We live in a paradoxical time. Never in human history have people been so connected—and so lonely simultaneously.
We have thousands of "friends" on social media, but no one to talk to about what truly matters. We can reach anyone anywhere on the planet in a second, yet we feel isolated. We're surrounded by people in offices, on public transport, in cafés—and still experience profound existential loneliness.
Society diagnoses this as an epidemic. "The loneliness crisis," newspapers write from Tokyo to New York. "The isolated generation," sociologists proclaim in London and Seoul. Governments are creating ministries to combat loneliness—in the United Kingdom, Japan, then in other countries. Psychologists sound the alarm across the globe.
But no one asks a different question: what if some of us choose solitude not out of desperation, but out of awareness?
What if, for some people, solitude is not a disease to be cured, but a way of life to be embraced?
This book is an attempt to answer that question.
I spent three years researching the phenomenon of voluntary solitude: interviewing people from twenty countries across five continents who consciously chose to live alone, studying historical examples of hermits and solitary philosophers from India to Iceland, analyzing contemporary data on the growing number of single-person households in developed and developing nations.
And I came to a conclusion: we stand on the threshold of a global cultural revolution.
Solitude is ceasing to be a stigma. It is becoming a choice. And this choice deserves respect, not pity.
This book is not a call for everyone to immediately break off their relationships and go live in the forest. It is an invitation to a conversation about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, when old models of happiness no longer work for many of us.
Welcome to the manifesto of solitude.