There was no moment of clarity, no decision made over morning tea or coffee. It grew on me the way most real things do — quietly, across years, without announcing itself.
And now, for a while, it’s been one of the more reliable sources of joy in my life.
1. Your Own Company
How long can you spend alone before restlessness sets in? An hour? An afternoon? A full day? I ask because I've come to believe that the answer to that question tells you something important about where you are with yourself. Not in a judgmental way. Just as information.
For much of adult life, we’re moving.
Task to task, person to person, screen to screen. The idea of an extended stretch alone without background noise or planned activity makes many people uncomfortable. Not necessarily because they’re extroverts, but because they’ve never really tried it.
I’ve arrived at something different. When I’m alone for long stretches — hours, sometimes most of a day — I don’t experience restlessness. I experience something closer to fullness.
My time with myself gets divided among reading, writing, watching something worth watching, thinking, and sometimes not thinking at all.
Just existing in a room, with no particular aim. Doing nothing is a skill most of us have been trained out of. This isn’t isolation or indifference to people.
I enjoy company, selectively.
A good conversation, ideas traded back and forth, sitting with someone until the talking runs its natural course — these things matter to me. I’m just choosy about when and with whom. And increasingly, I need them less to feel complete.
That’s the part worth noting.
When you stop needing an external agent to make you feel okay — when the room you're sitting in alone is enough — you've found something that most people spend their whole lives looking for elsewhere.
2. Home
This connects to the first part, obviously.
Home is my favourite place in the world. Over the years, I’ve claimed different corners of the house for different things. A spot for reading, one for writing, another for watching, and one more for thinking.
And my favourite — a particular arrangement of cushions and quietness on my couch — for doing nothing at all.
Just lying there, mind unhitched from everything, present in the most minimal sense of the word.
A happy weekend, for me, looks like this: home, and the things I actually want to do with my hours.
That doesn’t mean I skip meeting people. I make time for friends and family, and I cherish it when I do. But the default, when the choice is mine, is home.
Not because the outside world is uninviting. Because home has become enough in ways I didn’t anticipate when I first started choosing it.
The ability to stay home and feel completely satisfied is not a small thing. It's a particular kind of freedom. Most people need novelty, stimulation, plans — external inputs to feel like the day counted. When you can make meaning inside your own four walls, you've untethered yourself from a dependence that quietly costs more than most of us realise.
The hours I’ve spent in my own company, at home, doing the things that are actually mine — reading something nobody asked me to read, writing something that wasn’t on any brief, thinking without an agenda — these have contributed to a sense of a life well-lived.
Your Takeaway
Not everyone will relate to this. Some people genuinely come alive with others around them, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We’re built differently.
But if you’ve never really tested how long you can be content in your own company — if the idea of a day alone feels more like punishment than possibility — it might be worth asking why.
Not to change anything necessarily.
Just to know.
The company you keep with yourself is the one relationship that never ends. It might be worth tending to.
Nuggets From Lived Experiences — weekly reflections on life, as it actually happens.
About Me
I am a thinker at all times. I see, I think. I hear, I think. I read, I think. Every weekend I write. I would love to know what you think.