Yesterday I had a nice visit with the fellow who bought my first trailer from me. He bought my trailer for $1800, camped full time in it for two years, and then sold it for $20oo. The bastard!
I tend to treat him as my "grasshopper." So when the topic of loneliness came up, I was a bit disappointed to hear him endorse the "sacred solitude" paradigm of RV boondocking. But he didn't outright deny experiencing loneliness as some solitary campers do.
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Let's take an indirect approach to this issue of the loneliness of campers, by experiencing the human tribe at its best, during a festival. Currently I am camping near, and volunteering for, a mountain bike race in southwestern Utah.
1. Racing. The festival is predicated on the idea that racing is supposed to be exciting. Observing the crowd's behavior, this appears to be true. But it is strange how any human endeavor must be turned into a competition.
Consider the expense of these bicycles, let alone the risk of injury.
Is there nothing about the activity itself that is intrinsically interesting and rewarding? Must everything be about ego-gratification?
2. The sardine can. Consider the automatic tendency of many people to deliberately choose to camp unnecessarily close to other people, despite having the freedom to do otherwise.
3. The "beam." There are people who are like the two dogs I've had: they can easily and quickly win over just about any new acquaintance. They have a "charm-beam" like a bright LED flashlight: all they have to do is point it at their next conquest to light them up.
But calm people don't get noticed too much. Even worse are serious-looking people, who look nerdy and scholarly. Lepers would be more popular.
It is easy to observe people's impatience with other people.
4. Mis-managed expansiveness. Watch people roll in to camp in their cars. After turning off the engines, they pop all the doors open and spew music all over the camping area. What is going through their heads?
Give them a little freedom, and they instantly convert it into noise pollution. Paraphrasing the classic speech about television in the original "Manchurian Candidate," we could say that 'there are two distinct types of people in the world: people who go to the Great Outdoors to get away from noise, and a second group that goes there to make noise.'
But from their point of view they are doing something harmless or even positive that expresses a momentary feeling of expansiveness. The same might be said of dog owners whose expansiveness takes the form of giving their dog freedom around other people.
It's a good thing, is it not?, for freedom, cheerfulness, and expansiveness to be linked. Both the music-sharers and the dog-sharers are not evil; they are just forgetting to look at it from other people's perspective.
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But the reader might say that I could try harder to 'think positive' about human behavior. They're right. But one could also try harder to think positive about solitude. Therefore, how positive or negative one wants to be, cancels out of both sides of the equation.
The point here is not to force yourself into a deliberately positive or negative attitude, but rather, to observe human behavior as it really is -- not as you want it to be. The result is an ambivalence about being around human beings. This ambivalence should keep your annoyances mild when around people, and your loneliness mild when alone.
Anybody who says that solitary camping can't get lonely is simply in denial. Rather than deny, let's manage loneliness, instead. This consists largely of restraining yourself from exacerbating loneliness by fantasizing about ideal human beings.
Secondly, it involves going back and forth between solitude and group events of whatever kind, in order to restore your ambivalence and equipoise. Notice I did not say 'indifference.'
I tend to treat him as my "grasshopper." So when the topic of loneliness came up, I was a bit disappointed to hear him endorse the "sacred solitude" paradigm of RV boondocking. But he didn't outright deny experiencing loneliness as some solitary campers do.
______________________________________
Let's take an indirect approach to this issue of the loneliness of campers, by experiencing the human tribe at its best, during a festival. Currently I am camping near, and volunteering for, a mountain bike race in southwestern Utah.
1. Racing. The festival is predicated on the idea that racing is supposed to be exciting. Observing the crowd's behavior, this appears to be true. But it is strange how any human endeavor must be turned into a competition.
Consider the expense of these bicycles, let alone the risk of injury.
Is there nothing about the activity itself that is intrinsically interesting and rewarding? Must everything be about ego-gratification?
2. The sardine can. Consider the automatic tendency of many people to deliberately choose to camp unnecessarily close to other people, despite having the freedom to do otherwise.
3. The "beam." There are people who are like the two dogs I've had: they can easily and quickly win over just about any new acquaintance. They have a "charm-beam" like a bright LED flashlight: all they have to do is point it at their next conquest to light them up.
But calm people don't get noticed too much. Even worse are serious-looking people, who look nerdy and scholarly. Lepers would be more popular.
It is easy to observe people's impatience with other people.
4. Mis-managed expansiveness. Watch people roll in to camp in their cars. After turning off the engines, they pop all the doors open and spew music all over the camping area. What is going through their heads?
Give them a little freedom, and they instantly convert it into noise pollution. Paraphrasing the classic speech about television in the original "Manchurian Candidate," we could say that 'there are two distinct types of people in the world: people who go to the Great Outdoors to get away from noise, and a second group that goes there to make noise.'
But from their point of view they are doing something harmless or even positive that expresses a momentary feeling of expansiveness. The same might be said of dog owners whose expansiveness takes the form of giving their dog freedom around other people.
It's a good thing, is it not?, for freedom, cheerfulness, and expansiveness to be linked. Both the music-sharers and the dog-sharers are not evil; they are just forgetting to look at it from other people's perspective.
________________________________________
But the reader might say that I could try harder to 'think positive' about human behavior. They're right. But one could also try harder to think positive about solitude. Therefore, how positive or negative one wants to be, cancels out of both sides of the equation.
The point here is not to force yourself into a deliberately positive or negative attitude, but rather, to observe human behavior as it really is -- not as you want it to be. The result is an ambivalence about being around human beings. This ambivalence should keep your annoyances mild when around people, and your loneliness mild when alone.
Anybody who says that solitary camping can't get lonely is simply in denial. Rather than deny, let's manage loneliness, instead. This consists largely of restraining yourself from exacerbating loneliness by fantasizing about ideal human beings.
Secondly, it involves going back and forth between solitude and group events of whatever kind, in order to restore your ambivalence and equipoise. Notice I did not say 'indifference.'
Comments
Good post. I agree that whatever the noise and solitude balance a person desires, they should learn how to be considerate and not force their preference on others. This seems a very hard lesson for some—they can't really believe that others can be happily different than themselves ("there's something wrong with them").
I think I have better neighbors now! For the most part I also avoid the 'sardine can' problem and RV Parks are pretty good about keeping the noise down - ATVs, Motorcycles and Class 'A' idling diesels being the exceptions.