Last Updated on: 23rd October 2022, 12:16 pm
While I wouldn’t necessarily call myself antisocial, I’m definitely a person who treasures his alone time. Not everybody who knows me knows that, and even some of the ones who do don’t really seem to understand why or respect it. Maybe that’s why I find thispieceso interesting. I don’t agree with everything here and some of it doesn’t apply to me at all, but a couple of these stuck out bigtime as I read them, so I thought I’d share in the hopes that it might help people I know figure me out and understand things a bit better. It ain’t gonna work, but it’s interesting and it’s content so I’m sharing anyhow.
3. You gain insight
You cannot ever be rid of people entirely. I know this, I have tried. Hell, even Howard Hughes, the modern prophet of anti-socialism still had to deal with his lawyers. People, however, will be reduced to bite-sized chunks. You will be able to analyze them as you take your breaks from analyzing more important things. Spend enough time thinking about enough data and you come to some pretty interesting conclusions. The fact is that most people reveal far more than is immediately obvious in the course of a casual conversation, you just have to put it under a microscope, which means it needs isolated, and you
need private time look at it.
8. You don’t miss out on a whole lot
Most people have little to offer aside from the psychological comfort of being around another human being. They are not fun or interesting to anybody, least of all for the people who settle for them. In all but a few instances you could lose a relationship and feel very little, but even when you do, it’s pretty much always survivable. You lose that comfort from being around a particular person, but that’s more about adjusting to change than anything else. The point is that people are not all that important, not all that interesting, not all that fun, not all that essential. You would be making a better use of your time doing a crossword puzzle or learning a few words in a foreign language than hanging out with them.
This is absolutely true. if given the choice between having a lot of people in my circle or having a few good friends, I’ll take the few good friends every time. I’d rather have a couple of people I can have fun with than 27 people and their stupid drama and pointless conversation. I know folks who measure their happiness or status at least in part based on how many people they know. Funny enough, none of them are really all that happy. Reason 3 helped me figure that out long ago.
10. It helps you deal with loneliness
The most sociable, chatty, clingy, blowhards out there, the ones who try to spend as little time alone as possible, for them being alone is the same thing as being lonely. For the antisocial loneliness is very different from the sensation of being alone, they are two distinctly separate feelings. The anti-social can feel loneliness, but it’s rare. You treasure the moments with no distractions, no background movement, no responsibilities beyond what you have in front of you. That is largely, I suspect, a learned reaction to being alone a lot, but it’s good since everybody has to be alone at some point and it’s best to see it as a gift rather than a burden.
In my case at least, whoever wrote this suspects wrong. I’ve always had people around me. I’ve never considered myself starved for company. I can generally pick up the phone and call somebody for a chat or find somebody to have a beer with without a lot of effort. For me, the reason loneliness and alone time aren’t the same is simple. Thoughts. Basically, I have enough of them to get me through life. I find myself interesting enough to hang out with. We can read, we can write, we can learn, we can listen to music or a talk show, we can just sit in the quiet and ponder things. I’m not saying this to sound selfish, but I’m one of my favourite people to be around. Sometimes I argue with me, but for the most part we get along just fine. We’re never bored, and we don’t have to rely on our friends to entertain us. We sometimes wish we weren’t so relied on, but that’s another post for another day.
