To the people who live by themselves: how do you do it?

I am not talking about living on your own away from your parents, I am talking about living by yourself with no roommate, no family member, straight up alone. I assume that most people make this decision because they have a reason due to cost of living, the inability to find a roommate, their job, etc. All those reasons make sense to me, but if this is a reason by choice, why?

Every year my parents go out of town for multiple weekends. That leaves me home alone for days, and there is something so unsettling about it. It is not even that I miss my mommy and daddy (I mean I do), but it is that I hate coming home to an empty house. There is suddenly no one to talk to, no background noise and all you hear is silence. I cannot even talk either because there is quite literally no one to talk to.

There is this sense of safety I get when I am around other people. When I am by myself, I feel unsafe. I feel like this is mainly because humans are not meant to be alone.

I recently started watching the 2004 show “Lost,” and it made me think about what people would do if they were by themselves on a stranded island. In the show, there are many survivors from the plane crash, so they do not have to worry about being alone. However, in the movie “Cast Away,” Tom Hanks plays a sole survivor from a plane crash and is stranded on an island for years.

In that situation, we get to see how his mental health slowly starts to deteriorate, part of that being isolated from civilization. So again, humans are not meant to be alone. 

With no one to interact with, it can cause an outbreak of mental disorders and symptoms such as hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety, depression, etc. 

During the COVID-19 lockdown, so many people that I know have talked about how it was such a hard time for them. This was not necessarily because of the virus itself, but because we were forced to be isolated inside and away from everyone. They felt like their mental health decreased over time because they were not used to being alone by themselves for a long period of time. 

Although, being alone has its perks, sometimes you need to take a step back from everything and hit the reset button by listening to music, watching a movie, playing a video game or whatever your hobby may be. All these things are done to also avoid being in that total alone state. We must constantly be doing something to occupy ourselves, to occupy the silence.

Our brains control our emotions and other humans influence how we feel, so being used to having this interaction creates a dependency on it as well. We rely on social interaction without even realizing it, until it becomes absent. 

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