How To Live An Authentic Meaningful Life When You’re A Loner
What is authentic, anyways?
If you’ve stumbled upon this writing, more than likely “authentic”, “meaningful”, and “loner” drew your attention.
It’s easy to find articles on authenticity and meaning on the Internet these days. People brand themselves as being authentic. It sells well and attracts the crowds.
As for selling the loner card… no.
It doesn’t sell. No one wants to be a loner. And if they do, it might be because of their pop culture view of the Byronic Hero, Batman, or Boo Radley from To Kill A Mockingbird.
Being a loner is not the title nor brand that people aspire to hold. However, that doesn’t mean we do not exist (Do I exist? Am I really writing this?…) The reality is that there is a dire need for loners to come out of their shell and share their creations with the world.
Most of the loners I have met have been hiding. They are often artists of some shape or form but keep their work to themselves or the recesses of their mind.
If you’re reading this and haven’t stopped after these few short paragraphs, you are probably a loner of some sort.
If you don’t like that word, take your pick: loners are chameleons that go by other names:
Bohemian, boho, free spirit, gypsy soul, individualist, nonconformist, maverick, lone wolf, lone ranger, counterculturist, dilettante, artist, writer, deviant, outsider, outcast, eccentric, misfit, radical, rebel…
In this article, we will navigate how to create meaning even amidst the superficiality of the world. We will do our very best to live out an authentic, meaningful life as a loner. We will then execute these steps within our natural habitat and hideout: solitude.
Keeping It Real: Authenticity
Authenticity. It means something different for everybody. But the essence remains the same for everyone:
Being authentic is about being fearless about your interests, disinterests, who you decide to interact and mingle with, what set of principles you live by, and throughout it all, acknowledging you are a flawed inconsistent being.
Authenticity has nothing to do with living up to society’s standards. It also has nothing to do with living up to your own standards either. Living up and showing up to your standard is discipline (not authenticity). However, people who can live by both principles — discipline and authenticity — are just further along the path to a meaningful life.
What Does Meaningful Life Actually Mean?
Meaning is created by intermeshing authenticity with creation. You can’t make meaning without creating. You can be an authentic person yet still feel a void in your life. If authenticity is your top core value (if you’re a loner or one of its synonyms, authenticity is probably the core reason why you have adopted the lifestyle), then life will always feel meaningless without creating something…
Maybe that’s art, a book, a song, a business, a birdhouse — whatever it is — you need to start creating or else your thoughts will either drive you insane in your state of solitude or you will become numb to all feeling. You will become desensitized to even your dreams. It’s a scary place to be.
But the point of this article is not to induce you to the point of insanity, nor to numb you of all feeling, hopes, and dreams.
We will not thrive if we are loners by default.
Being a loner has to come to us by freewill. If not, the time in solitude is an equal inward prison as it was back in society.
Whatever type of loner you are, we are all meant to self-improve. If not physically, we will die mentally.
According to an article on Medical Daily from a few years ago,
“Physicians and researchers have begun looking deeply into the impact of loneliness and social isolation on health, well being, and mortality, and the data on the subject is overwhelming: a lonely person is significantly more likely to suffer an early death than a non-lonely one.” Additionally, “researchers at Brigham Young University conducted an influential meta-analysis of scientific literature on the subject, and found that social isolation increases your risk of death by an astounding 30%, and some estimates have it as high as 60%”
While this may be bad news for most of us, the good news is that we have the ability to change this morbid narrative. We can even change this narrative within our natural solitude state.
The incredible part of being able to sit with your mind in solitude is the opportunity to rewire your brain — without external forces and distractions of the world constantly jabbing at you from every side.
To beat the odds of death caused by loneliness rather than solitude(because death in and of itself is inevitable), we need to consider the following:
1. Based on neuroplasticity, our brains are moldable.
“Believe it or not, your brain can be molded to have more neural connections, synapses and brain cells, thereby increasing its power and capability. What’s more, you can have this change at any point in your life.”
This is very good news, especially if you feel that you are too “old” to change or follow up with that dream you always kept a dream instead of making a reality.
If we constantly push our minds to learn something new repeatedly, synapses in our brains will fire so that we can continue to nurture a growth mindset.
2. We can change our identity at any time.
You have the choice of what type of person you want to become at any point of time, regardless of your life growing up or your current environment.
We wear a mask in our day-to-day life. We choose what type of mask on every given day. If you can authentically say you do not wear a mask, good for you. We all should aspire to cast off our mask.
But for now, let’s settle with this for those who aren’t ready to cast off their masks yet.
Be careful of which mask you decide to wear today. Sometimes the masks we wear become deeply etched into our face… it becomes a reality to the point that we will not know if we are wearing a mask or not.
Choose your identity wisely. That’s who you will become.
3. You can learn everything you need from a book.
It’s more than going through a reading list of books to conquer. You can travel the world, fall in love, and learn valuable life lessons from literature.
If you really engage, you will have moments of pure bliss, anger, despair, and tears. If you are in your self-prescribed fortress of solitude, carve out moments to pause as you read to write out your thoughts and connections. Another step you can take is a “dialogue journal” or “letter to the character”. During these writing exercises, you practice critical thinking and deeper analysis skills — skills that are invaluable in the creating process.
- Dialogue Journal
- Write down emotionally-evoking quotes or pieces of dialogue that resonate with you.
- If there were two or more characters, write in a journal how you would have responded to the dialogue if you took the place of one of the characters interacting in the dialogue (actually write as if you were injected into the book).
- Afterwards, analyze how your injected dialogue in the story changed the plot, theme, or mood and tone of the story.
- Letter to the Character
Back when I was 16 years old, I read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde for a summer reading assignment.
I was completely enthralled by the character of Dorian Gray to the point that I wrote a letter to the character. In the letter, I wrote the reasons why it wasn’t too late for the protagonist to come back to purity and light. If I still had a copy and could look back at the work, I probably would inwardly cringe, but interacting with literature was necessary during that moment of time. It still is now.
Especially alone, it is extremely important that we interact with what we read. We risk becoming antisocial if we don’t practice interaction skills even in the abode of solitude.
Kevin Horton points out how:
“The combination of words and creativity tend to take us on amazing journeys without ever leaving the house. It does us no good to neglect the impact of interacting with those who write them.”
Some other reading strategies on how to interact with a book are highlighted in the following article by Kevin Horton:
4. Rehabilitate yourself back into the world.
All three of the steps above are cyclical and must rhythmically work together. We must be in constant flow of the transformative, learning process. If not, we are simply humans living on our primordial mode to survive and nothing more.
But if you’re a loner, there is always a reason. You see life more than just surviving. There is something more to life, and even if you do not know exactly what that is, you have decided to withdraw from the world because of it. You’ve decided to hide out for a little while to figure it out.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s healthy so as long as you take the time in solitude to truly reflect, muse, meditate, and finally create rather than leaving your mind in a perpetual comatose state of nothingness.
Things to remember about the loner lifestyle:
Most people won’t understand you.
Living your own life rather than in the shadows of someone else is difficult when we are constantly trying to gain acceptance and approval. The need for approval and acceptance often happens at the subconscious level and requires us to consciously step out of this mindset.
People won’t understand you unless they are highly empathetic extroverts, ambiverted, have some intuition on psyche and the mind, or are introverted/loners themselves.
The constant need to be understood — regardless of if you’re a loner — is overrated.
Sometimes, people will not understand because they are simply not you.
You don’t need people to understand why you’ve decided to climb to the peak of a mountain.
You don’t need someone’s approval before you begin to create something in your inner world.
You don’t need to accept the illusions of the world for that matter.
In which case, we can build our reality instead.
Not caring about the world’s demands is a step closer to creating the authentic, meaningful life we were meant to live.
What will you create?
With love. ❤
