Being Alone Can Be Terrifying—But It’s Actually The Key To Your Happiness

I. There is so much power in being alone… 

You are born alone, you live alone, and you die alone. Terrifying, right? But truthfully, you are the only person in this entire world who fully understands your experiences, knows your traumas and has heard the sound of your inner voice. At the end of your life, you will have been your own closest companion and the only being to truly have known you… Everyone else will simply have been a voyeur. 

Even your most intimate relationships are just intersections, sometimes entanglements, but never complete convergences of you. Within them, you exist through a filter, so living for them is living inauthentically. Out of all matter, space, and lifeforms, you are the only one to have witnessed this world through your lens; your time alone on this planet is quite literally incredible. It is the only proof of your raw existence and the only instance of you that is not inherently a performance. It cannot be judged or validated or even perceived by anyone else. In essence, your alone time is the only time that you are fully you. 

In complete solitude, you are so alive, having an experience that is incomparable to any other. Fundamentally, your time alone cannot be documented, preserved, or revisited; it exists in the present moment and then is lost forever. Value derives from rarity, and as time itself is fleeting and inimitable, being alone must be your most valuable asset. 

You are the only permanent fixture of your reality—and all else is temporary. Consequently, your overall life satisfaction hinges on the quality of your alone time. Being with yourself is a more unique experience than the wildest documented adventure, so find fascination in it. Because any mundane moment alone is wholly yours, these instances should be seen as the pinnacles of your existence. 

When you can extract contentment from these moments, you give yourself the unshakeable peace that asceticism describes: omnipresent, joyous, and completely your own. Peace that, ostensibly, lasts until death. You are born alone, you live alone, you die alone. If you want to die happy, you have to master being alone. (Maybe.)                            

II. There is so much power in being alone… 

…and it is fully under attack. Just by existing, you feed a system that actively suppresses your natural desire for self-relationship. In the West’s economy, it is nearly impossible to access your own power, because the state of capitalism effectively drowns out your capacity for critical thought. You are rarely alone anymore, as the data industry works to monetize every millisecond of your attention. Even in physical solitude, the internet is ubiquitous, working to sell you and sell to you. 

You are rarely alone, and it is not your choice anymore; you are a product, plain and simple, and your time alone is antithetical to the system. Describing the emergence of late-stage capitalism, author Shoshana Zuboff writes, “It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.” The environment has shifted your baseline into overstimulation, and your subsequent resistance to critical thought is exactly what sustains it. 

By design, you are terrified to be alone. The anxiety of facing your feelings is a direct product of the industries that usurp your alone time, alienate you from yourself, and then convince you to fill that void with product. You are afraid of the unfamiliar, and every moment you spend in that fear benefits the same system that created it. 

Critical thought moves us forward. When people are unwilling to accept the system as is, revolutions are catalyzed. Throughout history, regimes have violently suppressed activist voices, but capitalism has evolved a less brutal, more sinister approach. By shortening attention spans, inundating the population with stimuli, and eliminating time alone, it asphyxiates the very critical thoughts that could become revolutions. 

You live in a dystopia that effectively eliminates your ability to question it. As your brain space is monetized further and further, you are separated from yourself more and more. Who benefits?

III. There is so much power in being alone… 

Use it to heal. The time you spend caring for your inner child has greater ramifications than you can imagine–not just for you, but for all the generations to come after you. Because your relationships with others are simply projections of your relationship with self, the healing that occurs at a personal level translates to large-scale societal development. Humanity is all connected, and your unique experience is an integral piece of the puzzle. 

Your brain exists to serve you: to recognize danger, to isolate negative patterns, and to formulate solutions. When you retreat from the system, you can provide the answers to your own stress, reactivity, and self-sabotage. In intentional alone-time, you build self-awareness and mental fortitude, cultivating a healthy relationship with your only forever companion. 

By becoming familiar with yourself, you learn your traumas and stop holding yourself accountable for what has been done to you. You discover that your reactivity is derived from situations out of your control– ones that cannot define you. You learn why you made your last decision and that you are fully in charge of your next one. As these truths solidify, you lend grace to others and externalize that morality is relative. When you recognize that humans are simply products of their experiences, you become a more empathetic friend, lover, family member, and person. You become the change you want to see, and, slowly, the world evolves through you. 

You are the only person you will ever fully know; you are the only person you can ever fully love. From that love, generational trauma ends and generational healing begins. When you reject the industry of overstimulation, you find inner peace, disrupt the system, and move society forward.

You are the composite result of millions of years of survival, strategy, and love. Your existence is proof that life finds a way, and that innovation and beauty are facets of nature. You are the most powerful tool in existence, so make remarkable use of yourself… by doing nothing. Seriously. You are underutilizing your most valuable asset because you don’t do nothing enough.