"You can run, but can you hide?"

A startling revelation as I sit in my room, door shut, headphones securely in place, removed to my personal corner of campus and reduced to my own fleeting thoughts about life, the universe and everything:

I am never, ever alone.

No sooner do I think this than I feel the compelling urge to look it up online and find quotes to justify my stance. Is my instinct borne out by current research? Do the experts think that people are becoming less alone? Or perhaps the resounding opinion is that everyone is becoming less connected, more distant, increasingly solitary?

This impulse, of course, only further proves my point—at least about myself, anyway. Having become so accustomed to being able to cite someone else, I automatically look to another source for guidance. I can barely stand the solitude of my own thoughts.

Physical “solitude” is one matter—mental solitude is another entirely. I am evidently alone, in my room, isolated from the rest of Duke’s population. By myself, I should supposedly be deeply engrossed in my own private ruminations.

But physical separation does not true solitude make. Even as I pretend to study by myself in my room, I’m not completely disconnected. In fact, I count the ways in which I’m still in the “company” of someone else:

1) Headphones—the wire of which twists its way to my iPod, set to loop on an album I have long conditioned myself to associate with productivity.

2) Google Chat—on which I have two windows open and through which I am already entertaining a conversation about my lack of solitude with a friend studying in the U.K.

I think about performing an experiment—turning off my iPod, closing Firefox, ignoring my call when it comes—and shudder before I’m even able to imagine it in full. I wonder what life could have been like in a time before technologies that allowed humans to be constantly connected to each other but find myself unable to truly conceive of such an existence.

Is the lack of true seclusion really a concern? As my Gchat friend just jokingly asked me, why wouldn’t we want to be plugged in all the time? More information, more communication, more progress, right?

But the more I allow other people’s voices leverage in my mind, the less I find my own ideas holding sway. No thought can be legitimized until a Google search brings up several million concurring opinions. No experience is actually real until I’ve told someone else about it. With the advent of personal blogs, even the most shameless navel-gazing must be done in public.

Collectivity has collectively gone crazy. After Duke’s most recent advancement in the NCAA tournament, my Facebook news feed filled with identical statuses, which were then officially liked by every other Duke student online.

Is this too much, or is it natural? After all, evolutionary psychology tells me that I have been biologically programmed to be a social being. We naturally seek approval, and collaboration is the best method to ensure survival.

I suspect, though, that our evolutionary conditions allowed us to escape one another every once in a while. We were never previously so freakishly good at stalking each other as we are now. Solitude, if not completely desirable, was at least feasible. What, then, are the consequences of the contemporary exploitation by modern-day technology of such an innate desire for social interaction?

Well. My lack of concurring research makes me a little hesitant to say this, but I suppose it could lead someone first to search for collective validation of her opinion about individual isolation and then to publicly regret the lack of private thought.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I looked it up and I was right—it turns out Thoreau really valued solitude too.

Shining Li is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every Tuesday and today as an online exclusive.