Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Tonight, turn off every light except one screen and sit with it. Somewhere in the first ten minutes you will find out which one you are actually in — loneliness, or solitude. They feel identical for about a minute and then they stop.
I made sure that the only light in the room came from the 12-inch screen of my laptop. And the only source of sound also came from the speaker of the same laptop. By doing so, I felt as though my mind was being dictated by whatever stories, narratives, and conversations that were being released frame-by-frame, and word-by-word, from this little electronic source.
That feeling of your brain being hijacked by a screen is a specific kind of modern trap. It is a way of outsourcing your own consciousness. When we do that, we aren't really alone because we aren't even fully with ourselves. We are just containers for other people's thoughts.
But what happens when the screen goes dark? What happens when the noise stops? This is where things get uncomfortable. Most of us are terrified of that silence because we have spent our lives building a wall of noise to keep out a very specific feeling.
We call that feeling loneliness. We treat it like a disease. We assume that being by yourself is a failure of our social lives. But I want to look at that differently.
I want to look at it the way Jean-Paul Sartre did. Sartre was a man who was deeply worried about how we trick ourselves into believing we have a pre-set purpose. He worried that we use "shoulds" to hide from the fact that we are actually free. He called this bad faith, which is the way we lie to ourselves to avoid the weight of our own choices.
Think about how we do this with our emotions. We say, "Loneliness is bad, so I must find someone." We turn a physical state—being in a room by yourself—into a moral judgment. We act as if the universe has already decided that solitude is a tragedy.
"When Sartre, the father of existentialism, wrote the above passage, I believe that what he meant may have to do with the absurdity of how all of us have the tendency to prescribe our own judgments on things." What I mean by that is that we are constantly slapping labels on our experiences before we actually feel them. We decide that being alone is a "bad" thing before we even sit down in the chair. We treat it like a verdict.
If I were to live entirely inside Sartre's view, I would have to admit that there is no "correct" way to feel. There is no rulebook that says you must be happy when you are alone, or sad when you are with others. The universe doesn't care if you are solitary. It doesn't provide a script for your evening.
That sounds scary, doesn't it? It means that if you feel lonely, it isn't because the situation is inherently miserable. It is because you have decided it is. The truth is that being by yourself is just a condition.
It is a neutral fact, like the temperature of the room. Loneliness is the story you tell yourself about that fact. Most people never actually test this. They are too afraid to find out.
They fill the room with noise before the first minute of silence can even register. They would rather be miserable in a crowd than honest in a quiet room. You have to ask yourself: are you actually lonely, or are you just afraid of what you'll hear when you finally stop listening to everyone else?
You might be right to push back on me there. It is easy for me to sit in a quiet room and call the noise a "choice" or a "shield," but that feels a bit privileged. For a lot of people, the noise isn't a luxury they choose to turn on; it is the only way they can survive the day. If you grew up in a house where the silence was heavy, or if your job is a grinding machine that leaves you emotionally hollow, that "noise" might be the only thing keeping your head above water.
You could argue that for someone in that position, loneliness isn't a judgment they're passing on themselves. It’s a physical ache. It’s a biological signal, like hunger or thirst, telling you that you need connection to stay healthy. From that perspective, telling someone to just "stop judging" their loneliness is like telling a hungry person to stop judging their hunger.
It feels dismissive of how much our brains actually need other people to function. And I think that’s a fair point. We are social animals. Our brains are literally wired to seek out the tribe.
When we are cut off, our nervous system can go into a state of alarm. So, if you feel that pang of sadness when the house is quiet, it might not be a "bad faith" lie you're telling yourself. It might just be your body doing its job. It’s trying to keep you safe by reminding you that you aren't supposed to be alone.
But here is the part where I want to push back again, and this is the part worth stealing. Even if that feeling is biological, we still have to decide what to do with it. Sartre was obsessed with the fact that we are born into a world that doesn't give us a manual. We arrive here with no pre-set purpose.
We are just... here. Because there is no built-in meaning, we have to create it. And that is where the distinction between the condition and the verdict matters most.
"For instance, Loneliness is bad, but having a lot of friends is good; being alone is bad, but being married to someone is good. Believing in God because there's no otherwise way to believe how things pre-exist in the world is bad, but believing that God exists because he exists is good, and so on. Sartre did not see this way of thinking as being productive. Many philosophers have urged us, through a wide variety of rhetorics, to sidestep from engaging in loneliness." What I mean by this is that we often use these "shoulds" to avoid the work of actually living.
We say loneliness is bad, so we seek a crowd. We say marriage is good, so we seek a contract. We do this to escape the sheer contingency of our lives—the fact that we are just people, moving through time, trying to make sense of it. When we label loneliness as a "bad" thing, we stop looking at it.
We stop looking at what it's actually telling us about our own agency. If we can admit that being alone is just a neutral space, we can finally start to see what we actually want to do with that space.
This transition from a neutral space to a place of action is where most people get stuck. It is easy to agree that loneliness is a judgment. It is much harder to do what comes next. When you strip away the labels, you are left with a vacuum.
In that vacuum, you have to decide who you are going to be while no one is watching. This is the work of agency, which is a fancy way of saying your capacity to act and choose for yourself. Think about a time you had to complete a task that had no audience. Maybe it was a project at your job that no one else would ever see.
Maybe it was a way of organizing your home, or a way of speaking to a neighbor that didn't require any praise or validation from a crowd. Most of us wait for a reason to do things. We want a "why" that comes from the outside. We want the "should" of a boss, a spouse, or a social media feed to tell us that our effort matters.
But if you are doing that work in a room where the only light is your own, that "why" has to come from inside you. And this is the part worth stealing. If you only do the work because you want to be seen, you aren't actually the one doing it. You are just performing for a ghost.
You are letting the world do the choosing for you. "In fact, if we take down all of these facades of judgmental assumptions that we have about certain things, loneliness is not necessarily a bad thing." I mean that when we stop worrying if being alone is "wrong," we finally see what it actually allows us to do. It allows us to act without the weight of other people's expectations.
It gives us the chance to see what we do when we aren't trying to be anything for anyone else. That is the highest form of independence. It is the ability to maintain a standard when there is no one around to check it. It is the integrity of a choice made in the dark.
If you can find a way to do something well, or something kind, or something honest, simply because you decided it was the right thing to do, then you have moved from being a passenger in your own life to being the driver. You aren't just avoiding loneliness anymore. You are using the space that loneliness provides to build something that is actually yours.
This capacity for independent action, this agency, is only possible if we can stand the weight of our own presence. It is the hardest thing to do because it requires us to face what Sartre called the contingency of our lives. That is the idea that our existence is not a planned masterpiece. We just show up.
We carry on through sheer weakness, and then we eventually stop. We are not characters in a story written by some higher power; we are the ones holding the pen, even if our hands are shaking. "Loneliness is something I often do not think about because I am often too busy to be lonely." I mean that we use business as a shield against the terrifying reality of our own freedom.
We work, we scroll, we organize, and we move so we don't have to face the question of what we are doing it all for. But if you stop, even for a minute, you are left with a choice. The question I'm left with, and the one I think you'll be left with tomorrow morning, is this: if you stripped away every job, every role. And every person who expects something from you, what is the very first thing you would choose to do just because you decided it was worth doing?