Finding the joy in solitude
By: Ajay Menon
Tags: Loneliness, Solitude

After crossing 32, there’s a barrier which pops up during quiet introspection. The one muddled with advice and requests from relatives and friends asking you to find the right person to spend the rest of your life with. These range from seeming threats to passing remarks, as you carry forward the day with just you to go home back to. Living by yourself isn’t much a trouble these days. Just keep the TV on, or keep the music thumping in the background as you cook your dinner. Or keep that podcast on that your friends have recommended and the whole world seems to be loving. Things that act as background noise to help your mind not face the mirror. The questions that hang within you, that you choose to conveniently ignore over your third glass of whiskey.

And then, the power goes away. You’re just left in the darkness of the house and the darkness of your thoughts, raising question after question to yourself. How did I get here?

And as you whip up the phone and your social media, you see happy faces plastered across. Friends getting married, friends having babies, “friends” in exotic locations even with danger of the pandemic lurking around. We witness the carefully curated lives of dozens as each downward scroll brings with it a new set of expectations. Expectations on how YOU are supposed to live your lives. By the rules of others. What others prescribe. Complete strangers apparently have a great amount of control over the recipe of what you might call the agency over your personal experiences.

And why would we not pay heed to it? They seem happy. They seemed to have cracked the code. While I’m here lingering in my solitude. Alone in a room, with no noise. No commotion. Just my own thoughts to reflect on.

It had been almost 15 minutes with the lights gone. The backup generator had for some reason not yet kicked in. I looked out to the bright moon, slowly floating across the night sky carving it’s way through the stars. I guess the moon would feel lonely too. I find it weird how we tend to personify celestial bodies to have personalities just by a semblance of some select common attributes.

And yet in that silence something broke through the membrane. A feeling of it not being suffering from circumstance, but a feeling borne out of choice. I chose to be in this. This isn’t something that was thrust upon me. I was responsible because this is what I wanted…or was it?

I keep questioning myself time and time again. Is every man an island? (just this phrase gives me Ayn Rand triggers) or are we so bound to live in a society full of mutual emotions which our deep feeling of purpose stems from the validation from others. It shouldn’t be that way. Evolutionarily it makes sense when you look at it. Humanity was supposed to clump into a macro being against all odds that nature threw at it. And yet here we are, we thrive. With our tribes, with our communities and even our overflowing cities.

We are here with this deep need to connect to everything. The emotional web that connects us all with this interweaving network. And that’s when the individual got stigmatised. The community can’t handle an individual living by their own principles and rules. It needs that one node to join back in the network. And yet, we’re way past those evolutionary rules of existence. But our reptilian brain still kicks back to it’s primordial self.

We still need to be in our pack. We still need to fight our way up in the society. Struggle. Compete. Achieve. And in the process, face all the hardships that others have faced. Cause they want you to go through the same tribulations. Face the same fears. Cause that has been their formula of growth. You are all but a naive child in this brave new world. We, the forefathers, have laid down for you a clear path and the only way is for you to choose it. If you go astray, then you’re solely responsible for the pain of uncertainty. For your choices shall be yours alone.

And that’s the funny part. Your choices will always be yours alone. And yet we give maximum weightage to external factors. Thinking that everything and everyone else would have way more knowledge about your life than you yourself. Isn’t that concept just absolute bonkers?

Our fear of being ostracised makes us jump across so many hoops at our expense that we forgot who we’re doing this for in the first place. We chose to blindly follow cause that way, at least someone else is to blame. The formula was wrong all along, but at least I’m not responsible. And so I quietly resign to that. Make peace with it and go ahead on the predestined path. Safe. Not as per my own volition. But safe nonetheless.

I’m in no way claiming solitude is in some way a spiritually guiding experience that gets you through. I do not see any replacement to a good social environment. I love spending time with my friends and family. Making up silly games and jokes that get through tough times, eating good food and poking others with serious debates while you laugh on the sides. Those are irreplaceable. I just see solitude as one of the means to look back and cherish those times. And for the rest, look inwards and question how much I know myself.

I tend to keep doing this mental exercise of pretending to live a copy of me who is my roommate. I’m not sure how sane that sounds, but hopefully not enough to get institutionalised. I do that exercise as a means to look at my own actions from a third party perspective, and more often than not come across some weird insights about myself. Most of the time it does involve in thinking how much of a jerk I can be, but I’ll gladly attribute that to my critical self. But it acts as a mirror, and helps me somehow centre myself. Understand what my beliefs are, and question how my 1am pizza cravings come about in the first place. There’s a certain sense of self discovery involved here, which I’ve never experienced with a partner yet. And umm…let us not get into relationships now shall we.