I spend quite a lot of time alone by myself. I usually go for a walk or ride my bike. Going to the library is another way to fill your brain with other peoples’ ideas, just like scrolling social media.
But I have to be honest: there are zero profound thoughts when I’m alone. I sometimes get ideas for what I could work on. Write this article or that, make a standup comedy show. Write some junk porn novel. It’s entertaining while it lasts and after a while, the thoughts are gone and having thought about them, the drive to implement them is gone, too.
It’s literally like writing things on a TODO list and feeling good about having it written down, but the desire to do them is gone.
So, since I don’t get profound motivation or breakthroughs or whatever, I treat time alone as some kind of mental garbage collector. At least I get to move my body.
So, what’s the lesson here? I don’t know. Maybe that being alone to improve something is bullshit. Go out alone if it suits you, don’t expect profound thoughts. At least that’s how I am :)
That sounds very normal, at least it’s the same for me.
Sometimes I spent a considerable amount of time brainstorming an idea or concept over and over during alone times, and then at some point it won’t return to my thoughts again, but something new replaces it. Sort of like I am “done” with that thought and my brain wants to move on.
I don’t know why that happens, but I guess I get stimulation simply from that iterative thought process. Thus your garbage collector comparison seems accurate to me.
Secretly though, I do hope to get that business idea at some point via that process. Not sure if that’s ever going to happen, but that’s okay too.
I feel the exact opposite. I only get profound ideas when I'm alone. Spending time with others is leisure but does nothing for my creativity. So definitely not bullshit for me.
It all depends on whether you’re getting sufficient external stimulation.
If I go through an entire week of interesting experiences/conversations/etc. then spending a day alone will yield all kinds of interesting ideas/concepts/revelations. Usually because I didn’t have time to reflect during my busy week.
For me it’s the same as you, but only with “big” ideas that will require a lot of effort to get off the ground.
But I have been able to have a lot of great (to me) breakthroughs by focusing on smaller ideas: melodies or lyrics for a song, ideas for an algorithm or architecture for something I’m working on, perhaps planning a whole talk or presentation.
I believe most of us who are developers do that at work already, so it’s not too hard to extend it to alone time or exercise time.
On the other hand, I had the idea for a business I’m currently starting on one of those walks. So there’s exceptions.
It's the same for me, and that's when things go well. Sometimes, when thinking alone, anxious thoughts take place and I begin a spiral of bad thoughts about the past, things I should or shouldn't have done... In these cases I think it'd had been better to have listened to a podcast.
i do not believe being alone is meant to be the source of profundity, but of serenity · it is much cheaper (energy/time) to obtain profundity from others, but serenity can only be obtained after acknowledging that whatever i call I is always already locked in some kind of inside and only by being alone i can regulate this inside in such a manner as to be(wel)come (the) serene => alone not to improve, but to survive
I think balance is important. I think I remember that studies indicated that it often works well to immerse yourself in a subject and then rest. Your subconscious then processes the thing further and might come up with shower thoughts.
This works for me.
If I spend too much time alone, I end up mentally running in circles. If I spend too much time with people my mind becomes saturated and stops absorbing new information.
Are you a developer or somehow creating complex things?
Because for me, I get a lot of solutions when I'm alone (eg. shower). Sometimes I get stuck on a problem, or don't find a solution that feels right. A lot of times during these quiet times, some solution pops out of my (probably unconscious) brain.
yeah this sounds normal and a lot like what I feel too, No real profound ideas or aha moment still, but I do end up spending a lot of time alone, either walking or biking or swimming , the best I can get out of that time is the ability to fill my nice to have todo list with some random diy projects, or web tools I know I wont prioritize building ever. But I do still like to spend that time alone lost in aimless thoughts as I feel it enables me to feel happiness and pleasure when I do have company or I am interacting online with friends and colleagues.
That’s consonant with my experience and I think that’s kind of the point. Being alone is more about getting the necessary space we need for our brains to reset for once and not have to focus on anything or waste cycles on distractions. I often feel more refreshed after sitting around doing nothing outside for a second than I do after sleeping.
I think this is another reason being outdoors during solitude is great, it’s like a relaxation and brain refresh force multiplier.
I sorta get that, in that I can get a lot of game and story ideas that realistically will never make it into a full game (and recently it's been way worse, I need to fix my environment to facilitate creative work), and I have way more ideas then I'll ever have time to make into games or stories, but I've gotten plenty of ideas from those walks that I have successfully executed on afterwards.
All serious skills or accomplishments I have gotten in life have required both serious solo work and input, criticism, or encouragement from others. Purely solo activities I can go deep but burn out quickly if there is no real world reinforcement. Purely social activities I max out at a shallow level and never care to get any better. I think both types of learning are necessary.
But isn't the idea to be alone and have no important thoughts in itself is good?
For example, you have this huge complex problem that you cannot solve, then don't think about it and relax for one day and then all of a sudden you get an easy solution without even thinking hard about it. Happened to me quite some times.
You need to let go of the idea that every moment of your life needs to have purpose or some productive output. Luckily you already come to that conclusion: a way to reset the brain and moving your body is always a good idea.
"Go out alone if it suits you, don’t expect profound thoughts"
Often, I consciously decide to use time along to think. I don't think anything would happen without that conscious decision. But I've gotten some good results from that conscious decision. Once in the '90's I was driving back to my home in Maine from an internet conference in Boston. I had come up with a mathematical technique to recommend things to people based on their interests, and at the conference, there was a session on how it was hard for web sites to get advertising because they had to have "space salesman" to find advertisers.
On the drive I asked myself, what do I know that might be able to help solve problems I saw at the conference? Before I'd gotten north of Massachussetts, I had the idea that advertisers could send their ads to a central hub that would distribute the ads to web sites based on people's interests; so the web site wouldn't have to do anything and ads would be chosen automatically. Interests would be discovered by keeping track of which ads people tended to click on and other factors.
But I didn't know how to keep track of those clicks. Over the next couple weeks I looked into using Netscape's cookie mechanism along with other possibilities. But cookies had built-in privacy constraints. From my write-up at [1]:
"""
At first blush, cookies didn't appear like they could help, because they could only be written or read from the internet domain from which they were written. So, if a cookie was written by, for example, a CGI at golfing.com, it couldn't be accessed by a CGI at boating.com. It followed that the idea of having the servers for golfing.com and boating.com both accessing a central server at some other location to track user activity wouldn't work; there was no way to know that the same user had visited both sites because any cookies written at one site would be inaccessible to the other.
But as I looked further into the general topic of Web programming, I noticed that a Web site running on one domain could invoke a CGI running on another domain. And there seemed to be no reason why that CGI, running on that other domain, couldn't write its own cookie to the local computer.
"""
Now, Google owns the patent that came out of it (which did NOT claim the "tracking cookie" on its own, but only using it with MY particular mathematical algorithm for picking ads.) As far as I know the patent has never been used offensively, but even last year Google and Twitter were using it defensively against a patent troll. ( In their petition[2] in that case, Twitter and Google repeatedly refer to the tracking cookie as "Robinson's Cookie.")
So anyway, my advice is that you consciously CHOOSE to think when alone, while doing something like walking or driving. Somehow that low-level, automatic activity makes a huge difference to me in my ability to think, and most of the best ideas I've had in my career have come while driving. Other people have their best ones while walking. I don't HAVE to be alone, but I pretty much have had to say to my wife in the passenger seat, "Please don't talk to me now, I'm thinking." She doesn't mind because the results have sometimes been good in the past!
Holy smokes I feel bad for you. What happened to your curiosity (wo)man? I really can't empathize at all with comparing a library with scrolling social media. That's apathy to the max.
Quoting from a past comment[1]. This is from the late Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (of "flow" fame):
"The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention. It is relatively easy to become involved with a job, to enjoy the company of friends, to be entertained in a theater or at a concert. But what happens when we are left to our own devices? Alone, when the dark night of the soul descends, are we forced into frantic attempts to distract the mind from its coming? Or are we able to take on activities that are not only enjoyable, but make the self grow?"
A couple of years ago, I was going through a short stint of burn-out. I needed some time away, so I put a mattress in the back of my car and went to Germany for a few days. I loved the idea of not having to go anywhere and not having to discuss the next location with anyone. If I saw a place with a nice view around dinner time, I'd just stop there, warm up some food and eat, enjoying the view. Those couple of days were zen. I need to do this again some time, but for some reason when not burnt out, people are less accepting of this kind of thing.
This highlights what bothers me most about today's [mobile] culture. There are reams of other things to say about the damage being done (I'd recommend Johann Hari's book Stolen Focus [0] for a great, if severely worrying, overview) - but to me the ability to spend time doing nothing, being with oneself, being alone, living with one's thoughts - this is a hugely important thing.
Other people on the thread point out that "not much happens" when they spend time alone - to which I'd say: that's the point. Your brain needs time to process, to chew through, to formulate, to make sense of... all the things it has been spending time doing. So yeh, sometimes ideas happen in these spaces (ideas certainly don't happen where there's no space!), but sometimes nothing at all "happens". And...that's important.
As well as that, the constant-always-filled-always-on culture created by mobile devices takes you away from the present moment. It's like the least mindful thing you can be doing, and given the quantities of evidence around happiness, flow, focus, etc - just being in the world is a critically important thing.
The other angle is about the ego in all of this. One of the strange things that comes out of a meditation practice is that (and bear with me here, it sounds weird) - when you spend more time with yourself, focusing on what your inner voice is saying, without constant distraction, you actually become very much better at being empathetic in the world. Because you understand more about who you are (and, ultimately, who your "self" isn't...), you get to understand more about other people and who they are. I wouldn't be at all surprised if being good at being alone also boosted this sense of empathy for others. It sounds counter-intuitive, but I suspect it's true.
This post reminds me of the life of Christopher mccandless, the protagonist of into the wild.
McCandless had happily escaped humanity his whole life, only to find that happiness itself can only be amplified when shared. One of his final quotes being:
I interpret that in the complete opposite way: he was a deeply unhappy person who didn't realize it until he really experienced being alone. I can be just as happy alone as when I'm with people so the sentiment certainly doesn't apply to some people
This is adjacent to the notion of a "Flâneur", someone who idly wanders a city with nothing in particular to do, but who engages with it intellectually and socially.
It very much requires a high level of privledge or, in more rare cases (these days), the ability to survive in poverty looking like a homeless person yet still be interesting and welcomed by others.
For Gen-X, this was also known as being a "slacker". It was good while it lasted.
> This is adjacent to the notion of a "Flâneur", someone who idly wanders a city with nothing in particular to do, but who engages with it intellectually and socially.
I've recently started watching Seinfeld again. Kramer seems like exactly this kind of character.
This article caught my wandering attention today during an
intermittent fast. Normally I'd take a light exercise day to burn a
bit more, but a minor injury is telling me to take it easy. Reading HN
and tinkering with code isn't enough. Fasting makes me restless. I
almost never get "bored", but this brings it on. I want to break the
link between boredom and waves of hunger. How we manage solitude and
how we manage hunger seem connected.
I borrowed this book from a library at age 10 or so - 50 years ago. As a kid, when we went on holiday as a family the first thing we would do would be to visit the library at our destination and get 'visitor tickets'. I was an only child (still am) and was expected to amuse myself. The title is perfect for an only child. I read this book pretty much cover to cover one holiday and remember making darts out of sewing needles and matchsticks.
> What I call zazen is not developing concentration by stages and so on. It is simply the Awakened One's own easy and joyful practice, it is realized-practice within already manifest enlightenment. It is the display of complete reality. Traps and cages spring open. Grasping the heart of this, you are the dragon who has reached his waters, the tiger resting in her mountains. Understand that right here is the display of Vast Reality and then dullness and mental wandering have no place to arise.
Returning to the joyful ease of a child, not putting distinctions and discriminations on play, or worrying about the next thing or even doing the current thing well, is what we train by sitting zazen in Zen Buddhism
> not putting distinctions and discriminations on play
Honestly that stands out for me from your comment. What do you mean? It does not follow logically, at least for me, from the rest of the things you mention.
meta -- i'm just wondering if the OP found this blog post through the https://projectnaptha.com main page screenshot of the book. these two posts are side-by-side on HN now and it gave me the chills "what a coincidence" - perhaps not.
> now more than ever, it seems — have a profound civilizational anxiety about being alone.
It seems to me the "natural" state of things is to NOT be alone. Did cavemen survive if they were alone? It use to be common for the majority of people in the world it live in single room houses. I'd think the "natural = better" crowd would be very much of the thought that being alone is a symptom of modern society. I'm not personally saying that being alone is bad. Only that the framing seems to be that not having alone time is bad and that seems like a strange framing to me if for most of our existance we were rarely alone.
Also, I notice almost none of the comments are about the "Do nothing" part. They're all about "do something with nobody all alone by yourself", not "do *nothing* with nobody all alone by yourself"
I am reminded of James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." So much of my life has required just waiting, so daydreaming, people watching and hyper-focusing on my surroundings have become valuable skills.
These skills allow me to "be there" for others. My mom had many surgeries and I would go to the hospital and just wait with my dad. We said little. He would read paperback fiction, a pastime he learned riding in carpools, but he was not alone.
I read this book as a child in the 1990s. I think I picked it up at a garage sale, along with another of his books "Where did you go?" Out "What did you do?" Nothing", an entertaining memoir of his youth and all the nonsense he got up to with the other kids.
[+] [-] WA|3 years ago|reply
But I have to be honest: there are zero profound thoughts when I’m alone. I sometimes get ideas for what I could work on. Write this article or that, make a standup comedy show. Write some junk porn novel. It’s entertaining while it lasts and after a while, the thoughts are gone and having thought about them, the drive to implement them is gone, too.
It’s literally like writing things on a TODO list and feeling good about having it written down, but the desire to do them is gone.
So, since I don’t get profound motivation or breakthroughs or whatever, I treat time alone as some kind of mental garbage collector. At least I get to move my body.
So, what’s the lesson here? I don’t know. Maybe that being alone to improve something is bullshit. Go out alone if it suits you, don’t expect profound thoughts. At least that’s how I am :)
Edit: last paragraph
[+] [-] ffritz|3 years ago|reply
Sometimes I spent a considerable amount of time brainstorming an idea or concept over and over during alone times, and then at some point it won’t return to my thoughts again, but something new replaces it. Sort of like I am “done” with that thought and my brain wants to move on.
I don’t know why that happens, but I guess I get stimulation simply from that iterative thought process. Thus your garbage collector comparison seems accurate to me.
Secretly though, I do hope to get that business idea at some point via that process. Not sure if that’s ever going to happen, but that’s okay too.
[+] [-] Kiro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreilys|3 years ago|reply
If I go through an entire week of interesting experiences/conversations/etc. then spending a day alone will yield all kinds of interesting ideas/concepts/revelations. Usually because I didn’t have time to reflect during my busy week.
[+] [-] ratww|3 years ago|reply
For me it’s the same as you, but only with “big” ideas that will require a lot of effort to get off the ground.
But I have been able to have a lot of great (to me) breakthroughs by focusing on smaller ideas: melodies or lyrics for a song, ideas for an algorithm or architecture for something I’m working on, perhaps planning a whole talk or presentation.
I believe most of us who are developers do that at work already, so it’s not too hard to extend it to alone time or exercise time.
On the other hand, I had the idea for a business I’m currently starting on one of those walks. So there’s exceptions.
[+] [-] rubslopes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ly3xqhl8g9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roeles|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koonsolo|3 years ago|reply
Because for me, I get a lot of solutions when I'm alone (eg. shower). Sometimes I get stuck on a problem, or don't find a solution that feels right. A lot of times during these quiet times, some solution pops out of my (probably unconscious) brain.
[+] [-] maskedinvader|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidhorse|3 years ago|reply
I think this is another reason being outdoors during solitude is great, it’s like a relaxation and brain refresh force multiplier.
[+] [-] cableshaft|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] porknubbins|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romanovcode|3 years ago|reply
For example, you have this huge complex problem that you cannot solve, then don't think about it and relax for one day and then all of a sudden you get an easy solution without even thinking hard about it. Happened to me quite some times.
[+] [-] fleddr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garyrob|3 years ago|reply
Often, I consciously decide to use time along to think. I don't think anything would happen without that conscious decision. But I've gotten some good results from that conscious decision. Once in the '90's I was driving back to my home in Maine from an internet conference in Boston. I had come up with a mathematical technique to recommend things to people based on their interests, and at the conference, there was a session on how it was hard for web sites to get advertising because they had to have "space salesman" to find advertisers.
On the drive I asked myself, what do I know that might be able to help solve problems I saw at the conference? Before I'd gotten north of Massachussetts, I had the idea that advertisers could send their ads to a central hub that would distribute the ads to web sites based on people's interests; so the web site wouldn't have to do anything and ads would be chosen automatically. Interests would be discovered by keeping track of which ads people tended to click on and other factors.
But I didn't know how to keep track of those clicks. Over the next couple weeks I looked into using Netscape's cookie mechanism along with other possibilities. But cookies had built-in privacy constraints. From my write-up at [1]:
""" At first blush, cookies didn't appear like they could help, because they could only be written or read from the internet domain from which they were written. So, if a cookie was written by, for example, a CGI at golfing.com, it couldn't be accessed by a CGI at boating.com. It followed that the idea of having the servers for golfing.com and boating.com both accessing a central server at some other location to track user activity wouldn't work; there was no way to know that the same user had visited both sites because any cookies written at one site would be inaccessible to the other.
But as I looked further into the general topic of Web programming, I noticed that a Web site running on one domain could invoke a CGI running on another domain. And there seemed to be no reason why that CGI, running on that other domain, couldn't write its own cookie to the local computer. """
Now, Google owns the patent that came out of it (which did NOT claim the "tracking cookie" on its own, but only using it with MY particular mathematical algorithm for picking ads.) As far as I know the patent has never been used offensively, but even last year Google and Twitter were using it defensively against a patent troll. ( In their petition[2] in that case, Twitter and Google repeatedly refer to the tracking cookie as "Robinson's Cookie.")
So anyway, my advice is that you consciously CHOOSE to think when alone, while doing something like walking or driving. Somehow that low-level, automatic activity makes a huge difference to me in my ability to think, and most of the best ideas I've had in my career have come while driving. Other people have their best ones while walking. I don't HAVE to be alone, but I pretty much have had to say to my wife in the passenger seat, "Please don't talk to me now, I'm thinking." She doesn't mind because the results have sometimes been good in the past!
[1] https://www.garyrobinson.net/2021/07/did-i-invent-browser-co... [2]https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/ptab-filings/IPR2021-0048...
[+] [-] navjack27|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lubesGordi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kashyapc|3 years ago|reply
"The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention. It is relatively easy to become involved with a job, to enjoy the company of friends, to be entertained in a theater or at a concert. But what happens when we are left to our own devices? Alone, when the dark night of the soul descends, are we forced into frantic attempts to distract the mind from its coming? Or are we able to take on activities that are not only enjoyable, but make the self grow?"
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28942369
[+] [-] danadannecy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dinvlad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donkeyd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmje|3 years ago|reply
Other people on the thread point out that "not much happens" when they spend time alone - to which I'd say: that's the point. Your brain needs time to process, to chew through, to formulate, to make sense of... all the things it has been spending time doing. So yeh, sometimes ideas happen in these spaces (ideas certainly don't happen where there's no space!), but sometimes nothing at all "happens". And...that's important.
As well as that, the constant-always-filled-always-on culture created by mobile devices takes you away from the present moment. It's like the least mindful thing you can be doing, and given the quantities of evidence around happiness, flow, focus, etc - just being in the world is a critically important thing.
The other angle is about the ego in all of this. One of the strange things that comes out of a meditation practice is that (and bear with me here, it sounds weird) - when you spend more time with yourself, focusing on what your inner voice is saying, without constant distraction, you actually become very much better at being empathetic in the world. Because you understand more about who you are (and, ultimately, who your "self" isn't...), you get to understand more about other people and who they are. I wouldn't be at all surprised if being good at being alone also boosted this sense of empathy for others. It sounds counter-intuitive, but I suspect it's true.
[0] https://stolenfocusbook.com/
[+] [-] personjerry|3 years ago|reply
I'll write an email, jot a few notes.
Inevitably I will open up a video or a game and distract myself.
If I'm spending time with myself and I'm at home, I'm on my computer.
I think it's a problem. I'm considering thinking about it some more and writing a blog post on it.
[+] [-] glouwbug|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thyrox|3 years ago|reply
McCandless had happily escaped humanity his whole life, only to find that happiness itself can only be amplified when shared. One of his final quotes being:
“Happiness only real when shared.”
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silicon2401|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Otek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DIARRHEA_xd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crispyambulance|3 years ago|reply
It very much requires a high level of privledge or, in more rare cases (these days), the ability to survive in poverty looking like a homeless person yet still be interesting and welcomed by others.
For Gen-X, this was also known as being a "slacker". It was good while it lasted.
[+] [-] ThalesX|3 years ago|reply
I've recently started watching Seinfeld again. Kramer seems like exactly this kind of character.
[+] [-] mgdlbp|3 years ago|reply
Flânerie: The Art of Aimless Strolling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32002486 (125 comments)
[+] [-] amelius|3 years ago|reply
-- Blaise Pascal
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigDinosaur|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ma8ee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teh_klev|3 years ago|reply
Sure but that's missing the point of the book.
[+] [-] sitkack|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taffronaut|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
https://wwzc.org/dharma-text/fukanzazengi-how-everyone-can-s...
Returning to the joyful ease of a child, not putting distinctions and discriminations on play, or worrying about the next thing or even doing the current thing well, is what we train by sitting zazen in Zen Buddhism
[+] [-] tuxie_|3 years ago|reply
Honestly that stands out for me from your comment. What do you mean? It does not follow logically, at least for me, from the rest of the things you mention.
[+] [-] burnaway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fbn79|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gernb|3 years ago|reply
> now more than ever, it seems — have a profound civilizational anxiety about being alone.
It seems to me the "natural" state of things is to NOT be alone. Did cavemen survive if they were alone? It use to be common for the majority of people in the world it live in single room houses. I'd think the "natural = better" crowd would be very much of the thought that being alone is a symptom of modern society. I'm not personally saying that being alone is bad. Only that the framing seems to be that not having alone time is bad and that seems like a strange framing to me if for most of our existance we were rarely alone.
Also, I notice almost none of the comments are about the "Do nothing" part. They're all about "do something with nobody all alone by yourself", not "do *nothing* with nobody all alone by yourself"
[+] [-] memcg|3 years ago|reply
These skills allow me to "be there" for others. My mom had many surgeries and I would go to the hospital and just wait with my dad. We said little. He would read paperback fiction, a pastime he learned riding in carpools, but he was not alone.
[+] [-] ianferrel|3 years ago|reply
Highly recommended by 12-year-old me.
[+] [-] ribs|3 years ago|reply
Really? Has the author ever been to Hacker News, I wonder.
[+] [-] NoGravitas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walty8|3 years ago|reply