Existential Pursuits

Solitude

Every philosophy rests on an unstated assumption that the person living it can stand alone. That they can inhabit their own company without dread. That, in the absence of witnesses, validation, or distraction, they do not crumble.

But most people flee from solitude before they ever learn what it means, requires, or provides. Connection is safer. Busyness is easier. Distraction is, well, distraction. Solitude, however, is a confrontation that directly reveals the state of your relationship with yourself. And that relationship, more than any bond you form, more than any purpose you seek, more than any reputation you build, will determine the character and quality of your life.

The Self

Before you are a friend, a partner, a sibling, or anything, you are a self. Every other identity is an extension of or a compensation for your relationship with that self. If that bond is unstable, every other connection you form will carry the silent burden of those unmet needs. You’ll enter friendships to escape yourself, chase lovers to validate yourself, or fill every unclaimed moment with noise to avoid hearing your own thoughts.

No one escapes this gravity. It expresses itself in different forms, but the root is the same: a person uneasy in their own presence, desperate for external validation.

A person at peace with themselves carries no such hunger into the world. They are capable of love because they do not need to be rescued. They are capable of friendship because they do not need to be validated. They are capable of standing up for what they believe in because their worth is not contingent on external factors.

This is not detachment. It is the creation of a foundation. You cannot truly stand well with others until you stand well with yourself.

The Ignorant

People who neglect their relationship with themselves create lives of chronic distortion. Every relationship, goal, or pursuit becomes a proxy for self worth. Life becomes a series of unconscious attempts to outsource what should be internally manifested.

When you neglect the relationship with yourself, you don’t become empty, you become scattered. Identity fragments into borrowed roles, reactive behaviors, and performance based worth. Without an internal anchor, you’ll instinctively seek out people, titles, causes, and distractions to fill the silence that self neglect leaves behind. The person uneasy in their own company will compulsively attach to others, not from genuine connection, but from a need to escape themselves. Every relationship becomes a transaction: validate me, distract me, stabilize me. And because no one can permanently shoulder that weight, resentment and disappointment accumulate in every bond you form.

This neglect distorts how you define meaning. Lacking a private sense of worth, you chase external markers you don’t actually value in hopes that they fill the void: attention, status, affiliation, aesthetics. Purpose becomes something you perform for an audience instead of something you build for yourself. Life is experienced through the lens of other people’s perception. You feel valuable when seen, but invisible when ignored. Without internal stability, rejection feels catastrophic, neutrality feels like neglect, and even success feels hollow if unacknowledged. You live at the mercy of external forces, mistaking their inevitable fluctuations for your own worth.

Over time, this leaves you brittle. Every minor insult or indifference lands too hard. You lose the ability to act without spectators or enforcers. Restless in silence, you overcommit, overconsume, or over-identify with roles you don’t believe in. You betray your own instincts to avoid friction, trade clarity for approval, and numb yourself with distraction to delay confrontation. The real tragedy isn’t loneliness, it’s that you slowly become a stranger to yourself, someone you neither know nor trust, and you carry that fracture into everything you interact with.

When solitude feels unbearable, it’s not the absence of others that matters. It’s the unavoidable confrontation with yourself. You either address it yourself or unconsciously live by its hand.

The Silence

Solitude is not exile. It is not evidence of failure. It is the only environment in which you can examine the architecture of your mind without interference.

Solitude isn’t just the absence of others, it’s the removal of external input. Without an audience, your true desires become clearer. So much of what people claim to want is a performance meant to secure approval, status, or proximity. In solitude, there’s no one left to impress. The ambitions you clung to for appearances unravel, and what remains is what you actually want, not what you were told or taught to chase. It exposes how much of your life was built to be witnessed, and forces you to reckon with what’s worth pursuing if no one else ever sees it.

It also reveals your fears. Most people don’t fear solitude directly, they fear what rises within it. The absence of distraction makes you confront what you’d rather bury: your insecurities, unresolved failures, contradictions, untested values. With no one to perform to and no audience to deceive, your inner landscape surfaces in its raw, unfiltered form. You learn what genuinely unsettles you, not what you pretend to fear for social sympathy. Solitude strips away the narrative you write for others and shows you the actual story of your mind.

Most importantly, solitude refines meaning. Without applause to reward you, you’re forced to examine why you do anything. The roles, ambitions, and ideologies you adopted for recognition fall away, and you’re left with the question: what still matters when no one’s watching? Meaning forged in solitude isn’t loud or dramatic, it’s clean, durable, and personal. It stops being a performance and becomes something you internalize and inhabit. It makes you intact and honest with yourself and defines what you truly want.

The person who sanctifies their solitude becomes effective in the greatest sense: immune to flattery and insult, resistant to manipulation, and discerning in their choices and allegiances. Their presence and attention becomes valuable precisely because it isn’t offered carelessly. If you can become truly satisfied on your own, life itself becomes a whole lot brighter.

Solitude is not the absence of life. It is where life is sharpened into clarity.

The Method

This is not some “love yourself” bullshit. It’s a systematic, difficult, but essential project. And it proceeds through a few primary practices:

Learn to Sit in Silence

Solitude without distraction. No phone, no background noise, no passive consumption, nothing. Deliberate, unstructured time with your own thoughts and nothing else.

Start small, maybe a few minutes. It might take a while to slip into. Let whatever arises surface without interference and let your thoughts flow from topic to topic. You might feel restless. You might instinctively reach for distraction. You might feel like you’re wasting your time. Resist. This is the point. Remain in your thoughts for some time. What you notice in this time is your internal landscape. Learn to navigate it.

Over time, you’ll realize those early discomforts aren’t obstacles, but signals. Where your mind goes in silence is where your true work is. The patterns of your inner world become visible when nothing else drowns them out. And once you’ve learned to remain in your own company without needing to sedate yourself, every other area of your life sharpens. You stop fleeing from quiet moments and begin using them as checkpoints to recalibrate your priorities and your state of mind.

Define What Matters

Without external input, what do you believe in? What do you value when no one’s watching? What traits do you admire, what behaviors do you despise, what conduct do you require of yourself? What do you actually want from your life?

Write it down. Make it explicit. It doesn’t need to be comprehensive, but it must be honest.

Then test and examine it. Are you living it when you’re alone? When no one rewards or punishes you? Would you still hold this value if it cost you something? Are you willing to enforce it when it makes you unpopular or controversial? Do you actually believe it, or do you just repeat it because it sounds good? This code becomes the scaffolding of self respect, so it must be clear. Without it, you will default to adopting the values of whoever happens to be nearby.

This isn’t about locking yourself into a rigid set of rules, but about identifying what actually matters to you now. People, identities, desires, and societies inevitably shift and change. The point isn’t to decide once and live by it forever, but to regularly check whether your actions still reflect what’s important to you. Alignment takes time. You won’t embody your values perfectly overnight. What matters is that you stay conscious of the gap between what you claim to believe and how you actually live, and that you keep closing that distance over time.

The more clearly you define these principles, the easier it becomes to recognize when you’re betraying them. Not in a dramatic failure, but in small daily compromises. The purpose of a personal code isn’t purity or rigidity, but clarity. It keeps your conduct from dissolving into the moods and agendas of others. It ensures that when pressure, loneliness, or opportunity test you, your decisions still reflect your actual values rather than your temporary circumstances.

Earn Your Own Respect

Self love is cheap and counterproductive if unearned. Self respect, however, is the product of keeping promises with yourself. Set difficult and meaningful tasks that relate to what’s important to you, whether physical, creative, intellectual, ethical, whatever. And follow through because it matters.

The task itself is secondary. The fact that you did what you said you would do without supervision or external enforcement is what matters. It forges trust in yourself. The accumulation of these private victories is the bedrock of dignity.

It teaches you that you are capable of discipline without a coach. And it shows you that your integrity is intact. Every time you choose to uphold your own standard in private, you close the gap between who you claim to be and who you actually are. And over time, that consistency becomes resilience. You stop being tempted by easy exits, cheap approval, or the need to be seen, because your self respect no longer relies on external permission or recognition. It’s earned property, and it travels with you.

Do What Actually Pleases You

Develop activities, pleasures, and interests that exist entirely for your own enrichment, not for display. Books you read without talking about, skills you hone without an audience, places you visit alone, ideas you explore for no one’s benefit but your own. And follow through because it matters and belongs to you alone.

This rebuilds meaning on the level it was meant to exist, as something internal, voluntary, and lived rather than curated. The more you cultivate pleasures that belong to you alone, the more you take responsibility for them, and the less you feel indebted to trends, approval, or performance. You rediscover what it feels like to want something without being told to want it. And in doing so, you reclaim agency over your time, your energy, and your identity, because nothing you do alone can be taken from you.

The Bond

The relationship with yourself is the precursor to every interaction you’ll have, every purpose you’ll seek, every standard you’ll hold. If you neglect it, no connection can fill its absence. If you cultivate it, no loss can hollow you.

Solitude is not a punishment to endure while waiting for something better. It is where your character is refined, your purpose is clarified, and your resilience is earned. It is where you learn that your worth does not require witness.

The person who sanctifies their solitude does not live separated from the world. They return to it sharper, cleaner, and unburdened.

A life built from this foundation is not immune to loneliness, loss, or uncertainty. But it cannot be dismantled by them. The people who sanctify their solitude are rare. And needed. And doing well for themselves.