I recently was home alone for a week– the rest of my family was somewhere else. Pretty much everyone I talked to before they left offered some version of “enjoy it. So nice to have a quiet house.” I did not really enjoy it. There have only been two times in my life when I have lived without other people around– once, for a year in college, and again in my first year of medical school. I was not particularly happy either of those years. I do not think I’ve spent a week alone in almost 20 years. Wherever I’ve been– on the road, at home, at camp, staying somewhere, in the wilderness– I’ve always had other people living with me.
It is strange, because I do not think of myself as a particularly social person (although I am willing to accept that perhaps, I am). Humans are social animals, evolved to live in groups. It is not natural for us to be alone. Given that, it is somewhat curious that so many people desire time alone, and long for quiet space. When my family returned, I shared my unhappy experience of the week and got funny looks. Well, you might not have liked a week alone, but it sounds nice to me.
Many people, when they find themselves with a week alone, do enjoy it. That is worth taking seriously. It suggests that the experience of being alone is not straightforward—that the same quiet house that felt like absence to me can feel like relief to another.
I suspect that part of what complicates this is that the desire for solitude is not always clearly understood by the person experiencing it. People often feel a clear pull toward being alone, toward quiet, toward space, but the source of that pull is not always explicit. The feeling is real, but its interpretation may be incomplete.
In many cases, what is being sought is not really an absence of people, but relief from the demands that come with being in a relationship. All relationships require something from us: attention, time, patience, compromise, responsiveness. In caregiving relationships especially, this demand is often continuous rather than occasional. The structure of the day is shaped by the needs of others. Even when these relationships are loving and chosen, they are still built on repeated acts of attention and adjustment. All versions of close human life include this kind of ongoing requirement, and however wonderful that may be, it can also be exhausting.
Solitude can therefore feel like relief not because people are absent, but because demand is suspended. The nervous system is no longer required to track, respond, anticipate, or adjust to others. In that suspension, there is often a sense of ease—not because being alone is inherently better, but because obligation has been lifted.
That raises a more precise question: when solitude feels good, what is it actually relieving us from?
Perhaps it is less about the presence or absence of people, and more about release from relational demand itself—the steady requirement to attend to others’ needs, coordinate with their emotions, and remain available in small and large ways throughout the day. Modern life may amplify this through constant communication and interruption, but the deeper source is not technological. It is structural. To be in relationship is to be required.
I know I am not alone in struggling with the idea of obligation. There is often a discomfort not just with what is asked of us, but with the fact that anything is asked at all. To be needed means to be drawn into responsibility, into responsiveness, into the lives and needs of others. It means being accountable in small and large ways, repeatedly, without final resolution. There is a kind of fatigue that comes from this, especially when it is continuous. There are times at the end of the day when I find myself online, browsing listings of farmhouses in Tuscany, fantasizing about living a life where my only concern is the ripeness of the olives.
There is also another layer underneath it that is easy to miss. To be needed is not only to be burdened; it is also to be located. It is to have a place in the lives of others that is active rather than abstract. It is to matter in a way that is not theoretical, but enacted daily through expectation and response. Even when obligation feels heavy, it is also what confirms participation in a shared life.
This is part of what makes the experience of solitude more complicated than simple relief. When we step away from demand, there is often a sense of lightness. But there can also be something harder to name underneath that lightness. Not just rest, but a kind of absence of role. A loosening of the ways in which we are called into existence by others.
Many of us, if we are honest, struggle at times with what it would mean not to be needed at all. Not needed can be a synonym for not important– or worse, superfluous. This is not always conscious, but it shapes the emotional experience of distance and withdrawal more than we tend to admit. The question is not only whether we want relief from obligation, but what it feels like to imagine ourselves outside of it entirely.
There is a deeper tension beneath the desire for solitude. It is not only that we are seeking rest from demand, but also that we are navigating our relationship to being required in the first place. Much of our resistance to obligation comes from a very understandable place: we do not want to be bound, constrained, or consumed by the needs of others. We want space, autonomy, and ease.
But we cannot have deep and meaningful relationships and be free of obligation. The two are not separable in practice. To be meaningfully connected is to be, in some form, required. The structure that makes relationships demanding is the same structure that makes them real.
This is the trade we are often negotiating without fully naming it. Relief from obligation is real, and at times necessary. But so is the recognition that stepping away from it entirely is not simply stepping into freedom—it is also stepping out of a form of significance that only exists through being needed, and loved, by others.
Love,
Doc
Forwarded this email? Sign-up here
See past posts here.