On loneliness, solitude, and technology, two

But those old contacts can also turn into a crutch that prevents students from truly engaging with the new world around them or learning to be alone in their own mind. One of the freshmen McEwen interviewed confessed that every day she spent her lunchtime sitting on the steps outside a campus building, calling or texting her sister. That was less painful for her than sitting alone. Yet like the helicopter parents who hover over their children at the playground in the hopes of shielding them from bumps and bruises, we can delay the hurt only so long. As the Talmud tells us, sometimes a little bit of pain can be a blessing.

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More than anything, McEwen found in her University of Toronto study that college students are constantly connected to the point of having no concept of a truly unplugged life. There's a time-honored tradition in Canada of "going to the cottage," usually in the summertime, and being blissfully disconnected from the rest of the world. "The participants in my study had real discomfort going to the cottage," McEwen says. "If there's no cellphone reception, no Internet access, they think, 'What the hell am I doing out there?' "

It's hard to imagine a Henry David Thoreau emerging from this millennial generation, someone motivated to log two years and two months alone in the woods around Walden and wax about how he "never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." He'd have no time to observe the bullfrogs or water his bean plants. He'd be too busy searching for a Wi-Fi signal.

The End of Alone