Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Sophie Lalani's avatar

I think the most noteworthy part of living alone is the way it attunes you more sharply to your own thoughts (of course, taken to the extreme this can be a bad thing). There’s a quote by Claire Louise Bennett that comes to mind “in solitude, you don’t need to make an impression on the world, so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you.” There’s a beauty in solitude I think, especially when a lot of modern life is engineered to distract us from ourselves and from thinking too deeply whilst conditioning us for a kind of performance. Being in the company of others is certainly vital for personal growth and development but I think we sometimes undervalue the power of being alone, without distraction from our own minds and patterns. It’s also interesting to discover how you are when you don’t (even unwittingly) alter your behaviour for someone else—your weird habits and proclivities. I don’t think it necessarily needs to be a rite of passage for everyone but it can certainly be an illuminating one that enhances your comfort with yourself. I often long for more spaces for community and I believe very much in interdependence but I don’t think living alone has to diminish those things, if anything it should make you seek them out more actively because they’re not built into your home life. From my perspective, so much of life is recognizing the inevitability of being alone to some degree—we are always alone in our heads, I think it’s worth getting comfortable there.

Expand full comment
Evvie's avatar

I would argue that gender plays a role in how you spin it. Women, as caretakers/overseers of domestic sphere have only relatively recently been given the cultural green light to live alone. For centuries, a woman lived with her family until she married or she went to a convent (yay! all-female communal living) or she drifted/opted into spinsterdom, and most likely due financial dependency reasons, lived with at least one family member. So while I totally hear you on the valorization of individualism etc., I think the aspiration to live alone (at least for women) can also be seen through the lens of social progress, and not just social fragmentation/dissolution. I would also point you to a "Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf :)

Expand full comment
173 more comments...

No posts