Some adults can spend a Saturday afternoon by themselves and find it pleasant. Others find the same afternoon faintly unbearable by the second hour. The difference, on examination, has less to do with temperament than with practice.
People who grew up entertaining themselves, for whatever combination of reasons, tend to have built up a specific competence: the ability to occupy several hours of unstructured time without the absence of company tipping into something heavier. It is a quieter capacity than the ones that get praised in childhood. From the outside it looks like a person reading, pottering, or sitting on a bench, apparently fine.
The good news in the title of this piece is that the capacity is not fixed. Adults who did not have an unsupervised childhood can build the same competence later, more slowly, by paying attention to what actually distinguishes solitude from loneliness in their own experience.
The distinction the research draws
The clearest theoretical framing of the distinction comes from Christopher Long and James Averill’s 2003 paper “Solitude: An Exploration of Benefits of Being Alone,” in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Long and Averill argued that solitude and loneliness, although colloquially conflated, are different states with different determinants. Solitude, in their framing, is a condition of being alone that the person experiences as freely chosen and engaged. Loneliness is the same outward condition experienced as imposed, empty, or socially deficient. The same Saturday afternoon, with the same external circumstances, can produce either, depending on what the person is doing with it.
The empirical companion to that theoretical paper, by the same lead author, appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in the same year. Long, Seburn, Averill, and More’s “Solitude Experiences: Varieties, Settings, and Individual Differences” used a questionnaire study to factor-analyze the kinds of experience people reported during time alone. Nine types of solitude reduced to three underlying dimensions. Two were positive: inner-directed solitude, characterized by self-discovery and inner peace, and outer-directed solitude, characterized by intimacy and spirituality. The third was loneliness. The same time alone, in other words, did not produce a single emotional state; it produced different states depending on what the person was using the time for and how the time was situated in their life.
Neither paper resolves the question of how adults who do not currently experience solitude positively could come to experience it that way. They establish that the distinction is real, that the positive forms are real, and that they correlate with specific situational and personal factors. The rest of this piece is reasoning the author is offering, not a finding from those papers.
What the competence is actually made of
Watching the people in our lives who do this well, the capacity seems to have a few recognizable components.
The first is a tolerance for the opening twenty minutes. Almost no one finds the early stretch of an unstructured afternoon immediately pleasant. There is a small interval, after obligations have finished and before the time has settled into anything in particular, when most adults feel restless, slightly bored, and tempted to fill the gap with a phone or a chore or a call. People who can spend the afternoon alone seem to know, from practice, that the interval passes. They do not interpret the restlessness as a signal that something is wrong with the afternoon. They wait it out.
The second is a small inventory of activities they actually enjoy alone, which is not the same as the inventory of activities they enjoy. Many social pleasures are unrecognizable as pleasures in solitude. Conversation, meals with friends, a shared show, a game with the children, do not improve by being done alone, and an adult who tries to do them alone often comes away feeling that the afternoon failed. The solitary inventory is its own thing. It tends to involve reading, walking, making something, working on a small ongoing project, listening to music with attention rather than as background, or doing nothing in a deliberate sense. The people who handle solitude well usually know, without thinking about it, what is on their list.
The third is the absence of an audience in their own head. This is the harder component to describe. A person who has spent their adult life narrating themselves to other people, in conversation or on social platforms or simply in their own anticipations of being seen, often finds that the narration continues when no one is there to receive it. The afternoon gets spent thinking about how the afternoon would sound described to someone else, rather than spent in the afternoon. The people who do solitude well have, by whatever route, mostly quieted that voice. They are doing the thing for the thing.
How childhood does and does not figure in
The folk theory of this competence is that you either acquired it as a child or you did not. The folk theory contains something true and overstates it.
What is true is that children who spent long stretches alone, with a moderate amount of boredom and a moderate amount of resourcefulness, got repeated practice at the three components above. They had to wait out the early interval many times. They developed an inventory of solitary pleasures by trial and error, because the alternative was sustained boredom. They had no audience in the room for many of the relevant hours, and the internal narrator either developed later or developed less centrally.
What the folk theory overstates is the inference that adults who did not have this childhood are stuck. Solitude looks, on the available evidence, more like a skill than a fixed disposition. Skills are learnable later. Learning them later is slower and feels more effortful, which is part of why the folk theory persists. The slowness is not evidence that the skill is unavailable to the learner. It is evidence that the learner is doing it as an adult.
What it looks like to build it now
The route is not mysterious. It involves spending some time alone, on purpose, repeatedly, and noticing what happens.
The first few afternoons are often unpleasant in the way described above. The restlessness in the opening twenty minutes is real, and is worse for adults who have spent years filling small intervals with a phone. The inventory of solitary pleasures has to be built from somewhere, often by returning to things the person used to enjoy before adult life crowded them out. The internal audience tends to quiet on its own as time accumulates, because the audience requires the assumption of being watched, and that assumption is easier to relax as the evidence builds that nobody is, in fact, watching the Saturday afternoon.
The thing to avoid, in the building phase, is interpreting the early discomfort as proof that one is not the sort of person who can do this. The early discomfort is, on examination, what the building phase consists of. It is also the point at which most attempts get abandoned.
Where this is not the right frame
The pattern this piece is describing is the lighter one: a few hours alone, by choice, in an otherwise socially adequate life, that the person would like to be able to handle better. A person spending many days alone, not by choice, and feeling worse over time rather than better, is in a different situation. Chronic loneliness, isolation maintained by circumstance rather than preference, and withdrawal that comes alongside low mood or anxiety are real and well-studied, and they do not yield to the practice this piece is describing. The right resource for those is a clinician, a doctor, or a community connection of some kind, not a longer reading list.
Within the lighter pattern, the more interesting question is one the Long papers do not directly address. It is whether the modern conditions under which adults try to build this capacity, conditions which include a device that supplies social contact at any moment of restlessness, make the early discomfort harder to push through than it would have been thirty years ago. The answer is probably yes, though the evidence is not yet what it should be. The implication is that the practice is now slightly more difficult to begin, which is a separate matter from whether the underlying capacity is still there to be built. On the available reading, it is.
