Nothing wrong with being a loner

"Here we are, having this rendezvous without having to see each other, without having to be in the same place at the same time, without having to talk or check each other out or wear decent clothes. It's loner time.

My book Party of One is about our subculture - the subculture that will never, by nature, join hands and whose voices will never, by nature, form a chorus. Some loners are neuroscientists and some are office cleaners. Some are sculptors and some are Survivor fans. Some are law students and some are surfers. No two loners are alike, but all of us have one thing in common: we like to be alone. We like it. Everyone else - nonloners, that is — can't stand to be alone. They squirm. They feel ashamed. They yearn for company when they're alone. They're bored and don't know what to do. They're lonely.

We're not.

Maybe we're not holed up in caves all day, or in submarines like Captain Nemo in his Nautilus. But alone we feel most normal. Most ourselves. Most alive.

Mainstream culture loves nonloners. Joiners, schmoozers, teamworkers, congregants and all those who play well with others scoop up the rewards.

Meanwhile, loners get dissed. All the time. At school, at work, at church or temple, in movies, loners are misunderstood, misjudged, loathed, pitied and feared. Reporters and profilers calmly and constantly call us perverts, losers, stalkers and serial killers.

If every headline that includes the word "loner" had "Canadian" or "certified public accountant" instead, imagine the outcry.

Nonloners call loners crazy. Cold. Stuck-up. Standoffish. Selfish. Sad. Bad. Secretive. But we know being a loner isn't about hating people. It's about essence, about necessity. We need what others dread. We dread what others need.

Do birds hate lips? Do Fijians detest snowplows?

A journalist and the author of several critically acclaimed books, and a lifelong loner, I wrote Party of One as a way to expose mainstream culture’s antiloner prejudice. But I also wrote it to show the ways in which loners have not just survived but actually changed the world, not just saved civilization but had a lot to do with creating it.

Famous loners span every era, every realm. Albert Einstein, Anne Rice, Michelangelo, Barry Bonds, Isaac Newton, Franz Kafka, Stanley Kubrick, Janet Reno, John Lennon, James Michener, Emily Dickinson, Alexander Pope, Hermann Hesse, Paul Westerberg, Georgia O’Keeffe, Kurt Cobain, Haruki Murakami, Gustav Klimt, Charles Schulz, Dan Clowes, Piet Mondrian, Saint Anthony, H.P. Lovecraft, Beatrix Potter and Joe DiMaggio....

Not to mention Superman, Batman and Shiva.

So — as the pickpockets sang in the musical Oliver! — consider yourself one of us."===http://www.annelirufus.com/partyofone/

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Loner...or introvert?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts_in_a_World_That_Can't_Stop_Talking

 

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I value my alone time more than diamonds or gold.

 

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I need to buy both those books. I think they're available on Amazon..

 

I always saw myself as a "rebel" as I didn't hang around the "in crowd" when I attended school. So even though I wasn't a part of the crowd I always could see what they were doing and smirked as I watched then do their in crowd things. Even we rebels had associates and weren't completely cut off from social interaction but only saw each other on occasion.I was building a motorcycle in my garage at home when I was going to HS so most of my time was spent working on that project while not working at my local grocery store. Not many people cared about what I was up to and that lent a hand in my being a rebel in many ways.

 

I am extremely introverted, so like others do not really like others.

So for me, nothing wrong with it.

 

There is certianly nothing wrong with being a loner. You just have to watch out for those nasty GEICO ads.http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fgMVMaK1NnY

 

Maybe Captain Nemo isn't the best example; he was barking mad. You need somebody to bounce your ideas off instead of just listening to the voices in your head. Otherwise you're liable to become one of those "loners" in the headlines.

 

The internet provides a way for bouncing ideas off others without compromising one's loneness. Some of the deepest and most engaging feedback to my ideas comes from posting here. I know of no relatives or acquaintances who'd be interested in discussing issues on this more focused level.

 

No, i do not agree.

Most criminals and killers are people that have partners or are sex mad, like most folk. Most criminals probably have partners, or had. So there fore your more likely to commit crime if your interested in others, lol

George bush and tony blair are sex mad freaks, and wanted to kill a million people. So being extroverted means your more likely to commit crimes, lol

Like when and if you go out, most criminals out there are people with partners, whether male or female.

I am alone and always will be, and never did anything wrong in my life and could not care less if i never talk to others in my life.

 

Why are you here?

 

ahh, i was going to post that line until i seen this post
(oh well

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" and a loners gotta be alone "

 

I don't know where you get your information but I'll let that claim pass. In any case, we're not talking about "most"; we're talking about loners. I'm not suggesting that all crime would immediately cease if everybody was partnered up. I'm just saying that those crimes that are committed by the cliche "loners" are sometimes caused by not having somebody to talk to.

Some people are loners by choice, others have lonerness thrust upon them.

Charles Manson never did anything wrong in his life - at least, nobody dared to tell him he was wrong. You can be alone in a crowd.

 

Loner?
Twice in the last month I got rides to the hospital in ambulances after I awoke with my blood pressure crashing. My wife, called 911, and dealt with the paramedics for me. With the crashed blood pressure, I was barely conscious. Without her to take over, I do not know if i would have survived. The main thing the medicos did for me was the saline drip which rehydrated my body and restored the blood pressure to reasonable norms.
Cause unknown.
Doctors ain't scientists, they address symptoms(quite handily---so far).

My uncle Frederick, known as Fritz, was a hermit(an extreme loner), and died younger than I am today. Maybe he'd have lived longer with a caring loving spouse?

 

"The difference between married people and single people, in terms of health, is narrowing. To really understand this, we have to be precise about terms. Researchers typically distinguish between never married, currently married, widowed and divorced. As we look in-depth into this issue of marriage and health, we’ll see that things get pretty fuzzy nowadays.

The Changing Face of Marriage and Life Expectancy

No one is saying that having a piece of paper that says “married” on it is going to improve your life expectancy. There is something about people who live in marriage that improves life expectancy –- or to be more precise, there was something about people who lived in marriage in the 70s that was found to improve life expectancy. Now, people could be listed as “single never married” in census data, but be living with someone and be experiencing all the health benefits of marriage without having the marriage certificate. This complicates research on marriage and health (I predict that we aren’t going to see anymore “marriage and life expectancy” research because of the multiple living arrangements that are options for people. Instead we’ll see new indicators like “intimate partner” or “spouse-like relationships”).

Singles Catching Up

Even using the traditional categories of “currently married” or “never married,” singles are catching up, but only men. Men who were never married typically had the lowest life expectancy (in 1972). Now, the never married men are closing in on their currently married counterparts. The difference in life expectancy is becoming smaller because (the researchers think) that single men now have access to support and health resources that, in the past, only came because their wife took care of them. In other words, in the 1970s, married men had the advantage (over never married men) because they had their wives to make sure they went to the doctor and took care of themselves. Now, men are taking more responsibility for their own health and it is normal for a man to express concern about his health and take action.

What About Widows?

Bad news for the widowed (as if being widowed weren’t bad news enough). Compared to 1972, people who are widowed now report poorer health than their married counterparts. In the 70s, they reported their health as the same as married people, now their health is about 7% worse. No one really knows why the experience of being widowed now is more detrimental to health than being widowed in the 70s. My guess is that in the 70s, widowed people had more of a community and extended family to help them out (they were more likely to live with their children, for example). Now, the widowed are more likely to be isolated.

The Study – Marriage and Life Expectancy

This study used data from the National Health Interview Study over a period of 32 years. The purpose of the study was to look at how the relationship between marriage, health and life expectancy changed over that period. There were 1.1 million people in the database.
Source(s):

Liu H, Umberson DJ. The times they are a changin’: marital status and health differentials from 1972 to 2003. J Health Soc Behav 49(3), 2008.

http://longevity.about.com/od/wholiveslongest/a/marriage_le.htm

 

I spend a lot of time in solitary pursuits, so in that sense, some would regard me as a 'loner'. Doing things by myself does not bother me in the way it seems to disturb many others. Though I am quite capable of interacting and working well with others, I find it very tiring because of all the distractions. Many people seem to need to chatter all the time which reduces productivity and efficiency in my observation. More errors are made and work needs to be done twice.

Others are forever trying to place me in leadership roles because of my work ethic and analytical abilities. I am quite willing to teach and lead, but only if the students are ready to learn. I am presently mentoring two persons in the art of horsemanship, without recompense, for the lessons they are learning cannot be valued in those terms.

As for employment leadership roles, they have yet to offer me sufficient incentive to attempt to lead the unwilling, unknowing and uncaring, lol. :bugeye:

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Extroverts value the energy of human contact and interaction. It's not a matter so much of efficiency vs. inefficiency. It's a matter of emotional relationship vs. immediate task-accomplishment. As a loner too I see the impracticality of small talk and feeling people out. But I understand the need to relate to the person as a whole. You want to cultivate trust and reliability with the person. You want to establish commonality such that future mutual interdependence becomes guaranteed. I have had to realize that with most people it is FEELINGS that count more than IDEAS. That's just the way the majority of people are orientated.

 

For the priceless compensation of positive feedback, plenty of folks like me will take the "virtual horsemanship" (horsepersonship?) version of your "Arabian Nights" however you choose to dish it out. Your persona exudes a serenity all posters should aspire to. Even I feel a palpable loss of cantankerousness . . . which I will presently abandon as I march off to where the little boys are swordfighting.

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Heretic!
Turncoat!
Fortunately (as Sche well knows) I, at least, don't.

 

There are evolutionary advantages to being able to cooperate in a group versus not being able to cooperate over resources and defense with others of your species. And it's a good bet humans would not have been able to have risen to earthly dominance if we were a solitary species.

But as someone once said: "If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you need to find another room."