by Don Hall

There’s a weird and persistent cultural myth that being alone is inherently bad—like solitude is something that happens to you, not something you choose. It’s the lurking specter of loneliness that makes people confuse solitude with exile, like the only reason anyone would be alone is because they couldn’t find anyone to tolerate their presence. But solitude isn’t social failure; it’s an essential, if deeply misunderstood, state of being. In fact, it might be one of the few ways to reclaim some sanity in a world designed to fracture your attention into a million hyper-stimulated pieces.

The modern human being is under constant psychic assault. Everything—your phone, your email, your third “urgent” Teams message about the quarterly budget review—is designed to drag your attention out of your own mind and into a buzzing collective hum. In this environment, solitude becomes not just restorative but revolutionary. To be alone, truly alone, is to declare independence from a world that monetizes your distraction. It’s an act of rebellion against the relentless encroachment of notifications and alerts, the digital equivalent of clearing out a forest overgrown with invasive species.

Solitude also makes space for thinking—the real, deep, hard kind. The kind of thinking you can’t outsource to a search engine or compress into a bullet-point list. Virginia Woolf, who understood solitude better than most, famously said that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write fiction, but what she really meant (or what she should have meant) is that anyone doing any kind of meaningful intellectual work needs time and space free from the clamoring demands of other people. The human mind, left to its own devices, will wander into strange and fertile territory. Solitude is the condition that allows creativity to flourish because it removes the noise and static of everyday life.

Of course, solitude isn’t all productive epiphanies and existential breakthroughs. It’s also just… nice. There’s something deeply restorative about sitting alone in a quiet room, reading or staring out a window, or just existing without anyone needing anything from you. In a society that equates busyness with virtue, allowing yourself to be alone can feel suspiciously like slacking off. But solitude offers a kind of rest that sleep can’t provide—a rest from being seen, judged, evaluated. To be alone is to be momentarily free from the performance of being yourself.

But here’s the trick: solitude only works if you choose it. The same quiet that feels like liberation when you seek it out can feel like suffocating isolation when it’s imposed on you. There’s a delicate balance between solitude and loneliness, and the line between them is thinner than most people realize. One is a sanctuary; the other, a trap.

So the next time you feel the gravitational pull of your phone or the instinctive urge to fill the silence with music or a podcast, resist it. Sit still. Be alone. Not because you have to, but because you can. In a world that’s constantly demanding your attention, solitude is how you reclaim it.