More and more emphasis is placed on the idea that growing up psychologically consists of surrounding oneself with people , learning to relate to all sorts of people at all times, letting the verb flow through all sorts of conversations.

Where creativity is required, work is increasingly teamwork, and learning is collaborative. The trades and professions related to solitude are associated with the mechanical, the monotonous.

However, this idea is misleading. Loneliness is not simply an almost inevitable circumstance in a society where the traditional family model has lost its strength. Above all, solitude is a source of inspiration and personal growth .

Being alone is not a crime

In many countries introverted people, who are those who need to spend more time in non-overloaded and undercrowded environments, are highly valued.

In Western countries, however, this kind of personality is viewed with the condescension of someone who addresses someone who does not know what he is missing. The normal thing, it seems, is to be surrounded by people practically all the time. People who, moreover, interact with us and show their camaraderie or admiration . Being unnoticed or isolated in an informal meeting does not count.The superficial charm of psychopaths and narcissists seems to be rewarded.

The few times we talk about the good thing of being alone is almost always to compare it to the possibility of “being in bad company”. But… does the positive side of loneliness really only appear if we compare it to the worst situation that can occur in its absence? The answer is no; lack of company also has psychological aspects that are good in themselves and that, in fact, have allowed many geniuses to make history.

Company limitations

There’s another way of looking at things. One in which being in company doesn’t have to expand our horizons of creativity and spontaneity or even produce the opposite effect.

Interacting with someone requires adapting to a communication code that limits us . We try to make ourselves understood, and to do so we devote part of our attention to controlling the way others react. In the same way, one of our main objectives will be to communicate ideas and sensations successfully. In a way, we carry the responsibility for the other to reach certain conclusions. Even when we lie, we need to use common references to be understood.

Similarly, when we share space with someone, we devote a good part of our mental processes to making a good impression, even involuntarily. In short, relating to others means making an effort to bring our ideas to something translatable, even if it means subtracting authenticity and nuance from them.

To talk is to lead our thoughts along paths that, in part, have already been thought of by many other people some time ago in order to create effective communication codes thanks to which we make ourselves understood in a matter of seconds. Phrases, metaphors, recurrent comparisons… all this acts as a psychological funnel and biases both us and our interlocutors .

The creative potential of introspection

Loneliness, on the other hand, offers almost total freedom. There we are alone, with our own metaphors and ways of understanding life, and we can continue to build on those foundations in a much purer way than we would in the company of someone else.

We are not accountable to anyone, as we are not supposed to communicate with anyone; it is enough for us to understand ourselves.

In solitude, brilliant ideas appear that we do not have to reject out of shame or because they are not understood at first. If they fit well into our mental schemes, they are already valid. And if not, many times they are too.

Maybe that’s why great geniuses like Leonardo DaVinci. Charles Darwin or Friedrich Nietzsche appreciated solitude so much. In the end, the greatest intellectual advances are always a renunciation of following the path of thought that others have marked out.

Creating creative revolutions is just that, breaking the mold. Not to please others , but because the ideas we have had are so powerful that, if we are given a choice between social conventions and them, we decide on the latter. But this can only be done if we respect our thoughts enough to give them some time alone, so that they can develop without social distractions.

Creating Great Connections

The mind works like an idea association machine; creativity comes when we think of joining several of those that seem to have less in common with each other. It is clear that for these connections to occur we need to relate to others; among other things, because otherwise we would not have a language with which to articulate abstract ideas.

But to complete the circle, we also need solitude. Firstly, to rest, and secondly, to cultivate a way of seeing life that is uniquely and truly ours , through introspection.