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Comment by shaunpersad | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there is this blanket, universally accepted fact that humans are social creatures. But I can't help but feel like it's not the whole story.

This feeling comes from my own experiences that I am at my happiest, best self when I'm alone. And I don't understand how starkly this contrasts from what I hear from others and from studies such as this one.

This isn't a "I'm an introvert" or "people suck" anecdote. This is something that I repeatedly try to objectively access and measure, and almost every time my body responds better to being alone. The less people I have in my life, the better I feel. The more time I spend by myself, the better I feel. The less I speak to anyone, the better I feel.

It might be a bit ironic to ask this, but am I alone in this feeling?

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That's very odd. At one point on my life I spent about a year working from home, single, without friends in real life. The psychological damage I've caused myself was very obvious.

If solitude makes you happy it takes very little effort to isolate yourself.

> If solitude makes you happy it takes very little effort to isolate yourself.

Not if you are in relationship.

I'm a bit like that. I think this is mostly due to living inside of my head most of the times, so when there are no people around very small part of my world is missing. Second factor is that (paradoxically) I'm very driven by people around me so when they are not there I feel freedom.

I also hate travel, because for me it's just suffering through bodily inconveniences and achieving nothing else than slight change of background, that's as I said is not a big part of my world.

For me, solitary sounds like the best, safest and least troubling place to be in prison.

I'm similar, for sure. But over time my tendency to isolate has made me fit less and less into the social world. This leads to a feedback loop which has isolated me past even my own comfort zone.

It seems that even though most social activity is to me less enjoyable than being alone, there is some minimal baseline level of interaction and acceptance which needs to be maintained.

At the very least there must be some kind of very broad bell curve or something, with extreme outliers on both sides.

There are people who spend years in a cave or closed room practicing meditation. If done properly, there don't seem to be any negative side-effects. I'm sure the fact that it's a voluntary activity is very important - as opposed to involuntary confinement to the solitary cell.

Do you have a social circle that you take breaks from? Or are you truly alone?

Those are very different experiences.

How is that different from being a introvert?

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