Is loneliness tied to creativity?
Many of the lonely people I interviewed in LONELY said that their feelings of isolation made them more creative: they wrote songs, they wrote poems, they painted. It’s a very common idea that lonelinss somehow feeds creative work.
But that’s not the whole story. I think that what loneliness does, above all, is fuel a huge need to communicate. And if there’s no one around to talk to, or laugh with, you’re going to turn to a journal, or write a short story, or pen a song about how alone you feel.
But that doesn’t mean that loneliness is a creative blessing. Experiments have shown that people who are cued to feel isolated actually do worse on thinking and reasoning tests than people who feel connected. This suggests that loneliness—rather than being a creative blessing—can actually interfere with the sharp skills you need to create something really good.
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 10:38 am and is filed under the category Loneliness and Creativity.
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I think this is spot on. What I take from your book and other authors (such as the sociologist Randall Collins, who writes on “interaction rituals”) is that successful interactions give us the emotional energy we need not just to be happy, but also to think and be creative.