105 hours: Making time to be alone

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours.

It helps me allocate the 105 hours I have in the week.

Today, we spend almost no moment by ourselves.

So I make time to be alone.

... or with my cats. That's ok too.

It's hard to be away from family

It's hard to be alone because we lack permission to disconnect from those we're connected to.

Mostly our family.

Many of us live with our family: partners, kids, and parents. It often means we have no alone time.

For example: A close friend, let's call him John, works a lot, and is married with kids.

We were once chatting about hiking and cycling, and he mentioned how before he was married with kids, he used to ride his bike on the weekend to a local peak and then sit down and watch the view for hours. He loved it.

I asked him why didn't he do it anymore; did he need a new bike? He looked at me, confused as if I was speaking a foreign language. He explained he was married with kids now and spent all weekdays away from his wife and kids at work. He couldn't take more time away from them on weekends. He had to help his wife since she handled all the child-rearing and chores on her own during the week, and weekends were the only quality time he could spend with his kids.

For John, alone time wasn't an option because of his family. The options were either time at work or time with family.

No time with John.

Overcoming the guilt of solitude

We justify our lack of alone time by saying everyone always needs us, and our kids' lack of alone time with the dangers of them being alone (all while conveniently ignoring our own alone time as kids.)

It can be hard to overcome the guilt of leaving family members alone; it's OK to leave them to go to work, to the doctor, or even to the supermarket!

But getting time to be alone seems like a lavish luxury, like going to an all-inclusive spa while our family sadly stays behind at our rundown home with all those urgent family chores to do and without our invaluable presence; poor them, abandoned by us.

That narrative needs to stop.

Solitude is not a luxury; it's a necessary part of life.

I don't mean we should spend every minute of every day alone instead of with family, but many of us swung entirely in the other direction; some parents have no alone time in a whole week.

It's about restoring balance.

This requires normalizing our and our family members' need for solitude. Baking into our familial schedules time to be alone and into our family values that it's OK to want it.

Which introduces one last challenge:

Wanting to be alone.

Overcoming the fear of not being needed

The anxiety of solitude comes from attachment and our need to feel needed.

I was once chatting with a friend; I'll call her Jen (and change other minor details), a successful journalist. We talked about making time for important things, and she said she had no alone time: she had a hectic schedule balanced between her work and caring for her 13-year-old.

But as we talked, it became less and less clear to me who needed whom in that mother and child relationship.

What seemed at first like an impossibly busy mother's schedule on top of a busy professional schedule started showing cracks of over-commitment and over-attachment. Concerns about leaving her 13-year-old alone at home after school, letting the father serve dinner, or the kid's difficulty doing homework alone – trivial things when talking about a 13-year-old.

This attachment can come from a fear of not being needed. This propensity leads to two negative results:

• It creates a false sense of need, creating assumptions in our minds that we're needed for something we're not.
• It creates helplessness, manufacturing a need for us and preventing the development of self-efficacy. A negative consequence of over-protection instead of plain protection.

Real need is mixed with false and manufactured need.

Our reluctance to be alone can mean we're trying to build the path for the person instead of the person for the path.

Embracing the importance of not being needed by those we care about is crucial to us wanting to be alone.

Solitude as a requisite to self-reflection

Once we have overcome the biggest blockers to making alone time, one more question remains: Why do it?

Our minds work by absorbing what's happening around us, processing what we perceive, and creating judgments, emotions, and actions. What happens to us dramatically influences what we feel and do.

Alone time allows us to perceive and process what is internal to us: our values, judgments, thoughts, and feelings. It enables us to use ourselves as the inputs to our minds.

Alone time is the only time we can freely think about ourselves.

To be effective, this solitude requires independence from inputs from others: time away from family and friends and disconnecting from digital distractions such as TV and smartphones.

In the book Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport talks about solitude and freeing ourselves from in-person and digital inputs:

solitude is [..] a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds. You can enjoy solitude in a crowded coffee shop, on a subway car, or, as President Lincoln discovered at his cottage [..] so long as your mind is left to grapple only with its own thoughts. On the other hand, solitude can be banished in even the quietest setting if you allow input from other minds to intrude. In addition to direct conversation with another person, these inputs can also take the form of reading a book, listening to a podcast, watching TV, or performing just about any activity that might draw your attention to a smartphone screen. Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences.

Newport, Cal. Digital Minimalism (pp. 93-94). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Cal Newport further explores our lack of alone time caused by the prevalence of digital devices, where solitude in the physical world is eroded by connection in the digital world.

Through solitude and self-reflection, we better understand ourselves and how we fit in the world. We articulate and polish the ever-evolving answers to our big questions.

After all, if we don't make time to understand ourselves, how can we understand how we want to live?