The Value of Solitude | Why it Might Be Better to Be Less Social

When you wake up, wake up as if you had no friends, no family, no country.

Remove every single person from your life’s story.

Disentangle yourself from the trap of seeing yourself through the eyes of anyone.

You are not known.

You are solitary.

And you are here for a reason.

You have no past.

You have no future.

You have no name.

You have no identity.

You are here.

And no one knows you — and you know no one.

Who are you… now?

I wrote the above passage to myself over five years ago. And sometimes, I go back to it. Reading it gives me a sense of incredibly delicate spaciousness and lightness. The question at the end is never meant to be answered with words.

One of the things that’s perplexed me for many years is friendships.

They exist in this vacuum. A friendship can’t be quantified.

The connection you share with one of your friends, is different from the connection you share with another one of your friends.

Whoever you are with them, forms a reputation of some kind. They build an image of you. You build an image of yourself with them.

And when you exit an interaction with them, it’s almost like you keep this updated reputation of yourself and them in the back of your pocket.

Maybe Ben helps bring a certain side out of you. Maybe Suzzy helps you see a side of humanity you don’t ordinarily see. In any case, your bond with these persons, exists somewhere in this invisible unknown force field.

And it’s almost as if, each person in the friendship, connects to this field. We extract the same sense of positive feeling, when we think about/reach out/hear from them.

There’s an exchange happening — in the background of life — like a WiFi signal. Sometimes you get less reception because you haven’t seen or spoken to each other in a while. But the pulse of these signals is never too far away.

The more friends you have, the more of these signals you’re connected to. And more you connect with these friends, the more these signals discombobulate and reintegrate themselves into something slightly more crystallized each time.

The question I have is: are these signals actually helpful? I believe they are. But they can also prove to be limitations — when we’re looking to grow out of who we currently are, so that we can step into the unknown.

Solitude for selected periods of time allows us to step away from these signals, so that we can connect to newer, perhaps more enriching signals — untethered from people — we may gain access to greater intuition, insights, about the direction of our lives and who we really are.

A Song on this theme: Inofaith — Nocturne