The ART of solitude

Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude draws on his own experiences with contemplative practice across cultures and centuries, from Buddhist monasteries in Asia to the essays of European philosophers and the disciplined isolation of modern artists. What he discovers is a profound continuity. Across time and geography, human beings have turned to solitude not as escape, but to learn how to live with themselves. That insight feels especially urgent now, in an age that prizes connection yet breeds distraction. Across the diverse set of examples of solitude practice provided in the text, several particularly salient themes emerge. You can use what follows as “doors” to relate the text to your own life experience.

Montaigne’s Tower: The Restless Mind

Throughout the book, Batchelor returns to Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French essayist whose personal experiments in withdrawal, self-reflection, and honest writing made solitude a form of philosophy. Montaigne becomes a kind of patron saint of aloneness, reminding us that the struggle to be with oneself is not new.

When Montaigne retreated to his tower, he expected leisure and peace. Instead, he discovered his mind was more restless than ever. Thoughts he had long avoided came to the forefront. Even in his analog world, he couldn’t escape the impulse to refresh, to scroll mentally through worries and distractions. There was an impulse to do anything but sit with himself.

We know that restlessness today, only amplified. The discomfort of being alone now has a digital escape hatch always within reach.

Without structure or purpose, solitude can feel like falling into one’s own mind. Yet that is precisely where philosophy begins. We must listen to the inner noise until something intelligible emerges, until we can distinguish between the world’s chatter and our own voice. The answer depends on how much we allow the world to intrude. How much we let digital cues turn up the volume of the past, the future, the world outside this present moment.

Somewhere between silence and noise lies the space where one can hear oneself again.

Isolation happens to you; solitude is a choice you make. Isolation cuts you off from meaning and connection. Solitude turns you inward so you can return to the world more consciously. Batchelor opens The Art of Solitude by tracing how easily the two blur in modern life. We flee to screens to avoid loneliness, only to end up more isolated than before.

To choose solitude, then, is not to reject company but to refine it. In solitude, the mind can become a friend again, not a cage. Montaigne knew this: his tower was a physical refuge, but the mental refuge was harder to find. The self, once encountered, can be uneasy company. Yet that unease is the proof of solitude’s work.

Batchelor writes that solitude begins “not with withdrawal but with attention.” You can be alone in a room and feel isolated, or sit in a café and feel intensely solitary. The difference is whether the moment is inhabited or avoided.

To inhabit aloneness is to stay with discomfort long enough for it to teach you. To watch the mind search for exits and not follow. Montaigne found that ideas emerged only after boredom had done its work, when stillness softened into something generative. Batchelor calls this the art of resting awareness: you do not force clarity but allow it to rise naturally when the noise subsides.

This is the foundation: solitude as attention, not escape. Everything that follows in this guide builds on that distinction.

Solitude as Practice: Does Everyone Need It?

Montaigne spent nearly a decade in near-total solitude before realizing how easily someone with that experience could mistake solitude for pure virtue, a performance rather than a practice. True solitude, he found, resists display.

That raises an essential question: should everyone practice solitude, at least in some form?

The answer, inevitably, is yes, but not for the reasons you might think.

Batchelor recalls his own early experience as a young monk: a five-day retreat in the hills, where he read, meditated, and camped alone. That experience seeded his lifelong devotion to solitude. But the practice doesn’t require monasteries or mountain retreats. It requires only this: creating space where contemplation becomes possible.

The time we spend consuming information far outweighs the time we spend contemplating it. A single day’s exposure to news, crises, and personal worries can easily tip the scales of our inner world toward overwhelm. But in moments of chosen solitude, for me, a quiet Sunday morning with coffee in hand, my dog at my feet, and birdsong outside, the world narrows to a manageable frame. In that small, still space, reflection becomes possible. Choices begin to clarify.

I’ve often found that contemplative space, especially during uncertain times, gives me confidence in my decisions. So when people ask, “Are you sure?” the most accurate answer is: Yes. I’ve contemplated it. This is different from pure intellectualizing. A decision considered in solitude is intensely personal and goes beyond simple pros and cons.

The practice doesn’t have to be elaborate. It just has to be deliberate. Which brings us to the deeper work solitude makes possible: figuring out which thoughts are actually ours.

Disentangling Yourself from Others

That confidence I find in solitude only emerges after I’ve done harder work first: figuring out which thoughts are actually mine.

Which beliefs are authentically ours? Which are inherited, absorbed, or expected?

For some, social expectations align seamlessly with personal values. For others, they clash. Life’s disruptions often reveal how entangled our identities are with our circumstances. Solitude allows us to peel back those layers.

Montaigne understood that the world’s expectations, even when rejected, still live within us. Solitude gives us space to question them without severing connection entirely. It allows us to redefine relationship on our own terms.

For Montaigne, the purpose of solitude was never to reject the world, but to return to it more consciously. When things fall apart, we often mistake external turmoil for internal brokenness. But solitude helps us ask the right question: Am I broken, or are these circumstances simply difficult?

When the resume, social life, family, and lovely things are stripped away, who remains?

That question guided me through my own difficult seasons. Alone, I rediscovered what I valued and wanted instead of what I was supposed to value or want.

Montaigne wrote, “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself.”

Batchelor adds: “There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.” Self-pity is one of them. But so is avoidance. Solitude’s gift is not comfort but clarity.

And clarity, Batchelor suggests, often requires slowing down dramatically.

The Gift of Slowing Down

Montaigne discovered his mind was restless in solitude. Pyrrho found clarity in suspending judgment. But both required the same foundational shift: moving at a different pace than the world demands.

Batchelor writes movingly about silence, both literal and figurative, including his own experience with psychedelics and wordlessness. As a teacher accustomed to speaking and writing, he found silence profoundly corrective: it reminded him why he had chosen his vocation in the first place.

We can all find versions of that silence without retreating to monasteries or experimenting with substances. For me, it came after a period of grief and overexertion. I stopped rushing. I spent more time outdoors. I walked my dog without earbuds. I lingered over books and art instead of consuming them efficiently.

When I eventually returned to friends and family, I was present and not performing. That, too, is a form of solitude: not withdrawal, but attentiveness. The slowing down itself becomes the practice.

There’s a therapeutic concept called “opposite action” when you’re stuck in a destructive pattern, you deliberately do the reverse of your habitual response. Anxious? Move slower, not faster. Isolated? Reach out, don’t withdraw. The practice interrupts the pattern just enough to create space for something new.

Solitude works similarly. When the world demands constant speed, deliberate slowness becomes radical. When noise is everywhere, choosing silence is an act of resistance. Not performance, not display, just the quiet decision to move at your own pace.

But like any powerful practice, solitude carries risk. What nourishes in moderation can isolate in excess. The line between healthy withdrawal and harmful avoidance isn’t always clear especially after the years we’ve just lived through.

Mindfulness as Ethical Practice

Montaigne discovered his mind was more restless in solitude, not less. The answer wasn’t to flee back to distraction. It was to develop a practice for working with that restlessness. This is where Batchelor turns from solitude as concept to solitude as discipline, introducing mindfulness not as relaxation technique but as ethical training.

He draws on the 8th-century Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva, who described mindfulness as a guard at the doorway of the mind. As Batchelor paraphrases: “For Śāntideva, mindfulness means to be constantly aware of one’s ethical aspirations like a gatekeeper standing watch, ready to intercept any impulse that might divert us from our goals or undermine our integrity.”

For much of my life, I thought mindfulness was something that happened apart from the world sitting on a cushion, listening to guided meditation, performing a body scan. The purpose, I assumed, was to emerge calmer, more centered, better equipped for whatever the day required. But I rarely considered that what I did afterward, how I spoke, reacted, or made choices was part of the same practice.

Batchelor’s framing changed that. By linking mindfulness to ethics, he makes it urgent rather than optional. To be mindful is to notice our “reactive impulses and neurotic habits before they have a chance to take hold.” Mindfulness becomes the art of catching ourselves before we betray our own principles.

Western culture often portrays mindfulness as escape. But Batchelor reframes it as tuning in: strengthening our capacity to live with integrity amid constant distraction. People who practice mindfulness aren’t zoning out; they’re preparing to act in alignment with their values in a world that endlessly tests them.

This ethical dimension of mindfulness connects directly to solitude. Most ethical challenges arise in relation to others: the temptation to judge, to respond sharply, to lash out. In those fleeting moments between stimulus and response (what Viktor Frankl called “the last of the human freedoms”) solitude emerges. It is the inner pause in which we choose how to act.

Seen this way, solitude becomes not withdrawal from the world but a discipline that sustains engagement with it. When many people cultivate the capacity to pause, reflect, and respond ethically, solitude becomes something larger than personal practice. It becomes a form of civic health.

But like any discipline, solitude has its acolytes. Agnes Martin was one of them, and her story reveals both the power and the cost of radical aloneness.

Finding Your Own Way: Agnes Martin and Creative Solitude

Our relationship to aloneness changes over time. We crave it in one season and resist it in another. In moments of crisis, solitude often tempts us toward reinvention. I’ve had periods where I imagined entirely different lives, drawn less to the work itself than to the sense of self-direction those choices seemed to promise.

Agnes Martin, the painter who lived much of her life in near-complete solitude, embodies both the discipline and the danger of that impulse. Batchelor writes that her work “inhabited that indefinable space between artistic practice and ascetic practice.” The phrase captures the tension at the heart of solitude: it demands rigor, yet when done well, it yields something closer to grace.

Martin’s minimal, meditative paintings, comprised of grids and stripes rendered in pale washes, emerged from a life stripped to essentials. She lived alone in remote locations, avoided the art world, and worked with monastic dedication. Her solitude wasn’t romanticized retreat; it was the condition of her practice.

But Martin’s story also raises uncomfortable questions about perfectionism, safety, and the line between chosen solitude and necessary withdrawal.

Solitude and perfectionism share an unexpected link. You might think that without witnesses, the pressure to be perfect would dissolve. But the absence of feedback can amplify self-scrutiny. Without others to mirror or challenge us, we become both creator and sole critic. For Martin, even isolation didn’t free her from perfectionism. Her art was created to be displayed, and with that came internalized standards that persisted in seclusion. We carry the gaze of others within us, long after we’ve stepped away from their presence.

Then there’s the question of safety. Agnes Martin lived and worked in a world not built for her. She inhabited a male-dominated art world, hostile to queer identities, indifferent to mental health. Her solitude may have been both refuge and necessity.

As a gay man of color, that part of her story resonates immediately. When you move through environments that feel unsafe or unrecognizing, the options narrow: adapt, hope they change, or withdraw. From the outside, such retreat can look like oversensitivity. In truth, it often reflects the exhaustion of existing in spaces not designed for you.

For Martin, solitude may have been how she reclaimed safety she couldn’t find in community. That raises a powerful question: who is solitude for, and when does it become refuge rather than choice?

If we carry the gaze of perfectionism even when alone, do we also carry others’ expectations? Perhaps solitude becomes a way to lay those gazes down, even temporarily.

For me, solitude has become essential when I don’t feel psychologically safe or fully seen. It offers containment, a private space where safety cannot be disturbed. It’s not escape from the world, but brief return to me, unobserved and uncorrected.

Gentleness is part of that practice.

Where Martin’s solitude was ascetic and bordered on isolation, Johannes Vermeer shows us something different: solitude hiding in plain sight, woven into the fabric of ordinary life.

Vermeer: Solitude in the Everyday

Vermeer’s paintings don’t depict dramatic withdrawal. No towers, no studios, no deserts. Instead: a woman reading a letter by a window. Another pouring milk. A third weighing pearls in morning light.

What Vermeer captures and what Batchelor recognizes is that solitude doesn’t require grand gestures. It lives in the pauses between tasks, in moments of absorption, in the interior life that unfolds even amid domestic routine.

Most of Vermeer’s surviving works depict bourgeois women alone in quiet interiors. The scenes are ordinary, but rendered with extraordinary psychological intimacy. Each subject seems caught in private thought, and we viewers are drawn in not merely to observe, but to wonder: What is she thinking? What has just happened, or what is about to?

In Vermeer’s hands, solitude becomes visible without being announced. Within the limitations of domestic life, countless interior dramas unfold ranging among boredom, defiance, longing, peace. In those moments alone, the mind moves freely. The forbidden can hide in plain sight: a resentment silently acknowledged, an honest opinion formed but not spoken, a fantasy of escape.

We’ve all known those moments. Silently rehearsing arguments we’ll never have. Scripting retorts we’ll never deliver. Imagining lives we’ll never live. Solitude can be a theater of imagination where alternate realities that satisfy something essential even if they never materialize.

Vermeer reminds us that solitude doesn’t require leaving the world. It can exist in the five minutes before anyone else wakes, in the walk between errands, in the pause before responding. Batchelor writes about monastics and artists who withdrew dramatically, but Vermeer shows us the solitude available to everyone: the interior space we carry with us, accessible anytime we choose to inhabit it.

That choice between performance and presence is at the heart of what Montaigne called being an “accidental philosopher.” We don’t need formal training to ask these questions. We just need to pay attention.

The Accidental Philosopher

Vermeer reminds us that solitude doesn’t require leaving the world. It can exist in ordinary moments, accessible to anyone who chooses to inhabit them. That insight connects directly to how Montaigne understood himself: not as a trained philosopher, but as what he called himself, an “accidental philosopher.”

Among all the insights about Montaigne Batchelor unpacks, this one resonates most for me. Philosophy, in its academic sense, is structured, rigorous, deeply historical. But in another sense, we are all accidental philosophers who are shaped not by formal study, but by lived experience of asking what it means to live well, and by our imperfect attempts to answer this question.

Life’s complexity lies in the fact that most questions yield no absolute answers. We rarely know for sure whether we’re “doing life right.” At best, we act according to what we believe is right. We are guided by moral intuitions, traditions, or systems of belief that give us scaffolding for meaning. But empirical proof of a life well-lived doesn’t exist. “Right,” after all, is relative and context-dependent.

That uncertainty is precisely what makes philosophical inquiry necessary and surprisingly liberating.

Batchelor also spends time discussing Pyrrho, the ancient Greek philosopher whose students claimed he “declared that things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable, and undecidable.” At first this sounds nihilistic, as though nothing matters. But I read it differently: not that our stances are meaningless, but that everything deserves examination. Every conviction contains more complexity than it initially appears to hold.

It’s the same curiosity that draws us to mystery novels or true crime: we think we know who did it, until new evidence shifts the entire story. There’s always a perspective or context that makes things more complicated than they seemed. The latest information opens the door to renewed inquiry.

Applied to our present moment, politically, socially, culturally, this suggests that intellectual humility might serve us better than moral certainty. The challenge, of course, is actually listening once we’ve made up our minds. There’s comfort in being right and vertigo in realizing we might be wrong. Yet the braver act is risking wrongness to stay in conversation.

Batchelor writes, “To be truly alone requires that we settle into a still and clear state of mind, no longer troubled either by obsessive thoughts or by conflicting emotions.” Solitude becomes training ground for that clarity. It becomes a place where we can loosen our grip on being right and rest instead in honest uncertainty.

Which matters more:

Being kind, or being right?

Being at peace, or being right?

Staying curious, or being right?

At some point, someone more forceful will disagree with you. You can’t control that. You can choose whether to engage in battle or preserve your inner quiet. We often speak of “dying on hills” to defend our ideas, but more often, it’s our peace that dies there first.

This practice of loosening our grip on certainty, of choosing presence over performance. It has real limits. Solitude, like any discipline, can tip from nourishment into something darker.

When Solitude Goes Wrong

Focusing this first podcast on solitude after everything that unfolded during COVID still feels raw. Even as the world reopened with “hot girl summer” and social life resuming, something fundamental had shifted. Friend groups shrank. Conversations deepened. The appetite for constant company dulled. Our collective relationship to being alone had changed.

And sometimes, it still goes too far.

After years of remote work and intermittent isolation, it’s easy to blur the line between solitude and withdrawal, to convince ourselves that staying home for days is mere convenience, when in truth it edges toward avoidance. I’ve learned to recognize this pattern in myself.

To counter it, I’ve enlisted accountability partners. Sometimes it’s as simple as a morning text: “Are you vertical?” or “Have you left the house today?” It’s a small but vital check and a reminder that solitude, to remain healthy, must stay porous to the world.

Used well, solitude is a too and its form differs for everyone. For creatives, it’s a wellspring of insight. For introverts, a condition of equilibrium. For many, simply a form of rest. But like anything powerful, it carries risk at its extremes. What nourishes us in moderation can consume us in excess.

Batchelor doesn’t romanticize solitude. He’s honest about its dangers. It’s not difficult to morph Into self-pity, avoidance, the seduction of permanent retreat. Agnes Martin’s story reveals both solitude’s creative power and its potential cost. Montaigne recognized that even chosen aloneness could become performance or prison, if approached without clear intention.

The warning signs vary by person, but common patterns emerge: Days blending together. Conversations feeling effortful. The world seeming smaller and less relevant. These aren’t moral failures. They’re signals that the balance has tipped.

Solitude should make you more present when you return to the world, not less. It should clarify what matters, not blur everything into comfortable numbness. If aloneness begins to feel like hiding rather than restoration, that’s the moment to reach out, even when, especially when it feels difficult.

Because ultimately, solitude isn’t about choosing between being alone and being with others. It’s about finding the rhythm that sustains both.

The Balance

This is only a glimpse of what Batchelor offers in The Art of Solitude. I’ve returned to it in both crisis and calm, each time learning something new about the courage it takes to be alone and the grace it brings when we allow it.

Sitting with yourself without distraction, without self-editing changes the texture of life. It’s uncomfortable, but it won’t last forever. It’s work, but not punishment.

Batchelor concludes: “In the end, the task is not to choose between a life of solitude and a life of engagement, but to embrace both and learn how to find a healthy balance between them.”

That’s the art of solitude: not absence but presence. Not retreat, but return.

I hope this guide finds you when you need it most.