What is remarkable about your essay is not simply its defense of solitude, but the precision with which it separates solitude from deprivation. Most writing on the subject collapses into diagnosis or self-help. You masterfully resisted both. You treated aloneness as a perceptual condition, almost an artistic medium, and that distinction gives the essay unusual intellectual integrity. The passages on attention, especially the idea that solitude alters the texture of perception, are exceptionally strong. An artist immediately recognises this as true. The eye does not really begin to see until performance stops.
I love your argument that modern noise is not connection but avoidance with better branding. That line cuts because it reframes distraction as an aesthetic problem. We have lost tolerance for unedited consciousness. Contemporary life trains people to curate themselves continuously, which means many never encounter the raw material from which serious art, thought, or even genuine preference emerges. Your essay understands that solitude is not valuable because it is peaceful, but because it removes the audience. That is a much more difficult and interesting claim.
There is also something formally impressive in the way you move between philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and lived experience without becoming ornamental. Too many essays use references as social proof. Here, Pascal, Woolf, Winnicott, Rilke, and Proust function like structural beams; each thinker advances the argument rather than decorating it. That level of intellectual choreography is rare, but we are used to it in the Museguided salon — the only real salon on Substack.
I am also thinking about the relationship between solitude and aesthetic risk. From the perspective of an artist, solitude is not only where perception deepens; it is where taste detaches from consensus. In groups, people unconsciously stabilise one another’s preferences. Alone, however, you begin discovering what genuinely arrests your attention without social calibration guiding the response. This is why prolonged solitude often changes an artist’s work before it changes their personality. Certain colors become intolerable. Certain rhythms suddenly feel dishonest. Certain subjects begin insisting on themselves. Solitude recalibrates the sensorium before it recalibrates identity.
And perhaps this is another reason solitude unsettles culture so deeply. A person who has spent enough time alone becomes harder to market to, flatter, shame, or synchronize. They develop private standards of beauty and meaning. Economically and socially, that kind of inward independence is inefficient. Artistically, it is indispensable.
I think the recalibration you describe isn’t only sensory, but ontological too. Solitude doesn’t just change what the artist sees; it changes what the artist is willing to not-see, which is a different and harder discipline. The capacity to let certain subjects insist on themselves requires first dismantling the social hierarchy of worthiness, the inherited sense of which subjects deserve serious attention and which are too small, too private, too embarrassing to pursue. That hierarchy is almost entirely socially installed. Solitude is where it begins to loosen.
The point about becoming harder to market to is my essay’s most threatening implication, and I deliberately left it mostly implicit. A self that has developed private standards of beauty and meaning is economically inefficient as well as epistemically dangerous to systems that depend on manufactured consensus. Advertising, ideology, and certain kinds of social pressure all require a subject whose preferences are still negotiable, still calibratable by external signal. The person who has spent enough time alone to know the difference between what they actually want and what they have l been persuaded to want is, in the most precise sense, ungovernable in that domain.
On the references… the highest compliment you could pay is that they functioned structurally rather than decoratively because that is exactly the distinction I hold myself to. A thinker quoted as social proof is a thinker betrayed.
The salon recognises its own. Grateful, as ever, for the artistic insights you bring here, Alexander. You make it even more incredible.
Agreed, solitude is freedom from inherited emphasis. An artist’s real struggle is often not discovering what to look at, but granting themselves permission to look where prestige, fashion, or ideology insist there is “nothing there”. The private, the minor, the supposedly unserious are frequently where reality is hiding before culture catches up to it.
Your point about negotiable preferences is especially sharp because it reframes autonomy as perceptual résistance rather than rebellion. Most systems do not require obedience so much as predictable attention. A person who has cultivated an interior standard becomes difficult because they no longer automatically absorb value from collective cues. That is a quieter and far more consequential form of independence.
And the line about thinkers being betrayed when used decoratively is exact. Quotation without structural necessity is intellectual taxidermy! Your essay avoided that entirely. The references breathe because they are doing essential work inside the argument rather than standing beside it as credentials.
I always look forward to conversation between the two of you. This one has added considerably to my understanding of the essay, and has very much kept me thinking about it.
I am so glad when my readers read what others wrote in the comments section. The exchange is essential for me. It means my writing is alive. I am beyond grateful.
I love reading the comments because you have really interesting continuations of what you've written. Also, different points of view or of emphasis. It's a big part of what makes me really think about your writing.
Alexander TD: “That level of intellectual choreography is rare, but we are used to it in the Museguided salon — the only real salon on Substack.”
I thought you said one thing, but you said three things, and they’re all true! Plus, I think these essays AND the comments should be a book! In addition to my own writing, I’m semi-retired from formatting and doing the interior design of other authors’ books, and I was trying to imagine how I would format Tamara’s new book (lol—-see this is how rumors get started: ‘New book? what new book?’) as yet unnamed, and I haven’t figured it out yet. So many of the answers/comments are so vital to the essays, as Tamara is the first to acknowledge, Including yours, Alexander…and I picked an easy one because sometimes it takes me DAYS to figure out what everyone is talking about! I love that! I also loved this essay, Tamara./t
The book rumour is now officially started, and I accept no responsibility for the consequences.
But the instinct is sound, and not just as flattery. The comment section as intellectual apparatus, as genuine extension of my essay’s argument rather than mere response to it, is itself a form worth preserving. The salon analogy that many readers have been making for almost a year now holds here precisely because the conversation doesn’t just react, it thinks. What you describe formally, the essay and its replies as a unified intellectual object, is actually how the best of these exchanges already function. The formatting problem is real though. How do you give the margins equal weight without flattening the hierarchy that makes the whole thing work?
The easy comment sections are the least interesting ones. Mine is definitely not :)
I appreciate the nuance here: solitude, not isolation; the gendered differences; being alone versus being seen alone; the fact that solitude does not mean introspection or productivity; and the fact that you recognize that it's less about the cliche of personal growth and more about the tolerance of discomfort, and familiarity with the self.
As with so many other things, the answer is in balance. Solitude is healthy in contrast with the social, and vice versa. Spending too much time doing one or the other has a cost, and because solitude represents a type of refusal, it is maligned and misrepresented as a threat, in the way that boundaries tend to be.
Boredom is an offshoot of this. The fear of isolation and the discomfort with boredom all reflect the dampening of sensory input. The dependence on phone is as much an addiction to sensory input as it is a desperate attempt to prove one's social viability. If productivity is the value, boredom represents a failure state, just as solitude is seen as a failure to socially flourish. What we can't perceive with our senses or validate through the eyes of another represents the most terrifying thing of all: ambiguity.
Boredom is the presence of an unstructured self, and that’s exactly what makes it unbearable for people who have never made peace with their own company. The phone fills time; it also forecloses the particular anxiety of not knowing what you are when nothing is happening to you. That’s a much more existential function than we usually ascribe to scrolling.
And the ambiguity framing is so precise. Solitude and boredom share the fact that they refuse to tell you what to think about yourself. They offer no external verdict. For a culture that has outsourced self-knowledge almost entirely to social feedback (likes, responses, the presence of others as a constant referendum on one’s own existence), that ambiguity is vertigo.
Solitude, chosen and protected, says: “I do not require constant external confirmation to know that I exist and that my inner life is real”. That’s not a threat to anyone reasonable. But reasonable people rarely feel threatened by it.
The precision you brought to my essay was its own pleasure to read, Andrew. Thank you!
I think to add to the sentiments you have expressed. I think solitude reveals that some of what we call "desire" is actually mimetic hunger, that one might just want what others have designated as appropriate wants for them. I also think that solitude is a rehearsal for facing one's own mortality. It's the only practice space where we genuinely confront the fact that we are an alone consciousness that will end someday.
And as you have so rightly put it sometimes olitude is not generative, some days are definitely better than others. I guess life is an effort to live in oscillation, to sit in the boredom and ennui of it all and to also luxuriate in the richness of experience.
René Girard spent a career arguing that most of what we want, we want because someone else wanted it first, and solitude is one of the few conditions that interrupts that triangulation. Alone, without the social mirror running, you start to notice which desires persist and which ones dissolve without an audience. The ones that dissolve were never quite yours to begin with. That’s not a comfortable discovery, but it’s a clarifying one.
I find the mortality point even more interesting because it’s rarely made so directly. Solitude is the one rehearsal that actually resembles the final condition… no, not morbidly, but structurally. Every genuine encounter with one’s own consciousness, unmediated, is a small reminder that this particular awareness is singular and temporary. Most people find that unbearable. I think it’s one of the better arguments for taking the interior life seriously while there’s still time to do something with it.
And yes, oscillation is the honest word! Not balance, which implies a stable midpoint, but oscillation, which allows for the full range. Some days the silence is a gift. Others it’s just…… Wednesday.
Worth every exclamation mark. :) Thank you so much, Christine!
This is extraordinary writing, Tamara, because it restores dignity to an experience modern culture keeps trying to diagnose away. Most people feel only in fragments what you write about, the self is not a problem to solve, but a landscape to encounter. Your essay feels like someone slowly turning up the lights in a room readers didn’t realise they’d abandoned inside themselves.
Your idea that solitude sharpens perception rather than shrinking life is incredible . I think there’s another layer to this too, solitude is one of the last places where memory can settle into meaning instead of content. In constant company, social, digital, conversational, experience passes through us too quickly to become wisdom. We react before we metabolise. But alone, something slower happens. Old conversations reorganise themselves. Regret becomes instruction. Desire becomes legible. You begin to notice not only what you think, but what keeps returning. And what repeatedly returns is often the closest thing we have to truth.
That may be why genuine solitude can feel almost subversive now. A person who can sit alone with their own mind becomes harder to manipulate. Advertising weakens. Social performance weakens. Even envy starts to lose oxygen because attention is no longer constantly ricocheting off other people’s lives. Solitude reveals the self and changes the economics of desire itself.
Your line about people bringing their phones as chaperones was painful because it’s true. We have created a civilization where uninterrupted interiority feels suspicious, almost irresponsible. Yet nearly every serious work of art, philosophy, spiritual insight, or moral reckoning in history emerged from someone who protected silence fiercely enough for an unapproved thought to survive.
In an age built on reaction, originality may simply begin with the courage to remain alone long enough to hear yourself before the world does. And Tamara, you are among the most unique and original voices I have ever read.
The distinction between experience as content and experience as meaning is important because it identifies something the pace discourse almost always misses. The problem isn’t that modern life moves quickly, life has always had velocity, it’s that the infrastructure of contemporary attention actively prevents absorption . You can’t digest what you are not allowed to sit with. And everything today is ingestion without digestion, which produces a kind of intellectual malnutrition that is very difficult to diagnose because the person suffering from it feels extremely busy and extremely informed.
What keeps returning is a genuinely underrated epistemological instrument. Not nostalgia, not obsession, but the gravitational pull of the unresolved, the thought that won’t stay filed, the image that resurfaces in unguarded moments.
I trust that signal more than most deliberate thinking because it hasn’t been curated. It arrives without asking permission, which means it hasn’t been shaped to please anyone, including me.
The subversion point is correct and it runs deeper than individual psychology. A person who has learned to sit with their own unmediated mind doesn’t just resist manipulation, they become capable of noticing it, which is an entirely different and more active condition. Résistance is defensive. Recognition is precise.
And yes, every serious thought in history required someone to protect the silence long enough for an unapproved idea to survive its own fragility. That’s just how it works although it sounds romantic.
I am grateful for the generosity and the sharpness in equal measure. Both are rarer than they should be. Thank you so much, Céline!
This could not have landed in my inbox at a more perfect time. I’ve been struggling with solitude lately: living on my own; completing my PhD; being the only single friend out of all my friends; dealing with anxiety. I’ve been seeing “aloneness” as something to fix or fill, dreading a weekend or days with no plans, and impatiently waiting for the next moment I know I won’t be on my own. And while I’ve certainly filled my life more where it was genuinely lacking connection, lightheartedness, and fun, I have also been practicing just being with myself in the in-between moments. It has been incredibly uncomfortable, excruciating actually.. I’ve had to face lot of grief, fear and shame that I have been running away from my whole life. But, my god, has it been liberating! So thank you for reminding me - in such beautiful words - how powerful and transformative solitude can be. I will be returning to this when I need another reminder.
Each of those situations alone would be enough to make solitude feel like a verdict rather than a choice. All three together, and the silence must have had a particular weight to it. The fact that you have stopped trying to outrun it, and started sitting with what it actually contains, is amazing. Most people never do it. They just get faster.
Grief, fear, and shame are terrible houseguests because they don’t leave just because you ignore them. They renovate while you do not look. Facing them directly, in the uncomfortable quiet, is the only way to find out which ones were ever really yours and which ones you inherited and never examined.
The in-between moments are where most of a life actually happens, which is exactly why we work so hard to fill them. Learning to be present in them, not productively, not hopefully, just present, is a form of courage.
Keep the PhD company well! It deserves your full attention, and so do you, Grace! Thank you so much for finding the time to read me!
Solitude is venerable to a practical point. But like anything else, it always threatens to teeter off the deep end. I can attest.
The problem with too much solitude is that you risk a sort of inbreeding depression from lack of input. I don’t mean from ideas; I mean from social and cultural tests.
The other problem is teleological. If you acknowledge your human limitations, you can surmise that there’s a hazard with going so deep in the depths or so high in the heights, no one else can reach you. To a point, it’s a good way to separate those dedicated enough to rise or descend from those who want to fritter at ground level. Beyond that, it will either be you and the summit, or you and the abyss, and you need to learn to negotiate with that, because there’s no coming back.
Not only that, but don’t expect too many people to understand any of your foibles, either. I may be blowing the importance of commiseration out of proportion for those who crave solitude, but I can never seem to answer the question of why it all matters if no one can seem to relate. In some ways, it can be indistinguishable from punishment.
Some talk of solitude as if they’ve been granted the golden secret to life that most will never understand. I’ve just never felt a choice. I can’t seem to relate to most people, and maybe I’ve grown anesthetized to it because I’ve just become institutionalized to having my own way all the time, but it can turn into a doldrum. I spend a fair amount of my time trying to relate to others and find myself repeatedly retreating because none of it seems relevant or meaningful.
So sure: there’s the development and self-edification and whatnot, and that’s wonderful. But if there’s really no practical purpose save building up a defense against an uncaring world, it’s not always that great a meditative experience.
It’s also a matter of perspective, like anything. I don’t think I’d bemoan the experience so much if I’d had to recently spend an unhealthy amount of time around tittering chatterboxes, so I guess the moral is, if blessings are all you have, it gets hard to keep count.
Ian, you describe something the more celebratory accounts of solitude tend to omit, that there’s a point past which it stops being chosen and starts being the only available terrain. That’s a completely different experience, and it deserves a different name.
The inbreeding metaphor is biologically accurate. Thought, like any system, needs friction from outside itself to stay honest. Without the résistance of other minds (not chatter, but genuine encounter), certain ideas harden into certainties they haven’t earned. The summit and the abyss are both, in their extremes, echo chambers.
The teleological problem you raise is the one I find the hardest to argue around. If the self you have cultivated in solitude becomes increasingly untranslatable to others, the question of purpose becomes genuinely pressing. Meaning is at least partly relational, without needing approval, because significance seems to require a witness at some point, even an imperfect one. A thought that can never be shared is not necessarily more profound for its privacy. Sometimes it’s just stranded.
At the end you name the exhaustion of a particular paradox… too much solitude makes company feel irrelevant, but without the possibility of genuine connection, solitude loses its counterweight and becomes its own kind of confinement. Neither pole redeems the other automatically.
I didn’t write this essay from resolution. I wrote it from inside the same negotiation you have described. That felt worth saying honestly.
Thank you for this. When I have interactions that don't seem relevant or meaningful, I do one of two things, and sometimes both. I quiet down and listen deeply to the other person or people. And while focusing outward, I keep an eye on myself. I listen for what this interaction is bringing up, and what possible mirror it could be holding up to me. There's usually something there, and in thinking about it, there's something to be gained from what initially appears to be trite and irrelevant to me.
The mirror discipline is really demanding because it requires holding two attentions simultaneously, one outward toward what’s being said, one inward toward what’s being activated. Most people can manage one or the other. The capacity to run both without collapsing them is a form of interior bilingualism that takes considerable practice.
What you describe also dismantles the hierarchy between meaningful and meaningless interaction. If even the apparently trite exchange can become a diagnostic, revealing something about what you carry, what you resist, what you haven’t finished with yet, then nothing is entirely wasted. The irritation that seems disproportionate. The boredom that arrives too quickly. The unexpected tenderness toward someone who shouldn’t matter. All of it is data, if you’re watching yourself watch.
The solitude doesn’t stay at home. You have learned to carry it into the room. I am the most grateful.
I know for myself, holding two dialogues simultaneously is something I've done all my life, including childhood. It's directly related to growing up as a queer child in the 60s and 70s. The toxic male environment sharpened my ability to do that. And the dysfunctional home helped too! Let's super-not forget that! 😆
Necessity is the oldest school, and the curriculum you describe, holding the inner dialogue steady while navigating a surface that couldn’t safely know about it, is one of the more demanding forms of interior bilingualism there is. The self learned to run continuously beneath whatever the room required, because exposure carried real cost.
What is remarkable is that what began as survival became capacity. The doubled attention that kept you safe as a child became the instrument of genuine perception as an adult. The toxic environment sharpened something it never intended to sharpen.
And that is just what some people do with what they are given. Admirable!
Society keeps treating solitude like a software bug instead of the last place where an unsponsored thought can still occur. We’ve built a culture where people panic if left alone with their own mind for eleven seconds, then wonder why every opinion sounds prepackaged and every personality feels algorithmically assembled.
The modern fear is not loneliness. It’s the possibility that, in silence, you might discover a self that cannot be marketed or socially performed.
Your essays do something increasingly rare, Tamara. They make interior life feel intellectually serious again instead of therapeutically branded. That is an extraordinary achievement. Your voice is unparalleled.
The software bug framing is exact, and what makes it particularly insidious is that the proposed patch is always more connection, more input, more signal, when the actual problem is the absence of any process that converts experience into something personal and irreducible. We keep treating the symptom as the cure.
The prepackaged opinion problem follows directly from this. You cannot develop a genuinely private judgment about anything if you’ve never spent enough time alone with a question to find out what you actually think before the social consensus arrives to tell you. Most people encounter the consensus first and mistake it for their own conclusion. Solitude is the only condition that reverses that sequence.
And yes, the unmarketable self is the genuine terror. Not loneliness, not silence, but the discovery of a self that has developed preferences, résistances, and convictions that didn’t come from anywhere social and therefore can’t be appealed to through social means. That self is, economically speaking, a catastrophe. Which is precisely what makes it worth cultivating.
Grateful for your precision, Clara! It’s a pleasure when a comment arrives already thinking.
So good! So true. There is an argument out there that loneliness somehow has induced elements of totalitarianism...we are a lonely society and hence we are at fault for the state of affairs in many countries, we are to be blamed because we haven't prioritized connection and we somehow brought so much agony on ourselves. That never convinced men fully, only enough to blame myself. What you've articulated Tamara, is the truth. Solitude, if we allow it, allows us to shine our own light and step away from the shadows cast by others. So indeed, relationships as well as friendships can get super lonely or draining. I joke to myself that the last 6 years have felt like a cruel imprisonment, but they led to clarity as well. I wouldn't have started writingnas English was always my worst subject, putting pen to paper was never my thing and whenever I would do it, it was mostly therapy, though I do keep journals. Going to operas alone would never have happened until one fine day in London when a woman in a finishing course said to me, "either you're the Queen, or you dont go at all". Off I went in a ballgown with a train...on the tube. If I worked the same job, I'd never found my own tech company which I am launching this week. Had I let myself remain blinded, I would never have figured out how many haters I had either through some weird envy or other issues, people from childhood and university I mistook as well meaning and my friends. Had I not been broken, I would never have realized how few people I had to rely on, when I really needed someone not to judge or God forbid, to actually help. Now nearly all of my friendships are meaningless, almost unrecognizable, and I am in that in between phase (I hope) before new ones arrive. Adversity reveals those who are around you. Clarity comes at a cost, but it is so freeing.xx
The woman on the finishing course gave you better philosophy than most formal education manages, and you took it literally, which is the only way to take good advice. A ballgown on the tube looks like eccentricity when it’s only a proof of concept.
Your clarity didn’t arrive despite the difficulty but through it, not because suffering is ennobling in itself, it isn’t, and anyone who tells you otherwise has usually suffered decoratively. Sustained pressure eventually strips away what was never truly essential. The friendships that couldn’t hold weight when weight was actually applied weren’t friendships. They were social furniture. I have had those too. Discovering that is painful and also, as you say, freeing, in the way that travelling light is freeing after years of carrying luggage that wasn’t even yours.
The in-between phase is real and it’s uncomfortable because it’s honest. You’re not pretending the old connections are what they were, and the new ones haven’t arrived yet. That takes the courage to stand in the gap without filling it with something false just to ease the waiting.
Launching a company this week, from that particular interior journey, is the shape clarity takes when you finally stop apologising for having it!!!
Good luck with the launch, Paulina! And thank you for being here.
💯"not because suffering is ennobling in itself"...and "social furniture", precisely, very performative, superficial but conveniently absent when it truly mattered. Thank you for your kind words and support Tamara, and I can't wait to celebrate and delve into many of these discussions vis-a-vis in Paris! 😍
Social furniture is everywhere until the room needs rearranging, and then you discover how much of it was decorative load, which is to say, not load-bearing at all.
Paris, real conversation, no performance required. Something to look forward to properly. I agree, Paulina!
"The phone at the restaurant table, the podcast on the walk, the television left on for company are not neutral habits." This is jarring and so, so true. Our souls are altered every time we opt for dissociation.
“Altered” is the right word, and stronger than most people are willing to use about habits that have been normalised into invisibility. The television left on for company doesn’t feel like a choice anymore. It is part of the furniture. But furniture doesn’t reshape the quality of your inner life over decades. This does.
Dissociation as the frame implies there was something to dissociate from, a self present enough to require escaping. The phone doesn’t create absence. It answers an absence that was already uncomfortable. Which means the habit always points at something worth examining, if you can tolerate turning toward it instead.
The soul that gets altered in small increments rarely notices the accumulation until the silence, when it finally arrives, feels truly foreign. That foreignness is the diagnosis.
I have chosen to live alone for over ten years now. I have had numerous opportunities to change that, but I enjoy my own company and the quality of life that living alone can offer. When I want company, I arrange it, only to return to my sanctuary.
Ten years is long enough to know the difference between a choice and a default. What you’re describing isn’t solitude as consolation prize — it’s solitude as a deliberately maintained condition, which requires something most people underestimate: the willingness to keep choosing it against a culture that reads it as a problem to be solved, usually by someone else moving in.
The sanctuary framing is amazing. A sanctuary isn’t empty, it is protected. And the fact that you move freely between company and solitude, on your own terms, is precisely the interior independence that no lifestyle column will ever quite capture because it doesn’t photograph well and it can’t be sold as a product.
Manuela, I am glad this found you in yours.
Ever since I was a kid I have experienced solitude as a kind of moment of connection and alignment with the real world before it's colored and decorated with the output of the human psyche (absorbing as it tends to get). That's where all of the best work is done.
That’s a rare early inheritance. Most people spend decades unlearning the noise before they find what you seem to have arrived at instinctively. The idea that solitude connects rather than separates, that it strips away the human overlay to get at something more unmediated, is actually closer to certain contemplative traditions than most secular writing on the subject admits. The desert fathers would recognise it immediately. So would Thoreau, though he would spend considerably more words saying so.
What interests me in what you describe is the sequence: solitude first, then work. As calibration. The best thinking I’ve done has always had that quality, not produced in isolation exactly, but clarified by it, the way a tuning fork needs silence to tell you whether the note is true.
I am grateful, Gerry, that you traced it all the way back to childhood.
What stayed with me was the way the essay separates solitude from absence. So much contemporary language around loneliness treats aloneness as a defect to be solved, when sometimes it is the first condition in which thought can finally stop performing and begin speaking in its own rhythm. I especially felt the truth in the idea that certain forms of silence are not emptiness but exposure, and that exposure can become a more honest kind of company than constant distraction ever was. The piece understands something important: solitude is not always peaceful, but it can make a person more legible to themselves.
I would like to add a distinction here. Legibility to oneself is not the same as comfort with what you read. Sometimes solitude makes you legible in the way a very honest mirror does, useful, occasionally unflattering, ultimately more trustworthy than the softer reflections other people offer when they need something from you.
What I find most underexamined in the loneliness discourse is exactly what you point at, the assumption that thought, left alone, defaults to suffering. It doesn’t. It defaults to itself, which is a completely different proposition. The performing mind and the thinking mind use the same instrument but play entirely different music. Most people never hear the second one long enough to know it exists.
And yes, exposure as company. That phrase is doing real work. Distraction doesn’t keep you company; it keeps you from noticing you are alone. The inhabited silence actually sits with you. There’s a difference between a room that’s empty and a room that’s quiet, and most people have stopped being able to tell them apart.
Antonio, I am grateful this resonated at that level of precision, it’s the level at which I meant it.
Thank you, Tamara, for letting us peep for a little while into your Self back-room. What you write resonates, awakens, delights. The Self is real, the Self is the only one we know best and yet we've all managed to not learn how to befriend the Self. Your article is a good 'wake up call'. So I thank you for that too.
The back-room is always there. The door was never locked, just rarely tried. That so many people recognise it immediately upon being reminded suggests the self-knowledge was always closer than the noise made it seem.
You seem to have struck quite a nerve, with all of the comments! Rightly so. I love the Rilke quote: "...have patience toward all that is unsolved in your heart." We do love to fix things, the sooner the better. To let yourself be present with the discomfort of something unsolved is a gift.
Your comment on women and solitude, that they are seen as "cold, or failing at femininity" is accurate, and might also be stretched to include the accusation of being antisocial (a favorite comment thrown at me as a teenager). A Room of One's Own is seen as a need for women. It's something that isn't easily possible as a child if you share a room with a sibling, or has a parent who doesn't consider you have any expectation of privacy. Then the room is an interior room, and solitude can occur only within the self.
Because I had to inhabit myself from a young age, I don't recall feeling any particular discomfort with it. In a way, it was as if my books had come to life in my mind, and there was a world with friends and families with whom I could touch base when needed. At the same time, my mind created scenarios and interactions with those characters and with myself that didn't exist in any books. As you put it, it was "an interior country, fully habitable." You could say I had my own Swiss Family Robinson and island in my mind and heart.
What I realised as I read through your essay again, is that you can be comfortable in solitude, and still feel unlovable. Because while you may be lovable within the solitude, outside those borders, your role as unlovable still awaits.
I understand the experience of loneliness in company. The solution I found sometimes worked, was in the midst of a large group of cousins and family, to find one or two people who were also in the "outcast" group and talk with them. Any time when I could have a good conversation with one or two people, I found I enjoyed the event and the company despite the moments of loneliness.
From my own experience of solitude, discomfort arises if you are unfamiliar with it, as you said. Also, as you mentioned, if you are hiding something and unwilling to face it. Otherwise, I tend to enjoy it. After my dad's death and settling his estate, I took seven weeks on my own to travel. People were constantly asking me if I wasn't afraid to go alone, or would I prefer to have someone with me. They didn't understand when I said I enjoyed traveling alone, that it was easier to adapt to last-minute changes, easier to meet and talk with people, easier to sink into being somewhere with no agenda or timetable. Two people were flat out jealous, but not of my solitude. They said they were jealous that they couldn't be there with me. I read those notes and thought how grateful I was that they weren't there. They were both very dear to me, and also both people who would never stop talking to just be present.
One final note: when you are used to solitude, it sends you signals if you pay attention. Well, to be precise, your body sends you signals, which you clearly receive in your solitude, but as Rilke astutely pointed out, they may not be ready to be solved. There's been a clear signal for me in the last week of a very short temper with many things, including the most trivial of things. With all the meditation I sit, I'm still not quite sure what it is. What I do know is that it will be clearer when I'm ready to understand. Meantime, patience.
The interior country built from books is one of the more moving accounts of childhood solitude I have encountered, not as deprivation but as genuine world-building, the imagination doing what the material circumstances couldn’t provide. And yet, you weren’t escaping into those books. You were extending them, creating scenarios and interactions that didn’t exist on any page, which means the solitude was never passive. It was generative from the beginning. The Swiss Family Robinson island in the mind is a civilisation built by a child who understood, before anyone told her, that the interior country was fully habitable.
The observation about being comfortable in solitude and still feeling unlovable is the sharpest thing in your comment, puncturing something my essay skirts around without quite confronting directly…. solitude can be a genuine competence, a fluency, even a pleasure, and still coexist with a wound that operates in an entirely different register. The self that thrives alone is not necessarily the self that feels worthy of being chosen. Those are two different questions, and conflating them, assuming that comfort in one’s own company resolves the question of one’s lovability to others, is one of the more subtle errors the solitude discourse tends to make. You can be sovereign in the interior country and still find the border crossing difficult.
The 7 weeks of solo travel after your father’s death is exactly the right instinct at exactly the right moment. Grief, like solitude, requires a particular quality of unhurried attention that other people, however beloved, tend to inadvertently disrupt simply by being present and needing to respond to. The two who said they were jealous of not being there, the ones who would never stop talking to just be present, that parenthetical is a complete portrait. Presence and talking are not the same thing, and some people never discover the difference. You clearly had, which made their company on that particular journey genuinely impossible, however dear they were.
The antisocial accusation thrown at teenage girls who prefer their own company is a specifically gendered punishment, and I agree, it extends Woolf’s argument further than I pushed it. The boy who keeps to himself is proto-philosophical. The girl who keeps to herself is failing at her social function, which is to be available, responsive, warm, connective tissue for everyone around her. The accusation of antisocial is really an accusation of insufficiently distributed attention, a refusal to be endlessly permeable to others’ needs, which in a young woman reads as character flaw rather than as the entirely reasonable preference it actually is.
The short temper is interesting as signal, as the body’s way of insisting that something requires attention that isn’t getting it. Rilke’s patience toward the unsolved is harder to maintain when the unsolved is actively irritable rather than waiting. But perhaps that’s simply the signal turning up its volume. The things we are ready to understand tend to arrive discreetly. The things we are not ready for make themselves known through the furniture.
Patience, then! It will find its language when it’s ready. It usually does. Thank you so much, Doc, for extending my essay with your insight and experience!
I too find my tolerance for utter bullshit growing much shorter than I might measure it by the preferences of my own little consciousness. I believe it must be Divine time for that. 👌
Divine time is the right frame… not impatience as failure, but as discernment finally outpacing diplomacy. The BS was always BS. You have simply stopped being available to the argument that it wasn’t. And it’s very healthy to do so, Ana!
You know, Tamara, my life is so upside down and backwards, that for me, being alone is to be with other people, and that the self you are plying forth within, in this essay, is found for me in others.
I have spent years alone, and these last three years with my post-stroke wife have also been mostly solitary. And after her passing, with some other motivating circumstances, I am finding the same soverign self, in the company of others where it is not available much, while home alone.
Normally it is the other way around, when solitude is necessary to be able to listen to the workings of one's inner ear, hearing the sound of one's own thinking. Yet for my life, I am more able to listen to myself now in the company of others, to think thoughts I never knew before in the midst of people.
My life phasing also is so inverted that when most people are retiring at my age, I am looking to start a totally new career. The story that makes for such a different drum is something I have only within the past couple of years come to realize and which I've also alluded to here on Museguided's commentary in the wake of one essay or another, last year sometime, and your impeccable repy has become part of the air I breath, today.
To find things so fundamentally askew verses the norm, as when finally being alone is for one to be in the company of others, well, that is the tangential way I am able to reach the same destination, to meet and befriend that strange being that is oneself, in front of the world! The anima mundi?
Thank you, Tamara, I told the people in the men's group circle this morning at Unity of Whidbey, that I would write back to you about just this, and so I have. Aho, and have a great day, like Turquoise would always say!
The inversion you describe isn’t a contradiction of my essay’s argument but its most interesting edge case. If solitude is ultimately about the conditions under which the self becomes audible to itself, then the medium is less important than the quality of attention brought to it. For most people, silence is that medium. For you, something in the presence of others creates the precise friction or contrast that makes your own thinking legible. The inner ear finds its frequency differently.
3 years of caregiving, that particular solitude, the one lived in constant proximity to another’s need and diminishment, is one of the most demanding and least discussed forms of interior isolation there is. That it reconfigured how and where you find yourself makes complete sense. The self had to find new rooms.
Starting a new career where most are retiring is the same refusal to accept the socially prescribed sequence. The drum has always been different. You have simply stopped apologising for the rhythm.
The anima mundi, the soul of the world encountered in the midst of withdrawal is a beautiful frame for what you describe. Jung would recognise it. So would Whitman, who found his interior country in crowds, in the press of bodies, in the democratic multitude.
Grateful you kept your promise to the morning circle and wrote. Thank you, Michael!
What is remarkable about your essay is not simply its defense of solitude, but the precision with which it separates solitude from deprivation. Most writing on the subject collapses into diagnosis or self-help. You masterfully resisted both. You treated aloneness as a perceptual condition, almost an artistic medium, and that distinction gives the essay unusual intellectual integrity. The passages on attention, especially the idea that solitude alters the texture of perception, are exceptionally strong. An artist immediately recognises this as true. The eye does not really begin to see until performance stops.
I love your argument that modern noise is not connection but avoidance with better branding. That line cuts because it reframes distraction as an aesthetic problem. We have lost tolerance for unedited consciousness. Contemporary life trains people to curate themselves continuously, which means many never encounter the raw material from which serious art, thought, or even genuine preference emerges. Your essay understands that solitude is not valuable because it is peaceful, but because it removes the audience. That is a much more difficult and interesting claim.
There is also something formally impressive in the way you move between philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and lived experience without becoming ornamental. Too many essays use references as social proof. Here, Pascal, Woolf, Winnicott, Rilke, and Proust function like structural beams; each thinker advances the argument rather than decorating it. That level of intellectual choreography is rare, but we are used to it in the Museguided salon — the only real salon on Substack.
I am also thinking about the relationship between solitude and aesthetic risk. From the perspective of an artist, solitude is not only where perception deepens; it is where taste detaches from consensus. In groups, people unconsciously stabilise one another’s preferences. Alone, however, you begin discovering what genuinely arrests your attention without social calibration guiding the response. This is why prolonged solitude often changes an artist’s work before it changes their personality. Certain colors become intolerable. Certain rhythms suddenly feel dishonest. Certain subjects begin insisting on themselves. Solitude recalibrates the sensorium before it recalibrates identity.
And perhaps this is another reason solitude unsettles culture so deeply. A person who has spent enough time alone becomes harder to market to, flatter, shame, or synchronize. They develop private standards of beauty and meaning. Economically and socially, that kind of inward independence is inefficient. Artistically, it is indispensable.
Tamara, the supernova shines again.
I think the recalibration you describe isn’t only sensory, but ontological too. Solitude doesn’t just change what the artist sees; it changes what the artist is willing to not-see, which is a different and harder discipline. The capacity to let certain subjects insist on themselves requires first dismantling the social hierarchy of worthiness, the inherited sense of which subjects deserve serious attention and which are too small, too private, too embarrassing to pursue. That hierarchy is almost entirely socially installed. Solitude is where it begins to loosen.
The point about becoming harder to market to is my essay’s most threatening implication, and I deliberately left it mostly implicit. A self that has developed private standards of beauty and meaning is economically inefficient as well as epistemically dangerous to systems that depend on manufactured consensus. Advertising, ideology, and certain kinds of social pressure all require a subject whose preferences are still negotiable, still calibratable by external signal. The person who has spent enough time alone to know the difference between what they actually want and what they have l been persuaded to want is, in the most precise sense, ungovernable in that domain.
On the references… the highest compliment you could pay is that they functioned structurally rather than decoratively because that is exactly the distinction I hold myself to. A thinker quoted as social proof is a thinker betrayed.
The salon recognises its own. Grateful, as ever, for the artistic insights you bring here, Alexander. You make it even more incredible.
Agreed, solitude is freedom from inherited emphasis. An artist’s real struggle is often not discovering what to look at, but granting themselves permission to look where prestige, fashion, or ideology insist there is “nothing there”. The private, the minor, the supposedly unserious are frequently where reality is hiding before culture catches up to it.
Your point about negotiable preferences is especially sharp because it reframes autonomy as perceptual résistance rather than rebellion. Most systems do not require obedience so much as predictable attention. A person who has cultivated an interior standard becomes difficult because they no longer automatically absorb value from collective cues. That is a quieter and far more consequential form of independence.
And the line about thinkers being betrayed when used decoratively is exact. Quotation without structural necessity is intellectual taxidermy! Your essay avoided that entirely. The references breathe because they are doing essential work inside the argument rather than standing beside it as credentials.
I always look forward to conversation between the two of you. This one has added considerably to my understanding of the essay, and has very much kept me thinking about it.
I am so glad when my readers read what others wrote in the comments section. The exchange is essential for me. It means my writing is alive. I am beyond grateful.
I love reading the comments because you have really interesting continuations of what you've written. Also, different points of view or of emphasis. It's a big part of what makes me really think about your writing.
And the biggest joy for me.
Thank you so much. When you have a conversation partner like Tamara, it’s impossible to have anything else but glorious exchanges.
Alexander TD: “That level of intellectual choreography is rare, but we are used to it in the Museguided salon — the only real salon on Substack.”
I thought you said one thing, but you said three things, and they’re all true! Plus, I think these essays AND the comments should be a book! In addition to my own writing, I’m semi-retired from formatting and doing the interior design of other authors’ books, and I was trying to imagine how I would format Tamara’s new book (lol—-see this is how rumors get started: ‘New book? what new book?’) as yet unnamed, and I haven’t figured it out yet. So many of the answers/comments are so vital to the essays, as Tamara is the first to acknowledge, Including yours, Alexander…and I picked an easy one because sometimes it takes me DAYS to figure out what everyone is talking about! I love that! I also loved this essay, Tamara./t
The book rumour is now officially started, and I accept no responsibility for the consequences.
But the instinct is sound, and not just as flattery. The comment section as intellectual apparatus, as genuine extension of my essay’s argument rather than mere response to it, is itself a form worth preserving. The salon analogy that many readers have been making for almost a year now holds here precisely because the conversation doesn’t just react, it thinks. What you describe formally, the essay and its replies as a unified intellectual object, is actually how the best of these exchanges already function. The formatting problem is real though. How do you give the margins equal weight without flattening the hierarchy that makes the whole thing work?
The easy comment sections are the least interesting ones. Mine is definitely not :)
Grateful you are here, T, part of it all!
Tamara is an inspiration.
I appreciate the nuance here: solitude, not isolation; the gendered differences; being alone versus being seen alone; the fact that solitude does not mean introspection or productivity; and the fact that you recognize that it's less about the cliche of personal growth and more about the tolerance of discomfort, and familiarity with the self.
As with so many other things, the answer is in balance. Solitude is healthy in contrast with the social, and vice versa. Spending too much time doing one or the other has a cost, and because solitude represents a type of refusal, it is maligned and misrepresented as a threat, in the way that boundaries tend to be.
Boredom is an offshoot of this. The fear of isolation and the discomfort with boredom all reflect the dampening of sensory input. The dependence on phone is as much an addiction to sensory input as it is a desperate attempt to prove one's social viability. If productivity is the value, boredom represents a failure state, just as solitude is seen as a failure to socially flourish. What we can't perceive with our senses or validate through the eyes of another represents the most terrifying thing of all: ambiguity.
Well done, Tamara.
Boredom is the presence of an unstructured self, and that’s exactly what makes it unbearable for people who have never made peace with their own company. The phone fills time; it also forecloses the particular anxiety of not knowing what you are when nothing is happening to you. That’s a much more existential function than we usually ascribe to scrolling.
And the ambiguity framing is so precise. Solitude and boredom share the fact that they refuse to tell you what to think about yourself. They offer no external verdict. For a culture that has outsourced self-knowledge almost entirely to social feedback (likes, responses, the presence of others as a constant referendum on one’s own existence), that ambiguity is vertigo.
Solitude, chosen and protected, says: “I do not require constant external confirmation to know that I exist and that my inner life is real”. That’s not a threat to anyone reasonable. But reasonable people rarely feel threatened by it.
The precision you brought to my essay was its own pleasure to read, Andrew. Thank you!
Honestly sublime article!!!!
I think to add to the sentiments you have expressed. I think solitude reveals that some of what we call "desire" is actually mimetic hunger, that one might just want what others have designated as appropriate wants for them. I also think that solitude is a rehearsal for facing one's own mortality. It's the only practice space where we genuinely confront the fact that we are an alone consciousness that will end someday.
And as you have so rightly put it sometimes olitude is not generative, some days are definitely better than others. I guess life is an effort to live in oscillation, to sit in the boredom and ennui of it all and to also luxuriate in the richness of experience.
René Girard spent a career arguing that most of what we want, we want because someone else wanted it first, and solitude is one of the few conditions that interrupts that triangulation. Alone, without the social mirror running, you start to notice which desires persist and which ones dissolve without an audience. The ones that dissolve were never quite yours to begin with. That’s not a comfortable discovery, but it’s a clarifying one.
I find the mortality point even more interesting because it’s rarely made so directly. Solitude is the one rehearsal that actually resembles the final condition… no, not morbidly, but structurally. Every genuine encounter with one’s own consciousness, unmediated, is a small reminder that this particular awareness is singular and temporary. Most people find that unbearable. I think it’s one of the better arguments for taking the interior life seriously while there’s still time to do something with it.
And yes, oscillation is the honest word! Not balance, which implies a stable midpoint, but oscillation, which allows for the full range. Some days the silence is a gift. Others it’s just…… Wednesday.
Worth every exclamation mark. :) Thank you so much, Christine!
This is extraordinary writing, Tamara, because it restores dignity to an experience modern culture keeps trying to diagnose away. Most people feel only in fragments what you write about, the self is not a problem to solve, but a landscape to encounter. Your essay feels like someone slowly turning up the lights in a room readers didn’t realise they’d abandoned inside themselves.
Your idea that solitude sharpens perception rather than shrinking life is incredible . I think there’s another layer to this too, solitude is one of the last places where memory can settle into meaning instead of content. In constant company, social, digital, conversational, experience passes through us too quickly to become wisdom. We react before we metabolise. But alone, something slower happens. Old conversations reorganise themselves. Regret becomes instruction. Desire becomes legible. You begin to notice not only what you think, but what keeps returning. And what repeatedly returns is often the closest thing we have to truth.
That may be why genuine solitude can feel almost subversive now. A person who can sit alone with their own mind becomes harder to manipulate. Advertising weakens. Social performance weakens. Even envy starts to lose oxygen because attention is no longer constantly ricocheting off other people’s lives. Solitude reveals the self and changes the economics of desire itself.
Your line about people bringing their phones as chaperones was painful because it’s true. We have created a civilization where uninterrupted interiority feels suspicious, almost irresponsible. Yet nearly every serious work of art, philosophy, spiritual insight, or moral reckoning in history emerged from someone who protected silence fiercely enough for an unapproved thought to survive.
In an age built on reaction, originality may simply begin with the courage to remain alone long enough to hear yourself before the world does. And Tamara, you are among the most unique and original voices I have ever read.
The distinction between experience as content and experience as meaning is important because it identifies something the pace discourse almost always misses. The problem isn’t that modern life moves quickly, life has always had velocity, it’s that the infrastructure of contemporary attention actively prevents absorption . You can’t digest what you are not allowed to sit with. And everything today is ingestion without digestion, which produces a kind of intellectual malnutrition that is very difficult to diagnose because the person suffering from it feels extremely busy and extremely informed.
What keeps returning is a genuinely underrated epistemological instrument. Not nostalgia, not obsession, but the gravitational pull of the unresolved, the thought that won’t stay filed, the image that resurfaces in unguarded moments.
I trust that signal more than most deliberate thinking because it hasn’t been curated. It arrives without asking permission, which means it hasn’t been shaped to please anyone, including me.
The subversion point is correct and it runs deeper than individual psychology. A person who has learned to sit with their own unmediated mind doesn’t just resist manipulation, they become capable of noticing it, which is an entirely different and more active condition. Résistance is defensive. Recognition is precise.
And yes, every serious thought in history required someone to protect the silence long enough for an unapproved idea to survive its own fragility. That’s just how it works although it sounds romantic.
I am grateful for the generosity and the sharpness in equal measure. Both are rarer than they should be. Thank you so much, Céline!
This could not have landed in my inbox at a more perfect time. I’ve been struggling with solitude lately: living on my own; completing my PhD; being the only single friend out of all my friends; dealing with anxiety. I’ve been seeing “aloneness” as something to fix or fill, dreading a weekend or days with no plans, and impatiently waiting for the next moment I know I won’t be on my own. And while I’ve certainly filled my life more where it was genuinely lacking connection, lightheartedness, and fun, I have also been practicing just being with myself in the in-between moments. It has been incredibly uncomfortable, excruciating actually.. I’ve had to face lot of grief, fear and shame that I have been running away from my whole life. But, my god, has it been liberating! So thank you for reminding me - in such beautiful words - how powerful and transformative solitude can be. I will be returning to this when I need another reminder.
Each of those situations alone would be enough to make solitude feel like a verdict rather than a choice. All three together, and the silence must have had a particular weight to it. The fact that you have stopped trying to outrun it, and started sitting with what it actually contains, is amazing. Most people never do it. They just get faster.
Grief, fear, and shame are terrible houseguests because they don’t leave just because you ignore them. They renovate while you do not look. Facing them directly, in the uncomfortable quiet, is the only way to find out which ones were ever really yours and which ones you inherited and never examined.
The in-between moments are where most of a life actually happens, which is exactly why we work so hard to fill them. Learning to be present in them, not productively, not hopefully, just present, is a form of courage.
Keep the PhD company well! It deserves your full attention, and so do you, Grace! Thank you so much for finding the time to read me!
Solitude is venerable to a practical point. But like anything else, it always threatens to teeter off the deep end. I can attest.
The problem with too much solitude is that you risk a sort of inbreeding depression from lack of input. I don’t mean from ideas; I mean from social and cultural tests.
The other problem is teleological. If you acknowledge your human limitations, you can surmise that there’s a hazard with going so deep in the depths or so high in the heights, no one else can reach you. To a point, it’s a good way to separate those dedicated enough to rise or descend from those who want to fritter at ground level. Beyond that, it will either be you and the summit, or you and the abyss, and you need to learn to negotiate with that, because there’s no coming back.
Not only that, but don’t expect too many people to understand any of your foibles, either. I may be blowing the importance of commiseration out of proportion for those who crave solitude, but I can never seem to answer the question of why it all matters if no one can seem to relate. In some ways, it can be indistinguishable from punishment.
Some talk of solitude as if they’ve been granted the golden secret to life that most will never understand. I’ve just never felt a choice. I can’t seem to relate to most people, and maybe I’ve grown anesthetized to it because I’ve just become institutionalized to having my own way all the time, but it can turn into a doldrum. I spend a fair amount of my time trying to relate to others and find myself repeatedly retreating because none of it seems relevant or meaningful.
So sure: there’s the development and self-edification and whatnot, and that’s wonderful. But if there’s really no practical purpose save building up a defense against an uncaring world, it’s not always that great a meditative experience.
It’s also a matter of perspective, like anything. I don’t think I’d bemoan the experience so much if I’d had to recently spend an unhealthy amount of time around tittering chatterboxes, so I guess the moral is, if blessings are all you have, it gets hard to keep count.
Ian, you describe something the more celebratory accounts of solitude tend to omit, that there’s a point past which it stops being chosen and starts being the only available terrain. That’s a completely different experience, and it deserves a different name.
The inbreeding metaphor is biologically accurate. Thought, like any system, needs friction from outside itself to stay honest. Without the résistance of other minds (not chatter, but genuine encounter), certain ideas harden into certainties they haven’t earned. The summit and the abyss are both, in their extremes, echo chambers.
The teleological problem you raise is the one I find the hardest to argue around. If the self you have cultivated in solitude becomes increasingly untranslatable to others, the question of purpose becomes genuinely pressing. Meaning is at least partly relational, without needing approval, because significance seems to require a witness at some point, even an imperfect one. A thought that can never be shared is not necessarily more profound for its privacy. Sometimes it’s just stranded.
At the end you name the exhaustion of a particular paradox… too much solitude makes company feel irrelevant, but without the possibility of genuine connection, solitude loses its counterweight and becomes its own kind of confinement. Neither pole redeems the other automatically.
I didn’t write this essay from resolution. I wrote it from inside the same negotiation you have described. That felt worth saying honestly.
Thank you for this. When I have interactions that don't seem relevant or meaningful, I do one of two things, and sometimes both. I quiet down and listen deeply to the other person or people. And while focusing outward, I keep an eye on myself. I listen for what this interaction is bringing up, and what possible mirror it could be holding up to me. There's usually something there, and in thinking about it, there's something to be gained from what initially appears to be trite and irrelevant to me.
The mirror discipline is really demanding because it requires holding two attentions simultaneously, one outward toward what’s being said, one inward toward what’s being activated. Most people can manage one or the other. The capacity to run both without collapsing them is a form of interior bilingualism that takes considerable practice.
What you describe also dismantles the hierarchy between meaningful and meaningless interaction. If even the apparently trite exchange can become a diagnostic, revealing something about what you carry, what you resist, what you haven’t finished with yet, then nothing is entirely wasted. The irritation that seems disproportionate. The boredom that arrives too quickly. The unexpected tenderness toward someone who shouldn’t matter. All of it is data, if you’re watching yourself watch.
The solitude doesn’t stay at home. You have learned to carry it into the room. I am the most grateful.
Oh, thank you.
I know for myself, holding two dialogues simultaneously is something I've done all my life, including childhood. It's directly related to growing up as a queer child in the 60s and 70s. The toxic male environment sharpened my ability to do that. And the dysfunctional home helped too! Let's super-not forget that! 😆
Necessity is the oldest school, and the curriculum you describe, holding the inner dialogue steady while navigating a surface that couldn’t safely know about it, is one of the more demanding forms of interior bilingualism there is. The self learned to run continuously beneath whatever the room required, because exposure carried real cost.
What is remarkable is that what began as survival became capacity. The doubled attention that kept you safe as a child became the instrument of genuine perception as an adult. The toxic environment sharpened something it never intended to sharpen.
And that is just what some people do with what they are given. Admirable!
Probably my personal definition of a silver lining. Thanks for drawing my attention to this.
Society keeps treating solitude like a software bug instead of the last place where an unsponsored thought can still occur. We’ve built a culture where people panic if left alone with their own mind for eleven seconds, then wonder why every opinion sounds prepackaged and every personality feels algorithmically assembled.
The modern fear is not loneliness. It’s the possibility that, in silence, you might discover a self that cannot be marketed or socially performed.
Your essays do something increasingly rare, Tamara. They make interior life feel intellectually serious again instead of therapeutically branded. That is an extraordinary achievement. Your voice is unparalleled.
The software bug framing is exact, and what makes it particularly insidious is that the proposed patch is always more connection, more input, more signal, when the actual problem is the absence of any process that converts experience into something personal and irreducible. We keep treating the symptom as the cure.
The prepackaged opinion problem follows directly from this. You cannot develop a genuinely private judgment about anything if you’ve never spent enough time alone with a question to find out what you actually think before the social consensus arrives to tell you. Most people encounter the consensus first and mistake it for their own conclusion. Solitude is the only condition that reverses that sequence.
And yes, the unmarketable self is the genuine terror. Not loneliness, not silence, but the discovery of a self that has developed preferences, résistances, and convictions that didn’t come from anywhere social and therefore can’t be appealed to through social means. That self is, economically speaking, a catastrophe. Which is precisely what makes it worth cultivating.
Grateful for your precision, Clara! It’s a pleasure when a comment arrives already thinking.
Just thank you, Tamara, thank you that you exist and above all thank you that you write.
So good! So true. There is an argument out there that loneliness somehow has induced elements of totalitarianism...we are a lonely society and hence we are at fault for the state of affairs in many countries, we are to be blamed because we haven't prioritized connection and we somehow brought so much agony on ourselves. That never convinced men fully, only enough to blame myself. What you've articulated Tamara, is the truth. Solitude, if we allow it, allows us to shine our own light and step away from the shadows cast by others. So indeed, relationships as well as friendships can get super lonely or draining. I joke to myself that the last 6 years have felt like a cruel imprisonment, but they led to clarity as well. I wouldn't have started writingnas English was always my worst subject, putting pen to paper was never my thing and whenever I would do it, it was mostly therapy, though I do keep journals. Going to operas alone would never have happened until one fine day in London when a woman in a finishing course said to me, "either you're the Queen, or you dont go at all". Off I went in a ballgown with a train...on the tube. If I worked the same job, I'd never found my own tech company which I am launching this week. Had I let myself remain blinded, I would never have figured out how many haters I had either through some weird envy or other issues, people from childhood and university I mistook as well meaning and my friends. Had I not been broken, I would never have realized how few people I had to rely on, when I really needed someone not to judge or God forbid, to actually help. Now nearly all of my friendships are meaningless, almost unrecognizable, and I am in that in between phase (I hope) before new ones arrive. Adversity reveals those who are around you. Clarity comes at a cost, but it is so freeing.xx
The woman on the finishing course gave you better philosophy than most formal education manages, and you took it literally, which is the only way to take good advice. A ballgown on the tube looks like eccentricity when it’s only a proof of concept.
Your clarity didn’t arrive despite the difficulty but through it, not because suffering is ennobling in itself, it isn’t, and anyone who tells you otherwise has usually suffered decoratively. Sustained pressure eventually strips away what was never truly essential. The friendships that couldn’t hold weight when weight was actually applied weren’t friendships. They were social furniture. I have had those too. Discovering that is painful and also, as you say, freeing, in the way that travelling light is freeing after years of carrying luggage that wasn’t even yours.
The in-between phase is real and it’s uncomfortable because it’s honest. You’re not pretending the old connections are what they were, and the new ones haven’t arrived yet. That takes the courage to stand in the gap without filling it with something false just to ease the waiting.
Launching a company this week, from that particular interior journey, is the shape clarity takes when you finally stop apologising for having it!!!
Good luck with the launch, Paulina! And thank you for being here.
💯"not because suffering is ennobling in itself"...and "social furniture", precisely, very performative, superficial but conveniently absent when it truly mattered. Thank you for your kind words and support Tamara, and I can't wait to celebrate and delve into many of these discussions vis-a-vis in Paris! 😍
Social furniture is everywhere until the room needs rearranging, and then you discover how much of it was decorative load, which is to say, not load-bearing at all.
Paris, real conversation, no performance required. Something to look forward to properly. I agree, Paulina!
“…anyone who romanticises suffering as a precondition for art has probably not suffered enough to know better…”
Indeed.
Thank you so much, Diane!
"The phone at the restaurant table, the podcast on the walk, the television left on for company are not neutral habits." This is jarring and so, so true. Our souls are altered every time we opt for dissociation.
“Altered” is the right word, and stronger than most people are willing to use about habits that have been normalised into invisibility. The television left on for company doesn’t feel like a choice anymore. It is part of the furniture. But furniture doesn’t reshape the quality of your inner life over decades. This does.
Dissociation as the frame implies there was something to dissociate from, a self present enough to require escaping. The phone doesn’t create absence. It answers an absence that was already uncomfortable. Which means the habit always points at something worth examining, if you can tolerate turning toward it instead.
The soul that gets altered in small increments rarely notices the accumulation until the silence, when it finally arrives, feels truly foreign. That foreignness is the diagnosis.
Thank you for this!
I have chosen to live alone for over ten years now. I have had numerous opportunities to change that, but I enjoy my own company and the quality of life that living alone can offer. When I want company, I arrange it, only to return to my sanctuary.
Ten years is long enough to know the difference between a choice and a default. What you’re describing isn’t solitude as consolation prize — it’s solitude as a deliberately maintained condition, which requires something most people underestimate: the willingness to keep choosing it against a culture that reads it as a problem to be solved, usually by someone else moving in.
The sanctuary framing is amazing. A sanctuary isn’t empty, it is protected. And the fact that you move freely between company and solitude, on your own terms, is precisely the interior independence that no lifestyle column will ever quite capture because it doesn’t photograph well and it can’t be sold as a product.
Manuela, I am glad this found you in yours.
Ever since I was a kid I have experienced solitude as a kind of moment of connection and alignment with the real world before it's colored and decorated with the output of the human psyche (absorbing as it tends to get). That's where all of the best work is done.
That’s a rare early inheritance. Most people spend decades unlearning the noise before they find what you seem to have arrived at instinctively. The idea that solitude connects rather than separates, that it strips away the human overlay to get at something more unmediated, is actually closer to certain contemplative traditions than most secular writing on the subject admits. The desert fathers would recognise it immediately. So would Thoreau, though he would spend considerably more words saying so.
What interests me in what you describe is the sequence: solitude first, then work. As calibration. The best thinking I’ve done has always had that quality, not produced in isolation exactly, but clarified by it, the way a tuning fork needs silence to tell you whether the note is true.
I am grateful, Gerry, that you traced it all the way back to childhood.
What stayed with me was the way the essay separates solitude from absence. So much contemporary language around loneliness treats aloneness as a defect to be solved, when sometimes it is the first condition in which thought can finally stop performing and begin speaking in its own rhythm. I especially felt the truth in the idea that certain forms of silence are not emptiness but exposure, and that exposure can become a more honest kind of company than constant distraction ever was. The piece understands something important: solitude is not always peaceful, but it can make a person more legible to themselves.
I would like to add a distinction here. Legibility to oneself is not the same as comfort with what you read. Sometimes solitude makes you legible in the way a very honest mirror does, useful, occasionally unflattering, ultimately more trustworthy than the softer reflections other people offer when they need something from you.
What I find most underexamined in the loneliness discourse is exactly what you point at, the assumption that thought, left alone, defaults to suffering. It doesn’t. It defaults to itself, which is a completely different proposition. The performing mind and the thinking mind use the same instrument but play entirely different music. Most people never hear the second one long enough to know it exists.
And yes, exposure as company. That phrase is doing real work. Distraction doesn’t keep you company; it keeps you from noticing you are alone. The inhabited silence actually sits with you. There’s a difference between a room that’s empty and a room that’s quiet, and most people have stopped being able to tell them apart.
Antonio, I am grateful this resonated at that level of precision, it’s the level at which I meant it.
Thank you, Tamara, for letting us peep for a little while into your Self back-room. What you write resonates, awakens, delights. The Self is real, the Self is the only one we know best and yet we've all managed to not learn how to befriend the Self. Your article is a good 'wake up call'. So I thank you for that too.
The back-room is always there. The door was never locked, just rarely tried. That so many people recognise it immediately upon being reminded suggests the self-knowledge was always closer than the noise made it seem.
Grateful you came in for a while, Meera!
You seem to have struck quite a nerve, with all of the comments! Rightly so. I love the Rilke quote: "...have patience toward all that is unsolved in your heart." We do love to fix things, the sooner the better. To let yourself be present with the discomfort of something unsolved is a gift.
Your comment on women and solitude, that they are seen as "cold, or failing at femininity" is accurate, and might also be stretched to include the accusation of being antisocial (a favorite comment thrown at me as a teenager). A Room of One's Own is seen as a need for women. It's something that isn't easily possible as a child if you share a room with a sibling, or has a parent who doesn't consider you have any expectation of privacy. Then the room is an interior room, and solitude can occur only within the self.
Because I had to inhabit myself from a young age, I don't recall feeling any particular discomfort with it. In a way, it was as if my books had come to life in my mind, and there was a world with friends and families with whom I could touch base when needed. At the same time, my mind created scenarios and interactions with those characters and with myself that didn't exist in any books. As you put it, it was "an interior country, fully habitable." You could say I had my own Swiss Family Robinson and island in my mind and heart.
What I realised as I read through your essay again, is that you can be comfortable in solitude, and still feel unlovable. Because while you may be lovable within the solitude, outside those borders, your role as unlovable still awaits.
I understand the experience of loneliness in company. The solution I found sometimes worked, was in the midst of a large group of cousins and family, to find one or two people who were also in the "outcast" group and talk with them. Any time when I could have a good conversation with one or two people, I found I enjoyed the event and the company despite the moments of loneliness.
From my own experience of solitude, discomfort arises if you are unfamiliar with it, as you said. Also, as you mentioned, if you are hiding something and unwilling to face it. Otherwise, I tend to enjoy it. After my dad's death and settling his estate, I took seven weeks on my own to travel. People were constantly asking me if I wasn't afraid to go alone, or would I prefer to have someone with me. They didn't understand when I said I enjoyed traveling alone, that it was easier to adapt to last-minute changes, easier to meet and talk with people, easier to sink into being somewhere with no agenda or timetable. Two people were flat out jealous, but not of my solitude. They said they were jealous that they couldn't be there with me. I read those notes and thought how grateful I was that they weren't there. They were both very dear to me, and also both people who would never stop talking to just be present.
One final note: when you are used to solitude, it sends you signals if you pay attention. Well, to be precise, your body sends you signals, which you clearly receive in your solitude, but as Rilke astutely pointed out, they may not be ready to be solved. There's been a clear signal for me in the last week of a very short temper with many things, including the most trivial of things. With all the meditation I sit, I'm still not quite sure what it is. What I do know is that it will be clearer when I'm ready to understand. Meantime, patience.
The interior country built from books is one of the more moving accounts of childhood solitude I have encountered, not as deprivation but as genuine world-building, the imagination doing what the material circumstances couldn’t provide. And yet, you weren’t escaping into those books. You were extending them, creating scenarios and interactions that didn’t exist on any page, which means the solitude was never passive. It was generative from the beginning. The Swiss Family Robinson island in the mind is a civilisation built by a child who understood, before anyone told her, that the interior country was fully habitable.
The observation about being comfortable in solitude and still feeling unlovable is the sharpest thing in your comment, puncturing something my essay skirts around without quite confronting directly…. solitude can be a genuine competence, a fluency, even a pleasure, and still coexist with a wound that operates in an entirely different register. The self that thrives alone is not necessarily the self that feels worthy of being chosen. Those are two different questions, and conflating them, assuming that comfort in one’s own company resolves the question of one’s lovability to others, is one of the more subtle errors the solitude discourse tends to make. You can be sovereign in the interior country and still find the border crossing difficult.
The 7 weeks of solo travel after your father’s death is exactly the right instinct at exactly the right moment. Grief, like solitude, requires a particular quality of unhurried attention that other people, however beloved, tend to inadvertently disrupt simply by being present and needing to respond to. The two who said they were jealous of not being there, the ones who would never stop talking to just be present, that parenthetical is a complete portrait. Presence and talking are not the same thing, and some people never discover the difference. You clearly had, which made their company on that particular journey genuinely impossible, however dear they were.
The antisocial accusation thrown at teenage girls who prefer their own company is a specifically gendered punishment, and I agree, it extends Woolf’s argument further than I pushed it. The boy who keeps to himself is proto-philosophical. The girl who keeps to herself is failing at her social function, which is to be available, responsive, warm, connective tissue for everyone around her. The accusation of antisocial is really an accusation of insufficiently distributed attention, a refusal to be endlessly permeable to others’ needs, which in a young woman reads as character flaw rather than as the entirely reasonable preference it actually is.
The short temper is interesting as signal, as the body’s way of insisting that something requires attention that isn’t getting it. Rilke’s patience toward the unsolved is harder to maintain when the unsolved is actively irritable rather than waiting. But perhaps that’s simply the signal turning up its volume. The things we are ready to understand tend to arrive discreetly. The things we are not ready for make themselves known through the furniture.
Patience, then! It will find its language when it’s ready. It usually does. Thank you so much, Doc, for extending my essay with your insight and experience!
I too find my tolerance for utter bullshit growing much shorter than I might measure it by the preferences of my own little consciousness. I believe it must be Divine time for that. 👌
Divine time is the right frame… not impatience as failure, but as discernment finally outpacing diplomacy. The BS was always BS. You have simply stopped being available to the argument that it wasn’t. And it’s very healthy to do so, Ana!
Thanks for the affirmation, sister!
You know, Tamara, my life is so upside down and backwards, that for me, being alone is to be with other people, and that the self you are plying forth within, in this essay, is found for me in others.
I have spent years alone, and these last three years with my post-stroke wife have also been mostly solitary. And after her passing, with some other motivating circumstances, I am finding the same soverign self, in the company of others where it is not available much, while home alone.
Normally it is the other way around, when solitude is necessary to be able to listen to the workings of one's inner ear, hearing the sound of one's own thinking. Yet for my life, I am more able to listen to myself now in the company of others, to think thoughts I never knew before in the midst of people.
My life phasing also is so inverted that when most people are retiring at my age, I am looking to start a totally new career. The story that makes for such a different drum is something I have only within the past couple of years come to realize and which I've also alluded to here on Museguided's commentary in the wake of one essay or another, last year sometime, and your impeccable repy has become part of the air I breath, today.
To find things so fundamentally askew verses the norm, as when finally being alone is for one to be in the company of others, well, that is the tangential way I am able to reach the same destination, to meet and befriend that strange being that is oneself, in front of the world! The anima mundi?
Thank you, Tamara, I told the people in the men's group circle this morning at Unity of Whidbey, that I would write back to you about just this, and so I have. Aho, and have a great day, like Turquoise would always say!
The inversion you describe isn’t a contradiction of my essay’s argument but its most interesting edge case. If solitude is ultimately about the conditions under which the self becomes audible to itself, then the medium is less important than the quality of attention brought to it. For most people, silence is that medium. For you, something in the presence of others creates the precise friction or contrast that makes your own thinking legible. The inner ear finds its frequency differently.
3 years of caregiving, that particular solitude, the one lived in constant proximity to another’s need and diminishment, is one of the most demanding and least discussed forms of interior isolation there is. That it reconfigured how and where you find yourself makes complete sense. The self had to find new rooms.
Starting a new career where most are retiring is the same refusal to accept the socially prescribed sequence. The drum has always been different. You have simply stopped apologising for the rhythm.
The anima mundi, the soul of the world encountered in the midst of withdrawal is a beautiful frame for what you describe. Jung would recognise it. So would Whitman, who found his interior country in crowds, in the press of bodies, in the democratic multitude.
Grateful you kept your promise to the morning circle and wrote. Thank you, Michael!