is an art form. Those who take pride in their work try to build something elegant that is not only functional, but also a beauty to look at and work on. If you are not careful it can also become an obsession that can dominate your life. Being an introvert just compounds it.
Unlike some other types of art, software is never really finished. I don't think that painters or sculptors regularly revisit their creations to try and improve them. They don't have versions 2, 3, or 4 of a painting or statue. The closest thing might be writers who sometimes have multiple editions to their books. There is always something to do to improve a piece of software so it can keep you up too late at night because it is just a compile or two away.
Oops, gotta go, I just thought of a new feature for my project...
> My introverted nature has affected my family life as I withdraw into my own little world. ..Many of my fellow programmers that I have worked with over the years also exhibit some of these tendencies.
I believe many professional writers, artists, even musicians exhibit similar traits - they live in their own self-created worlds, stories, imaginary inner lives - often to the detriment of their social lives in "real" life.
Some are extroverted, some are introverted, but most are solitary brooders and counter-intuitively, exhibitionists at the same time.
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This is a beautiful passage from the post.
> You need to get back to the solitude that you knew as a child. They see the world with eyes unclouded. They live in their own world, a world of pure authenticity.
This resonates with me so much to the point where I’ve started publishing blogs about my own struggles and resolutions. It sounds like you have a lot of awareness.
It’s kind of easy to take this extremely literally and pick it apart, which a lot of comments here are doing, but might be helpful to broaden what “solitude” means and maybe even read it as though it’s a bit allegorical. Also important to remember this was more than 100 years ago, and that he’s talking very specifically about how to write poetry. All the way through I felt like he could have been talking about social media.
Metaphorically, he seems to be saying (to me even more strongly than isolation): that motivation needs to be intrinsic, it should come from yourself and your own desires, not from others; and that you should practice your craft intensely and make sure the practice of writing poetry is free from interruptions or noise that cloud things. He may be naming the state of flow we all want using words for it that we’re not used to these days, along with a push for writers to set their own standards and not judge themselves by publishing metrics. These are fairly timeless and applicable ideas today, not to mention all of us programmers frequently dream of solitude and perhaps resent the fact that we almost never get it at work.
My partner does a lot of art and frequently draws in social settings. She finds drawing by herself lonely, isolating, and draining. These sorts of takes incense her as she faces pressure to work alone. The problem with these sorts of theses is that they affirm the experiences of those who agree but do nothing with others. Programmers are more likely than most to prefer solitude, but even that isn't a constant. Extrapolating behavior across humanity from personal anecdotes has never been particularly effective.
Yeah I agree with this too, which is one reason I was subtly making a distinction above between goals and actions. Rilke’s goals seem to be intrinsic motivation and intense focus, but “solitude” is the action he concludes one needs to do to achieve those goals (of writing poetry). Really, there are different kinds of people and different kinds of creative work, and different goals. Rilke had success, but there are plenty of poets, and many many more artists and creatives, who are wildly social. Creativity doesn’t require solitude, I just wanted to extract the parts of this essay that were helpful for me.
I liked reading this fictitious conversation by Rilke, but I’m not about to take it as bible truth and go live in the woods in hopes of being more creative. (And I don’t think he was actually suggesting that either, it seems like he was talking about protecting his work time, like during the day, because it’s an action that worked for him to achieve his goals.)
> Programmers are more likely than most to prefer solitude, but even that isn’t a constant.
True! And we often want solitude even when it isn’t the best thing. ;) I have watched myself and others go too far away from what is needed in some situations because the requirements weren’t understood well enough, and assumptions were being made, and because it’s super fun to dive into a clever algorithm or data structure, or a learn and implement a fancy technique. Programming in a business setting is a social process and sometimes means checking in with people early and often, iterating, and getting repeated feedback. I got in trouble in my very first industry job when I complained about having to report my progress daily because it took an hour to prepare and interrupted my flow, the note in my file about uncooperativeness stayed around for years. Later I came to believe I was in the wrong because of watching people drift away from the goals without enough talking…
> My partner does a lot of art and frequently draws in social settings.
Just as an aside: drawing is just a technical activity, no diferent than programming. It can be creative or pretty rote (just ask any game dev artist working on yet another big guy with an axe) - same as programming. Same with music, btw.
Anything can be a creative practice once you learn that the rules that constrained it can be bent. Obviously there are areas where creativity will lead to massive explosions (which is how we know!) but programming, computers, art, hell even sitting in a toll booth can be creative endeavors. (Shout out to the fun folks working the booths at Universal Studios Orlando!)
I think so. Here are several possibly unrelated takes that are my own opinion: one is that a “creative practice” at it’s most basic is simply creating something, and in that sense programming is absolutely creative. It need not be mysterious or artistic or particularly unique or personal, it can be seen as creative if it’s nothing more than new. Another is that I practice digital art on my own, separate from my day job, and the process of making procedural art using a computer is similar in many ways to making art using traditional techniques, I absolutely view programming imagery as creative programming. A third view is that good programming is an art, not a science. We always have lots of options and it can be hard to choose; the people who are best at it are the ones who spend time designing and crafting and worrying about function and form. Deciding on the architecture is usually about balancing goals and understanding your audience. Tuning the performance of code is done best when finding out and thinking about how people perceive it while they use it. I do personally think of writing good code as an artistic process, conceptually similar to my own workflows for writing stories or painting pictures. The tools are different but the ideas are often the same.
I mean programming is more or less understanding a thing well enough to tell the machine how to go through the steps of it. I've always thought of it in a similar vein to the problem solving we use in design.
So if we think of design or writing as creative, yes I think programming is too.
There is a core duality to being human (for all except for rare cognitive outliers):
We are fundamentally a tribal species. Our entire evolutionary history—the thing that turned us into the species we are—revolves around our incredible ability to cooperate and share information. The basic unit of survival for our species is the tribe, not the individual. So at one very fundamental level, we must be around others to survive and thrive. We must subsume parts of ourselves that are unacceptable to the tribe so that we can be allowed to be one of its members. "Us" is more important than "I".
But at the exact same time, the tribe only wants and needs us if we can provide value, preferably unique value to it. So while we need to fit in to survive, we must also stand out in ways that the tribe finds valuable, explore where other tribespeople won't and bring back resources (physical, conceptual, etc.) that others can't.
The tension between these two opposing forces—to conform or to stand out—is, I think, one of the key pieces of being human.
> A small-world network is a type of mathematical graph in which most nodes are not neighbors of one another, but the neighbors of any given node are likely to be neighbors of each other and most nodes can be reached from every other node by a small number of hops or steps.
I mean there are people like that. As someone teaching at an art university this is something I observe frequently.
The caveat being: there are also people who are the polar opposite, so the global scope of that statement is indeed a bit to broad.
Also consider this: we are social animals, but this does not automatically imply that everything we are doing we like to do in a social setting. E.g. most humans will prefer not to defecate in public. Many people instinctively pull back from society in times of shock, grief or pain etc.
True loners are rare I believe. There's also a lot of people that "participate" by not participating in social life. I've been truly alone a bunch of times and I realized that my introversion was not desire to not have people around, but mostly a weird kind of mode I was stuck into socially.
I'll share here a quote from Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism, which I mentioned in another comment. Our brain's so-called default network, the one that fires "when thinking about nothing, […] seems to be connected to social cognition."
> Because the subject wasn’t engaged in a specific task, it was easy for researchers to think of the default network as something that comes on when you’re thinking about nothing. A little self-reflection, however, makes clear that our brains are hardly ever actually thinking about nothing. Even without a specific task, they tend to remain highly active, with thoughts and ideas flitting by in an ongoing noisy chatter. On further self-reflection, Lieberman realized that this background hum of activity tends to focus on a small number of targets: thoughts about “other people, yourself, or both.” The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition.
I think the stronger interpretation is that as sapient beings, we're each our own 'island universe' as Huxley said in 'The Doors of Perception' - I believe it's also a big concept in zen practice.
Amazing, you can brush aside everything he said as "wrong" without providing any evidence or any sort of interesting argument whatsoever.
Not to mention your counter claim makes no sense and is far too broad. Which humans can't function outside of a society? All of them? For how long? For 10 milliseconds? What do you mean by "function"? What does it mean to be "outside of a society"?
The post makes perfect sense to anyone who is actually willing to understand it, rather than poorly attempt to nitpick at some aspect of it you hold near and dear to your heart.
Oh, I understood "every word" to pertain to the quoted text, not the whole article, but it's a little ambiguous, I grant you.
But are you taking exception to the parent chuckling over the premise of humans as solitary animals? Humankind of society and culture and trade and language and art solitary animals?
I am an artist, I sell at national fairs such Art Palm Springs, Art Market San Francisco, Scope Miami, L.A. Art Show and I have sold works in New York's Chelsea district. With the group of artists I know, and hang with, the introverts really put in the work and explore to the far reaches of an idea, and then they catalog it. Being an introvert does not give one a creative advantage, but in my experience, introverts have the patience to thoroughly explore without distraction or caring what others think. Extroverts in my experience, like myself, discover ideas via serendipity, collaboration, and asking for critiques.
"Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team."
I haven't read the book, but that paragraph makes me think in all the artists that never did anything interesting, but were artists. It makes me think in all the artists that believed strongly that their work, and indeed their existence, was of the utmost importance, even if it wasn't.
This is not a rant, you need to believe in yourself to do art, you need to believe that your work is of the most upmost importance, otherwise you wouldn't be able to give in to it.
The problem is that, from the outside, that is not necessarily true, and often isn't.
I actually agree with the premise, I do need solitude to be creative. I don´t want to feel lonely, but I need to feel that my mind will not be perturbed at unexpected times, for unwelcome reasons. I just want to emphasize that calling ourselves artists is not making us any favors.
What does it matter if it's true? Many artists won't even know if it was true or not, because, for the many of the most revolutionary ones, the recognition only comes many years after their death. For others, it may never come, due to confluence of irrelevant factors (let's say they were writing in a very niche language). If the artist believe in what they're doing, whether or not people recognize it is secondary and not something they should worry about too much.
This comment resonates with me. I'm currently working in a corporate environment, and I suffer every single second. I always fantasize about being a writer, programmer, producer, artist, no matter what, but where I reduce social interaction to zero.
This is why I think the so-called loneliness epidemic is either overblown or does not exist. We see that as soon as people get some money and autonomy, what do they do? They isolate. People spend a huge premium, such as business or first class plane tickets, stadium box seating, vacation retreats, man caves, etc. to isolate from other people. There is no shortage of ways for humans to interact with other humans, yet we see people choose to isolate, like netflix or smart phones.
My impression of the loneliness epidemic is that people only ‘choose’ to isolate once they have money and autonomy because it is easy, not because it is truly something they enjoy.
At least that’s true for me. Organising things socially and then participating in social events, with all the awkward moments and crappy small talk, is painful and at times daunting. But I know after it, I feel enriched and over time it builds strong relationships that add huge amounts of joy to my life. But as we have more and more excuses not to put ourselves through this, like endless Netflix or smart phones, we end up not doing it and feeling lonely.
> We see that as soon as people get some money and autonomy, what do they do? They isolate. People spend a huge premium, such as business or first class plane tickets, stadium box seating, vacation retreats, man caves, etc. to isolate from other people.
The low quality/safety of public infrastructure could be to blame. Why would anyone use unpleasantly hot and smelly public transportation, full of loud and potentially shady individuals, without any security around in case someone creates a commotion - when they could just pay a little bit more and not even worry about any of those things?
Why would anyone go to a public gym with a tiny shared space, number of subscriptions that far exceeds the capacity of the place, and deal with unpredictability of whether or not there will be room to train - when they can build a private gym and train whenever they feel like it?
Why would anyone stand around in the crowded "fan pit", having problems even moving because vendors sold more tickets then there is capacity, wait in the line for public bathroom, wait in the line for drinks, make yourself a target for pickpocketing, etc. - when they could just buy a VIP seat, enjoy their time, and go home?
People will stop isolating themselves when not isolating stops being so unpleasant.
Incorrect - though for some, it seems to be their only access to productive creativity.
What about collaborative creativity? What about spontaneous creativity which is independent of environment? What about the kind of creativity that happens when a person goes into a very public place and sits alone and writes poetry... is that solitude?
I know some writers who are exactly as described in the interview. They cannot work if they are not alone. It makes sense. I know others who are almost the opposite - who need the presence of humanity to be creatively productive.
Methinks the calculus here is more complex than Rilke states.
"Ask yourself at the darkest hour of the night: must I write? If your answer is yes, then you should redesign your life to align with this necessity."
This is really great practical advice. Decide what you must do. Remove the roadblocks and optimize to achieve your goal.
"You’re looking outside of yourself for the answers, and that’s the last place you’ll find them. The only way for you to move forward is to move inward."
If I can only find answers internally, then why the hell would I listen to you now? What if my internal voice tells me the only answers come from outside?
"Do not strive to uncover all of the answers right now. The answers can’t be given to you because you haven’t been able to live with them. What matters is to live everything. So live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answers, one distant day in the future."
> Decide what you must do. Remove the roadblocks and optimize to achieve your goal.
The problem is that humans don’t work like that. We aren’t the passionate bunch the author think we are.
People work for money and status , we are extremely result oriented not passion oriented.
Even on here people enjoy technology , hacking etc. But if you gave us absolute certainty of economic and social success via some other drastically different path (e.g. a reality show such as Jersey Shore) , we would not hesitate one second and wear our tightest tank top and trunks , get tanned and play the part.
I say “us” because I include myself in this scenario too, and I despise reality shows but you cant argue with millions of dollars and millions of followers.
They are respectively the currency of financial and social success.
it’s far better to be a millionaire reality star whose claim to fame is clubbing and partying on camera than a professor with an IQ of 185 whose fusion startup went under
I'm not so sure about it. Maybe I'd do the Jersey Shore thing, but if someone offered me enterprise sales job at twice what I make as a coder, I wouldn't take it. It is just so much at odds with my personality, that the money would absolutely be not worth it. (If it was $1m per year, and my middling performance would be acceptable, I'd probably take it though).
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But at different times of my life, I have been quite active socially. My college years especially were filled with social interactions that I grew to enjoy. It started out as friends and roommates dragging me to one thing or another, but after a while I instigated a lot of it.
But I naturally gravitated to a career in programming where I can spend 10 hours straight at the keyboard with almost no interaction. My hobby project is a major one that deals with a whole new way to manage data. It has consumed several years of my life as I spend a great deal of my 'free time' thinking about it, writing code, or optimizing something.
My introverted nature has affected my family life as I withdraw into my own little world. My wife sometimes wonders if I am depressed, unhappy, or stressed. Although I am perfectly content, I have to force myself to come out of my shell and interact much more with the wife and kids (and friends and neighbors). Many of my fellow programmers that I have worked with over the years also exhibit some of these tendencies.
I guess it is debatable whether this adds to or subtracts from actual creativity.
In grade-school, my family moved often. I never had the experience of a friendship longer than about 3 years. Tech appealed to me - I always wanted to know how things worked and since no one took kids seriously, outside of it being a bonding experience with my dad occasionally, it was an activity I did alone, one where I spent large parts of my days learning about and experimenting with whatever I could get my hands on.
College was the first time I was exposed to people who shared a common interest. It wasn't a large campus, and somehow I ended up getting a reputation for being one of the more competent CS students on campus. People would approach me every day in the university's coffee shop to ask for help with class or pick my brain for ideas on hobby projects. I grew to seriously enjoy talking to people about what they're working on. I also grew to enjoy teaching and tutoring people - to the point where I'd give unofficial supplemental lectures in our ACM meetings about things I felt were missed in various classes. Computer graphics was a huge passion of mine at the time and a lot of people hated the class because it did a poor job of bridging theory to practice. I did so, so many OpenGL tutoring sessions.
After college I moved away from everyone I knew to take a job in another part of the state. I didn't really start to understand until then that I now craved socialization. I spent the next few years without anyone to (physically) spend time with. Much of my socialization was my Discord gaming group of everyone from back in college (still all together 6 years later).
After the main part of the pandemic I decided I was tired of being alone. I feel like I spent 6 years of my 20s locked up so I packed my life up and transferred to where all the people I was actually friends with were. Multiple social engagements a week for the past 3 months - I haven't been this happy in years. I even have people to go to the gym with!
I feel like being alone turned me into a more negative and reserved person as opposed to the "can't wait to share the cool things I know and or learned with everyone" person I was in school.
I don't know what to call myself. A shy extrovert? I'm horrible at starting a conversation but wow can I keep one going if someone else initiates.
Unlike some other types of art, software is never really finished. I don't think that painters or sculptors regularly revisit their creations to try and improve them. They don't have versions 2, 3, or 4 of a painting or statue. The closest thing might be writers who sometimes have multiple editions to their books. There is always something to do to improve a piece of software so it can keep you up too late at night because it is just a compile or two away.
Oops, gotta go, I just thought of a new feature for my project...
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I believe many professional writers, artists, even musicians exhibit similar traits - they live in their own self-created worlds, stories, imaginary inner lives - often to the detriment of their social lives in "real" life.
Some are extroverted, some are introverted, but most are solitary brooders and counter-intuitively, exhibitionists at the same time.
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This is a beautiful passage from the post.
> You need to get back to the solitude that you knew as a child. They see the world with eyes unclouded. They live in their own world, a world of pure authenticity.
Metaphorically, he seems to be saying (to me even more strongly than isolation): that motivation needs to be intrinsic, it should come from yourself and your own desires, not from others; and that you should practice your craft intensely and make sure the practice of writing poetry is free from interruptions or noise that cloud things. He may be naming the state of flow we all want using words for it that we’re not used to these days, along with a push for writers to set their own standards and not judge themselves by publishing metrics. These are fairly timeless and applicable ideas today, not to mention all of us programmers frequently dream of solitude and perhaps resent the fact that we almost never get it at work.
I liked reading this fictitious conversation by Rilke, but I’m not about to take it as bible truth and go live in the woods in hopes of being more creative. (And I don’t think he was actually suggesting that either, it seems like he was talking about protecting his work time, like during the day, because it’s an action that worked for him to achieve his goals.)
> Programmers are more likely than most to prefer solitude, but even that isn’t a constant.
True! And we often want solitude even when it isn’t the best thing. ;) I have watched myself and others go too far away from what is needed in some situations because the requirements weren’t understood well enough, and assumptions were being made, and because it’s super fun to dive into a clever algorithm or data structure, or a learn and implement a fancy technique. Programming in a business setting is a social process and sometimes means checking in with people early and often, iterating, and getting repeated feedback. I got in trouble in my very first industry job when I complained about having to report my progress daily because it took an hour to prepare and interrupted my flow, the note in my file about uncooperativeness stayed around for years. Later I came to believe I was in the wrong because of watching people drift away from the goals without enough talking…
I used to draw a lot in school. All classes. I was not on the same planet. The hum of the crowd gave me energy.
Just as an aside: drawing is just a technical activity, no diferent than programming. It can be creative or pretty rote (just ask any game dev artist working on yet another big guy with an axe) - same as programming. Same with music, btw.
So if we think of design or writing as creative, yes I think programming is too.
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Amazing, every word of what that guy said is wrong.
Maybe he was actually talking about cats, that would make sense. But humans literally can't function outside of a society.
We are fundamentally a tribal species. Our entire evolutionary history—the thing that turned us into the species we are—revolves around our incredible ability to cooperate and share information. The basic unit of survival for our species is the tribe, not the individual. So at one very fundamental level, we must be around others to survive and thrive. We must subsume parts of ourselves that are unacceptable to the tribe so that we can be allowed to be one of its members. "Us" is more important than "I".
But at the exact same time, the tribe only wants and needs us if we can provide value, preferably unique value to it. So while we need to fit in to survive, we must also stand out in ways that the tribe finds valuable, explore where other tribespeople won't and bring back resources (physical, conceptual, etc.) that others can't.
The tension between these two opposing forces—to conform or to stand out—is, I think, one of the key pieces of being human.
> A small-world network is a type of mathematical graph in which most nodes are not neighbors of one another, but the neighbors of any given node are likely to be neighbors of each other and most nodes can be reached from every other node by a small number of hops or steps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network
The caveat being: there are also people who are the polar opposite, so the global scope of that statement is indeed a bit to broad.
Also consider this: we are social animals, but this does not automatically imply that everything we are doing we like to do in a social setting. E.g. most humans will prefer not to defecate in public. Many people instinctively pull back from society in times of shock, grief or pain etc.
> Because the subject wasn’t engaged in a specific task, it was easy for researchers to think of the default network as something that comes on when you’re thinking about nothing. A little self-reflection, however, makes clear that our brains are hardly ever actually thinking about nothing. Even without a specific task, they tend to remain highly active, with thoughts and ideas flitting by in an ongoing noisy chatter. On further self-reflection, Lieberman realized that this background hum of activity tends to focus on a small number of targets: thoughts about “other people, yourself, or both.” The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition.
Everyone generalizes from a sample size of one.
https://sectionhiker.com/dick-proenneke-builds-a-log-cabin-i...
Not to mention your counter claim makes no sense and is far too broad. Which humans can't function outside of a society? All of them? For how long? For 10 milliseconds? What do you mean by "function"? What does it mean to be "outside of a society"?
The post makes perfect sense to anyone who is actually willing to understand it, rather than poorly attempt to nitpick at some aspect of it you hold near and dear to your heart.
But are you taking exception to the parent chuckling over the premise of humans as solitary animals? Humankind of society and culture and trade and language and art solitary animals?
In it he said:
"Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team."
This is not a rant, you need to believe in yourself to do art, you need to believe that your work is of the most upmost importance, otherwise you wouldn't be able to give in to it.
The problem is that, from the outside, that is not necessarily true, and often isn't.
I actually agree with the premise, I do need solitude to be creative. I don´t want to feel lonely, but I need to feel that my mind will not be perturbed at unexpected times, for unwelcome reasons. I just want to emphasize that calling ourselves artists is not making us any favors.
That's a loneliness epidemic. Whether or not rich people isolate doesn't contradict this.
[1]: https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america [2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23/7986764...
At least that’s true for me. Organising things socially and then participating in social events, with all the awkward moments and crappy small talk, is painful and at times daunting. But I know after it, I feel enriched and over time it builds strong relationships that add huge amounts of joy to my life. But as we have more and more excuses not to put ourselves through this, like endless Netflix or smart phones, we end up not doing it and feeling lonely.
The low quality/safety of public infrastructure could be to blame. Why would anyone use unpleasantly hot and smelly public transportation, full of loud and potentially shady individuals, without any security around in case someone creates a commotion - when they could just pay a little bit more and not even worry about any of those things?
Why would anyone go to a public gym with a tiny shared space, number of subscriptions that far exceeds the capacity of the place, and deal with unpredictability of whether or not there will be room to train - when they can build a private gym and train whenever they feel like it?
Why would anyone stand around in the crowded "fan pit", having problems even moving because vendors sold more tickets then there is capacity, wait in the line for public bathroom, wait in the line for drinks, make yourself a target for pickpocketing, etc. - when they could just buy a VIP seat, enjoy their time, and go home?
People will stop isolating themselves when not isolating stops being so unpleasant.
What about collaborative creativity? What about spontaneous creativity which is independent of environment? What about the kind of creativity that happens when a person goes into a very public place and sits alone and writes poetry... is that solitude?
I know some writers who are exactly as described in the interview. They cannot work if they are not alone. It makes sense. I know others who are almost the opposite - who need the presence of humanity to be creatively productive.
Methinks the calculus here is more complex than Rilke states.
This is really great practical advice. Decide what you must do. Remove the roadblocks and optimize to achieve your goal.
"You’re looking outside of yourself for the answers, and that’s the last place you’ll find them. The only way for you to move forward is to move inward."
If I can only find answers internally, then why the hell would I listen to you now? What if my internal voice tells me the only answers come from outside?
"Do not strive to uncover all of the answers right now. The answers can’t be given to you because you haven’t been able to live with them. What matters is to live everything. So live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answers, one distant day in the future."
So, "Wherever you go, there you are".
The problem is that humans don’t work like that. We aren’t the passionate bunch the author think we are.
People work for money and status , we are extremely result oriented not passion oriented.
Even on here people enjoy technology , hacking etc. But if you gave us absolute certainty of economic and social success via some other drastically different path (e.g. a reality show such as Jersey Shore) , we would not hesitate one second and wear our tightest tank top and trunks , get tanned and play the part.
I say “us” because I include myself in this scenario too, and I despise reality shows but you cant argue with millions of dollars and millions of followers.
They are respectively the currency of financial and social success.
it’s far better to be a millionaire reality star whose claim to fame is clubbing and partying on camera than a professor with an IQ of 185 whose fusion startup went under
speak for yourself bro. i'm not it.