Which of Us Is Wrong?

I. A sentence

The sentence is usually spoken in good faith, sometimes even out of love. Someone close says it to a person who has been on their own for a long time, absorbed in their own work:

“Spend that much time alone and you start imagining things. You are exaggerating.”

The speaker means no harm. Most of the time they are genuinely worried. The listener feels something but cannot name it straight away: there is a part of the sentence that is right and a part that is wrong, and the two are so tightly woven that, unable to separate them, they cannot answer. The conversation ends there. Both sides walk away convinced they were right.

This essay opens that sentence up.

We take the sentence not as one person’s problem but as a recurring type of speech. Anyone who works alone for long stretches hears some version of it: the writer, the researcher, the founder, the composer, the student writing a thesis, whoever has been circling the same question for years. The question is this: how does isolation actually affect a person’s perception of reality and their foresight about the future? And who is in a position to measure that?

II. Two claims in a single breath

The simplicity of the sentence is deceptive. It contains two claims that are logically independent of each other.

The first is causal: isolation leads to a break with reality. This is a claim about isolation, and it can be tested empirically.

The second is epistemic: your expectation is not realistic. This is a claim about one particular forecast, and it can only be discussed by someone who knows what that forecast is about.

The two claims can be separated. One can be true while the other is false. Someone may indeed be isolated with their grasp of reality perfectly intact, and still make a very poor prediction. Or someone whose sense of reality is seriously disturbed may happen to be right.

When the judgement fuses the two in a single breath, here is what it does: it uses the first as evidence and lets the second pass without proof. The observation “you are isolated” becomes a bridge to the conclusion “therefore you are wrong.” But there is nothing underneath the bridge.

The first move of this essay is that separation. The second is this: having separated them, to take both claims seriously. Because both are sometimes true.

III. The same architecture, two lives

For anyone who wants to understand what isolation does, history holds a strange coincidence.

When the single-occupancy cell spread through American prisons in the nineteenth century, the architectural model for those cells was already at hand. That model was the monastery. The thought was that a prisoner left alone with his conscience would feel remorse, would turn inward and be cleansed; the cells in which sentences were served were indeed built on the model of monastic cells (Storr, 1988). The intention was good. The result was catastrophic. Prison administrations soon found that isolation placed an unbearable pressure on inmates, producing mental instability and violent outbursts.

It is worth pausing here. The same room. The same dimensions. The same silence. The same number of hours. On one side, a cell people have entered voluntarily for centuries in order to go deeper; on the other, a cell that takes a person apart.

This gathers the whole argument of the essay into a single image: isolation is not an outcome, it is a condition. What determines the outcome is not the condition itself but the chain that runs from it to the outcome. We will now look at the links of that chain one by one. But two pieces of clearing-up come first. One concerns a trap set by language, the other concerns when that trap was set.

IV. When was loneliness invented?

In 1719 a novel was published. Its hero lived alone on a deserted island for twenty-eight years.

Not once in the story of Robinson Crusoe does the word “lonely” or “loneliness” appear in the emotional sense we give it today. Crusoe is alone and nowhere describes himself as lonely (Alberti, 2019). For a reader today this is an almost unintelligible absence. Twenty-eight years, a desert island, and no loneliness at the centre of the text.

The absence was not the author’s oversight. No such concept was available at the time.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “loneliness” did not carry its present ideological and psychological weight. The word meant simply the condition of being alone: a physical state, not a spiritual or emotional one. Thomas Blount’s Glossographia, first published in 1656, defined loneliness in its 1661 edition as “an one; an oneliness, or loneliness, a single or singleness.” In 1676 Elisha Coles gave it as “solitude” or “wandering alone,” with none of its modern negative emotional connotations. Even Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 described the adjective “lonely” purely as the state of being alone (the “lonely fox”) or a deserted place (“lonely rocks”). The word carried no necessary emotional charge (Alberti, 2019).

Loneliness in the sense we use today is almost invisible in printed texts until the end of the eighteenth century. Usage begins to rise around 1800 and peaks at the end of the twentieth. The historical claim is this: modern loneliness is the product of a period in which the individual came to the fore against the community, and it is roughly two hundred years old (Alberti, 2019).

This claim is not one historian’s opinion. That the almost entirely negative concept of loneliness as social isolation was an invention of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a thesis the field of the history of emotions has found convincing; a separate historical study reading the same period through solitude is regarded as complementary to it (Rydberg, 2021).

Even so, a qualification is needed, because this kind of history has its limits. The absence of a concept does not mean the absence of the experience, and these studies do not claim otherwise. The physician who wrote a comprehensive treatise on solitude in the 1780s already had, before the word acquired its present weight, a rich framework in which to discuss the subject at length (Zimmermann, 1784). What changed was not that people were alone; it was the answer the culture gave to what being alone meant.

Great care is needed here, because this finding is easily misused.

It does not mean that the effects of isolation are a fabrication. In the cell we are about to enter, people genuinely came apart; what they lived through was not a cultural construct. What became historical is not the effects of isolation but the meaning attached to it. The sentence “being alone damages a person” and the sentence “living alone is a defect” do not sit on the same plane. The first is an empirical claim and can be tested. The second is a moral judgement and comes out of a cultural frame two centuries old.

The opening sentence carries both at once. That is why it is both arguable and wounding.

Now the second piece of clearing-up. In English, as in Turkish, a single word covers two distinct phenomena. Chosen, sought-after, productive solitude and unwanted, painful loneliness are crowded into the same term (Long & Averill, 2003). Yet there is a structural difference between them: loneliness is an emotion, solitude is a state. Loneliness involves particular desires, feelings and patterns of attention; solitude is a condition open to every kind of feeling and thought, and is not itself a feeling (Koch, 1994). One happens to a person, the other is where a person is.

The most robust empirical grounding of the distinction was made fifty years ago and still stands.

In that framework loneliness is a response not to being alone but to a relational deficit. Nor is it a single thing. The loneliness that arises in the absence of a close emotional attachment and the loneliness that arises in the absence of an engaging social network carry different symptoms and answer to different remedies (Weiss, 1973).

Two observations turn this into evidence.

The first is seen again and again in an organisation formed by people who have been widowed or separated. New members join because they are lonely and hope that membership will cure it. Inside they make new friendships and take on responsibilities. But unless they form one intense relationship, they remain lonely. A crowd of friends does not replace the attachment that was lost.

The second comes from the opposite direction. In a study of couples who had moved to the Boston area from another state, the women went through a period of what was called newcomer sadness. However close their marriages, their husbands could not help. Even a woman happy in her marriage was painfully lonely because she had no access to a circle with whom she could share her own interests. Her loneliness ended only when she found a community she could accept (Weiss, 1973).

Read together, the two observations yield a sharp conclusion. Having people nearby is not enough to relieve loneliness, and having no one nearby does not guarantee it. The most striking symptom in the same framework is this: a person experiencing emotional loneliness may feel utterly alone even when the company of others is in fact available (Weiss, 1973).

The implication for judgement is considerable. The person looking from outside sees physical aloneness, because that is what can be seen. The person inside may be living something else entirely, both better and worse.

So the observation on which the opening sentence rests is not as solid a footing as it appears. The person who says it has seen something, but the link between what they saw and what they judged is weaker than they suppose.

V. The question of the man in the cell

In 1979 the doors closed on the segregation unit of a Massachusetts prison. In August the outer steel doors were shut and personal belongings were removed from the cells: radios, televisions, all reading material except the Bible. The inmates brought suit. By order of the court, two psychiatrists interviewed fourteen inmates for about half an hour each. The median duration of isolation was two months (Grassian, 1983).

The conditions of the interviews were hostile. Guards stood just outside the door, so several inmates spoke in whispers to avoid being heard.

Care is needed now, because what follows is the most important passage in this essay.

A lawsuit was under way. One would expect the inmates to exaggerate their symptoms in order to strengthen their case. That is not what happened. The researcher reports the exact opposite: the inmates mobilised defences such as rationalisation, avoidance, denial and repression in order to minimise the severity of their reactions. The interviews began with sentences like these:

“Solitary doesn’t bother me.”

“Some of the guys can’t take it, not me.”

One inmate stated his symptom and made it trivial in the same breath:

“As soon as I got in, I started cutting my wrists. I figured it was the only way to get out of here.”

The psychiatrists had to press to bring information out, to offer reassurance, to open the gaps in these accounts by confronting them repeatedly. As the untroubled surface narratives broke up, something else came out from underneath. The inmate who said he could take it eventually described panic, fears of suffocation and paranoid distortions.

They had reasons for their resistance. They were afraid the guards would discover their fantasies of revenge. Or that the guards would see a weakness they could exploit. In several cases the fear had another source: the inmate believed he was in fact going insane, and was afraid to say so.

Keep this finding in mind. We will come back to it.

What they described was this.

Sound had become unbearable:

“You get sensitive to noise, the plumbing system. Someone in the tier above me pushes the button on the faucet, the water rushes through the pipes, it’s too loud, gets on your nerves. I can’t stand it, I start to holler. Are they doing it on purpose?”

“Everything gets exaggerated. After a while, you can’t stand it. Meals: I used to eat everything they served. Now I can’t stand the smells, the meat. The only thing I can stand to eat is the bread.”

“What really freaks me out is when a bee gets into the cell. Such a small thing.”

Vision had deteriorated:

“The cell walls start wavering.”

“Melting, everything in the cell starts moving; everything gets darker, you feel you are losing your vision.”

One described the breakfast trays:

“They come by with four trays; the first has big pancakes, I think I’m going to get them. Then someone comes up and gives me tiny ones, they get real small, like silver dollars. I seem to see movements, real fast motions in front of me. Then seems like they’re doing things behind your back, can’t quite see them. Did someone just hit me? I dwell on it for hours.”

The same inmate saw a guard in his cell holding a noose.

Memory was going:

“I went to a standstill psychologically once, lapse of memory. I didn’t talk for 15 days. I couldn’t hear clearly. You can’t see, you’re blind, block everything out, disoriented, awareness is very bad. Did someone say he’s coming out of it? I think what I’m saying is true, not sure. I think I was drooling. A complete standstill.”

“I can’t concentrate, can’t read. Your mind’s narcotized. Sometimes can’t grasp words in my mind that I know. Get stuck, have to think of another word. Memory is going. You feel you are losing something you might not get back.”

One inmate had built himself a method for keeping his mind upright:

“Got to try to concentrate. Remember list of the presidents. Memorize the states, capitals, five boroughs, seven continents, nine planets.”

In that sentence is a person’s bare struggle to keep hold of his own mind. Nobody taught him this. He found it himself. Keep this detail in mind too; we will return to it at the end.

Now we come to the problem underneath all of it.

One inmate heard the guards say they were going to cut off his leg. Then he could not be sure:

“I hear sounds, guards saying, ‘They’re going to cut it off.’ I’m not sure. Did they say it, or is it my imagination?”

The researcher establishes the clinical meaning of this uncertainty in a single sentence. If the guards really said it, the inmate is losing his sense of reality. If they said something else, or if what they said was not directed at him, he is suffering a paranoid distortion of perception. If they said nothing at all, he is hallucinating. Then comes this sentence:

“There is no independent corroboration.”

The inmate cannot know on his own which of these is the case. Because what he would need in order to know has been taken from him.

Another inmate, without meaning to, turned this into the title of this essay. He had tried to compare the sounds he heard with the man in the next cell:

“I overhear the guards talking. Did they say that? Yes? No? It gets confusing. I tried to check it out with the prisoner in the adjoining cell; sometimes he hears something and I don’t. I know one of us is crazy, but which one? Am I losing my mind?”

The man in the cell asked the question this essay is trying to ask forty years before us, and in far fewer words.

VI. Why it collapses: testing is a shared undertaking

What collapsed in that man’s case has a name. And the cause is not, as is commonly supposed, “loneliness.”

First a gap has to be seen. Psychiatry described these symptoms with precision. Grassian named the cluster that emerges in the isolation unit in six components: hyperresponsivity to external stimuli; perceptual distortions, illusions and hallucinations; panic attacks; difficulties with thinking, concentration and memory; intrusive obsessional thoughts; and overt paranoia. He recorded that this particular configuration of symptoms is strikingly unique, and that the perceptual disturbances in particular are found virtually nowhere else. But he left one question open: why do these symptoms occur together, and why are they produced by precisely this situation? The description was complete; the explanation was missing (Guenther, 2011).

The attempt at an explanation came not from psychiatry but from philosophy. Guenther set Husserl’s analysis of intersubjectivity beside Grassian’s testimonies. What comes out of that juxtaposition carries the claim at the centre of this essay considerably deeper than expected.

The phenomenological tradition holds that a person’s experience of the world as real depends on others. In Husserl’s term, transcendental intersubjectivity. The argument runs like this: we see objects not as flat surfaces but as many-sided things, and we are able to do so because we make an implicit reference to the perspectives others could take on the same object. Experiencing the world as real and objective rests on the silent corroboration of others (as discussed in Gallagher, 2014).

The sentence has to be read with its full weight. The sense of reality is not a one-person achievement. It is structurally shared.

Now the real matter arrives. Husserl sets up a thought experiment. Bracket out, in thought, other subjects and everything they contribute to my experience of the world. Not only the existence of other conscious beings, but also the quality objects have of “being there for and accessible to everyone.” What remains? Husserl’s answer is that a unitarily coherent, continuously harmonious stratum of world-experience still remains. The table ceases to be “a table anyone could see,” but it goes on being perceived as a table, stably. Husserl calls this residue the founding stratum; every other level of experience is built upon it.

Guenther’s move is this: the cell is that thought experiment carried out by force. And the result does not come out as Husserl said it would.

Go back to the inmates’ testimony. The pancakes shrink. The walls waver. Everything melts. When others are actually withdrawn, no coherent and harmonious stratum remains; even the barest perceptual stability disintegrates. Which means that the ground Husserl took to be the lowest and the firmest was being held up by the layers above it. The founding stratum does not carry itself.

The conclusion that follows is far harder than the sentence “man is a social animal.” Togetherness is not a layer added afterwards to the sense of reality. The most elementary perceptual coherence itself stands up jointly.

Husserl also names the mechanism: pairing. My “here” is the other’s “there”; were we to change places, their position would become my “here.” This reciprocity is not an operation of inference; it is constituted pre-reflectively, through passive synthesis. I do not decide that the one facing me is a consciousness rather than a mannequin; I perceive them as one. The conclusion Guenther draws from this matters: because pairing is not a deliberate operation of checking, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to compensate for by other means once it has been cut. It is not a gap that can be closed by paying attention to oneself.

Heidegger says the same thing from another direction: being-with-others is not a property added later to human existence but its constitutive structure. The sentence that follows from this is one that everyone who works alone should think about once: a person can be lonely only because they are a being who is with others (as discussed in Gallagher, 2014). Loneliness is not the absence of togetherness but a mode of it. Merleau-Ponty brings this down to the body: we perceive others not by observing them but by interacting with them; there is a coordination between bodies.

Now go back to the cell. What was severed there was not contact but the channel of verification. The man hears a sound and has no instrument left with which to test whether it is real. He asks the next cell, and that man is in the same position. Two fragile measuring devices trying to measure each other.

Guenther raises the obvious objection himself, and the answer marks the sharpest point of the distinction. The man in solitary confinement is not, in fact, alone. He is monitored twenty-four hours a day, depends on others for everything from his food to his toilet paper, and is subject to searches and forced interventions. There is no shortage of contact; he does not even have anywhere to escape it. But the relation runs one way: he is watched and does not answer; he is looked at and does not look together with anyone. Guenther sums this up in two phrases: isolation without solitude, relationality without relationships.

Here is why the distinction matters: what opens the channel is not the presence of contact but its reciprocity. One-way contact not only fails to open the channel, it deepens the isolation.

There is an empirical counterpart to this. Reality-testing is normally embedded in reciprocal, embodied interactions; disembodiment blunts it (Yang & Crespi, 2025). When contact with the real world is filled by a virtual substitute, shared inter-bodily coordination disappears. That mirror-neuron activity is markedly higher in face-to-face interaction than in front of a screen suggests that shared reality-testing rests physiologically on embodied reciprocity.

Another study completes the mechanism. When a low-grade mistrust leads to avoidance, the belief goes untested and becomes progressively less flexible and resistant to revision (Holt, 2025).

The intervention literature sharpens this further. A meta-analysis of studies aiming to reduce loneliness distinguishes four separate strategies: improving social skills, enhancing social support, increasing opportunities for social contact, and addressing maladaptive social cognition. Among studies using randomised comparison designs, the most successful were the last (Masi et al., 2011). A more recent meta-analysis covering thirty-two randomised controlled trials points the same way: programmes focused on increasing social contact did raise the amount of contact but left no effect on loneliness; the greatest benefit came from cognitive approaches addressing maladaptive attributional biases, particularly among younger participants (Zagic et al., 2022, as reported in Holt, 2025). What is decisive, then, is not the quantity of contact but the direction of cognition.

This finding is the empirical face of the distinction drawn in the fourth section. There we saw that loneliness is not the same thing as being alone; here we see that the remedy for loneliness is not a crowd of people. Two faces of the same structure.

There is a convergence here worth recording. Phenomenology sets out from an analysis of consciousness written a hundred years ago and arrives at the conclusion that one-way contact does not open the channel. Randomised controlled trials set out from the data of thirty-two separate experiments and arrive at the conclusion that increasing the quantity of contact does not solve loneliness. The two methods have nothing in common: one is conceptual analysis, the other numerical measurement. That they come out in the same place suggests that what has been found belongs to the phenomenon rather than to the method.

Together they cut the judgement “you are alone, therefore you are out of touch” straight down the middle. What produces the break is not loneliness itself. It is the closing of the channel of verification. And that channel can close in the middle of a crowd as well.

Precisely for this reason, what happened in the cell gives this essay a criterion. The question to ask is not “is this person alone?” The question to ask is this: is there a channel through which this person can test their beliefs?

VII. But is chosen isolation safe?

No. This has to be said, because the opposite thesis would comfort the text and be false.

In a study based on interviews with Western Buddhist meditation practitioners and teachers, forty-nine per cent of sixty-eight participants reported at least one delusion-like thought associated with meditation. The most common types were special knowledge (39 per cent), death or dying (27 per cent), paranoia in the form of danger from others (24 per cent) and grandiosity (21 per cent). These were not passing oddities: of the thirty-three who reported them, eleven were prescribed antipsychotic medication and eight were diagnosed with a new mental illness (Solomonova et al., 2025).

The people here are not prisoners. They came of their own accord, they work with a teacher and a community, they know what they are doing. They fit the definition of chosen isolation exactly.

The study’s most important finding is a finding of absence: those reporting delusion-like ideation did not have a more prevalent psychiatric or trauma history. Nor did they differ from the others in terms of being part of a community or working with a teacher. The phenomenon is not “something that happens to a few already fragile people.”

Now we come to the most telling case in this essay. One participant describes what happened on retreat:

“I certainly had one of those experiences of having this sense in retreat of: I knew exactly what I needed to do with my job, and if I did this and then this would happen and then this would happen. You know, this whole grandiose idea that I was sure was this wonderful insight. And, the moment retreat was over, it was like, ‘What was I thinking?’ I mean, it was just so totally off what would have really worked in reality.” (#62)

This man is not lying. Nor is he mad. On retreat he was certain of his own forecast, and that sense of certainty was real. Once out, he rejected the same forecast himself.

Note what did the correcting: it was not a judgement delivered from outside. Nobody told him he was exaggerating. His own channel of testing reopened, and he ran the test himself.

This case cuts in both directions at once. On one side it demolishes the consolation that chosen solitude is harmless. On the other it demolishes the claim that an isolated person cannot recognise their own error, because this man did recognise it, and without help.

The mechanism the researchers propose for why this happens fits the framework of this essay exactly: retreats are designed to reduce ordinary environmental cues, to alter the social and occupational context, to restrict sleep and social activity. Chosen isolation, then, narrows the channels of verification just as the cell does. The difference is that it locks the door from the inside and keeps the key.

Honesty is required on the quantitative side too. A meta-analysis of solitary confinement covering thirteen studies and more than three hundred and eighty thousand prisoners shows a medium-sized association with general psychological symptoms; the standardised mean difference is 0.45, and 0.51 with an outlier excluded (Luigi et al., 2020). The effect appears over and above imprisonment in general and pre-existing mental illness. But this study does not establish a dose-response curve. The widespread belief that deterioration increases as isolation lengthens is not demonstrated at the meta-analytic level; it has been flagged only in a single, methodologically weak study. That dose matters is plausible; the evidence does not yet make it certain.

VIII. Then why doesn’t everyone collapse?

A reader who has come this far may see a bleak picture. They should not. Because the other half of the picture is equally empirical and at least as solid.

A study conducted with more than two thousand people shows that the returns of solitude, meaning autonomy, self-connection and inner deepening, are real and measurable. The most robust finding is this: entering solitude voluntarily, out of a self-determined desire, is the strongest predictor of the well-being it yields (Weinstein, Nguyen & Hansen, 2021).

This is the measurable counterpart of the difference between the monastery and the prison. The observer from outside sees physical aloneness. The variable that determines the inner experience is invisible: the desire with which the person entered.

The same study carries a warning that should not be skipped: self-directed deepening can lower calm in the short term. Clarification has its cost. The same inward turn that feeds original work can also, taken to excess, set the mind revolving around itself.

But the missing link comes from somewhere else.

In his book on solitude, Anthony Storr openly revises his own earlier view. He used to believe this: that one cannot begin to be conscious of oneself as a separate individual without another person to compare oneself with; that a man in isolation is a man without individuality; that creative artists, believing they are most themselves when alone, forget that art is communication. Then he adds:

“I still believe this; but I want to add a rider to the effect that maturation and integration can take place within the isolated individual to a greater extent than I had allowed for. The great introverted creators are able to define identity and achieve self-realization by self-reference; that is, by interacting with their own past work rather than by interacting with other people.” (Storr, 1988)

This sentence completes and balances the dark picture of the sixth section.

What the man in the cell lost was the channel of verification. What Storr points to is this: the isolated maker has a second channel. Their own accumulated work. What they have produced over the years is an external reality that looks back at them, resists them, is capable of contradicting them. Someone who can look at last year’s work today and say “that was wrong” is running a test. The channel is open.

Here is the difference: the man in the cell had nothing. All reading material except the Bible had been taken away, his link with his own past had been cut, and all that was left to him were walls and sounds. That is why he memorised lists of presidents. With no external object left to hold him up, he tried to manufacture one.

Other instances of this manufacturing effort are on record. Robert King, across the twenty-nine years he spent in solitary confinement, made praline candies by collecting packets of sugar, peanuts and powdered milk and fashioning a pot out of an aluminium can; he also played chess on a board made of squares of folded toilet paper stuck to the floor with toothpaste (King, 2010, as reported in Guenther, 2011). Another inmate in solitary confinement, Herman Wallace, went on designing the house of his imagination in a collaboration with the artist Jackie Sumell (Sumell & Wallace, 2006, as reported in Guenther, 2011).

The study that reports these examples immediately adds a warning, and the warning holds for this essay too. That some people manage to resist does not soften the fact that the structure collapses. Resistance shows the durability of the person, not the harmlessness of the condition. Confusing the two leads all the way to taking the one who endured as the measure and blaming the one who did not.

The creator Storr describes is in exactly the opposite position: they have a body of work accumulated over years, which they can return to, in which they can see their own contradictions. The testing continues; only the interlocutor has changed.

Storr makes two further observations in the same place. First: after completing a project, the highly creative person often experiences a period of depression from which they are relieved only by embarking on the next piece of work. Second: such people tend to be protective of their inner worlds against premature scrutiny and criticism by others.

This second observation explains why the opening sentence hurts as much as it does. “You are exaggerating” touches something that has not yet matured. The problem is as much the timing of the judgement as its content.

One last counterweight, because the picture should not tilt in a single direction. A study of more than nine hundred remote workers finds that the effect of isolation depends on personality profile: a profile that prefers working alone, introverted and emotionally more fragile, showed lower creativity and higher stress in remote work (Michinov et al., 2022). This is an empirical brake on the expectation that people who work alone are more creative. Two subtleties should not be skipped either: the profile measured is not pure solitude, it measures a preference for being alone together with high emotional fragility; and the creativity measured is a five-minute rapid production task, which does not capture the long-range deep work that is the isolated maker’s actual field.

IX. “You’re daydreaming” is not the right question

Let us return to the second half of the opening sentence.

The phrase “you’re daydreaming” treats daydreaming as a defect in itself. But daydreaming is a neutral and universal capacity. Everyone does it. The meaningful question is not whether the daydream exists but what it does.

The concept of maladaptive daydreaming locates the threshold of pathology not in content but in function (Somer, 2002). A daydream is counted as maladaptive when it substitutes for human interaction or impairs academic, interpersonal or occupational functioning. The criterion is not what the daydream is about, but what it takes the place of.

A meta-analysis covering more than twenty-four thousand participants finds consistent links between maladaptive daydreaming and psychopathology; the correlation is 0.54 with general psychopathology, 0.45 with dissociation and 0.29 with loneliness (Somer et al., 2025). The number of studies underlying these three values is not equal: general psychopathology rests on six, dissociation on ten, loneliness on only three, which makes the last the most fragile.

An honest boundary has to be drawn here. The sample of this meta-analysis is built on the pathological end; the creative end we have been calling isolated original work is not represented in that data. The correlations found show not daydreaming in general but the form of it associated with pathology.

So the right question is not “are they daydreaming?”, because the answer is yes for everyone. The right question is this: does the daydream feed the work, or take the place of it?

In practice this distinction gives a very sharp criterion. If the daydream leads to sitting down at the desk in the morning, doing the work, seeing the result, it is a creative use of the capacity. If the daydream itself provides the satisfaction and the work never begins, the function has been displaced.

There is one more problem of timing, perhaps the most important of all.

Whether a forecast is a “vision” or an “idle fantasy” cannot be told apart before the outcome appears. What comes true is called vision afterwards, what does not is called exaggeration. Both are retrospective labels. Virtual reality experiments on delusion-like ideation show that such beliefs are an extension of normal processes rather than a separate deficit; ideas of persecution increase in graded fashion across three groups running from low paranoia to clinical delusion, by a factor of 2.86 in the non-clinical high-paranoia group and 12.51 in the clinical group (Freeman et al., 2010). The regularity of these steps points to a gradation rather than a categorical leap. The protective factor is also clear: not jumping to conclusions, leaving room for doubt and for alternative explanations.

What distinguishes them, then, is not the content of the belief but the flexibility of the reasoning. Of two people defending the same forecast, one may be visionary and the other deluded; what makes the difference is what happens when counter-evidence arrives.

X. The calibration of the one who judges

Now we move to the other side of the scales. Care is needed here, because this section could easily turn into a consolation. It will not.

“You are exaggerating” is a claim about probability. Implicitly it says: the likelihood of your forecast coming true is low.

Most of the time this claim is statistically justified. The probability that a randomly chosen individual’s large forecast comes true really is low. The base rate punishes optimism, and saying so is realism, not pessimism.

But there is a problem. Someone who has already embarked on an unusual undertaking and accumulated years of work in their field is not a random sample drawn from the general population. Applying the general population rate to them is using the wrong reference class. The same person looks “realistic” or “delusional” depending on which rate they are placed in.

The conclusion that follows is this: the error of calibration is symmetrical.

The maker may inflate their own probability, optimism bias pushing them towards a brighter future than the real one. This is a genuine error and this essay does not soften it. But the observer makes a symmetrical error: without knowing the internal rate of a field they are unfamiliar with, they place the person in the general population rate. Both sides are exposed to the base rate fallacy, only in opposite directions.

Now we return to the finding I asked you to keep in mind in the fifth section.

Recall: a lawsuit was under way, the inmates would have been expected to exaggerate their symptoms, and the opposite happened. The inmates played their symptoms down, began with “solitary doesn’t bother me,” and the psychiatrists had to press to get further.

The significance of that finding here is considerable.

The observer does not merely misestimate the probability of an outcome. They also misestimate the direction in which the other person will deviate. The judgement “you are exaggerating” assumes from the outset that the person deviates towards exaggeration. Yet in the very condition where exaggeration would be most expected from outside, that is, among prisoners in solitary confinement who had filed suit, the deviation went the other way.

This does not invalidate the judgement. It weakens the intuition the judgement rests on. The intuition that “people exaggerate in this situation” failed to hold in the most suitable place it could have been tested.

To which this is added: knowing that a belief is groundless is difficult at every point on the continuum. That difficulty applies not only to the person making the forecast but to the person judging. The one who judges also cannot see the ground of their own intuition.

One thing has to be said plainly here, or this section will be read wrongly.

None of this means “the people who criticise you are shallow.” Read that way, the essay collapses into a comforting lie. The observer’s error is not bad faith, nor is it condescension. It is a reasoning error everyone makes, and the maker is making the same error in their own favour. Indeed the person who speaks the opening sentence usually speaks it out of worry, not contempt.

The only conclusion that follows is this: neither side holds an instrument capable of delivering a final verdict. Both are subject to calibration.

XI. Neither praise nor blame

Until now this essay has assumed one thing: that a verdict will be delivered. We looked for criteria, we discussed calibration, we sharpened the questions. All of it circled the question “how do we deliver the right verdict?”

But one question was not asked. Do we have to deliver a verdict at all?

Recall the historical finding of the fourth section. Living alone was not a defect until two hundred years ago, because the concept that would make it one had not yet been built. Crusoe spent twenty-eight years on the island and it did not occur to his author to write this as a lack. If the same story were told today, the hero’s mental health would be at the centre of the novel.

This does not cancel the effects of isolation; we said so plainly in the fourth section. What it cancels is something else: the reflex that makes living in isolation a moral category. That reflex is not a universal human intuition but the product of a particular historical period.

One more step is needed, because this is where the real matter lies.

A person’s preferences are not decisions added to their life from outside. How they live, what they give their time to, whom they spend how much time with, is an extension of what they are. Someone who chooses to work alone is not merely choosing a way of living; they are continuing a way of being themselves. That is why a moral judgement directed at that choice touches not a behaviour but a being. It also explains why the sentence hurts out of all proportion.

Moreover, the preference is not fixed. This is the most interesting thing here.

The common frame treats chosen and imposed solitude as two separate boxes. But the boundary is permeable, and it works in both directions. One direction is already known: a solitude that began as chosen can turn into an imposed one as time lengthens and alternatives close. The reverse direction is discussed less often but is no less real: a situation that begins in necessity can become a preference over time. A person builds a way of working inside a solitude they did not want, the way of working proves effective, and then it becomes their preference. Even when the original necessity is removed, they do not go back.

This direction was recently observed in a large natural experiment. During the pandemic lockdowns, a large part of the population was involuntarily severed from its accustomed social surroundings. A qualitative study with young adults who lived through the lockdowns shows that some were able to turn this imposed solitude into a transformative resource: release from social obligations sustained for show, room opening up for inward reflection, a sense of self becoming more consistent with the person’s own values (Paterson & Park, 2023). From outside the picture was identical throughout: people staying at home alone. What was happening inside was, for some, a loss and, for others, a gain.

There is a trace of this on the measurement side. In the study of solitude across the lifespan, the self-determined desire to be alone is measured with three items, and one of them probes exactly this: “I felt I have no choice but to be alone” (Weinstein et al., 2021). The scale, in other words, tries to see the difference between genuine preference and helplessness. In the same study this self-determined motivation is lowest in adolescents and highest in adults; older adults report feeling most at ease and least lonely when alone. The opposite of the widespread anxiety about loneliness in old age.

Honesty is required here: this is cross-sectional data, and the same individuals were not followed over time. Different age groups answering differently could also stem from generational differences. So this finding does not prove the permeability; it is consistent with it. We have to preserve that distinction, or we will have made the data say what we wanted.

Now to the most serious objection to this argument, because if it is not anticipated this becomes the weakest point of the essay.

The objection is this: the turning of necessity into preference may not be a liberation but a capitulation. People stop wanting what they cannot have. Belittling the life one cannot reach and exalting the one within reach is a known way of reducing pain. In that case, saying “it turned into a preference” is nothing but an ornate way of saying the constraint has been internalised. The objection is serious, and there are cases where it is correct.

But there is a distinguishing criterion, and this essay has already shown it twice.

Remember the man in the cell. To keep his mind upright he was memorising the list of presidents, the states, the capitals, the continents, the planets. This is an effort at adaptation and it is worthy of respect. But note this: that list opens onto nothing. He is not producing anything with it, not arriving anywhere. The only function left to him is to delay disintegration.

Remember the creator Storr describes. He too is alone. He too has turned to his own inner resources. But the place he turns to is an accumulated body of work, and that work goes on growing. He can look at last year’s work and object to it, build this year’s accordingly, and next year object to both.

Both are coping with solitude. The difference lies in what the way of coping does to capacity. One protects it by narrowing, the other by widening.

In the first case necessity has genuinely turned into preference. In the second, the language of preference is a cover laid over a narrowing.

This criterion is the essay’s own argument. It does not sit ready-made in the sources we have; it was drawn from the comparison of two raw cases and needs to be marked as such. Studies measuring the voluntariness of being alone measure what is the case at one cross-section, not how that cross-section came about.

The conclusion that follows is normative, and it is the furthest point this essay reaches.

Isolation is a condition to be neither praised nor blamed. It cannot be praised, because the retreat data of the seventh section is there: chosen isolation can distort a person too, and nobody is immune. It cannot be blamed, because the data of the eighth section is equally there: the same condition can be the ground of maturation and of production, and through a channel moral judgement cannot see.

Nor is this conclusion new. The physician who wrote the first comprehensive modern treatise on solitude said this two hundred and forty years ago: the evil and good effects of solitude, under various circumstances and in various minds, must be observed and examined before one can say in which cases it is harmful and where it bears good fruit (Zimmermann, 1784; as reported in Rydberg, 2021). In the two centuries since, the instruments of measurement have changed; the haste to deliver verdicts has not.

What remains is not judgement but interest. That is, this question: are this person’s channels open, is their capacity growing, is their work moving forward? These are askable questions, and their answers do not require a verdict.

XII. What remains

This essay was not a defence. It did not try to refute the opening sentence; it took it seriously and opened it up. Let us gather what remains.

Isolation is not an outcome, it is a condition. It brings neither a break with reality nor original work of its own accord. This is why the sentences “you are hallucinating because you are isolated” and “you are original because you are isolated” share the same error. Both look at the same room and deliver a verdict without asking who is inside it doing what. The monastery and the prison are the same architecture.

But this essay does not end in uncertainty. Because the links of the chain have become visible, and the links turn into questions that can be asked.

Is the channel open?

What collapsed in the cell was not solitude but the possibility of verification. Is there an external surface against which you can strike your belief? That surface may be a person, it may be your own past work, it may be a real result your work has met in the world. The channel does not have to be a person. But it has to be something.

The seen or the lived?

Physical aloneness and the feeling of loneliness are not the same thing; one is visible, the other is not. Having people nearby does not relieve the one, and their absence does not bring on the other. The observer from outside can measure only the visible side, and usually does not notice that this is what they are measuring.

Who locked it? Is it still the same person?

Was the door locked from inside or outside? Voluntariness is the strongest distinguishing factor measured. But this question is not asked once and left, because the answer changes over time, and it changes in both directions: the chosen can become the imposed, the imposed can become the chosen.

Widening or narrowing?

Whether the turning of a solitude into a preference is genuine or a cover is told by the person’s capacity. If what they can do is increasing, the transformation is real. If only what they can want is decreasing, that is not preference but capitulation.

Is the daydream in front of the work, or in its place?

If the daydream leads to sitting down at the desk, it is capacity. If the daydream itself provides satisfaction and the work never begins, the function has been displaced. The criterion is not emotional but behavioural: what was produced this month?

What happens when counter-evidence arrives?

What separates vision from delusion is not the boldness of the content but the flexibility of the reasoning. Does a falsifiable forecast change when it is falsified?

Where is the dose?

Duration and intensity genuinely matter, but honesty is required in saying so: the dose-response curve has not been established meta-analytically. Plausible, not proven.

None of these questions gives the answer “you are right” or “you are wrong.” All of them are questions of calibration, and that is the point: before the outcome appears, the only legitimate operation is not a firm label but a calibration of probability.

Nor is calibration one-sided. That is why the opening conversation reached an impasse. Both sides were delivering firm verdicts, and neither held an instrument capable of delivering one. The answer was not “you are right,” nor was it “you do not understand.” The answer was this: we are both measuring, both our instruments are fragile, so let us talk about the criteria.

One last thing. Throughout this essay the subject has looked like a person working alone. It is not.

If reality-testing is a shared and embodied process, what can blunt it is not physical solitude but the erosion of the channels of verification. In an age where face-to-face reciprocity is increasingly replaced by screen-mediated contact, where everyone is surrounded by their own evidence in their own feed, that erosion is no longer the special situation of the solitary maker.

The man in the cell asked the next cell because he had no other measuring instrument. “Sometimes he hears something and I don’t. I know one of us is crazy, but which one?”