Chosen Aloneness: How We Got Here, and How We Come Back

I. The Ache Beneath the Quiet

There’s a new kind of silence humming under the surface of modern life. It’s not loneliness — not exactly. It’s something more chosen, more curated. We cancel plans and feel relief. We scroll and call it rest. We call connection what is, at best, mutual distraction.

But beneath all that? There’s still a hum. A quiet ache. A sense that something essential has slipped out of reach — like being hungry but forgetting what food tastes like.

II. The Great Privatization

Derek Thompson recently named what I’ve been circling in my essays and inner life for years.

If the car privatized our lives, the television privatized our leisure, and the phone privatized our attention — then what remains of us? What happens when we outsource the very conditions that made community feel alive, uncurated, surprising, sacred?

The answer, it seems, is what Thompson calls “the anti-social century.”

But what I call Chosen Aloneness.

III. Not Lonely, Just Numb

Loneliness used to be a signal — a pang in the chest that reminded us to call a friend, walk to the neighbor’s, gather. Now it’s overruled by convenience. A text arrives: “Dinner tonight?” The phone is warm in our hand. Our dopamine is spent. We say: “Another time.”

We’re not sad. We’re just… off.

Too tired to connect. Too online to notice.

And then the night passes. And another. And another.

✶ On Discernment and the Ease of Being Alone

Being alone is easy. Too easy.

It doesn’t ask anything of us — no navigating personalities, no coordinating logistics, no risking misalignment. But the longer we stay in that quiet, the more our discernment begins to atrophy.

We stop asking: Is this solitude or avoidance?

We stop feeling the difference between rest and retreat.

Even our intuition — once sharp, relational, deeply attuned — can grow dull from disuse.

It’s not that solitude is bad. It’s that the line between sacred solitude and passive disconnection is so thin, and so easy to miss when we’ve gone too long without being witnessed.

Discernment is a muscle — and sometimes, we only remember how to use it in the presence of others.

IV. The Reverie We Forgot

Once upon a time, there were places that held us.

Third spaces. Dinner tables. Stoops. Living rooms with mismatched mugs. Cafés that didn’t require a laptop as passport.

I think about those spaces all the time — not just nostalgically, but architecturally. As containers for presence, designed for spontaneity, for the kind of connection you can’t swipe away from.

And I wonder: what would it take to build those again?

V. Amistics: A New Old Way

Thompson mentions a concept I haven’t stopped thinking about: amistics — a value-based filter for technology. What if we adopted tools based on our values, rather than convenience?

What if we protected attention like we protect our wallets? What if we honored leisure not as escape, but as return? What if we curated for aliveness, not algorithm?

This is not a call to throw away your phone. It’s a call to remember what it was for.

VI. How We Come Back

The antidote isn’t complicated — it’s us.

The courage to invite. The bravery to show up. The awkward, beautiful act of being witnessed.

It’s a digital sabbath. A walk with a friend. A meal, cooked slowly, shared freely.

It’s pausing the scroll to say: I miss you. Let’s be humans again.