Introduction:
Solitude is an intense, profound experience. Some of us love to be alone, prioritizing alone time over the maintenance of our most important relationships with family and friends. Others of us find alone time intolerable, excruciating, and emotionally draining. How was covid twenty twenty for you? I started talking to myself. Why? Because I needed someone to hang out with. What I learned from my adventures in talking to myself is that being alone and having no one to hang out with are not the same thing. You can be alone in a room full of people, and you can be surrounded by laughter and joy with no one else around. All this lends itself to one simple, exciting fact: you can hang out with yourself! Hanging out with yourself is the key to curing your loneliness and getting by without positive social interaction, the benefits of which we so commonly rely on for survival. Though it may sound a bit abstract, hanging out with yourself is possible for everyone. Once you master this skill, you will be able to evade the negative health consequences that accompany a lifetime of solitude. Naturally, this strategy is more difficult for those of us who are averse to spending time alone. In order to make hanging out with yourself a possibility, it is necessary to uncover the reasoning behind your alone-time discomfort. Only then can you begin to interact with yourself as a friend. Let’s dive in.
Why You Don’t Like Being Alone:
Think of a person that you really, really hate. For the sake of explanatory power I will choose as my example the oft-shat-on republican senator for Texas, Ted Cruz. I fucking hate him so much. He is untrustworthy. He actively ruins things for me and people I care about. His motives are selfish. He is intellectually feeble. Naturally, he is low on the list of people that I would call to make plans with. Can you imagine hanging out with Ted Cruz? I don’t mean the kind of hang-out where you win a raffle and get to bully him over lunch for one hour with his security team standing by. I mean you and Ted Cruz, at Hooters, getting to know each other better over a plate of boneless wings and a margarita pitcher. And before you can go home you have to pose for a photo with Ted and the waitress, and he wants to be in the middle. Frankly, I would sooner eat a tide pod than let him wrap his wing-sauced fingers around my side waist for a pic. The point is, no one wants to hang out with someone they hate.
So, why would someone have difficulty being alone? To answer this question, it’s important to understand that to be alone is simply to hang out with yourself. And given what we learned from our Ted Cruz example, the answer is clear. If you don’t like being alone, it’s because you hate yourself. Chances are you hate yourself the way that I hate Ted: no amount of quality time could fix things between us. The thing is, though, that sometimes you will have no choice but to hang out with yourself, because the alternative aloneness is difficult to endure. So if you hate being alone, maybe try liking yourself more. If you can’t like yourself enough to tolerate a couple hours of hanging out, you’ll never survive a lifetime of solitude.
The Importance of Positive Interactions:
Once you have opened yourself up to the possibility of being your own friend, you may encounter the opportunity to hang out with yourself. Of course, in order to substitute self-hanging-out for traditional social interaction, we must come to understand what it is about social interaction that keeps us alive and well. Why do we need it?
Like I mentioned previously, I started talking to myself because I missed the positive social interaction that I had come to rely on for gratification in my daily life. All of us need positive interaction. When we go without it, we miss out on three processes that are crucial in the maintenance of a stable sense of self.
- Validation. First of all, and perhaps most obviously, positive social interaction offers us the opportunity to receive external validation of our perspectives. As human beings, we all feel a constant, fundamental need to be understood by others, and particularly by those whose opinions matter to us. Depending on how credible we consider ourselves to be, we may need more or less assurance from others that what we think and feel is reasonable. By interacting with others, we are able to collect affirming feedback on the perspectives we choose to share.
- Stimulation. Of course, we don’t just interact with others to feel better about ourselves. Most of us also develop and maintain friendships because we are interested in the perspectives of others. We can learn things from our friends and find nuance in life that we could not have stumbled upon independently. Positive interaction with others keeps us entertained and stimulated, and without these benefits we would be bored.
- Connection. The most important of these three benefits is undoubtedly that of feeling connected to others. Without social connection, an individual is unable to feel the comfort of shared experience and reciprocity. This consequence of solitude can leave you feeling lonely and uninspired.
These three byproducts of positive interaction are essential to the maintenance of any human’s emotional wellness. Without validation, stimulation, and connection, humans are rarely able to survive. So, what happens if you have no one? Do you die? Not necessarily. If you can find a way to offer validation, stimulation, and connection to yourself, you can survive without a single loved one to speak of. In the next section, I’ll explain.
The Basics of Hanging Out With Yourself:
Hanging out with yourself occurs in much the same way as hanging out with a friend: it involves sharing and listening. Obviously, when hanging out with yourself, you must play the role of both the sharer and the listener.
The sharing self is responsible for assuming vulnerability within the interaction by articulating an authentic belief or sentiment. If the sharing self is able to actively and transparently communicate with the listening self, you have set yourself up to receive validation, which is the first of the three major benefits of positive interaction. What’s more, you are also offering stimulation (the second benefit) to the listening self.
The listening self is responsible for receiving and processing the content offered by the sharing self. If the listening self is able to respectfully and meaningfully process the content shared by the sharing self, then the interaction has succeeded! Not only does the sharing self get the validation that it sought, but the listening self gets the stimulation that it needs. And most delightfully of all, the completion of the interaction between the two selves will result in the obtainment of the final benefit of positive interaction: connection! Once you defragment the sharing and listening components of your identity, you can be one person with three benefits of positive interaction and zero real-life friends. Theoretically, you can now survive in a social-emotional vacuum!
Techniques for Hanging Out With Yourself:
At this point, you may be thinking, “How do I fragment my self into two separate but related conversational roles?” Well, it’s easier than it sounds. In fact, you have many choices for a fundamental approach. Let’s walk through a few of them.
- Speaking to yourself out loud, and responding (out loud) in real time. This tried and true method of hanging out with yourself is beloved by respectable people all over the globe. It is an excellent way to witness yourself articulating your own thoughts and feelings as you would to a friend who is not privy to the inner workings of your mind. Witnessing yourself in this way can offer a great deal of clarity when it comes to processing your own subconscious thoughts and emotional processes. That right there is stimulation, validation, and connection! Bam
- Recording yourself and then watching it back. This is my personal favorite way to hang out with myself. Consider an example from my personal life. I used to triple dose my ADHD meds and then start recording myself talking in snapchat memories. Initially, this behavior arose because watching videos of myself talking from moments earlier was very entertaining as the self-inclined person on stimulants with homework to do that I was. Over time, however, I found that recording myself talking and then watching it back was a very effective way to assume both roles in a conversation. It became a strategy for processing my emotions, particularly with respect to my more unhealthy habits like substance abuse.
- Recording yourself and then saving it for later. Oftentimes, when I record myself in my snapchat memories in the way I described above, I save the footage so that I may revisit it at another time in my life, and react to it from a new point of view. This is perhaps the most rewarding sort of interaction I have been able to have with myself, because it involves a sharing self from an earlier time and a listening self from a later time! I sometimes find old videos of myself from years ago, doing something unhealthy (eg. never sleeping) with a smile on my face. In the moment of the recording, my sharing self was commemorating an enthrallingly bad time of life, with a future listening self in mind. Years down the line, when I re-encounter the video, I am in a better place and am able to be an extremely sympathetic and understanding listening self for this sharing self that is hurting. Though the exchange between these two selves takes years to complete itself, it offers by far the deepest connection possible between me and me. To recognize the perspective of a past self is something powerful, and it does a lot for both versions of an individual. The more you exercise this strategy, the more faith your sharing self will have that the future listening self it is speaking to will meet it with understanding and warmth. With enough patience and persistence, this strategy can fill your life with positive interaction and connection, and all it takes is the ability to stay alive long enough for something about you to change.
Conclusion:
Whether you found this post relatable or discomforting, I hope that you can take some aspect of it in stride to improve your friendship with yourself. The more you share with and listen to yourself, the more you’ll like yourself, and the more you’ll enjoy your time alone. With any success, you may even become averse to leaving the house and spending time with the friends that you do have. Thanks for making it to the end of this post! Next time you have no choice but to be alone, I hope you will consider hanging out with yourself. Bye