The art of being alone…

Being alone.

Many people find it difficult to be alone.

Proposition: Only if you can really be alone can you mean something to someone else.

You have to fill your own ‘love tank’ first, only then can you fill someone else’s love tank.

Being alone is different from being lonely. These are two different things.

“One may only be completely oneself as long as one is alone, so whoever does not like loneliness does not like freedom, because only when one is alone, one is free…”

= Arthur Schopenhauer in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) =

Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the greatest misanthropes in the history of philosophy.

The world is more than five-sixths full of villains, madmen and idiots, he believed.

So you better keep away from people. In society, human thinking is constantly parasitized, only in isolation can the mind fully develop.

The boredom of being alone is still better than the boredom of being around other people, he thought. ‘for only when one is alone is one free’…

Vanno Jobse