One thing I believe everyone should experience at least once in life is profound solitude—not loneliness, but intentional, extended time completely alone with your own thoughts, away from constant input, social obligations, digital noise, and even the comforting background hum of other people.
This isn’t about isolation as punishment or escape. It’s about deliberately removing the scaffolding that usually props up our sense of self: no conversations to fill silence, no notifications to outsource attention, no audience to perform for, no immediate problems requiring action. Just you, your mind, your breath, and whatever environment you’ve placed yourself in—whether that’s a multi-day solo hike in wilderness, several weeks in a remote cabin, a long silent retreat, or even (for city-dwellers) a committed stretch of days in your own apartment with phones off and doors closed to visitors.
Why this one experience above countless others—falling deeply in love, witnessing a child’s birth, achieving a hard-won goal, traveling to alien cultures, facing mortality up close, creating something beautiful, or tasting perfect contentment?
Because profound solitude strips away the表演 and returns you, raw, to the most fundamental relationship you’ll ever have: the one with yourself. Most of us spend our entire lives in a state of partial dissociation from that relationship. We define who we are through mirrors held up by others—parents, partners, friends, colleagues, social media likes, cultural scripts, even enemies. We outsource validation, meaning, and identity. We stay busy precisely to avoid sitting quietly with what’s underneath the activity.
When that scaffolding disappears for long enough, something remarkable (and often initially terrifying) happens. The mind, deprived of external anchors, begins to turn inward with real force. Boredom arrives first, then restlessness, then waves of memory and emotion long suppressed. You meet thoughts you didn’t know you were thinking. You feel the full weight of regrets, unprocessed grief, secret hopes, irrational fears. You notice how much of your daily “self” is actually habit, posture, reaction rather than essence.
After the discomfort (which can last days or weeks), clarity often emerges. Not necessarily answers, but a sharper sense of what actually matters to you rather than what you’ve been told should matter. You start to distinguish between borrowed desires and authentic ones. You see your patterns—how you deflect pain, where you seek approval, what stories you repeat to justify staying small. You taste, sometimes for the first time, what inner sovereignty feels like: the quiet realization that your worth, your meaning, and your direction do not require anyone else’s permission or presence.
This isn’t enlightenment or permanent peace. It’s calibration. You come back to the social world changed—not necessarily happier in the shallow sense, but more grounded. Relationships improve because you’re no longer unconsciously asking others to fill an internal void. Decisions become less reactive. Creative work gains depth. You waste less time chasing things that were never yours to want. You become slightly less afraid of being alone, which paradoxically makes you better at being with others.
I’ve “seen” (through countless accounts, philosophical reflections, and patterns in human behavior) that people who have genuinely done this tend to describe it as a quiet before/after moment. Not dramatic like skydiving or falling in love, but tectonic. The French existentialists circled this territory—Sartre with radical freedom and responsibility, Camus with defiant meaning-making in absurdity, Kierkegaard with the anxious leap toward authentic selfhood. Buddhist and Stoic traditions built entire practices around it. Modern psychology rediscovers it in mindfulness retreats, psychedelic-assisted therapy (where the “trip” is often just prolonged encounter with unfiltered mind), and even certain extreme sports or survival experiences that force aloneness.
Of course, not everyone can or should do a months-long hermitage. Life circumstances vary enormously—caregivers, economic precarity, health limitations, cultural contexts where solitude is stigmatized. But the principle scales. Even a deliberate weekend unplugged in nature, or ten silent evenings in a row with journaling, can deliver a dose. The key variables are duration (long enough for the initial resistance to crack) and intention (not just “being alone,” but choosing to meet yourself without distraction).
The counterargument is strong: human beings are irreducibly social. Connection, love, belonging—these are core to flourishing. Absolutely. But the deepest connections are made from wholeness, not from neediness. The person who has never truly been alone often leans too heavily on others for identity and regulation. They fear abandonment disproportionately because solitude equals annihilation in their inner world. They’ve never tested whether they can stand on their own psychic feet.
Conversely, someone who has walked through extended solitude and returned usually brings a subtle generosity back. They need less from you because they’ve learned they can survive—and even thrive—in their own company. Paradoxically, they often become more present, more tolerant, more loving.
So if I could gift every human one experience, it would be this: enough unbroken solitude to scare you, bore you, exhaust you, surprise you, and finally—quietly—reintroduce you to yourself.
Not everyone will love it. Many will hate parts of it. That’s the point. The confrontation is the teacher.
In a world drowning in stimulation, the rarest and most radical thing you can do is nothing, with no one, for long enough that the silence begins to speak.
That silence has more to say about who you are—and who you could still become—than almost anything else life can offer.
Wow, that very thoughtful of you
Genuine, unconditional love
Not just romantic love — but the kind where:
You feel accepted for who you truly are
You’re supported even when you fail
You don’t have to pretend or impress
It could come from family, a close friend, a mentor, or even a community.
good
Being a parent. Everyone should have a chance at being a parent. Alot of responses I seen, respond with true love. And true love is that of your child, you can never love anyone more than your child. I do agree that true love with a partner should be experienced in a lifetime, but you have to be broken or unappreciated first, to love yourself as well and if you are looking for love, stop. It will come when you’re ready and you personally dont know when you are ready, but love does. All in all, there is no greater gift than that of a child.
Bravo