How to Be Alone

When was the last time you were truly alone—without a phone, a podcast, or someone expecting something from you? In How to Be Alone, Sara Maitland asks us to reconsider solitude, not as a lack but as a gift. She argues that in a culture obsessed with connection, constant entertainment, and endless communication, our deep unease about being alone has become a form of collective fear—a fear so entrenched that we call solitude not just sad, but even suspect.

Maitland’s key contention is that solitude is not a problem to solve but a skill to cultivate. Although we prize autonomy and individuality, we’ve grown terrified of actual aloneness. We have lost the language, rituals, and appreciation for the deep satisfactions of being alone. Her book is both cultural diagnosis and practical handbook: part history, part philosophy, part set of gentle experiments to help us rediscover this ancient human capability.

Why Solitude Matters Today

Maitland begins by posing a paradox: in a time when we talk endlessly about self-expression, autonomy, and creativity, why do we dread our own company? From social media to organized leisure, we fill every quiet moment. Her answer is that modern Western societies have inherited a deep confusion about solitude, produced by two competing traditions. The Greco-Roman tradition prized public life—citizenship, honor, civic virtue—while the Judeo-Christian tradition revered the inward, spiritual retreat into silence. Over time, she shows, these clashing legacies left us unsure whether solitude signifies virtue or pathology. Thus we alternate between romanticizing the solitary genius and pitying the lonely recluse.

This confusion is compounded by modernity’s pace. Industrialization and consumerism have compressed leisure, turned domestic upkeep into endless “maintenance,” and blurred the boundaries between work, rest, and community. We’ve made social life into duty and leisure into spectacle. In that context, silence and solitude appear suspicious—useless, unproductive, or selfish. Maitland invites readers to challenge that mindset by asking how solitude might, instead, be a path to stronger identity, creativity, and even joy.

Fear, Culture, and the Stigma of Aloneness

Maitland’s starting point is the stigma that attaches to those who spend time on their own. Our language betrays it: “loner,” “spinster,” “antisocial.” She examines how media narratives equate solitude with danger—how “the loner” has become shorthand for the mass murderer or the socially broken. The irony, she notes, is that many great social contributors—saints, artists, scientists—nurtured their work through periods of solitude. Yet modern society praises teamwork and networking while failing to recognize the restorative power of being apart.

She reframes solitude as a universal human potential, as central to growth as sociability. Solitude can make us more self-aware, independent, and compassionate. Its absence, she suggests, is what renders our inner lives so thin and our cultures so anxious.

Learning Practical Solitude

The majority of Maitland’s work is devoted to teaching solitude as practice. She structures her later chapters like exercises in a manual: how to face the fear of being alone, how to do something enjoyable alone, how to rethink your relationship with nature, and how to build children’s comfort with solitude. These are rehearsals for real independence. She encourages small, low-stakes experiments—train rides by yourself, solitary walks in nature, moments of silence—to desensitize the fearful self and rediscover the deeper pleasures on the other side of unease.

Maitland’s methods borrow from psychology and anthropology as much as from spiritual practice. For instance, she draws on cognitive-behavioral therapy’s desensitization techniques to suggest that fear of solitude can be unlearned, and invokes meditation, memory, and ritual as ways to “stock the mind” so that solitude feels nourishing rather than empty. Her sections on running, solitary walking, and creative hobbies show that solitude can coexist with productivity, and even amplify it.

Solitude as Joy, Not Punishment

In the final section, she elaborates on what solitude can offer: a deepened consciousness of self, a sense of unity with nature, encounters with the transcendent, creative flourishing, and genuine freedom. She argues that these are not rare or mystical experiences reserved for hermits or geniuses, but accessible to anyone willing to step away from constant connection. By reclaiming solitude, you can expand your emotional and spiritual capacities—and stop outsourcing your self-worth to endless social validation.

Why We Need This Skill Now

Maitland’s book arrives at a time when loneliness is framed as an epidemic and solitude as a threat. Yet she insists that our fear of being alone is not the same as loneliness. Loneliness is the pain of disconnection; solitude is the privilege of self-communion. Without learning solitude, we cannot endure the inevitable alone times that come with loss, aging, or change. Indeed, developing this skill may be one of the most practical forms of psychological resilience you can cultivate.

Ultimately, Maitland positions solitude as a radical act of self-reclamation. To be alone well is to assert that your inner life matters—that you can generate meaning, delight, and purpose without external validation. In a world terrified of silence, solitude becomes both resistance and refuge. And learning how to be alone, she concludes, might be the most life-giving education of all.

Maitland begins her practical lessons with the hardest step: confronting your fear of being alone. She observes that while phobias about snakes, spiders, or heights are well-documented, few people acknowledge autophobia—the fear of isolation. Yet in a hyperconnected modern world, fear of solitude manifests everywhere: the anxiety that rises when our phone dies, the discomfort of an unstructured weekend, or the dread of eating alone in public.

Recognizing Cultural Fear

Instead of treating the dread of solitude as a purely personal failing, Maitland explores it as a social construction. We are conditioned from infancy to see constant engagement as safety and validation. Our entertainment, advertising, and even charity suggest that an unshared life is unworthy. Yet paradoxically, being alone will visit everyone eventually—through bereavement, breakup, or simple circumstance. Our terror, then, reflects a failure to prepare for the most certain human condition.

Using Desensitization and Curiosity

Borrowing ideas from cognitive-behavioral therapy, Maitland proposes a desensitization process. Just as one overcomes a phobia by gradual exposure, you can unlearn your fear of solitude through small, structured steps: take a bath instead of a shower so you are still and quiet longer; sit alone in another room while your family socializes; spend an afternoon in a café without your phone. Each act builds tolerance and curiosity.

Her own story offers a template. A self-described extrovert, Maitland discovered solitude only after divorce. Expecting misery, she rented a cottage alone and found herself unexpectedly calm and productive. Over time, she sought deeper levels of isolation—eventually building a home on the Scottish moors with no nearby neighbors. Her joy in solitude, she says, came from “small doses” that grew into a lifelong love affair with silence.

Transforming Anxiety into Insight

When fear arises, Maitland encourages intellectual inquiry rather than panic: ask what you believe will happen when you are alone. Will you go mad, or face truths you’ve long avoided? Often the horror we feel is not about solitude itself but about unexamined awareness. The quiet removes distractions and forces us to meet ourselves. This meeting, though unnerving, is the beginning of sanity, not its loss.

Evidence Against Fear

To counter myths about solitude’s dangers, Maitland turns to history and psychology: the Desert Fathers of the early church, Tibetan nuns like Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, and modern explorers like Admiral Richard Byrd all found solitude physically and mentally sustaining. What harms people, she stresses, is forced or punitive isolation—such as solitary confinement—not chosen solitude. Voluntary aloneness, rooted in purpose or curiosity, tends to heal and strengthen individuals by clarifying identity and will.

Ultimately, facing the fear of solitude means replacing myth with evidence, anxiety with practice. Once you acknowledge that solitude, rightly chosen, has healed saints and artists alike, fear loses its power. The reward, Maitland reminds us, is not withdrawal but expansion—the discovery that you are larger and stronger than you imagined when you were never left alone.

After naming our fears, Maitland moves to rehabilitation through pleasure. She asks: how can solitude become enjoyable, even delightful? Modern life divides our days into work, maintenance, and leisure—and nearly all leisure is social. To be alone, then, often feels countercultural. But Maitland argues that reframing solitary leisure is central to healing our relationship with solitude.

Reclaiming Leisure from Social Expectation

Maitland observes that historically, people worked either alone or in small family groups and saw communal festivals as welcome breaks from solitude. Today, the opposite is true—our work is socialized, and our leisure is performative. We are leisure-poor not because we lack time, but because we fill our downtime with consumption and maintenance. Electric devices, transport, even cleanliness standards have all multiplied our busyness. She quips that we “work longer to buy the things, then spend hours maintaining them.”

Integrating Solitude into Ordinary Joys

Solitude does not demand exotic retreats. Maitland recommends building it into existing pleasures: walking, gardening, cooking, reading, or listening to music alone. She highlights “solitary walking” as especially powerful—a practice with philosophical and spiritual roots from Wordsworth to Thoreau. Walking alone, she says, strengthens integrity and restores curiosity. You notice more, feel more, and experience environment and self more directly without conversation dissipating sensation.

Examples of Modern Solitary Joy

Running, too, exemplifies modern solitude reclaimed. Citing psychologists Michelle Maidenberg and Cindra Kamphoff, Maitland notes that solitary running invites mindful focus: you practice “letting go of the inner chatter” that hinders goals. Interestingly, jogging became culturally normal only in the 1960s—precisely when industrial modernity left people craving embodied quiet. This shift shows that solitude can become mainstream once detached from social stigma.

Even activities usually considered communal—watching films, visiting museums, or traveling—can yield fresh magic when done alone. The key, Maitland insists, is curiosity: notice how the emotional tone deepens when you have no one to explain or filter it for you. Intensity replaces dispersion. Observation becomes communion.

Solitude as Emotional Intensifier

She concludes that solitary activity heightens experience. Shared enjoyment divides attention, but solitude amplifies perception. Even sadness feels more truthful when unmediated. This is why she guards the freedom to walk alone, eat alone, and travel alone. It’s not an act of withdrawal but of deep participation. To enjoy solitude, then, is to relocate joy from other people’s approval into your own attentive presence.

Maitland’s advice is deceptively simple: schedule solitude into the things you already love. Don’t add tasks; subtract distractions. In solitude, you’ll find that life’s texture grows stronger, colors brighter, and time itself more generous.

One of Maitland’s most original chapters argues that the capacity for solitude should be taught early, like language or emotional intelligence. Children, she says, are socialized intensely—to share, cooperate, and empathize—yet rarely to be alone. In protecting children from isolation, adults may actually stunt their imagination and resilience.

Solitude as a Learned Skill

Psychologist Donald Winnicott once described healthy infancy as “being alone in the presence of the mother.” Maitland extends this insight: just as we teach children manners and empathy, we can also teach them comfort with solitude. A child who learns to enjoy their own company will grow into an adult capable of creativity and emotional independence.

Practical Strategies for Parents

Maitland lays out seven practical tips drawn from both research and experience: allow even newborns brief periods of quiet reverie; let toddlers play alone without interruption; read fairy tales where children navigate solitude and danger; accept boredom as productive; delay giving children personal mobile phones; never use isolation as punishment; and avoid unnecessary interventions when a child is contentedly alone.

She emphasizes playful environments like the woods—places that feel adventurous yet safe. Here children experiment with independence while adults remain close enough to ensure safety. Woods offer exactly the right balance of wonder and control: “the child can vanish behind a tree and believe she is alone.”

Why It Matters

Maitland links the decline of childhood solitude to rising rates of anxiety and unhappiness. Between over-scheduled activities, surveillance, and consumer distractions, children lose the chance to exercise imagination. Studies now show that unstructured play and downtime build resilience and self-esteem—exactly what constant parental oversight undermines.

By training solitude early, parents give their children an internal compass. Someday, she insists, every human being faces aloneness—through grief, illness, or simply growing up. To meet it as a familiar friend rather than a terrifying stranger may be one of the greatest gifts we can bestow.

Freedom, for Maitland, is the crowning joy of solitude. She distinguishes between freedom from—the absence of restraint—and freedom to—the ability to act and think for oneself. In solitude, you experience both. When unobserved, you are unedited; when unneeded, you are unbound. This simple release from others’ gaze is transformative.

Freedom from Social Expectation

Even trivial social constraints—what to wear, what to say—shape behavior. Alone, those scripts dissolve. Maitland recounts how, after her marriage ended, she discovered her aesthetic freedom in unexpectedly vivid colors. For the first time, she painted her home walls in rich jewel tones, choices she had unconsciously suppressed before. Solitude, she realized, recovers buried preferences and impulses.

This isn’t mere self-indulgence. Freedom also means responsibility. As Alice Koller writes (whom Maitland quotes approvingly), solitude allows you to become “self-governing according to laws of your own choosing.” To live freely is not to reject others but to discern your own compass before rejoining them.

Love and Boundaries

Relationships, Maitland acknowledges, can enrich but also entangle. We often confuse care with control—the wish for others to be happy becomes a way of losing touch with our own will. She illustrates this with R. D. Laing’s playful monologue on empathy gone awry (“If they’re not having fun, I can’t have fun…”). Solitude interrupts this spiral. It reminds you that your peace need not depend on someone else’s mood.

Freedom as Creative Ground

Solitude and creativity mirror each other: both require inner space. Gibbon called solitude “the school for genius,” and Maitland agrees. Writers from Rilke to Virginia Woolf have testified that creation demands withdrawal—not misanthropy, but privacy enough to listen inwardly. Without solitude, “the angel in the house,” Woolf’s metaphor for social expectation, stifles your authentic work.

To be free, then, is to align with your “true self,” as Thomas Merton phrased it. Solitude becomes not escape but grounding. It restores autonomy by revealing that your worth and meaning are generated inside, not conferred from outside. Maitland closes simply: solitude is an achievement, not an absence. To practice it is to step into the freedom that no society, relationship, or technology can give—or take away.