The Necessity of Solitude is a claim within the theme of the self and suffering: solitude is not an optional lifestyle preference but a precondition for knowing oneself and for carrying any depth. If a person wants to ask “what kind of person am I,” they must of necessity enter solitude, because only in a state with no other gaze upon them and no role to play does the real self come into view. The claim rests on two remarks. The first welds the question of the self directly to solitude: “What kind of person am I? A person must be alone.” The second describes a contemporary predicament of loneliness: “Every short-video creator is a lonely soul, playing their own actor before a lifeless screen.” The first speaks of solitude as a method for knowing oneself; the second, of solitude deformed once it has been alienated by performance.
Solitude and the Questioning of the Self
Solitude and the question “what kind of person am I” are two sides of one and the same act. To set the questioning of the self alongside “a person must be alone” is to say that the question cannot be answered amid other people. When one is among others, the answer one gives is always an answer calibrated to the other person—a version shaped by what is expected, judged, and responded to, rather than the naked self. Only after withdrawing from the field of relations, after stripping away every gaze one has to manage, is what remains an object fit to be questioned.
This springs from the same root as the judgment in Growing Up Is Being Pressed Into Society’s Mold: Disenchantment Reveals Freedom: society’s mold is pressed into shape within relations, and solitude is the only way to take a person back out of the mold. Solitude, then, is not flight but a step in an epistemological procedure—first isolate the source of interference, and only then can there be any talk of observation.
Solitude as the Condition for Turning Inward
To understand solitude as a method for knowing oneself is to connect it to a deeper account of practice: seeing oneself clearly requires Awareness Reveals Self-Nature: Meditation Is a Finer-Grained Turning Inward, and the precondition for that turning inward is that attention is no longer seized by external objects. A crowd is the strongest of all attention black holes: every face, every sentence calls for a response, and the margin left for turning inward approaches zero. Solitude is “necessary” precisely because it withdraws attention from the outside, clearing the empty space in which turning inward can take place.
This also echoes the orientation in Attention Is Precious: Beware the Coreless and the NPCs—attention is the scarcest resource, and solitude is the structural means of guarding it, of not having it dissipated by the coreless. In this sense, solitude and meditation are continuous: meditation is a finer-grained solitude, and solitude is a more everyday meditation.
Playing Your Own Actor Before a Lifeless Screen
The second card brings out solitude’s other face: “every short-video creator is a lonely soul, playing their own actor before a lifeless screen.” This is not an industry gripe but an observation about alienation: when expression must be mediated through a lens, what a person faces is no longer another person who responds, but a “lifeless screen.” The screen does not look back, does not nod, does not interrupt; it merely records you, coolly.
And so there arises a forced, imposed solitude—a person performs, yet no audience is present; a person communicates, yet across from them is utterly nothing. This is the exact opposite of the first kind of solitude: there, solitude is an active withdrawal from relations in order to see oneself; here, solitude is the hollow shell left after the relation has been emptied out by technology. The performer must be at once actor and director, at once the one speaking and the listener who ought to be present but is absent. Their loneliness lies not in being unwatched but in the watching being delayed, displaced, transcoded into data.
The Divide Between the Two Solitudes
Setting the two cards side by side, one can read off a twofold attitude toward solitude. One is solitude as method: necessary, positive, the procedure for knowing oneself and completing the turn inward. The other is solitude as symptom: a person playing their own actor before a lifeless screen—the form of loss that expression takes once it has been mediated, corresponding to what is described in Every Transmission Loses Something: Heart-to-Heart Sealing, the Picture Frame, and Education: any transmission by way of a medium loses something, and what this particular medium, the screen, loses is precisely “response” itself.
The divide between the two is this: the former is a withdrawal from relations in order to reach the essence; the latter is a relation hollowed out until only form remains. Both are “being alone,” yet the former leads toward Awareness Reveals Self-Nature: Meditation Is a Finer-Grained Turning Inward, while the latter leads toward the predicament described in Silent for Want of Focus: Expression Lags Behind Depth—depth cannot be brought into focus in a field that has no real receiver. The claim neither merges the two solitudes nor denies the second; it records the latter as a specimen of how solitude has been alienated in this age.
Sources
- Manuscript —“What kind of person am I? A person must be alone.”
- Manuscript —“Every short-video creator is a lonely soul, playing their own actor before a lifeless screen.”
See also
- Awareness Reveals Self-Nature: Meditation Is a Finer-Grained Turning Inward
- Silent for Want of Focus: Expression Lags Behind Depth
- Attention Is Precious: Beware the Coreless and the NPCs
- Growing Up Is Being Pressed Into Society’s Mold: Disenchantment Reveals Freedom
- Every Transmission Loses Something: Heart-to-Heart Sealing, the Picture Frame, and Education