How to Be Alone and Why

medium.com/s/story/how-to-be-alone-and-why-f4e264c320fd

The average adult spends about one-third of his or her waking time alone.

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

How are you spending yours? Scrolling Facebook? Texting? Tweeting? Online shopping?
The to-do list is endless.

But time isn’t.

Alone time is an invitation, a chance to do the things you’ve longed to do. You can read,
code, paint, meditate, practice a language, or go for a stroll.

Alone, you can pick through sidewalk crates of used books without worrying you’re
hijacking your companion’s afternoon or being judged for your lousy idea of a good time.
You need not carry on polite conversation. You can go to a park. You can go to Paris.

You’d hardly be alone. From North America to South Korea more people are now living by
themselves than ever before. Single-person households are projected to be the fastest-
growing household profile globally from today to 2030, according to Euromonitor
International. More people are dining solo. More are traveling alone — a lot more. From
vacation rental companies to luxury tour operators, industry groups have been reporting
double-digit upticks in solo travel. And the boom isn’t being driven just by people who are
single: The “married-with-kids” solo traveler market is growing as well. Nearly 10 percent of
American travelers with partners and children are taking solo vacations during the year,
according to MMGY Global’s Portrait of American Travelers, 2016–17. In other words,
traveling alone isn’t just for twentysomethings and retirees, but for anyone who wants it, at
any age, in any situation: partners, parents, and singles looking for romance — or not.

Few of us want to be recluses. The rise of co-working and co-living spaces around the
world is but the latest evidence of that. Yet having a little time to ourselves, be it five days in
Europe or five minutes in our backyard, can be downright enviable.

Some 85 percent of adults — both men and women, across all age groups — told the Pew
Research Center that it’s important for them to be completely alone sometimes. And yet
many of us, even those who cherish alone time, are often reluctant to do certain things on
our own — which may lead us to miss out on entertaining, enriching, even life-changing
experiences and new relationships.

A series of studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2015 found that men
and women were likely to avoid fun public activities like going to a movie or restaurant if
they had no one to accompany them. The studies suggested that people believed going
alone wouldn’t be as much fun, and that they were concerned about how they might be
perceived by others.

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Indeed, for many of us, solitude is something to be avoided, something associated with
problems like loneliness and depression. Freud observed that “the first situation phobias of
children are darkness and solitude.” In many preliterate cultures, solitude was thought to be
practically intolerable, as the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Flow, his book
about the science of happiness: “Only witches and shamans feel comfortable spending time
by themselves.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a series of studies published in the journal Science in 2014
found that many participants preferred to administer an electric shock to themselves rather
than be left alone with their own thoughts for fifteen minutes. Man, as scientists and
philosophers from Aristotle on have noted, is a social animal. And with good reason.
Positive relationships are crucial to our survival; to humanity’s collective knowledge,
progress, and joy. One of the longest studies of adult life in history, the Harvard Study of
Adult Development, has tracked hundreds of men for about eighty years, and the takeaway
again and again has been that good relationships — with family, friends, colleagues, and
people in our communities — make for happy, healthy lives.

Socially isolated people, on the other hand, are at an increased risk for disease and
cognitive decline. As Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard study, put it in a talk for
TEDxBeaconStreet: “Loneliness kills.” Christian hermits broke up their solitary periods with
communal work and worship. Thoreau had three chairs in his house in the woods, “one for
solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto.

Solitude and its perils is an ancient and instructive story. But it’s not the whole story. The
company of others, while fundamental, is not the only way of finding fulfillment in our lives.

For centuries people have been retreating into solitude — for spirituality, creativity, reflection,
renewal, and meaning. Buddhists and Christians entered monasteries. Native Americans
went up mountains and into valleys. Audrey Hepburn took to her apartment. “I have to be
alone very often,” she told Life magazine in 1953. “I’d be quite happy if I spent from
Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”

Others went great distances. Miles were sailed, flown, and driven by solo adventurers like
Captain Joshua Slocum and Anne-France Dautheville, one of the first women to ride a
motorcycle alone around the world. “From now on, my life would be mine, my way,” she
said of riding solo 12,500 miles in 1973. Scholars have been insisting for decades that the
positive aspects of solitude deserve a closer look, from the pediatrician and psychoanalyst
Donald Winnicott in the 1950s to the British psychiatrist Anthony Storr in the 1980s, to
psychologists leading studies today. A little solitude, their research suggests, can be good
for us.

For one thing, time spent away from the influence of others allows us to explore and define
who we are. In private, we can think deeply and independently, as the legal scholar and
privacy expert Alan Westin explained in “Privacy and Freedom.” There’s room for problem
solving, experimentation, and imagination. The mind can crackle with intense focus or go
beachcombing, plucking up an idea like a shell, examining and pocketing it, or letting it go
to pick up another.

Thinkers, artists, and innovators from Tchaikovsky to Barack Obama, from Delacroix and
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Marcel Marceau to Chrissie Hynde and Alice Walker, have expressed the need for solitude
at one time or another. It’s what Rodin has in common with Amy Schumer; what
Michelangelo shares with Grace Jones. Philosophers and scientists spent much of their
lives in solitude, including Descartes, Nietzsche, and Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize–
winning geneticist who, the New York Times reported, resisted having a telephone until she
was eighty-four. Countless writers, including Shakespeare, Dickinson, Wharton, Hugo, and
Huxley, mined solitude as a theme. Symphonies and songs, poems and plays, and
paintings and photos have been created in solitude.

For the creative person, “his most significant moments are those in which he attains some
new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moments are chiefly, if not
invariably, those in which he is alone,” Storr wrote in his seminal book, Solitude: A Return
to the Self. While other people can be one of our greatest sources of happiness, they can at
times nonetheless be a distraction. Their presence may also inhibit the creative process,
“since creation is embarrassing,” as the writer Isaac Asimov wrotein an essay published in
the MIT Technology Review. “For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten
thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.” Monet slashed his
paintings before the opening of an exhibition in Paris, declaring the canvasses unworthy to
pass on to posterity. Robert Rauschenberg flung his early works into the Arno.

Yet just as alone time can be important for creation (and possible subsequent destruction),
it can also be necessary for restoration. Some of the latest research has found that even
fifteen minutes spent by ourselves, without electronic devices or social interaction, can
decrease the intensity of our feelings, potentially leaving us more relaxed, less angry, and
less worried. The studies, led by Thuy-vy Nguyen and published in the Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, suggest that we can use solitude as a tool, a way to regulate
our emotional states, “becoming quiet after excitement, calm after an angry episode, or
centered and peaceful when desired.”

Alone, we can power down. We’re “off stage,” as the sociologist Erving Goffman put it,
where we can doff the mask we wear in public and be ourselves. We can be reflective. We
have the opportunity for self-evaluation, a chance to consider our actions and take what
Westin called a “moral inventory.”

We can also take inventory of all the information that has accumulated throughout the day.
Even Bill Clinton, exemplar of extraversion, acknowledged that as president he scheduled
“a couple of hours a day alone to think, reflect, plan, or do nothing.” “Often,” he said, “I slept
less just to get the alone time.”

This notion of reflection harks back to an ancient Greek principle known as epimelesthai
sautou. The philosopher Michel Foucault translated it as “to take care of yourself,” and
though it was once “one of the main rules for social and personal conduct and for the art of
life,” Foucault observed that there is a tendency, particularly in modern Western society, to
view caring for oneself as almost immoral.

And yet alone time has the potential to leave us more open and compassionate toward
others. John D. Barbour, a professor of religion at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota,
has written that while solitude involves the self, it’s “not necessarily narcissistic.” He’s
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suggested, for instance, that the solitude sought by biblical prophets may have helped
shape their perspective and made them more sensitive to the suffering of people who were
less powerful. “Solitude at its best,” he wrote in “The Handbook of Solitude: Psychological
Perspectives on Social Isolation, Social Withdrawal, and Being Alone,” is not about
“escaping the world, but toward a different kind of participation in it.”

Unfortunately, there’s a tendency in our age of scant nuance to conceive of solitude and
society as either-or propositions: You’re either alone on your couch or you’re organizing
dinner parties. That’s an unhelpful (and often wrong) distinction. The psychologist Abraham
H. Maslow wrote in “Toward a Psychology of Being” that self-actualizing people — those
who have attained the highest tier of his hierarchy of human needs — are capable of being
more than one thing at one time, even if those things are contradictory. They can be
simultaneously individual and social; selfish and unselfish. Decades ago, the psychologist
Jerry M. Burger said in the Journal of Research in Personality that people with a high
preference for solitude don’t necessarily dislike social interaction, and aren’t necessarily
introverted. They probably spend most of their time around others, and enjoy it, he wrote;
it’s simply that, “relative to others,” they are more likely to decide to be by themselves now
and then because they appreciate the reflection, creativity, and renewal that solitude can
offer.

For years, the conventional wisdom was that if you spent a good deal of time alone,
something was likely wrong with you. And, certainly, as psychologists have observed, many
people do withdraw because they’re socially anxious or depressed. Yet many others
choose to spend time alone because they find it pleasurable. Maslow, for example, wrote
that mature, self-actualizing people are particularly drawn to privacy, detachment, and
meditativeness.

How much time alone feels right, however, is a matter of taste and circumstance. For
some, time alone is a rare privilege; something desired but hard to get between long work
hours and a full house. Others may feel they spend too much time by themselves. Finding a
balance that feels good is personal, and not necessarily easy.

“When do you pause?” wrote Julia Child’s husband, Paul, in the 1950s when the Childs
were living in Paris. “When do you paint or pant? When write family, loll on moss, hear
Mozart and watch the glitter of the sea?”

When you’re alone.

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