June 30, 2026
everyone should know how to be alone
real talk
okay so real talk. i think everyone should know how to be alone. like actually alone. not "my flatmate is in the next room" alone, not "scrolling through my phone with 400 people in my pocket" alone. properly by yourself, with nobody to perform for, and being completely fine with it.
and i don't think most people actually know how to do this. i'm not sure i fully did until pretty recently.
first thing, because we get this wrong constantly. being alone and being lonely are not the same thing.
being alone is just a fact. you're by yourself, that's it. lonely is a feeling. and the proof they're different is that you can be lonely in a room full of people, at a party, in a relationship, in a group chat that's going off all day. and you can be completely on your own and feel totally fine, even kind of great. we just smush them together because sometimes they show up at the same time.
there's this psychiatrist, anthony storr, who wrote a whole book about solitude, and one line of his stuck to me. he said that for most people, close relationships are a hub of life, not the hub. like yeah, people matter, obviously, they're the best part of being alive. but they were never supposed to be the only thing holding you up.
and here's the bit that genuinely surprised me, because i thought being alone was just empty time you have to get through.
there's actual science on this. a researcher called thuy-vy nguyen runs an entire "solitude lab" at durham, and what she found is that being alone, when you choose it, has this deactivation effect. basically your feelings settle. the really high highs and the really low lows both come down a notch. the volume in your head just... drops.
which means solitude isn't dead time. it's where you sort yourself out. it's the only place you actually feel what you feel without someone watching you feel it. thinking properly, having an idea, calming down, figuring out why you're upset, all of that needs you to be alone for a bit. you can't hear yourself in a crowd.
there's another old idea i love, from a guy called winnicott, called the "capacity to be alone." he basically said being able to be on your own and be okay is a sign of good mental health. and his reasoning is kind of beautiful. it's only when you're alone that you can work out what you actually feel and want, instead of what everyone around you expects you to feel and want. if you're never alone, you never hear your own voice under everyone else's. you just slowly become the average of whatever room you're in.
okay and this is the part i actually sat down to write about.
i've noticed some people get SO close to other people SO fast. they meet someone and within two weeks it's best friend, soulmate, telling-each-other-everything, "i've never felt this with anyone." and from the outside it looks lovely. and sometimes it is real, i'm not saying it never is. but a lot of the time it isn't, and honestly i think it can be a bit dangerous, and here's the thing nobody says.
you don't actually know them. you literally do not. closeness that fast isn't closeness, it's intensity, and we mix those two up just like we mix up alone and lonely.
there's this study by a guy called jeffrey hall who actually went and measured how long it takes to become friends with someone. and it is not fast. about 50 hours of time together to go from acquaintance to casual friend. about 90 hours to become an actual friend. and over 200 hours to become a proper close friend. two hundred hours. that is not a weekend. that is not "we stayed up talking till 4am that one time." that's months of normal, regular, slightly boring time. and get this, time spent working together barely counted. it's the hanging out, the joking, the in-between nothing-hours that actually build the thing.
so when someone is your best friend in two weeks, the maths just doesn't add up. you've borrowed a closeness you haven't earned yet. you skipped the entire part where you find out who they actually are when it's not exciting.
and there's a darker version of this you've probably heard of, love bombing. it's when someone floods you with intensity really fast. constant texts, huge declarations, "you're the one," soulmate stuff, all way too soon. and it feels incredible, that's the whole point of it. but the speed is the red flag, not the romance. real connection is happy to go slow. it doesn't panic if you say you want to take your time. the thing that needs you completely locked in immediately usually needs it for a reason.
and it's not always romantic, or even sinister. sometimes it's just two lonely people grabbing onto each other because being alone felt unbearable. which is the whole reason i'm writing this.
because i think people rush into other people when they can't be alone.
if being by yourself feels like drowning, of course you grab the nearest person to stay afloat. you pour your whole self into whoever happens to be there. you call someone your person after a week because you needed a person, not because it was actually them. loneliness makes you a terrible picker. it makes you attach fast, and attach to anyone, and then call it fate.
but if you genuinely know how to be alone, if your own company is fine, even good, then you don't need to rush. you can let it take its 200 hours. you can watch someone slowly and see who they really are before you hand them anything. you can walk away from the wrong ones, because you're not scared of going back to your own company. being okay on your own is the exact thing that lets you choose people instead of just grabbing them.
and you stay yourself inside it. that's the bit i keep landing on. when you can be alone, you bring a whole actual person to a friendship, someone with their own thoughts and taste and weird inner world. when you can't, you kind of dissolve into whoever you're with. average of the room, again.
i'm thinking about all of this because in september i'm moving somewhere new where i won't know a single person. and i can already feel the two options sitting in front of me. one is to panic and cling to the first people who are nice to me and call them home before they've earned it. the other is to be okay on my own for a while, let the real friendships build slowly over actual hours, and not be so afraid of my own company that i go and hand myself to strangers.
i want to do the second one. i'm really trying to.
so yeah. learn to be alone. not forever, and not instead of people, people are the whole point. but learn it enough that you're not running from yourself, because that's exactly when you make the worst calls about who to let in.
be alone well, and i swear you'll love people better. i actually believe that.