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The Psychology and Philosophy of Solitude

Jove decadent (1899), by Ramon Casas.
Jove decadent (1899), by Ramon Casas.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Solitude and loneliness are not synonyms; if anything, they’re opposites. Whereas there is not much to recommend in loneliness, solitude gives us the freedom to think our own thoughts, follow our own inclinations, and live, if only for a time, entirely at our own pace.

Other people constrain us. They may be too inhibited for us, shrinking from thoughts that we would pursue, or unable to have them; or they may be too boorish, offending our sensitivities with their nasty habits and crude opinions.

Company, like employment, is a trade-off. A job provides income, security, and structure, but at the cost of our best life. Similarly, company provides affection, stimulation, and distraction, but at the cost of sinking our time and potential. For many people, this is a bargain well worth making. But perhaps not you, or you wouldn’t have read this far.

The Metaphysics of Loneliness

We tend to think of lonely people as single people, assimilating people who are lonely with people who are alone, and people who are alone with people who are single. But people who are single are not necessarily alone, and people who are alone are not necessarily lonely. Conversely, it is possible and even common to feel at our loneliest when completely surrounded by partner, family, and friends.

Many people choose to remain single, and some even choose to isolate themselves, or, at least, not to actively seek out social bonds. Such ‘loners’ (the very term is pejorative, implying, as it does, abnormality and deviousness) may revel in their rich inner life or simply dislike or distrust the company of others, which, they feel, comes with more costs than benefits. Many loners are actually very good with people when needs must, or when the right person turns up.

Timon of Athens, who lived at around the same time as Plato, began life in wealth, lavishing money upon his fawning friends, and, in accordance with his notion of friendship, never expecting anything in return. But when he ran out of coin, all his friends deserted him, reducing him to the hard toil of labouring the fields.

One day, as Timon tilled the earth, he uncovered a pot of gold, and, suddenly, all his former friends came tumbling back. But rather than welcome them with open arms, he cursed them and drove them away with sticks and clods of earth. Timon declared his hatred of humankind and withdrew into the forest—where, much to his chagrin, people sought him out as some kind of holy man.

Did Timon feel lonely in the forest? Probably not, because he did not believe that he lacked for anything. As he no longer valued his friends or their company, he could not have desired or missed them—even though he may have pined for a better class of person, and, in that limited sense, felt lonely. Loneliness is not an objective state of affairs so much as a subjective state of mind, a function of desired and achieved levels of social interaction and also of types of interaction. Lovers often feel lonely in the single absence of their beloved, even when completely surrounded by family and friends. Jilted lovers feel much lonelier than lovers who are merely apart from their beloved, indicating that loneliness is not merely a matter of the amount or degree of interaction, but also of the potential or possibility for interaction—as brought home during the coronavirus lockdowns.

Conversely, it is common to feel lonely within a marriage because the relationship is no longer validating or nurturing us, but diminishing us and holding us back. As the writer Anton Chekhov (d. 1904) admonished, ‘If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.’

And yet for many people marriage is, among others, an attempt to flee from their lifelong loneliness and escape from their inescapable demons.

At the bottom, loneliness is not the experience of lacking but the experience of living. It is, in other words, part and parcel of the human condition. Unless a person is resolved, it can only be a matter of time before the feeling of loneliness resurfaces, often with a vengeance.

On this account, loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of meaning from the universe, an absence that is all the more glaring in modern societies which have sacrificed traditional structures of meaning on the thin altar of truth.

So much explains why people with a strong sense of purpose and meaning, or simply with a strong narrative, such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, or St Anthony of the Desert, are protected from loneliness regardless of the circumstances in which they may find themselves.

St Anthony (d. 356 CE), like Thoreau centuries later, sought out aloneness precisely because he understood that it could bring him closer to the real questions and value of life. He spent fifteen years in a tomb and twenty years in an abandoned fort in the desert of Egypt before his devotees persuaded him to withdraw from his seclusion to instruct and organise them, whence his epithet, ‘Father of All Monks’ (‘monk’ and ‘monastery’ derive from the Greek, monos, ‘solitary’, ‘alone’). Anthony emerged from the fort not broken and emaciated, as all had been expecting, but healthy and radiant, and expired in his hundred and sixth year—which in the fourth century might in itself have counted as a minor miracle.

Loneliness vs Solitude

St Anthony did not lead a life of loneliness, but one of solitude. Loneliness, the pain of being alone, is distressing; solitude, the joy of being alone, is freeing and empowering.

Our unconscious requires solitude to process experiences and unravel problems, so much so that our body imposes it upon us each night in the form of sleep. By removing us from the constraints, distractions, and opinions imposed upon us by others, solitude frees us to reconnect with ourself, assimilate ideas, and generate identity and meaning.

For Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), people without the aptitude or opportunity for solitude are mere slaves because they have no alternative but to parrot culture and society. In contrast, anyone who has unmasked society naturally seeks out solitude, which becomes the source and guarantor of a more authentic set of values and ambitions.

Nietzsche was never one to mince his words:

I go into solitude so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think. After a time it always seems as if they want to banish my self from myself and rob me of my soul.

Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quickens into our muse and companion. When we think of company, we usually think of people. But animals too are company, as are plants, the sea, wine, and all beautiful things. I call them ‘low intensity company’, and, often, I prefer them.

By loosening the bonds of dependency and the constraints of compromise (and compromise about compromise), we free ourselves up for problem solving, creativity, and spirituality. If we are able and willing to embrace it, this opportunity to refine our perspectives creates the strength and security for still greater solitude and, in time, the substance and meaning that guards against loneliness.

The life of St Anthony can leave the impression that solitude is at odds with attachment, but this need not be the case so long as the one is not pitted against the other. For the poet RM Rilke (d. 1926), the highest task of lovers is not merely to tolerate but ‘stand guard over’ the solitude of the other.

Of his early mentor, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Rilke wrote: ‘Rodin was solitary before he was famous. And fame, when it arrived, made him perhaps more solitary.’ Other creatives who found inspiration in solitude include Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Proust, Nikola Tesla, and Vincent van Gogh.

In Solitude: A Return to the Self (1988), the psychiatrist Anthony Storr persuasively argues that: ‘The happiest lives are probably those in which neither interpersonal relationships nor impersonal interests are idealised as the only way to salvation. The desire and pursuit of the whole must comprehend both aspects of human nature.’

Be this as it may, not everyone is capable of solitude, and for many people aloneness will never amount to anything more than bitter loneliness. Younger people often find aloneness difficult, while older people are more likely, or less unlikely, to seek it out. So much suggests that solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.

Profound peace of heart and perfect peace of mind, these highest earthly goods after health, are to be found in solitude alone, and, as a permanent disposition, only in the deepest seclusion. And if our own self is great and rich, we enjoy the happiest state that can be found on this miserable earth. —Arthur Schopenhauer

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And Why Ataraxia Is the Ultimate Cool

Life in Epicurus' garden
Life in Epicurus’ garden

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Ataraxia—literally, ‘lack of disturbance or trouble’—was the Holy Grail of ancient philosophy: a state of profound mental tranquillity in which a person was no longer tossed around by anxiety, anger, desire, and the vicissitudes of fortune. For what is the point of wealth, power, pleasure, or even freedom if we ourselves remain in a state of inner turmoil?

Prior to the advent of Christianity, there were, of course, the pagan gods, but, especially for the high-minded, there were also a number of philosophical schools.

Aside from the more academic Platonism and Aristotelianism, the four major philosophical schools of Western antiquity were Cynicism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism.

Despite each having their own outlook and approach, all four schools emphasised the attainment of mental tranquillity and mastery, or ataraxia—making them, in my view, much more similar than different. If you like, ataraxia was to the Western schools what liberation was to the Indian schools.

The best way to grasp the concept of ataraxia is to look at how it fitted into each of the four schools, starting with Cynicism.

Cynicism

The first Cynic appears to have been the Athenian philosopher Antisthenes (d. 365 BCE), who had been an ardent disciple of Socrates. Then came Diogenes (d. 323 BCE), the paradigm of the Cynic, who took the simple life of Socrates to such an extreme that Plato called him ‘a Socrates gone mad’.

Diogenes held that human beings had much to learn from the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not ‘complicated every simple gift of the gods’. In fact, the term ‘Cynic’ derives from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon, or ‘dog’.

Diogenes placed reason and nature firmly above custom and convention, which he held to be incompatible with happiness. Rather than pursuing wealth, renown, and other worthless things, people should have the courage to live like animals or gods, partaking in life’s simplest pleasures—which are also its greatest—without bond or fear.

The stories surrounding Diogenes, though embellished, or because embellished, help to convey his spirit. Diogenes wore a simple cloak which he doubled up in winter, begged for food, and sheltered in a tub. He made it his mission to challenge custom and convention, famously ‘defacing the currency’—that is, overturning the false values that governed society. Upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, he mused, ‘If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly.’ He used to stroll about in broad daylight brandishing a lit lamp. Whenever people gathered around to gawk at him, he would explain, ‘I am just looking for a human being.’

His fame spread far beyond Athens. One day, Alexander the Great came to meet him. When Alexander asked whether he could do anything for him, he replied, ‘Yes, stand out of my sunlight.’

For Diogenes and the Cynics, much of our disturbance is self-inflicted. We surrender our peace of mind to things we do not need: money, possessions, and the good opinion of others. The less we depend upon such things, the less power they have to disturb us.

Stoicism

Diogenes was followed by Crates of Thebes (d. 285 BCE), who renounced a large fortune to live the Cynical life of poverty. Crates married Hipparchia of Maroneia, who, uniquely, adopted male dress and lived on equal terms with her husband.

By the first century, Cynics could be found in cities throughout the Roman Empire. At that time, Cynicism vied with Stoicism, a broader philosophical system that emphasised perspective and clear thinking. Stoicism was popular with leading Romans such as the senator Cato the Younger and the emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Zeno of Citium (d. 262 BCE), the founder of Stoicism, had been a pupil of Crates, and Cynicism came to be seen as an idealised form of Stoicism.

Like their ancestors the Cynics, the Stoics sought freedom by reducing our dependence upon things outside our control. But whereas Diogenes had dramatised this freedom by living in radical simplicity, the Stoics developed a more nuanced, and moderate, psychology of judgement and emotion.

Events do not simply make us angry, anxious, envious, or miserable. Between the event and the emotion lies our interpretation of the event. If we can catch and work on that interpretation, we can alter our emotional response. Thus, Stoics such as Epictetus drew a line between things that are ‘up to us’ and those that are not. Our possessions, reputation, and body are vulnerable to fortune. But our mind is more properly our own. Marcus Aurelius often returns to Epictetus in his Meditations, for example, when he says, ‘If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.’

Skepticism

Skepticism and Epicureanism also took off around the time of Alexander. Unlike the sophists whom he opposed, Socrates had skeptical tendencies, claiming that he knew little or nothing and cultivating a state of non-knowledge, or aporia.

Pyrrho of Elis (d. 270 BCE) travelled with Alexander across Persia and into India, where he encountered various schools of thought and ascetics, including the ‘naked wise men’ or gymnosophists (probably Jain monks), with their emphasis on detachment and inner peace.

Blending East and West, Pyrrho came to believe that certain knowledge is impossible and urged suspension of judgement with the aim of exchanging anxiety and dogmatism for ataraxia. After all, if we cannot know what is true or false, or good or bad, why attach so much importance to our opinions? For example, most people are convinced that death is a terrible thing, when it might in fact be the best thing for us.

The Pyrrhonian Skeptic Sextus Empiricus (d. 210 CE) compared Pyrrho’s prescription for ataraxia to a real or fabled episode in the life of the painter Apelles of Kos. One day, Apelles was painting a horse but failed so completely to depict its froth that he gave up and flung his sponge at the picture—thereby accidentally achieving the desired effect. When we stop straining and let go of our judgement, as Apelles did, tranquillity may arrive as if by accident.

In the sixteenth century, the translation of the complete works of Sextus Empiricus led to a resurgence of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, and the work of Descartes—‘I think therefore I am’—can be read as a response to a Skeptical crisis… with roots in Ancient Athens and Ancient India.

Epicureanism

Epicurus of Samos (341–270 BCE) and Zeno of Citium (the founder of Stoicism) were almost exact contemporaries in Athens but may never have met. 

A few years before Zeno began teaching, Epicurus founded a school of philosophy in a garden outside the city’s Dipylon gates. This school, called ‘the Garden’, dedicated itself to attaining happiness through the exercise of reason, and, in a highly sexist and stratified society, admitted both women and slaves.

Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’

Like Zeno, Epicurus dedicated himself to attaining happiness through the exercise of reason: reason teaches that pleasure is good and pain bad, and that pleasure and pain are the ultimate good and bad. This has often been misconstrued as a call for rampant hedonism, but actually involves a kind of hedonic calculus to determine which things, over time, are likely to result in the most pleasure and least pain. Epicurus explicitly warned against overindulgence, because overindulgence so often leads to pain; and, rather than pleasure, emphasised the avoidance of pain, the elimination of unnecessary desire, and ataraxia. ‘If thou wilt make a man happy,’ said Epicurus, ‘add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.’

Epicurus divided pleasures and pains into physical and mental, and argued that fear of the future, especially fear of the gods and fear of death, is the greatest obstacles to happiness.

Although the gods exist, they have absolutely no concern for, or even awareness of, humankind. Indeed, for the gods to involve themselves in the menial matters of men would be to perturb the supreme happiness and tranquillity that characterises and defines them. Instead of fearing the gods, we would do better to emulate them in their supreme removal and detachment.

Neither should we fear death, and this for two main reasons. First, Epicurus, drawing on Democritus, held that everything in the universe, including the human body and mind, is ultimately composed of atoms. Our death entails the disintegration of both body and mind and the re-dispersion of their atoms. As there is no longer any person to be troubled, death cannot trouble us after we are dead. And if death cannot trouble us after we are dead, neither should it trouble us while we are still alive. Second, the eternity that comes before our birth is not regarded as an evil; therefore, neither should the eternity that comes after our death. These two arguments are early formulations, respectively, of the ‘no subject of harm’ argument and the ‘symmetry’ argument, which have both, more or less, withstood the test of time.

Where the Cynic says, ‘free yourself from convention and artificial wants,’ the Stoic says, ‘stop trying to control what you cannot control,’ the Skeptic says, ‘stop demanding certainty where certainty is unavailable,’ and the Epicurean says, ‘simplify your desires and free yourself from unnecessary fears.’ Different diagnoses, different methods, but a remarkably similar destination: ataraxia, freedom from disturbance.

The Ultimate Cool

As a psychiatrist, I find the concept of ataraxia especially appealing. Psychiatry is chiefly concerned with the treatment of mental disorder, as of course it ought to be. Once a person has stopped taking the tablets, surely, that cannot be the end of their journey. I believe that there is much more to mental health than the mere absence of mental disorder. Mental health is not just about surviving, but about thriving, about developing and expressing our highest, fullest potential as human beings.

The concept of ataraxia is so important to me that I named my six-book Ataraxia series after it. Like each of the ancient philosophical schools, each book in the series adopts a distinct but complementary approach to peace of mind: exploring the deep origins of our distress in The Meaning of Madness; defending against the demons of self-deception in Hide and Seek; understanding and refining our emotions in Heaven and Hell; regulating our relations with others in For Better For Worse; developing our cognitive capacities in Hypersanity; and, finally, rethinking success and failure in The Art of Failure.

These books are not only about achieving tranquillity but also about expressing our full potential as human beings. Ataraxia is closely linked with eudaimonia, which is often translated as ‘happiness’ but which is, in fact, a much deeper, fuller, and richer concept, sometimes articulated in terms of flourishing, or living a life that is both fulfilling and fully realised.

Ataraxia may be more difficult to attain today than it was in Ancient Athens. In our economy of disturbance, the danger is not merely that we become more restless, but that we have become so accustomed to disturbance that we cease even to notice it. Younger people in particular, who may have spent their whole lives answering, reacting, worrying, scrolling, and striving, may not even know what it is like to enjoy an undisturbed mind.

Ataraxia is not indifference or disengagement. Diogenes was anything but disengaged, and Marcus Aurelius led armies and governed an empire. It is the ability to engage fully with the world without being continually thrown off balance by it.

The person who needs less, fears less, and is less easily manipulated has achieved a rare kind of freedom.

And that, surely, is the ultimate cool.

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My Philosophy of (Most) Depression

A path through dark forest, with light at the end
In the middle of our life’s walk, I found myself alone in a dark forest… —Dante Alighieri

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Like heart disease or diabetes, depression can be highly debilitating, even fatal. But unlike heart disease or diabetes, depression is poorly understood and heavily stigmatised. People with depression are often seen as ‘failures’ or ‘losers’, too weak or lazy to pick themselves up or pull themselves together.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If you feel the way you do, it is most likely because you tried too hard or took on too much—so hard and so much that you made yourself ill with depression. In other words, if you feel the way you do, it is because your world was simply not good enough for you. You wanted more, you wanted better, and you wanted different, not just for yourself but for all those around you.

So if you’re a ‘failure’ or a ‘loser’, that’s only because you set the bar far too high. You could have swept everything under the carpet and pretended, as many people do, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Instead, you had the honesty and the courage to recognize that something was amiss, that something was not quite right.

Rather than being a failure or a loser, you are all the opposite: you are ambitious, you are truthful, and you are courageous. And that’s precisely why you got ‘ill’.

Depression as a Signal

But here’s the good news. Unlike heart disease or diabetes, depression can also have a silver lining.

Crushing though it may be, depression can present a precious opportunity to identify, acknowledge, and address deep-seated problems.

Just as physical pain evolved to signal injury and prevent further injury, so depression may have evolved to remove us from distressing, damaging, or futile situations—situations that do not serve us well as human beings.

The time and space and solitude afforded by depression can enable us to reassess our needs, reframe our perspectives, and round up the resolve to break with established patterns.

In other words, depression, or the depressive position, may have evolved as a signal that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing—or, at the very least, processing and understanding.

In the normal run of things, we become so immersed in our day-to-day that we no longer have the opportunity or perspective to think and feel about ourselves. The adoption of the depressive position invites—or compels—us to shed our defences, stand back at a distance, reassess our needs and priorities, and formulate a modest but realistic plan for fulfilling them.

At a deeper level, the depressive position can enable us to develop a clearer understanding and appreciation of ourselves, our lives, and life in general. From an existential standpoint, it obliges us to become aware of our mortality and freedom, and challenges us to exercise the latter within the framework of the former. By meeting this ultimate challenge, we are able to break out of the mould that has been imposed upon us, discover who we truly are, and begin to give deep meaning to our lives.

The Gift of the Dark Wood

It can be no coincidence that so many of history’s most creative and insightful people suffered from depression, or from a state that might today be diagnosed as depression. They include Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Leo Tolstoy, and many others.

To quote Marcel Proust, who himself suffered from depression, ‘Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.’

The concept of depression as a mental disorder may be helpful for the more severe and intractable cases treated by hospital psychiatrists, but probably not for the majority of cases, which, for the most part, are mild and short-lived and more readily understood in terms of life circumstances, human nature, or the human condition.

Thinking of our distress or protest or withdrawal in terms of a mental disorder or chemical imbalance in the brain can be counterproductive, insofar as it can prevent us from identifying and addressing the important life problems or psychological issues that lie at the root of our distress, and that are, almost literally, crying out for our care and attention.

Maybe all this is more common sense than philosophy, but I do think it merits saying.

In the middle of our life’s walk
I found myself alone in a dark forest
Where my path was confused.

Ah how hard it is to retell
How dense, dark, and dangerous
The thought of it alone fills me with fear!

So bitter that death is scarcely worse;
But to speak of the good I found there,
I shall tell of the other things that I saw.

—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno

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If you are struggling with depression, you can also download my practical self-help guide Growing from Depression free of charge.

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Three ancient mind exercises for processing and subliming bad news.

Imagine: Your house has been burgled. You’ve been fired. Your partner cheated or walked out on you. You’ve been diagnosed with a life-changing condition…

Bad news can leave us in a state of dread and despair. It seems like our whole world is falling apart, almost as if we’re being driven into the ground. We fear the very worst and cannot get it out of our mind, or gut. Often, there are other emotions mangled in, like anger, guilt, despair, betrayal, and love.

Bad news: we’ve all had it, and the worst is yet to come.

So, how best to cope?

I’m going to give you three cognitive strategies, or mind exercises, that I picked up from the Stoic philosophers—who, in the second century, could count the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, among their followers.

All three strategies aim, in one way or another, at generating perspective. While reading, hold a recent piece of bad news in the front of your mind, and consider how the strategies might or might not apply to your bad news.

Contextualization

Try to frame the bad news, to put it into its proper context. Think about all the good things in your life, including those that have been and those that are yet to come. Remind yourself of all the strengths and resources—the friends, facilities, and faculties—that you can draw upon in your time of need. Imagine how things could be much, much worse—and how for some people they actually are. Your house may have been burgled. Yes, you lost some valuables and it’s all such a huge hassle. But you still have your health, your job, your partner… Bad things are bound to hit us now and then, and it can only be a matter of time before they hit us again. In many cases, they are just the flip side of the good things that we enjoy. You got burgled, because you had a house and valuables. You lost a great relationship, because you had one in the first place. In that much, many a bad thing is no more than the removal or reversal of a good one.

Negative visualization

Now focus on the bad news itself. What’s the worst that could happen, and is that really all that bad? Now that you’ve got the worst out of the way, what’s the best possible outcome? And what’s the most likely outcome? Imagine that someone is threatening to sue you. The worst possible outcome is that you lose the case and suffer all the entailing cost, stress, and emotional and reputational hurt. Though it’s unlikely, you might even do time in prison (it has happened to some, and a few, like Bertrand Russell, did rather well out of it). But the most likely outcome is that you reach some sort of out-of-court settlement. And the best possible outcome is that you win the case, or better still, it gets dropped.

Transformation

Finally, try to transform your bad news into something positive, or into something that has positive aspects. Your bad news may represent a learning or strengthening experience, or act as a wake-up call, or force you to reassess your priorities. At the very least, it offers a window into the human condition and an opportunity to exercise dignity and self-control. Maybe you lost your job: time for a holiday and a promotion, or a career change, or the freedom and fulfilment of self-employment. Maybe your partner cheated on you. Even so, you feel sure that he or she still loves you, that there is still something there. Perhaps you can even bring yourself to look at it from his or her perspective. Yes, of course it’s painful, but it may also be an opportunity to forgive, to build a closer intimacy, to re-launch your relationship—or to go out and find a more fulfilling one. You’ve been diagnosed with a serious medical condition. Though it’s terrible news, it’s also the chance to get the support and treatment that you need, to take control, to fight back, to look at life and your relationships from another, richer perspective.

A Taoist story for the road

There’s a Taoist story about an old farmer whose only horse ran away. “Such terrible news!” said a neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer. The next day, the horse returned with six wild horses. “Such wonderful news!” exclaimed the neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer. The day after that, the farmer’s son tried to tame one of the wild horses but got thrown off and broke a leg. “Such terrible news!” cried the neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer, biting into a peach. A week later, war broke out: thanks to his broken leg, the farmer’s son managed to escape military conscription. “It all worked out really well in the end,” said the neighbour, “such great luck!”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer, rolling his eyes.

Neel Burton is author of Growing from Depression, which is currently free to download from his website bookstore.

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Life in Epicurus' garden
Life in Epicurus’ garden

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay lightly revised on 21 August 2026.

Why do we garden? We spend extraordinary amounts of time and effort digging, planting, pruning, watering, and weeding, only to have to do it all over again. Yet gardens have been with us since the beginnings of civilisation, serving not merely as sources of food but as expressions of power, religion, philosophy, and our relationship with nature.

Ineni, architect to Pharaoh Thutmose I (d. 1492 BCE), had his garden painted into his tomb, along with a list of all the trees within it—presumably, so that they might be accounted for in the afterlife.

Ineni’s garden included:

  • 170 date palms
  • 120 doum palms
  • 73 sycamore figs
  • 31 persea
  • 16 carob
  • 12 grapevines
  • 10 tamarisks
  • 8 willows
  • 5 figs
  • 5 pomegranates
  • 5 garland thorns
  • 2 moringas
  • 2 myrtles…

A grand garden of this sort symbolised control and mastery over nature, a haven of peace and plenty, of order and beauty, by which to project the status, power, and temperament of its owner. Other, more famous, examples include the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Gardens of the Real Alcázar in Seville, and the Gardens of Versailles.

The garden could also have a religious or philosophical message or dimension. For example, the Old Testament’s four rivers of Eden are represented by four watercourses in Islamic paradise gardens, and four paths in Christian cloister gardens. The Zen garden, by hinting at hidden principles, serves as an aid to meditation about the true meaning of existence.

The Gardens at Versailles reflect a rationalist, Cartesian vision of God-given ideas and principles for the intellect to apprehend, whereas English landscape gardens are more in the empiricist mould, presenting nature as a stream of sensory experiences skirting across the blank slate of the mind.

In either case, the garden represents a taming of nature, from dark and deadly forest, or disease-infested swamp, to an extension of our living space: open and structured to still our minds, but retaining enough mystery to sustain our interest and even, perhaps, capture our imagination.

Trees as Symbols

Individual plants too can have a meaning. English churchyards often feature yew trees, which are poisonous, dark, and evergreen, and symbolise both death and immortality. A yew tree is commonly found near the lychgate, where, prior to the advent of mortuaries, the dead awaited burial while mourners kept vigil.

In the ancient world, the palm tree symbolised victory, peace, and bounty, while the cedar of Lebanon symbolised pride, majesty, and dignity. Both also stood for righteousness, as in Psalm 92:12: ‘the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree, grow tall like the cedar of Lebanon.’ Today, Cedrus libani is the national emblem of Lebanon, and a symbol of the peaceful Cedar Revolution of 2005.

Trees can also be planted to mark an important occasion, which is why British royals are often asked to brandish a shovel. In an annual tradition, the Friends of my local park purchase a noteworthy tree and invite a dignitary such as the Lord Mayor to plant it.

A New Religion?

Today, gardens and gardening are more popular than ever. Millions of people in the UK garden, whether in a garden, on an allotment, or simply on a balcony.

The BBC’s flagship Gardeners’ World, presented by Monty Don, attracts millions of viewers—which, in the UK, is many more people than go to church.

Community garden projects and ‘guerrilla gardening’ are on the rise, as are garden towns and villages. A few years ago, one of my neighbours organised for thousands of daffodils to be planted on a neglected and overlooked common, transforming it into a Wordsworthian idyll for the selfie generation. I wonder, do they know that ‘daffodil’ is Narcissus in Latin?

Screenshot of Monty Don sharing this article on Twitter
Monty Don sharing this article on Twitter. Narcisse, moi?

Good for Mind and Body

Gardening is more and more recognised, and even prescribed, for its health benefits. These include increased muscle strength and cardiovascular fitness; improved sleep and diet (if you grow your own produce); reduced stress, anxiety, and depression; a greater sense of community and belonging; and better self-esteem.

You don’t even have to get your hands dirty: some of these benefits accrue simply from visiting a garden, or even just looking over one—although it probably helps to notice and mentally engage with the greenery.

Researchers in Korea randomly assigned hospital patients recovering from thyroidectomy to rooms with plants and flowers, and rooms without, and found that the test group fared significantly better, asking for less pain relief and requiring less time in hospital. So yes, it makes sense to bring flowers, and, at home, to have indoor plants.

Even street trees greatly benefit our health. An American study looking at the city of Toronto found that, for cardio-metabolic conditions (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity…), an increase of just 11 trees per city block had a comparable effect to an increase in annual personal income of USD 20,000.

How might gardening help with mental health? To various degrees, we live inside the stories we tell ourselves. But gardening drags us out of our tortured heads and back into the natural world, which blunts the ideological and emotional extremes to which detached, abstract thought is prone.

In 1920, a mentally strained Ludwig Wittgenstein took up the post of assistant gardener at Klosterneuburg Abbey, explaining in a letter to a friend that he had been longing for ‘some kind of regularized work which, of all the things I can do in my present condition, is the most nearly bearable…’

Voltaire’s Candide (1759) is an attack on the highly abstracted, convoluted, and strained philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz (whom I nevertheless love), and famously concludes with the phrase ‘we must cultivate our garden.’

The Gardening of the Soul

In the Philosophy of Existence (1938), Karl Jaspers describes this disinterested process of looking outside oneself—or phenomenology, as it is sometimes called—as ‘a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me.’

Just picture the gardener’s pure and simple delight at the first crocuses or tulips, a bird’s nest, a swarm of bees…

If gardening makes us feel better, it also makes us into better people. It is a moral education, a school of life, instilling virtues such as pragmatism, patience, perseverance, reliability, and humility, which then transfer out into other spheres.

In his treatise on agriculture (c. 160 BCE), Cato is quite clear that farmers make the bravest and strongest soldiers, and that, of all men, they are ‘the most highly respected, most stable, and least hated (minime invidiosus).’

In Plato’s Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), Socrates compares the wise man to the good husbandman, who is careful to scatter the right seed in the right soil in the right season. Similarly, the good teacher is careful to sow the right words in the right soul at the right time. For Plato, the Divine Teacher, teaching is the gardening of the soul.

Building on these notions, Epicurus (d. 270 BCE) founded his philosophical school in a garden just outside Athens. The Garden sought to return to an agricultural golden age of harmony, community, and self-sufficiency—to ground a flourishing life in the midst of a flourishing garden.

Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’ 

Time Made Visible

A garden is a microcosm of the outside world. Gardeners are acutely aware of the rhythms and cycles of nature: which flowers are in their prime, when to plant out the seedlings, when and how and how much it last rained. Just as music is time made audible, so the garden is ‘time made visible’ (Clive James).

Winter is difficult, yes because it is dark and cold, but also because time is no longer structured by a succession of flowerings and fruitings. Time becomes amorphous, to be entertained and endured rather than savoured and celebrated like the season of magnolias, cherry blossom, rhubarb, plums, or chestnuts.

More than just keen observers of time, gardeners are real-life Time Lords, able to speed up time by working in the garden, and, later, to slow it right down by sitting back and surveying the fruits and flowers of their labour. Some gardeners are even able to step out of time altogether, working year-round to create Arcadian moments of perfection.

But moments are all they will ever be. When you paint a picture or write a book, it is there for ever (and isn’t that just amazing?), but when you mow the lawn you have to do it all over again in just a few days’ time. The gardener is like Sisyphus, the mythological king made to repeat for all eternity the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again.

In his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus concludes: ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.

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