by Leroy on January 30th, 2026.
It took me 30 years on this Earth before I experienced being alone. Fully alone. I've spent a lot of time by my self but hardly alone.
I remember those first days back to school after the summer break when someone would say, "It was so boring last summer, wish I had something to do." I never voiced my true feelings but my attitude toward them was always: "Some people just haven't learned how to be alone."
My summer breaks were great because I had figured out how to be alone, of course. I loved spending time in my room playing video games, surfing the Internet (which, truthfully, was better), and listening to music. All my friends were out of town but that didn't matter because I had what I coveted most of all: my alone time.
My alone time consisted of a constant rotation of stimulus. A computer was always present too. If I wasn't watching the next television show or playing a video game, I was listening to music and surfing the Internet. As I got older I began to program and tinker but never without music playing on my headphones or speakers.
I developed quite the taste in music and shows and video games. Listening, watching, and playing the same things would be boring so I always sought something unique. When I tried to share these things with friends or classmates it was always met with derision. "What else do you do while alone?" I asked but no one could give me an answer. There was such a depth of artistry to explore so why didn't they explore it?
Eventually I found a blind spot in my tastes: I knew nothing about books. I'd read the ones required for school and few others but reading was just so difficult for me. Instead of enduring a book it was much easier to open my eyes and ears and have a story almost literally beamed into my mind. But I put on headphones, turned on some tunes, and read and read and read. I developed quite a bit of taste for books too even if it was more painful than sitting idle while stimulus played directly into my senses.
Stimulus being played directly into my senses: this was how I lived for the majority of my life. My alone time was my place of solitude, my recluse, and my ultimate stimulation.
It goes without saying that music was always playing. When I pressed the "on" button of my computer monitor the very next button I reached for was "play." I pressed "pause" only to stop the music for a video. I played music when I took a shower and I played music as I fell asleep. On my morning commute I hated listening to the morning radio DJs so I played CDs instead. If I went to a friend's place and they didn't have music playing I thought it was weird because I always played music at mine. "How do they stand it?" I remember asking myself.
My journey toward being alone -- truly and fully alone -- was a slow descent. There's only so much the senses can take before stimulation starts to become repetitive. I'm not sure where and when it started but I just became less interested in most things. I felt like I'd seen it all. I tried to enjoy my coveted and stimulating alone time only to find it depressed me. I realized I was doing it only out of habit, a sick ritual -- I wouldn't even watch the videos I chose to watch and only passively listened to them instead. Instead of searching for interesting music it was instead fed to me by an algorithm trained to play music like the music I already knew.
Bit by bit my alone time occupied me less and less and, at some point in my late twenties, media stopped compelling me at all. The Internet wasn't novel. Movies weren't interesting. Television shows were too long and boring. Books weren't worth the investment. Music was bland. So I began stopping it all.
I didn't binge a show for eight hours straight. I didn't play video games with headphones on, eyes glued to the screen, hands occupied. I didn't scroll mindlessly on my phone in hopes the next video would be funny. I didn't read the comment section of random articles on the Internet until 3am. I didn't have music playing for almost every single one of the one thousand four hundred and fourty minutes in a day.
Eventually, I sat alone. Thoughts appeared in my mind but I didn't act on them. My mind showed me images of my computer screen and images of me using my phone. My mind showed me typing on my keyboard and my mind showed me some cool projects to work on. My mind showed me a video game. My mind even played parts of my favorite songs. And then my mind showed me something about myself.