Read How to Be Alone (School of Life) for Free Online Page A

alone is a challenge to the security of those clinging desperately to a sinking raft. People who pull out and ‘go solo’ are exposing the danger while apparently escaping the engagement.
    No wonder we are frightened of those who desire and aspire to be alone, if only a little more than has been acceptable in recent social forms. No wonder we want to establish solitude as ‘sad, mad and bad’ – consciously or unconsciously, those of us who want to do something so markedly countercultural are exposing, and even widening, the rift lines.
    But the truth is, the present paradigm is not really working. Despite the intense care and attention lavished on the individual ego; despite over a century of trying to ‘raise self-esteem’ in the peculiar belief that it will simultaneously enhance individuality and create good citizens; despite valiant attempts to consolidate relationships and lower inhibitions; despite intimidating efforts to dragoon the more independent-minded and creative to become ‘team players’; despite the promises of personal freedom made to us by neoliberalism and the cult of individualism and rights – despite all this, the well seems to be running dry. We are living in a society marked by unhappy children, alienated youth, politically disengaged adults, stultifying consumerism, escalating inequality, deeply scary wobbles in the whole economic system, soaring rates of mental ill-health and a planet so damaged that we may well end up destroying the whole enterprise.
    Of course we also live in a world of great beauty, sacrificial and passionate love, tenderness, prosperity, courage and joy. But quite a lot of all that seems to happen regardless of the paradigm and the high thoughts of philosophy. It has always happened. It is precisely because it has always happened that we go on wrestling with these issues in the hope that it can happen more often and for more people.

III. Rebalancing Attitudes to Solitude
    If there is any credibility at all to the somewhat gloomy analysis with which I finished the previous section (and obviously I believe there is), then there is a serious problem confronting us, at least in the developed world. We have arrived at a cultural moment when we are terrified of something that we are not reliably, or healthily, able to evade. Solitude can happen to anyone: we are all at risk. There is no number of friends on Facebook, contacts, connections or financial provision that can guarantee to protect us. The largest, and fastest-growing, groups of people living alone are women over seventy-five (bereavement creates solitude) and men between twenty-five and forty-five (the breakdown of intimate relationships creates solitude). Most often, solitude catches people on the hop, as it were, and few of us can feel we will be securely and indefinitely supported by family, neighbourhood, community or even friendship. It is not sustainable to live in defensive postures of fear and avoidance all the time.
    The two most common tactics for evading the terror of solitude are both singularly ineffective. The first is denigrating those who do not fear it, especially if they claim to enjoy it, and stereotyping them as ‘miserable’, ‘selfish’, ‘crazy’ or ‘perverse’ (sad, mad and bad). The second is infinitely extending our social contacts as a sort of insurance policy, which social media makes increasingly possible.
    The first is ineffective because of the risk that a whole range of circumstances may force someone into solitude involuntarily. Should this happen, the fear-and-projection strategy will turn round and bite back: you will be the sad, mad, bad person, and this can only make a difficult situation very much worse. Additionally, since – as you will see – there is a good deal of evidence that none of these worries are actually true, people pursuing this route will be obliged to cut themselves off from many ways of knowing about the actual world in which they are living. This