Issue #66: How much alone time is too much?

A new study has calculated the ideal social-solitude balance. Plus, would you trust a wearable 'social tracker' to prevent loneliness?

I have a handful of friends who, like me, live alone. Among us, we have a shared understanding – an in-joke, even – that periods where we spend too much time on our own make us a bit weird.

Say, if I turn up to a friend’s house for brunch the morning after a Saturday night in, or if I go over to someone’s house for dinner when they’ve been working from home all day. Suddenly, one of us is talking a lot, in what feels like an uncontrollable stream-of-consciousness. Maybe it’s a much-needed rant. Or I’ll find myself greeting my friend with boundless, puppy-like enthusiasm; an inexplicable desperation to hear every last detail of their day. Or it’s the opposite: some days, my energy will be dwindling, my mood a bit off – and I’ll apologise, preemptively; assure my friend that I’ll perk up soon.

The justification, for all of the above, is the same: Sorry, I’ve just spent a bit too much time alone.

When you’ve got an easy pretext for prolonged aloneness, like living by yourself (see also, having a remote job), it doesn’t feel shameful to admit this. That’s actually quite liberating. Loneliness is often internalised as a personal failure. It’s something we fear, on a deep, tribalistic level. Something stigmatised by society. But when your default lifestyle involves a lot of alone time, it facilitates a more lighthearted discourse. When I’m among fellow members of the Live-Aloner Club, we can talk about our shared experiences openly and without excessive self-consciousness. We know that all we need, to feel normal again, is half an hour of conversation with another human.

When my fellow live-aloners & I turn up to one another’s houses acting a bit doolally, what we need to do is recalibrate. To reset the all-important balance between solitude and sociability. That balance was the subject of a recent psychological study, where the researchers calculated, as a percentage, how much alone time the average person can experience on a regular basis before it slips into loneliness. What do you reckon?

How much alone time is too much alone time?