How can we reconcile loneliness with retreat?

I guess there's training that leads up to it, but tou have monastic traditions where people go on a 3 year retreat in a cave. The people who bring them food probably don't stick around.

I suppose it's another extreme and when used as an opportunity to examine the mind there may be deep insights that translates to these microscopic maps.

It doesn't have to be that extreme for the average person but maybe somewhere in between.

 

Zooming out to a more general level, though I think it applies to this topic: Constraints for discipline. Social limitation is one kind, communication is another closely related one.

With communication there are two kinds of constraints: Quantity and structure.

The amount of words I type is obvious, not making it too long even if I can’t help or know the limitation of how much any given reader on a forum is willing to process.

Structure, on the other hand has to do with how we process the information, and whether we’re even willing to use a way of thinking even if we don’t have to adopt it.

It’s striking to me even very simple structures to process and make meaning, or just as a tool for people to try will be dismissed out of hand, and that seems to come down to attention.

The combination of being locked in ones own way of thinking and not paying attention to any new way of thinking (but plenty of informational junk food in terms of content for entertainment only) seems to be the general predicament of many. It also doesn’t seem to occur to many that just a superficial nicety that really doesn’t listen to anyone else really amounts to mostly ignoring other people. (“Welcome to Costco – I Love You.”) While it may not be anti-social, it can be said to be largely asocial and – well, fake.

Yet that seems to be largely the norm.

It’s like many people are always marketing and selling themselves in a general way, a kind of social packaging. And when someone else who has some substantial content, a “product” that isn’t just about the superficial presentation and doesn’t try to sell it and go straight to the structure they can’t relate to it.