Understanding Solitude

By Leo Gura - January 29, 2025

I really liked this guy’s take on solitude:

What I find most interesting about this is how when you’re young, socializing feels exciting and new, but as you gain more experience and mature you realize that most of socialization is just noise. It’s shallow, it gets weary and repetitive, and it just isn’t meaningful or satisfying compared to the depth of contemplation. I have felt this way since high school. I can socialize, but the rewards of it feel shallow, like I’m collecting pennies out of a public fountain when I could be swimming in my own gold vault like Scrooge McDuck. It took me a long time to realize what makes socialization work. The shallower the mind the more value socialization has. The deeper the mind, the less meaning socialization has because your own mind is more rewarding and profound than anything a human could say to you. What are you really going to talk about with a human? You’re going to talk about something profound like God or Love? Why? When you could connect to God or Love so much more deeply sitting alone in a closet. But to someone who has not made that decade’s long investment in building up their philosophical mind, that kind of connection to reality just doesn’t exist. So for them going out with a gaggle of friends to a nightclub is meaningful. I can go to a nightclub, I can make it fun, but it is not meaningful to me so I cannot sustain the activity. After a certain point it feels like a waste of my life.

Eventually you exhaust socialization. You exhaust clubbing, partying, small talk around the dinner table about the news, internet debates, arguing with others, trying to convince or persuade others that they are wrong and you are right. You exhaust asking people how their day is going, or what’s new. In the end, what does it matter what’s new, how someone’s day is going? It’s just some minor variation of the same petty human drama, over and over again. In the end, you realize that all of it is meaningless. These things only have meaning if you are lost in the dream of them. Once you exhaust that dream or finding something existentially deeper, that way of life becomes inferior because it’s just too existentially shallow. But most people live that way because they don’t even know anything deeper exists, and also because their survival demands it. You can’t have solitude if you manage a company or work in a team on some big project. I can do deep solitude because I developed financial independence, which few people have. Even wealthy people don’t really have it, since they have to keep running their businesses like rats in a wheel. So even the ability to have solitude is a precious thing most humans couldn’t do until retirement.

Warning: This is just one perspective on socialization. Keep in mind that I’m very introverted, so that is my bias. If you’re extroverted this perspective and lifestyle will not work for you. And even if you’re introverted, you need to learn to socialize before you make a retreat into solitude. Especially if you are young and lack social skills, do not use this perspective to bypass developing those skills. I am not telling you that all socializing is bad. Socializing is a critical skill and plays a critical role in human life, even for me. So be careful not to misapply this blog post. Remember that the perspective in the above video came late in his life, after he exhausted socialization. Notice that he did not do a bypass. It would be inappropriate to adopt his perspective in your 20s. With maturity, age, and burning through your karma, you can grow into solitude as he did. I also recommend that you have phases in your life where you are highly social and phases where you go into deep solitude. These alternating phases are very beneficial to your development.

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