📮 How to Be Alone (without Being Lonely)

Letters from a Seeker (Vol. 54)

The Lonely Ones by Edvard Munch (1899)

📮 Letters from a Seeker

“Letters from a Seeker” is an occasional series of short contemplations that explore the mystery, meaning, and art of living. The word ‘Seeker’ in the title is inspired by the Delphic maxim: “Be a seeker of wisdom.” *** This series is exclusive to members.

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Dear Fellow Traveler,

There’s the obvious kind of loneliness—grief, isolation, being left out. And then there’s the quieter kind: the loneliness that lives inside normal days, inside decent relationships, and inside a life that looks fine from the outside.

The philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) withdrew to a tower library in rural France and used it as a laboratory for self-examination, observing his mind with unusual honesty and humor, and essentially creating the personal essay as a way of thinking on the page.

He doesn’t romanticize solitude as an escape. Instead, he offers something more practical: build an inner space.

He calls it a “back shop”—a private area within your life, “wholly our own and entirely free,” where we can regain our freedom and reconnect with ourselves.

Most of us never built that room. So when we’re alone, we don’t meet ourselves—we meet the noise we’ve been avoiding. We reach for our phones like a drowning person reaches for the nearest branch. We turn on a podcast, then another. We scroll, then scroll again. We keep a low hum of input in the background so we don’t have to hear what’s actually happening inside us.

And then we tell ourselves we dislike solitude, when the truth is simpler: we haven’t learned how to be with ourselves without immediately trying to change the subject.

This is where Thomas Merton (1915–1968) proves to be a valuable guide. As a Trappist monk living in Kentucky, he offers insights that resonate with today’s restlessness. He draws a clear distinction that becomes obvious upon reflection: solitude isn’t mainly about changing your location but about changing your inner experience. “Solitude,” he explains, “is... a deepening of the present,” and if you overlook it now, you won’t discover it in some neater, quieter future.