"Solitude may cause discomfort, but that discomfort is often a healthy and inspiring sort. It's only in moments of absence that a daydreaming person like [novelist] Anthony Trollope can receive truly unexpected notions. What will become of all those surreptitious gifts when our blank spaces are filled in with duties to 'social networks' and the relentless demands of our tech addictions?
"I fear we are the last of the daydreamers. I fear our children will lose lack, lose absence, and never comprehend its quiet, immeasurable value. If the next generation socializes more online than in the so-called real world, and if they have no memory of a time when the reverse was true, it follows that my peers and I are the last to feel the static surrounding online socialization. The Internet becomes 'the real world' and our physical reality becomes the thing that needs to be defined and set aside — 'my analog life,' 'my snail life,' 'my empty life.'
Montaigne once wrote, 'We must reserve a back shop, all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.' But where will tomorrow's children set up such a shop, when the world seems to conspire against the absentee soul?"
