Strategies for living alone: Done right, it's an opportunity

At 85 he’s writing and publishing books at the rate of four or five a year. It’s nothing new, he’s been doing it nearly 70 years and counts 600-700 volumes as his lifetime output, still growing. He’s a social psychologist by trade and a writer by preference, one he discovered in himself in  his teens and has pursued ever since; Taizo Kato by name. Writing is lonely work. He’s used to being alone. When asked how he copes with loneliness he replies, “That’s like asking you how you cope with breathing.”

Loneliness a modern phenomenon. Modern humanity is alone in ways our ancestors never knew – modern Japanese humanity maybe especially so. More than a third of Japanese households are single-occupant; a fifth of Japanese people of marrying age consider themselves “lifetime singles” – both figures rising. 

Being alone can be good or bad, happy or unhappy, fulfilling or not. Done right, says President (March 3), it’s an opportunity; otherwise, an affliction. Kato, by his own testimony, seems to do it right. So does another President contributor, doctor and writer Minoru Kamata. 

 “If you can’t enjoy being alone at 50 or 60, you’re a grownup child,” says Kato. He divides life into four stages: childhood, youth, prime and age. Youth is a time of self-seeking and self-questioning: Who am I? What will I become? What do I like? What interests me? What is good for me? You meet people, form relationships, break them, explore possibilities, worship idols, outgrow them, wander from place to place, idea to idea, life plan to lie plan, all the while developing a personality, an identity, a self. Live this stage to the full and you emerge, says Kato, well equipped to be creatively alone. Fail to, and you risk “eternal childhood” – not irreversibly, it’s never too late to go back and complete the process, but one way or another, he says, it must be gone through.

Kamata, a decade younger, sounds a note of caution. Yes, he says, aloneness can be enriching of life and good for the soul, but there are limits; humanity is, after all, a social and mutually dependent species. He draws a distinction between kodoku (aloneness) and koritsu (isolation). The former is good; the latter, not.

The inability to be alone reflects the inner emptiness of psychological arrested development, says Kato. The immature soul lacks content and confidence; it must seek the approval of others, found only in company. Praise, encouragement, motivation come not from within but from without. Alone, one is fidgety, restless, insecure. “Is this right, is this good?” Your self is silent; life becomes a perpetual pursuit of outside praise and esteem; without them your very existence feels doubtful; no wonder anxiety assails. An accompanying symptom is narcissism – healthy up to a point in adolescence, morbid beyond. Power harassment is one of its manifestations. If your subordinates are afraid of you, your existence is confirmed.

“I get letters from readers,” Kato tells President: “‘Sensei! Help me! I don’t fit in at work…’” His stock reply, unsatisfactory at first blush but on second thought perhaps the only one possible, is “Look inside your own heart – only you can know what’s there.”

So far, Kamata agrees with him. Aloneness (kodoku) deepens and enriches life. He himself, he says, must spend three or so hours a day by himself in order to feel that he is himself. Beyond that lies isolation (koritsu) – and the risks that accompany it: depression, brain hemorrhage, dementia, early death.

There is the familiar phenomenon known as midlife crisis. Some 80 percent of us go through it, in one form or another. You hit your 40s, your 50s, your 60s – and suddenly it hits you: your work is done, your life lived, what now? He himself, he says, suffered acutely from it. Doctor, humanitarian, activist, writer, radio program host – his is a full life if ever there was one. In 1991 he founded the Japan Chernobyl Foundation, mobilizing medical care for victims of the 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. In the early 2000s he worked to organize medical services in war torn Iraq. Before all that, still in his 30s, he took control of a debt-ridden, bankruptcy-threatened hospital in Nagano Prefecture and turned it around – to the point, he says, where doctors from all over Japan were eager to come and contribute and nurture their skills.

 Then, suddenly, he was in his 50s; old age loomed; did he have a future? It seemed not; he felt a “dreadful emptiness.”

Art saved him. It so happens he is an art lover. Maybe we all should be. Alone – laying stress on that – he traveled to Austria and toured art museums, his special objects being works of the symbolist masters Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Egon Schiele (1890-1918).

Their paintings are startling, astonishing. Viewing them one senses, somehow, the aloneness that inspired them, and also the aloneness their contemplation demands. You stand before each canvas in awe-struck silence, impossible in company.

Kamata came back to life, got back to work. Old age be damned. Life is life, each stage a fresh chapter if not volume, deeper in potential than the last; if it’s not, as Kato would say, it’s your own fault.

Michael Hoffman is the author of “Arimasen.” 

© Japan Today