Dartmouth's dining facilities comprise some of the most interesting microcosms of community at the College. Other than perhaps our libraries, they are the only truly communal spaces that every Dartmouth student utilizes throughout their time in Hanover. Like the libraries, our dining facilities serve multiple purposes: they provide a space in which to eat but also serve as a study space for the diligent, such as the Class of 1953 Commons on a Sunday morning or Collis on a Thursday evening. Most importantly, however, the Hop, Collis and '53 Commons all provide a social space in which students, faculty and community members have the chance to interact. When we are in one of these environments, we are almost always surrounded by people.
It is particularly interesting to observe the Collis environment during peak hours. There are two ways to sit in Collis Common Ground: with a group or alone. Those who are eating with a friend or a group of friends engage in active conversation, exemplifying their sociability. Those who eat alone almost always face an open laptop or a stack of papers. What is interesting to note, however, is the number of those people who are actually doing work, as opposed to those who have their laptops open for the sake of appearance, looking busy while browsing Facebook or online shopping. To hide the fact that we are eating alone, we often adopt the semblance of work, believing this to be justification for solitude.
Why do we feel the need to justify being by ourselves? In a TED talk, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Sherry Turkle argued that being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved. And at Dartmouth, this is a particularly salient issue. Due to the great emphasis the College places on community, it almost seems inconceivable for Dartmouth students to be lonely. After all, one of the supposed benefits of attending such a small institution is the tight-knit student body. As such, it almost feels as though we do not have the right to claim to be lonely. With so many organizations and clubs and student groups, how is it possible for a student to be alone? Seventy percent of Americans identify as extroverts, indicating the obvious social stigma against being by oneself. At Dartmouth, a school in which big personalities and group mentalities thrive, the percentage may be even higher. Being lonely, or rather, being alone, becomes inexcusable.
But being alone is not a problem. Rather, the issue is that we refuse to share our loneliness. We do not admit to being lonely because we never allow ourselves to truly be seen alone. I cannot remember the last time I observed anyone in our dining halls simply eating by themselves. If we are without a meal partner, we take our food back to our rooms to eat, truly isolating ourselves and masking solidarity in our solitude. But by incapacitating ourselves from being alone, we only perpetuate our loneliness. We adopt the tendency to replace real interaction with pure presence. In essence, we become alone together.
What we should instead strive for is the ability to be together alone. Or better yet, simply alone. This is not to say that Dartmouth should seek to produce a barrage of antisocial hermits who have no interest in human interaction. But there is most certainly something to be said about the person who is truly unafraid to be seen completely unaccompanied in a public space. And perhaps it only looks strange because we have been conditioned to think in this way. When we remove the premise of a meal or the acceptable silence that accompanies studying, can we still stand to be together? Or do we sometimes use people the same way we use Facebook as filler? When we do make connections with people, we must make sure that it is not as a symptom of our loneliness, but rather as a cure.
Granted, this problem is not Dartmouth-specific. It is not only in the KAF line that people endlessly text or check blitz to keep busy. But at Dartmouth, we should make a concerted effort to live up to our promise of community and address loneliness by allowing people to be alone.
