Friedrich Nietzsche, Stanley Kubrick, Emily Dickinson, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Nikola Tesla, Fyodor Dostoevsky — men and women of absolute genius — all liked to be alone. There is a stigma that being alone is especially bad for people. After all, humans are social creatures. We constantly attribute negative words like recluse, introvert and loner to people who like to be alone. However, being alone has its benefits and allows you to think more creatively and independently.
You cannot know your strengths and weaknesses unless you identify them yourself. Even if another person tells you your flaws, you don’t realize them until you take ownership of them. Being alone is a great time to ask yourself about your aspirations in any aspect of your life. It is easier to do this when you are by yourself because there is a certain candidness that you rarely share with others.
It’s especially difficult for college kids to reflect on these attributes because they are constantly changing, but being alone allows one the opportunity to explore interests, successes, regrets and failures. This is perhaps one of the things that deters people from wanting to be alone. Feelings of failure, underachievement or any unpleasant feeling with oneself are perhaps the worst feelings someone can experience, and they are exacerbated when alone.
However, no human has lived without failure. The great thinkers used this feeling as fuel to improve themselves. Then there’s loneliness, and no one likes to feel lonely. Reed Larson, professor of human development and family studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a researcher of solitude, agrees. However, according to him, being alone has what he calls a “rebound effect.” It creates “more positive emotions and less self-reported depression down the line.” Anyway, the creativity and independence of thought outweigh any of the negatives of being alone.
The greatest thinkers use time spent alone to drown out the outer noise that limits their creativity. One of them, Pablo Picasso, swore that “without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” Alone time gives them an opportunity to think without other people’s ideas muddling their own. A distracted mind cannot be as creative as it is when able to focus on itself in silence. The mind loves this freedom and when it experiences it, one’s imagination explodes.
When you were a kid and you were alone without TV or friends to hang out with, what did you do? You probably imagined scenarios and acted them out to pass the time. Add on 20 or so years, and you are effectively doing the same thing with adult brainpower. The authors, above all, used this state of mind without distraction to create their worlds, or like Nietzsche or Tesla, to respectively interpret their surroundings philosophically and scientifically.
Being alone gives you independence of the mind. In our government, and especially in this climate, we need independent thinkers. In our world, we need people to come into the political sphere with different opinions and expressions to diversify the ideas we currently have about the government’s purpose. In more practical terms, it allows you the freedom to think outside the box for a class, club, internship or the like. Every teacher, employer and peer is impressed when a student resolves a problem, debates from a contrary position or writes a paper from a unique perspective. Solitude provides time and quiet that allows us to slow the constant flow of thoughts and more deeply think about the world around us so that we can independently and creatively respond to it.
Josh Hummell is a senior double-majoring in classical and Near Eastern studies and history.