How Solitude and Isolation Can Affect Your Social Skills

Neil Ansell became a hermit entirely by accident.

Back in the 1980s, he was living in a squat in London with 20 other people. Then someone made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: a cottage in the Welsh mountains, with rent of just £100 ($130) per year. This was a place so wild, the night sky was a continuous carpet of stars – and the neighbours were a pair of ravens, who had lived in the same cedar tree for 20 years.

The catch was that the scenic views came with extreme isolation – by standards achievable in the UK, anyway. He lived on a hill farm inhabited by a single elderly tenant, miles from the nearest village. He didn’t have a phone, and in the five years he lived there, not a single person walked by the house.

“I became so used to being on my own that I recall going to the village shop one day and my voice cracking, as I asked for something at the counter,” he says. “I realised I hadn’t spoken in two weeks, not a single word. And that became quite normal for me.”

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According to Ty Tashiro, a psychologist and the author of Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome, it seems plausible that we are becoming collectively more awkward at the moment. But he’s keen to stress that for most people, any resulting slip-ups are likely to be extremely minor.

“These tiny deviations from what’s socially expected in these situations can create a tremendous amount of embarrassment – and that just shows you how fine-tuned the human mind is to pick up on social expectations, and then assess whether we’re meeting them,” says Tashiro.

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