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!
Thanks for sharing, maybe the intention does make a difference. Or maybe I'm a bit too self-critical. I probably get some kind of breakthroughs or profound thoughts after all, but only on a fraction of all walks and rides – which is okay.
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?"
No. It's been decades since I read the book but the concept is simple and quickly in understood and doesn't need a book-length treatment. He doesn't give any guidance on how to achieve the flow state which is what I was looking for.
I definitely recommend it. He studied the topic of "optimal experience" for 40 years, and explores it in various settings. The book has plenty of guidance on understanding how do people get into flow states. There might not be highly precise "instructions", but the book absolutely provides valuable insights. The patient reader will be rewarded.
(Also, the bibliography at the end of the book is quite valuable. Good writers share their sources generously.)
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.
There is something to be said for the recovery that comes with just experiencing a place in the world without any agenda or accountability beyond simply being a living being. I'm glad you got to experience that. i've achieved this maybe a handful of times in my life, and it seems significantly harder to do in the US than elsewhere.
I did a spiritual retreat a few months ago at a Jesuit centre, and I think it was a bit like this— just leaving my phone in my room and spending the entire day taking everything an hour at a time with no obligations or timelines or goals at all.
Obviously the religious side of it isn't going to be for everyone, but absolutely the "hard break from the real world" side can be.
Sounds like a great vacation! And never mind other peoples opinions, some even call what you did "Vanlife", I know it as camping. If you enjoy, just do it!
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.
Yeah. I mean that's the thing, sitting in front of the computer is a necessity because you need to type ideas. So your screen has to become a catalyst for your thoughts instead of being a distraction.
You have to build an "environment" where you can "blog" or w/e you deem productive. I've been looking at https://kinopio.club/ to be my "default screen on computer start" for organizing thoughts, but it's not perfect.
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.
Then our cultures will actively penalize people who can sit still and be happy doing nothing. “laziness” is a cardinal sin and “lack of ambition” a critical issue.
A great deal of human bonding is based around frothing each other up about a topic that either doesn't really matter, or the group present has absolutely zero control over.
I'm sure most people notice this, but if you have freshly improved skills in 'sitting still in a room', this phenomenon is quite noticeable and, if I'm perfectly honest, somewhat alienating.
However possibly he meant sit still usefully, otherwise why sit rather than lounge in an ottoman? sit still, that is, sustain study, or read literature, or have creative idylls, write, comtemplate the inner realms. Sounds to me like the quote is the classical ideal of useful employment, by which comparison much social interaction or being glued to a phone is judged as laziness or, anachronically, dissipation.
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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
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.
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.
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.
I think this is another reason being outdoors during solitude is great, it’s like a relaxation and brain refresh force multiplier.
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.
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...
"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
(Also, the bibliography at the end of the book is quite valuable. Good writers share their sources generously.)
Obviously the religious side of it isn't going to be for everyone, but absolutely the "hard break from the real world" side can be.
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/
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.
You have to build an "environment" where you can "blog" or w/e you deem productive. I've been looking at https://kinopio.club/ to be my "default screen on computer start" for organizing thoughts, but it's not perfect.
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.”
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.
I've recently started watching Seinfeld again. Kramer seems like exactly this kind of character.
Flânerie: The Art of Aimless Strolling - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32002486 (125 comments)
-- Blaise Pascal
I'm sure most people notice this, but if you have freshly improved skills in 'sitting still in a room', this phenomenon is quite noticeable and, if I'm perfectly honest, somewhat alienating.