On Being Alone

Was reading the newspaper column Maladjusted by Phin Wong, which I adore for his sarcastically humorous takes on mundane yet intriguing issues. This time, it's about him trying to find some 'alone time' with himself just to find out how unbearably banal and unexciting he is to himself...
And I quote:

" It's terribly important to have 'alone time'. How else will you figure out what's going on inside? How else will you be made aware of your own hypocrisy when society is too polite to point it out to you? Who else but you knows you well enough to call you out on your crap? Unfortunately, it's also appalingly boring. . . . . . . . . . The problem with spending too much time with yourself is that you're made acutely aware of how ridiculously uninteresting you are. . . . The truth is, we are only as interesting as the company we keep. We don't gather in groups to have an audience (well, not all the time at least) - we need people around us so we can consider new ideas, and so that we may, hopefully, become more interesting."

Hm.....when I first read it I was like, "Nah, I don't have problems spending time with myself, and time alone doesn't make me think I'm boring..." But then, I realise that I don't actually spend my time alone to think a lot about myself..... I spend time alone to read books, think about new ideas, see Nature, take photographs, explore new places, write, play music, plan new pranks....in short, yeah, I spend time alone to enrich myself, and as a result I become more interesting when I'm with people.... Haaaa.....

Somehow the realisation is pretty cool..... I mean, sometimes when people know I love to spend time alone they think I'm a self-absorbed weirdly egoistical individual who thinks that other people are too boring to keep me company (F.Y.I, I don't think like that... ok at least not most of the time..)
. . . but hey, I just realised that even among my other friends who are loners, most of the time we are alone, we are doing activities that take the focus off ourselves anyway..... Oh wow it's good to not feel like a self-absorbed weirly egoistical individual hahahahaha.....

That said, spending 'alone time' do make me more aware of myself.... It's just that when we are not surrounded by people - who unavoidably bring in their values, their thoughts, their judgments, their pretenses, their truths, their influences - we are free to form our own thoughts and judgments, however unexciting or radical it is, and that's such a liberating thing.

Even for people like me who end up publishing their either unexciting or radical thoughts in a blog anyway =)