From the vantage point of spending a somewhat quiet weekend at home, I’ve been thinking about how much I enjoy those moments when I don’t have to be social.  From time to time, I even like to shut my eyes and reflect on my day, my life, what’s happening in my community and the world. But this habit may be going the way of the dinosaur.

Dailygood.org posted a long article by essayist William Deresiewicz called “The End of Solitude.” The writer bemoans what he believes is the end of an era where people appreciated the importance of spending time alone with their thoughts.  He argues that these days, people’s priorities are to be visible — think selfies — and connected to others — as in text messaging as a full-time occupation. “…Loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation…” He spoke of a teenage friend who in a month’s time sent one text “every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she’s never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she’s never alone.”

But spending time alone can be healthy. In “How Solitude Can Change Your Brain in Profound Ways,” Jane Porter quotes the author of the book “Quiet,” (Susan Cain) who says, “Solitude is a crucial and underrated ingredient for creativity.” Porter acknowledges that quiet moments are not to everyone’s taste.  She brings up the 2014 study in which two-third of the male subjects and a quarter of the females preferred giving themselves mildly painful electric shocks to spending fifteen minutes alone without their cell phones or any other form of entertainment.

Porter cites Sherry Turkle, researcher and founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, who says, “it’s important for people to intentionally set aside time each day when they abstain from “social snacking” activities like texting, tweeting, and Instagram.”

Turkle believes (from her book, “Alone Together” ) that “when we don’t have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive… It’s as though we’re using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self.”

Today, I asked two friends my age how they felt about spending time alone. Neither talked about solitude, but both shared stories of events in which everyone consciously unplugs.  One creates quiet events for her church, in which people come together to think, meditate, write and engage in other silent activities. The other takes part in an annual retreat away from the city in which phones, computers, radios and TVs are forbidden.

Maybe age makes us appreciate solitude more. As we get older, we spend more time looking back than ahead. We have more of a need to make sense of our lives and the world around us. And one obvious change: we know fewer people who will appreciate our selfies.