SOLUS

Everyone is afraid of being alone, and almost no one is honest about it.

We fill every blank evening. We call someone when the silence starts to get heavy. We say we love solitude and then avoid it in every practical choice we make. A large part of modern culture exists to protect us from ten unstructured minutes with ourselves. And for the most part, it works. We rarely find out who we are when no one is watching, because we have engineered our lives so that someone always is.

Epictetus noticed this problem in the first century AD, and he had more reason than most to think about it. He was born into slavery. His master, Epaphroditus, broke his leg, and he walked with a limp for the rest of his life. When he was finally freed, he taught philosophy in Rome until the emperor expelled all philosophers, and then he continued teaching in exile. He wrote nothing himself — his student Arrian transcribed his lectures into the book we now call the Discourses. One of those lectures is titled simply Peri erēmias. On Solitude.

It opens with a sentence that looks like a definition and turns out to be a trap.

Solitude, Epictetus says, is the condition of one who has no help.

You think you know what he means. Then he adds: and that is a condition of the soul, not the body. A man alone on a mountain is not necessarily in solitude. A man in the middle of Rome, surrounded by a thousand people, can be in the deepest solitude there is. The question is not whether other bodies are present. The question is whether you are present — whether, when everyone else leaves, there is someone still in the room.

You can be alone in a crowd and not be lonely. You can be surrounded by people and not be anywhere at all. The difference is whether you are home in yourself.

You can be alone in a crowd and not be lonely. You can be surrounded by people and not be anywhere at all. The difference is whether you are home in yourself.

This is the gift Epictetus offered from a life that had every reason to be bitter. He had been a slave. He had been beaten. He had been exiled. He had every right to call the world lonely. He did not. He said the world was exactly as full as the person walking through it. If you are empty, company will not fill you. If you are full, solitude will not drain you. The work is not to avoid aloneness. The work is to become someone worth being alone with.

The Czech poet who wrote i mezi lidmi sám, tak jaký smysl mám — even among people alone, so what is the point of me — wrote one of the most honest lines about the first half of this truth, the half where you have not yet done the work. Many people stop there. They decide that being alone in a crowd means something is missing, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to fix it with more crowds.

Epictetus points a different direction. The ones who look happiest, the ones who seem to move through the world with a kind of quiet in them — they are almost always the ones who have learned to be alone with themselves, and found that it is not a punishment. It is a homecoming. Aloneness stops being a problem the moment you stop running from it.

Don't be alone. Be alone. Alone. Lone. The song strips the instruction away, one word at a time, until only the core is left — and the core is not empty. The core is a person who no longer needs to be told what to do with silence.

SOLUS is the sound of that discovery — the moment solitude stops being the fear and becomes the ground.

— Epictetus, c. 50–135 AD