I Haven’t Fallen Out With the World…

I’ve Simply Changed My Relationship With It

There comes a time in life when you begin to look at things a little differently. It isn’t necessarily brought about by age, although age undoubtedly has a part to play. Sometimes it happens because the circumstances that once shaped your days begin to disappear, leaving you with something you may not have had quite so much of before… the freedom to decide what you actually want to do with your time.

For me, business has gone. The routines, the responsibilities and the expectations that once occupied a considerable part of my life have changed, and with that change has come an opportunity to think about what matters to me now. Not what mattered ten years ago, not what other people think ought to matter, and certainly not what society seems to expect from someone at a particular stage of life. What matters to me, here and now.

It is an interesting experience, and occasionally an uncomfortable one, because when you begin to make decisions based on your own needs rather than the expectations of others, those decisions are not always understood.

People close to me, including people I love dearly, sometimes see me as antisocial. They wonder why I don’t make more effort to meet people in the local area, why I don’t seem particularly interested in getting out and about, or whether my reluctance to socialise means that I don’t like the people around me.

I understand how it might look from the outside. If you enjoy company, look forward to meeting friends and feel energised by being around people, then someone who chooses to spend much of their time alone might appear a little odd. Perhaps even a little miserable. We have become accustomed to measuring a person’s wellbeing by how active their social life appears to be, as though a busy diary were a reliable indicator of a fulfilled existence.

But that isn’t how it works for everyone, and it certainly isn’t how it works for me.

I haven’t fallen out with the people around me. I’ve simply reached a point where I want to choose when I engage with them.

There is a difference, and I sometimes wonder why it is so difficult for people to recognise it.

The curious business of being left alone

For much of our lives, our time belongs to other people, whether we like it or not. Employment dictates when we get up, when we eat, when we can take a holiday and how much of our attention must be directed elsewhere. Family responsibilities, financial pressures and the ordinary business of getting through the week leave us with relatively little room to decide how we would genuinely prefer to spend our time.

Even our leisure can become organised around expectations. We should go out more, see more people, take more holidays, join this group, attend that gathering and make the most of every opportunity. Somewhere along the way, doing things because we enjoy them becomes entangled with doing things because we are supposed to enjoy them.

Then circumstances change. The business disappears, the working routine falls away, and the diary becomes a little less crowded. Suddenly, there is space to breathe.

You might imagine this would be universally welcomed. Yet the freedom to organise your own time can create a curious problem. Other people have their expectations of what you should do with that freedom, and those expectations don’t always match your own.

If I want to spend an afternoon writing, thinking, reading, listening to music or simply sitting quietly with my own thoughts, why should that be considered a problem? If I would rather watch the light change across the landscape than drive somewhere to make conversation over a coffee, does that automatically suggest that something is wrong?

I don’t think it does.

There are days when I want company, conversation and the pleasure of sharing an experience with someone else. There are other days when I want none of those things, and I don’t believe I should have to construct an elaborate explanation to justify the difference.

My headspace matters to me. It is where ideas develop, where thoughts settle, where I work through the things that interest or concern me, and where I can simply exist without having to respond to anyone else’s needs or expectations.

That isn’t loneliness. It is a form of independence, and there is a world of difference between the two.

Solitude isn’t the same as loneliness

We tend to talk about being alone as though it were something that needs correcting. A person lives alone, eats alone, travels alone or spends a great deal of time in their own company, and somebody will eventually ask whether they are all right.

The question is usually well-intentioned. We are social creatures, after all, and human connection matters enormously. Loneliness can be painful, and prolonged isolation can have real consequences for our physical and mental wellbeing. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.

But we sometimes make the mistake of assuming that solitude and loneliness are interchangeable.

Loneliness is the absence of connection that we want or need. Solitude can be the deliberate enjoyment of our own company. One can leave a crowded room feeling desperately lonely, while another person can spend an entire day alone and feel perfectly content.

The number of people around us is not necessarily a measure of the quality of our lives.

I suspect many people who are comfortable in their own company will recognise the distinction. They can enjoy a good conversation without needing to fill every silence. They can appreciate friendship without requiring constant contact. They can care deeply about people while still wanting a considerable amount of time in which nobody expects anything from them.

There is something rather liberating about discovering that you don’t need to be perpetually occupied or socially available to feel that your life has value.

Perhaps the difficulty is that solitude is not always easy to explain to someone who experiences it differently. If another person finds energy in company, they may struggle to understand why you find restoration in quiet. Neither person is necessarily wrong. They simply have different needs.

The trouble begins when one person’s preferences become the standard against which the other is judged.

I can like people without wanting to see them today

This is the part I wish were easier to explain.

Not wanting to attend a gathering does not mean disliking the people who invited you. Not being particularly interested in local social activities does not mean harbouring some secret contempt for the people who participate in them. And declining an invitation need not be a statement about the person making it.

Sometimes, I simply don’t want to go.

There is no hidden insult, no grievance waiting to be uncovered and no elaborate conspiracy of personal dislike. I might have other things I want to do. I might not feel in the mood for conversation. I might be perfectly happy where I am and see no compelling reason to be somewhere else.

That should be an acceptable position for an adult to take.

Of course, relationships require effort. Friendship cannot survive indefinitely on good intentions and the occasional thumbs-up on a social media post. People need to feel valued, and sometimes that means making an effort even when staying at home would be easier. I understand that, and I don’t believe independence should become an excuse for neglecting the people we love.

But there is a difference between making an effort because someone matters to you and feeling obliged to participate in every invitation simply to prove that they do.

I would like the freedom to meet people when I genuinely want to meet them, to enjoy their company without feeling that attendance has become a test of affection, and to decline an invitation without being required to defend my character in the process.

I don’t think that is an unreasonable request.

Perhaps we need to become a little better at accepting that affection does not always announce itself through constant availability. Some people demonstrate their love through regular visits and shared activities. Others show it through loyalty, thoughtful conversation, practical help, and simply being there when it matters.

The important thing is not that everyone expresses connection in precisely the same way. It is that we learn to recognise it when it takes a form different from our own.

The freedom to become somebody different

There is another aspect to all this that I find particularly interesting. When a major part of your working life comes to an end, you are left to reconsider not only how you spend your time, but also who you are when you are no longer required to fulfil the role that once defined so much of your existence.

Work gives us structure, purpose, responsibilities and a ready-made answer when somebody asks what we do. It can also dictate our priorities for decades, leaving little time to question whether those priorities still reflect the person we have become.

When that structure disappears, there is an opportunity to discover what remains.

For a writer, that might mean following an idea simply because it is interesting, without worrying whether it can be turned into a product or fitted into a marketing plan. It might mean reading about something obscure, beginning a project that may never make a penny, or spending several hours thinking about a question that other people would consider entirely irrelevant.

There is a particular pleasure in doing something because it engages the mind rather than because it serves a commercial purpose. After years of having to make things useful, productive or profitable, there is something rather refreshing about allowing curiosity to lead occasionally.

I am not suggesting that responsibilities disappear or that money ceases to matter. We still have practical realities to deal with, and the bills have shown little interest in our philosophical development. But when circumstances allow us greater control over our days, surely it makes sense to use some of that freedom to discover what genuinely interests us.

Perhaps this is one of the less discussed transitions in later life. We spend years being shaped by employment, family, financial necessity and social expectations, and then discover that we have reached a point where we can make more of our own choices.

That freedom can be unsettling. It can also be rather wonderful.

And it does not necessarily follow that we want to fill every newly available hour with other people.

Not an escape from the world, but a different way of living in it

I haven’t lost interest in the world. If anything, I have more time to think about it, question it, write about it and follow the subjects that catch my attention. I remain interested in people, their stories, their ideas and the curious things they do to one another in the name of progress, politics, profit, or simply getting through the day.

What has changed is my appetite for participation in every aspect of the world around me.

I can be interested in people without wanting to spend every weekend with them. I can care about my community without attending every local gathering. I can enjoy conversation without feeling that every quiet afternoon represents a missed opportunity.

Living in rural Spain has, perhaps, made me more conscious of this. There is something about the landscape, the changing light and the slower rhythm of life that encourages you to pay attention to things that might otherwise pass unnoticed. You begin to appreciate the small, unremarkable moments that don’t need an audience or a commentary.

A quiet morning can be enough. An idea taking shape on a page can be enough. The company of a cat, apparently convinced that your primary purpose in life is to provide somewhere comfortable to sit, can be enough.

Not every moment needs to become an event. Not every day needs to produce a story worth telling someone else. And not every experience is diminished because it is enjoyed privately.

Perhaps I have simply become less interested in living according to somebody else’s timetable, including the unwritten timetable that says a healthy, happy person should always be out doing something with somebody.

If so, I can live with that.

The people we love don’t always understand us

I know that the people close to me may see things differently, and I don’t dismiss their concerns. When someone you care about begins spending more time alone, it is natural to wonder whether they are happy, whether something has changed or whether they are quietly struggling with something they haven’t shared.

Those questions can come from love. I would rather someone cared enough to ask than assumed that everything was fine.

But concern can sometimes become interpretation, and interpretation can become a conclusion reached without ever asking the person concerned what is actually going on.

Perhaps the answer is not to insist that everyone else sees things my way. It is to explain, as honestly as I can, that this period of my life is about finding my own rhythm. I am not necessarily unhappy, I am not automatically rejecting anyone, and I don’t need every day to be filled with company in order to feel connected to the world.

I still value the people I love. I still appreciate friendship. I still enjoy a good conversation, a shared laugh and the occasional meeting of minds. None of that requires me to abandon my need for quiet or to apologise for enjoying my own company.

There may be times when I need to make more effort, just as there may be times when other people need to accept that my refusal of an invitation is not a rejection of them. Relationships, after all, are a two-way street, although occasionally both parties seem convinced that they own the traffic lights.

What matters is that we allow one another a little room to be ourselves.

I don’t expect everyone to understand my choices perfectly. I would simply like those choices to be recognised as what they are, rather than interpreted as evidence of something they are not.

Because I haven’t fallen out with the world. I haven’t decided that the people around me are unworthy of my time, and I haven’t stopped caring about those who matter to me.

I have simply reached a point where my own time, my own thoughts and my own peace of mind have become more important to me than they once were.

And perhaps that is not a retreat from life at all.

Perhaps it is the beginning of learning how to live it on my own terms.

Until Next Time