It's an orientation, not just a choice
Company drains, makes our eyes glaze over
Nonloners call us standoffish, aloof, afraid. They can't handle the truth that we don't need them
"The word alone should not, for us, ring cold and hollow, but hot. Pulsing with potentiality"
The world has a biased and prejudiced attitude towards loners because anything done alone is discredited, devalued, & undiscussed
Love and hate are both about engagement, which is what nonloners really want
Temperaments like skills, preferences, and modes are inborn according to behavioral geneticists
The mob depends on advice, not loners
Difference between introverts and extroverts is how they perceive and interpret info
Extrovert - objective, facts
Introvert - subjective, impressions and opinions
Loners are both subjective and objective thinkers
"In their world it is not safe to talk about things done alone. Unsafe or boring. Nearly everything a loner does is done alone - at least, the things that matter. So that when we loners are in company, those sparse occasions with those lucky few, what matters to us is not mentioned. Writing - the physical, part of it - evades description. I just sat there. But one writes about topics, and nothing is more interesting in the world. Why don't you ask me?...They do not ask. It will not come up if I do not bring it up. And I do not. I think I should not have to. I am testing them - not that they know"
Nonloners conclude that loners are too mean for friends or too unlikeable, too angry
A lack of friends is a matter of time because there is too much to do alone and it requires loners to put in overtime to recharge. So it is a matter of energy
Nonloners and loners have a different rulebook
"We are the ones who know how to entertain ourselves. How to learn without taking a class. How to contemplate and how to create. Loners, by virtue of being loners, in celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave - like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels, and sole survivors. Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before, and the unprecedented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints, esoteric like the cabalists"
"Loner values once played a much large role in American culture than they do now. A nation founded by iconoclasts, a revolution won by outnumbered outsiders. A wild land settled by rugged individualists: the cowboy and the pioneer against the unknown, the uncharted, the frightening creatures whose home it was. A protagonist on his own, brave and resourceful, making claims and righting wrongs, misunderstood, a stranger in a strange land, pure at heart. Loner values. But the rugged-individualist-as-American-hero has been more or less eclipsed in the culture, in general. A settled land functions on teamwork. A slow but sure anti loner sentiment has crept into every chamber of the American honeycomb. Loners, as portrayed in the media, have turned from saviors to terrorists. Loner heroes are less obvious onscreen and on the stage today than forty or even thirty years ago"
"At the dawn of the twentieth century, political economist Thorstein Veblen wrote about the rise of a new American leisure class to whom seeing and being seen meant everything. It was Veblen who coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption." A wealthy man's "own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence, " thus only by the showy expenditure of money will others be sure to see and understand"
"With the emergence of urban life, Veblen wrote, "the means of communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging his reputability than the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under their direction observation." It is now customary, and instantaneous, to identify strangers by their style, their choice of mass-produced popular culture"
"Something in the nature of comics - perhaps the sheer low-tech physicality of drawing or the way words and pictures feed each other - makes them a startlingly intimate mirror for an artist's soul. For his comic Ghost World, Daniel Clowes created a loner heroine in the alienated teen Enid Coleslaw, whose view of the world is that only two people in it - herself and her best finned, Becky - are at all worthwhile"
"Historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner have said that the American West is the key to our national identity, that from its man-against-the-wilderness dynamic sprang our pluck, our independence, our inventiveness. As we have seen, the paradigm of the Wild West is a longer paradigm: the outsider; the self-reliant career of his own future, the screw-you individualist. Nonlinear viewers feel that inner cowboy stirring deep inside, and in him they feel a wistful anguish at what has been lost. Actual loners see Wild West adventures as transparencies to be fitted over our own lives. Lariats aside, is navigating a tricky stretch of Jackson Hole alone on horseback all that different from plotting a course through a day at the office when time clocks, bosses, and coworkers are the rattlesnakes, the rapids, the Sioux on the warpath?"
"Bullhorn that it is for rebel voices, rock music has from its outset attracted loners. Like comics, rock at its roots is primal, minimal, a body and, maybe, an instrument. Nostalgic critics lament that rock was co-opted after Woodstock, when greed and cynicism poisoned its rebel ideals. True enough, later rock has a less and less longish sound. At the turn of the millennium, hip-hop was the world's top-selling musical genre, and almost universally its lyrics laud togetherness"
Early rock stars launched youth culture. Youth culture is conformist but its message is that of the loner. Rock lyrics are disenfranchised, individualistic, poetic, emotional, personal
1940s and 1950s film noir - heroes were loners. Explaining stoically the self-determined rules by which the classic noir protagonist plays, recounts mistakes to the camera. Strives to right wrongs, escape or overturn injustice, he's a small man in a big, dark, incomprehensible world where he's brutally tested, accused, persecuted
Mid-1950s - Wild West was new arena in which heroes were tested. Viewers could ingest loner-lessons like rugged individualism, independence, claiming a domain without taking them quite so personally as the noir films
"Western films had been around since the beginning of cinema, but silent-era Westerns were black-and-white in both morals and film stock. The new arrivals set messy dilemmas amid Technicolor valleys, deserts, and plateaus - loner dilemmas that forced protagonists to choose between lives of companionship and loose-limbed, solitary freedom"
"As realism became more the fashion, as viewers began to take films more and more personally, cinematic protagonists and their morals became less allusive, less symbolic, less abstract. And so loner protagonists could no longer be heroes. Another force has arguably hastened their descent. As corporations grow larger and advertising grows more sophisticated, culture in general glides more than ever into groupthink. Entertainment in the twenty-first century has more than ever to do with marketing strategies. What becomes popular now is increasingly determined by which manufacturer can spend the most money parading its product. And, increasingly, audiences are handed entertainment, prepackaged, with merchandising and mob behavior as not-very-well-hidden agendas. It is in the corporations' best interests to dissuade viewers from emulating loners, who tend not to adopt fads and to eschew to peer pressure, and thus who tend not to spend as much on entertainment's by-products, and on tickets to big-name blockbusters, as non loners. Thus it is in corporations' best interests to make loners look bad. Silly. Ugly. Crazy. Predatory. Lethal"
Loner role models can be found in revival theaters and vintage racks in video stores
"As for sex, that level of intimacy lies at the end of a journey whose navigation no longer can take lightly. Social creatures, for whom saying hello is second nature and, it follows, can keep up light conversation in a crowded bar, have a knack for telescoping those stages between strangerhood and sex. Between them, it's just understood"
"In chat rooms and on-line bulletin boards, the subculture emerges, defining itself and its preferences as it could never do in a public sphere. So many sites are dedicated to special interests - from Lord of the Rings to Indonesian Lepidoptera to yaws, not to mention autocastration - that like minds are only ever a click or two away"
"Even the word "cybersex" has the self-consciously sci-fi shiver of something from a Philip K. Dick novel. Yet the future is here. Unsolicited porn - sexual spam - accounted for as much as 8 percent of all email traffic in the summer of 2002. Hooking up with a live human being, albeit unseen, to spin on-line fantasies is easy and costs nothing....porn sites and sexual chat rooms have done more for loners than any of us want to admit"
Joani Blank says masturbation is not viewed well. Author of "I am my lover" and "First person sexual", she is self-pleasuring's most passionate pioneer
Alternative-lifestyle journal To-Do-List introduced the word "quirkyalone"
"For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not being alone. One a fine but by no means transcendent date we dream of going home to watch television. We would prefer to be alone with our own thoughts than with a less than perfect fit. We are almost constitutionally incapable of casual relationships"
"Written works do not produce fast reactions as pictures and sculptures and music do. It takes no effort to see or hear. But to read - to grasp what the writer has done - requires commitment. Engagement. As is the case with most art, the relationship between maker and audience is remote in time and space. The writer is nowhere to be seen when the reader takes up the book, or even dead. But most often, books go unread. The fiction shelves in any library are heavy with novels - look at their checkout slips - that have not been lent for years"
1984 study - Dr. David Weeks examined the nature of eccentricity - only or eldest children of strict parents, vivid imaginations, idealistic, wanted to make world better. Noncompetitive, opinionated, curious, intelligent, creative, offbeat eating and living arrangement, many single, most were loners
"Deserts as lonerlands offer comparatively few stimuli that demand a response. A desert's colors and occupants and climatic variations are relatively few. Its flat pastels and fuck-you climate make it "a haven for people who can't function in cities," Stillman says"
"For loners, traveling means never staying anywhere long enough for others to know us. In this way, it is a liberation. Hello, good-bye, without expectations, without obligations. No guilt. Passing through. Or not saying hello at all. It is an ideal state sometimes. You get all the advantages of being somewhere, seeing things, living, walking the streets alone or eating in restaurants alone, exploring and absorbing, and no one you know knows where you are. You see just strangers all day"
"Weather makes a difference, too. When it immobilizes you, pins you at home, you are a prisoner, a sitting duck. Then they can find you. But mild climates offer loners a handy escape route. On lovely days, no one can assume you are at home. Unanswered phones, unanswered doorbells are not so perplexing on a lovely day. You might be anywhere"
Barbie and G.I. Joe were both loners, then action figures came along in a pack
"Action figures give a wholly different message than a solo-adventurer toy like G.I. Joe. At the most basic level, they inspire a restless desire for quantity, more. One is never enough. One is ridiculous, pathetic, incomplete. And playing with an ensemble of toys might theoretically teach social skills such as cooperation, but it also limits each doll's putative abilities. It pigeonholes them, diminishes each of them, diminishing the individual. This is exacerbated by the fact that action figures replicate specific characters in famous films. They not only have names, but also quirks and pasts and dialogues. Their personalities come predetermined, known already by the child even before she plays with them"
"At first glance, these electronic playthings might be seen as "loner toys," but are they really? Yes, solo protagonists playing these games dispatch villains, solve problems, and blow things to bits. But the player hardly needs to think, only to click. Hours go by in a kind of daze. The child has not created a unique character, story, dialogue, or situation. In this sense, clicking away, he is even worse off than he would be with a boxful of Star Wars figures. Playing this way, he is cut off even from himself"
"With only a single doll, the child celebrates self-reliance, learns to strategize, and learns the most potent lessons of all: The doll or the real person the doll represents - requires nothing in order to do things and have experiences. Its adventures are sparked and carried out through ingenuity, imagination, creativity"
“People say the desert is desolate. Yet for me it's very much alive, full of surprises. As soon as I see those wide-open spaces, I can breathe”
"With the rise of industry, farms gave way to meatpacking plants. Smithies gave way to steelworks. In so doing, the average workplace expanded exponentially. In factories, the average worker was surrounded by row on row of other workers, often for brutally long shifts...the very technology that made life faster, brighter, and better in general made the lives of those who ran its machines hell. But writers decrying slums and factories do not mourn the special misery, the added agony, that such conditions visited on loners. Who, lamenting typhoid, smog, and amputations, would add to those ills too much company?"
"Previously, living solo had been the province only of rich lords and pariahs. But metropolises spawned the perfectly respectable studio apartment, ubiquitous and cheap, with room enough for only one. With this change, cities became their own kind of paradise for loners. In the very anonymity critics derided lay the privacy loners have always craved....thus, thanks to technology, the urban loner has emerged and flourished over the last hundred years"
"Who cares whether Net users behave like loners? Commentators never spew fire over the fact that offices force loners to act like nonloners.....Our friend the Internet, neutral as all technology, has done - no of its own volition, as it has none - the same thing that crime reporters have, and profilers, and witch-hunters. It has kindled that age-old panic which shows itself at every change it gets: fear of loners"
"Down the years, how many loners have been called upon to be creative in cramped cubicles, coworkers on all sides, phones jingling and shoes scuffling a partition away? Thinking of them means thinking of how many masterpieces were not written, how much cleverness or discovery died before it could ever see the light of day"
The freedom of not being confined to a specific shift and place frees loners
Massive changes of work structure, telecommuting, happened alongside the rise in the "Creative Class" called by Richard Florida economics professor. This class represents a third of the workforce. "The creative ethos" has a lot in common with the loner ethos
"Creative Age", creative output is the commodity. Schedule and rules have become more flexible in order to cater to how the creative process works
"Members of the Creative Class "do not want to conform to organizational or institutional directives and resist traditional group-oriented norms." "Creative Class Values" include individuality, self-statement, self-determination, and meritocracy - in which producing good work is more important than making a particularly good impression. All of these are loner territory. The Creative Class's lifestyle is experiential, its achievements fueled and inspirations sparked by being out of the office and in the world, observing it. Nice work if a loner can get it"
“If the notion of the self is a product of human confidence and security, of free time and free choice, then it is nothing less than a product of civilization. Individualism is a reward, like the printed word and manicures, for millennia well spent”