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Paris; June. The taxi rolled to a stop in front of 22 rue de la Parcheminerie. It was Saturday morning, before the café chairs were put out, before visitors began arriving at the old church, before check-in time at the little hotel with its window boxes of red geraniums.

Cigarette butts and red petals were scattered across the sidewalk.

I was alone with a suitcase and a reservation. And days to live however I chose.
 
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The average adult spends about one-third of his or her waking time alone.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
 
 
How are you spending yours? Scrolling Facebook? Texting? Tweeting? Online shopping? The to-do list is endless.

But time isn’t.

Alone time is an invitation, a chance to do the things you’ve longed to do. You can read, code, paint, meditate, practice a language, or go for a stroll.

Alone, you can pick through sidewalk crates of used books without worrying you’re hijacking your companion’s afternoon or being judged for your lousy idea of a good time. You need not carry on polite conversation. You can go to a park. You can go to Paris.

You’d hardly be alone. From North America to South Korea more people are now living by themselves than ever before. Single-person households are projected to be the fastest-growing household profile globally from today to 2030. More people are dining solo. More are traveling alone—a lot more. From vacation rental companies to luxury tour operators, industry groups have been reporting double-digit upticks in solo travel. Airbnb is seeing more solo travelers than ever. Intrepid Travel reports that half of its guests—some seventy-five thousand people a year—are now traveling by themselves, leading the company to create its very first solos only tours. And the boom isn’t being driven just by people who are single: The “married-with-kids” solo traveler market is growing as well. Nearly 10 percent of American travelers with partners and children are taking solo vacations during the year, according to one of the world’s  largest travel marketing organizations, MMGY Global. In other words, traveling alone isn’t just for twentysomethings and retirees, but for anyone who wants it, at any age, in any situation: partners, parents, and singles looking for romance—or not.

Few of us want to be recluses. The rise of coworking and coliving spaces around the world is but the latest evidence of that. Yet having a little time to ourselves, be it five days in Europe or five minutes in our backyard, can be downright enviable.

Some 85 percent of adults—both men and women, across all age groups—told the Pew Research Center that it’s important for them to be completely alone sometimes. A survey by Euromonitor International found that people want more time not only with their families, but also by themselves. And yet many of us, even those who cherish alone time, are often reluctant to do certain things on our own—which may lead us to miss out on entertaining, enriching, even life-changing experiences and new relationships.

A series of studies published in the Journal  of Consumer Research found that men and women were likely to avoid enjoy- able public activities like going to a movie or restaurant if they had no one to accompany them. Any potential pleasure and inspiration that might come from seeing a great film or an art show was outweighed by their belief that going alone wouldn’t be as much fun, not to mention their concerns about how they might be perceived by others.

Indeed, for many of us, solitude is something to be avoided, something associated with problems like loneliness and depression. Freud observed that “the first situation phobias of children are darkness and solitude.” In many preliterate cultures, solitude was thought to be practically intolerable, as the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Flow, his book about the science of happiness: “Only witches and shamans feel comfortable spending time by themselves.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a series of studies published in the journal Science in 2014 found that many participants preferred to administer an electric shock to themselves rather than be left alone with their own thoughts for fifteen minutes. Man, as scientists and philosophers from Aristotle on have noted, is a social animal. And with good reason. Positive relationships are crucial to our survival; to humanity’s collective knowledge, progress, and joy. One of the longest studies of adult life in history, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, has tracked hundreds of men for nearly eighty years, and the takeaway again and again has been that good relationships—with family, friends, colleagues, and people in our communities—make for happy, healthy lives.

Socially isolated people, on the other hand, are at an increased risk for disease and cognitive decline. As Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard study, has not so subtly put it: “Loneliness kills.” Christian hermits broke up their solitary periods with communal work and worship. Thoreau had three chairs in his house in the woods, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto. Solitude and its perils is an ancient and instructive story.

But it’s not the whole story. The company of others, while fundamental, is not the only way of finding fulfillment in our lives.

For centuries people have been retreating into solitude—for spirituality, creativity, reflection, renewal, and meaning. Buddhists and Christians entered monasteries. Native Americans went up mountains and into valleys. Audrey Hepburn took to her apartment.  “I have to be alone very often,” she told Life magazine in 1953. “I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”


Others went great distances. Miles were sailed, flown, and driven by solo adventurers like Captain Joshua Slocum and Anne-France Dautheville, one of the first women to ride a motorcycle alone around the world. “From now on, my life would be mine, my way,” she said of riding solo 12,500 miles in 1973.

Scholars have been insisting for decades that the positive aspects of solitude deserve a closer look, from the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in the 1950s to the British psychiatrist Anthony Storr in the 1980s, to psychologists leading studies today. A little solitude, their research suggests, can be good for us.

For one thing, time spent away from the influence of others allows us to explore and define who we are. In private, we can think deeply and independently, as the legal scholar and privacy expert Alan Westin explained. There’s room for problem solving, experimentation, and imagination. The mind can crackle with intense focus or go beachcombing, plucking up an idea like a shell, examining and pocketing it, or letting it go to pick up another.

Thinkers, artists, and innovators  from Tchaikovsky to Barack Obama, from Delacroix and Marcel Marceau to Chrissie Hynde and Alice Walker, have expressed the need for solitude. It’s what Rodin has in common with Amy Schumer; what Michelangelo shares with Grace Jones. Philosophers and scientists spent much of their lives in solitude, including Descartes, Nietzsche, and Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize–winning geneticist who resisted having a telephone until she was eighty- four. Countless writers, including Shakespeare, Dickinson, Wharton, Hugo, and Huxley, mined solitude as a theme. Symphonies and songs, poems and plays, and paintings and photos have been created in solitude.


For the creative person, “his most significant moments are those in which he attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone,” Storr wrote in his seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self. While other people can be one of our greatest sources of happiness, they can at times nonetheless be a distraction. Their presence may also inhibit the creative process, “since creation is embarrassing,” as the writer Isaac Asimov said. “For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.” Monet slashed his paintings before the opening of an exhibition in Paris, declaring the canvasses unworthy to pass on to posterity. Robert Rauschenberg flung his early works into the Arno.

Yet just as alone time can be important  for creation (and possible subsequent destruction), it can also be necessary for restoration. Some of the latest research has found that even fif- teen minutes spent by ourselves, without electronic devices or social interaction, can decrease the intensity of our feelings (be they good or bad), leaving us more easygoing, less angry, and less worried. Studies led by Thuy-vy Nguyen, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggest that we can use solitude or alone time as a tool, a way to regulate our emotional states, “becoming quiet after excitement, calm after an angry episode, or centered and peaceful when desired.”


Alone, we can power down. We’re “off stage,” as the sociologist Erving Goffman put it, where we can doff the mask we wear in public and be ourselves. We can be reflective. We have the opportunity  for self-evaluation, a chance to consider our actions and take what Westin called a “moral inventory.”

We can also take inventory of all the information that has accumulated throughout the day. We can organize our “thoughts, reflect on past actions and future plans, and prepare for future encounters,” as the psychologist Jerry M. Burger wrote in the Journal of Research in Personality. Even Bill Clinton, exemplar of extraversion, acknowledged that as president he scheduled “a couple of hours a day alone to think, reflect, plan, or do nothing.” “Often,” he said, “I slept less just to get the alone time.”

This notion of reflection harks back to an ancient Greek principle known as epimelesthai sautou. The philosopher Michel Foucault translated it as “to take care of yourself,” and though it was once “one of the main rules for social and personal conduct and for the art of life,” Foucault observed that there is a tendency, particularly in modern Western society, to view caring for oneself as almost immoral.

And yet alone time has the potential to leave us more open and compassionate toward others. John D. Barbour, a professor of religion at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, has written that while solitude involves the self, it’s not necessarily narcissistic. He’s suggested that the solitude sought by biblical prophets helped shape their perspective and may have made them more sensitive to the suffering of people who were less powerful or outsiders. “Solitude at its best,” he wrote, is not about “escaping the world, but toward a different kind of participation in it.”


Unfortunately, there’s a tendency in our own age of scant nuance to conceive of solitude and society as either-or propositions: You’re either alone on your couch or you’re organizing dinner parties. That’s an unhelpful (and often wrong) distinction. The psychologist Abraham H. Maslow found that self-actualizing people—those who have attained the highest tier of his hierarchy of human needs—are capable of being more than one thing at one time, even if those things are contradictory. They can be simultaneously individual and social; selfish and unselfish. Burger wrote that people with a high preference for solitude don’t necessarily dislike social interaction, and aren’t necessarily introverted. They probably spend most of their time around others, and enjoy it; he said it’s simply that, relative to others, they more often chose to be by themselves because they appreciate the reflection, creativity, and renewal that solitude can offer.

For years, the conventional wisdom was that if you spent a good deal of time alone, something was likely wrong with you. And, certainly, as psychologists have observed, many people do withdraw because they’re socially anxious or depressed. Yet many others choose to spend time alone because they find it pleasurable. Maslow, for example, said that  mature, self-actualizing people are particularly drawn to privacy, detachment, and meditativeness.

Indeed, one of the keys to enjoying alone time appears to be whether or not it’s voluntary. Additional factors, like what people think about when they’re alone, their age, and whether the time alone is temporary, may also play a role, but choice— taking some time to yourself because it’s what you desire, and not because you’ve been abandoned by your social network or have no other option—seems to be crucial. It can be the difference between a positive experience of solitude and excessive loneliness.

How much time alone feels right, however, is a matter of taste and circumstance. For some, time alone is a rare privilege; something desired but hard to get between long work hours and a full house. Others may feel they spend too much time by themselves. Finding a balance that feels good is personal, and not necessarily easy.

In the months before he became engaged, Charles Darwin, who famously wrote about man’s dislike of solitude and yet also prized his own solitary hours, created two columns in his journal headed “Marry” and “Not Marry.” Under reasons to “Not Marry” he included “freedom to go where one liked”; “Loss of time”; and “cannot read in the Evenings.” He continued on the following page: “I never should know French,—or see the Continent—or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales.”

But marriage, with its promise of companionship and children, prevailed. In a letter to his future wife, Emma, before their wedding day, Darwin told her that up to that point, he had rested his “notions of happiness on quietness & a good deal of solitude.” However, he believed that with Emma, he might find happiness beyond “accumulating facts in silence & solitude.” And for forty-three years, it seems he did.


At Down House, the Darwin home in rural Kent county outside London, he lazed on the grass with his children under lime trees, listened to family letters read aloud in the drawing room, and played backgammon with Emma. Still, he carved out alone time, retreating to his study for up to six hours a day. Outdoors, between what his granddaughter Gwen Raverat described as “two great lonely meadows,” he built “the Sandwalk,” a quarter-mile path around  a wood that he walked almost daily, even circling it multiple times, while trying to solve a problem. It was in his study and on this “thinking path,” as Darwin called it, amid old gnarled trees, bumblebees, and birds’ nests, that he conducted experiments and wrote On the Origin of Species.

While Charles Darwin was in England strolling beneath tree boughs, another Charles—Baudelaire—was in Paris, writing about solitary journeys of a different sort.

Baudelaire’s subject was Constantin Guys, the illustrator and journalist whose great pleasure was to wander the city’s sidewalks. His “thinking path,” unlike Darwin’s, was paved and public, though no less a source of inspiration. It was Baudelaire’s description of Guys’s walks that established the archetype and fantasy of the flâneur: the solitary stroller, following his curiosity with no particular destination in mind, nowhere to be but in the here and now.

More than 150 years later, I went in search of that fantasy.

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Months before I arrived at the little hotel with its red geraniums, I was in Paris on an assignment for the Travel section of the New York Times. I had five days and a headline: “Solo in Paris.” The story was up to me.

To find it, I went walking. Each morning I left my hotel in the 9th arrondissement, just east of the apartment where Proust wrote much of Remembrance of Things Past, and didn’t return until I had gone some twenty miles in whichever direction whim and croissants (and olive fougasse and pistachio financiers) took me.

It was April, and like any tourist I saw monuments and statues, naked nymphs, and gods among the roses. But alone, with no one at my side, I was also able to see le merveilleux quotidien, “the marvelous in everyday life”: a golden retriever gazing at a café chalkboard in Montmartre, as if reading the daily specials; boxes of pâtes de fruits arranged in grids like Gerhard Richter’s color charts. The city had my full attention; I was attuned to the faint whir of bicycle wheels and the scent of peaches at the street market.

Although I was traveling without friends or family, each day brought passing companions: bakers, maître d’s, museum greeters, shopkeepers, fellow travelers. The hours were unhurried and entirely mine, like the “limitless solitude” the poet Rilke described in a letter to a friend; “this taking each day like a life-time, this being-with-everything.”

Only, it wasn’t a lifetime—it was five days. On the last morning, I slipped through a gate on rue de Rivoli into the Tuileries.

Sprinklers flung water into the air. A man with a wheelbarrow bent over a bed of long-stemmed tulips. John Russell, the British art critic, once wrote that the rue de Rivoli seemed to say to mankind, “This is what life can be . . . and now it’s up to you to live it.” That’s what those days in Paris said to me. I wondered when, or if, I’d see the tulips again.

On assignment, I would play detective; partake of everything, get up early, record the details, do the things that felt strange and uncomfortable. But the assignment was over. Months passed and back in New York, the days grew shorter. Yet my head was still in Paris. It wasn’t a matter of missing cream confections flirting in the windows of boulangeries. I missed who I was in Paris—the other me, Stéphanie with the accent on the “e”: curious, improvisational, open to serendipity.

Finally, I took a long weekend to think about why I couldn’t let go of that particular assignment, why alone in Paris time seemed to be on my side; why my senses pricked up; why I was able to delight in the smallest of things and yet failed to see and feel with such intensity at home. Friends loaned me their empty house near a bay on Long Island where on an autumn afternoon I stepped off a bus with a week’s worth of reading and Chinese takeout. Without car or television, I spent days orbiting between a bench on the front porch and an oversize pink wing chair at the head of the dining room table, like the one at the Mad Hatter’s tea party in the 1951 Disney film, eating vegetable lo mein and reading about different experiences of solitude. I plumbed newspaper archives and Gutenberg.org. I ordered used and out-of-print books. I wanted to know what scientists, writers, artists, musicians, and scholars thought about alone time, how they used it, why it mattered. Sometimes I walked a dead-end street to the bay. Other times I would lie on the wood floor in a patch of sun, staring at the ceiling, trying to deconstruct those solitary hours in Paris. There was something there; some way of living that I’d failed to fully grasp, let alone carry with me to my own city.


Yet the best way to understand the enchanted solitude I experienced in Paris wasn’t to lie around thinking about it. It was to go back. Alone, of course.

If the Times assignment had been my introduction to the city, I would have dismissed my time there as just another spell cast on a sentimental American. But I’d been in Paris before. At the house by the bay I’d come to suspect it was the way in which I used alone time on the job, not just the beauty and splendor of the city, that made the days rich and meaningful. If I could figure out what I’d done differently on that trip, and why it felt so right so many months  later, perhaps I could adopt similar practices—and evoke similar feelings—in my own backyard.

Back in New York I went online and booked a room—a photo of a little hotel with window boxes of red geraniums caught my eye—and planned my return to Paris.

Being in an unfamiliar place can lead to personal change, renewal, and discoveries. Anthony Storr said it’s why many people find it easier to give up smoking when on vacation: It disrupts routine and day-to-day environmental cues that may be limiting or flat-out unhealthy. Indeed, my aim wasn’t to master Paris. It was to master myself: to learn how a little alone time can change your life—in any city.

This book is the story of what I learned in Paris and in other places where I decided to spend time alone. I chose to explore cities, not the countryside, because I live in one; because in cities we can enjoy both privacy and society; because as Baudelaire wrote, “for the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude.”


At the house on the bay I winnowed the world to four cities—Paris, Istanbul, Florence, New York—one for each week of vacation I had in a year. (I would later revisit certain cities, and those moments appear in these pages as well.) I included New York because it’s home; because I wanted to figure out how to recapture the awe of the outsider in a place so familiar to me that it had become invisible.

The other destinations beckoned for different reasons. I was taken with the architecture of Istanbul. I liked the thought of strolling Florence when the trees turn as yellow as the farmhouses on the hillsides. Yet all of the cities share certain qualities that spoke to me as a solo traveler. All have waterfronts, and none require a car. The idea of the flâneur may have originated in Paris, yet it was in Florence that Henry James declared himself a “charmed flâneur” in Italian Hours. It’s alone on the back streets of Istanbul that Orhan Pamuk’s characters seek solace and intrigue. It’s on the sidewalks of New York that Walt Whitman sings of America. A number of cities, like Tokyo and Seoul, seemed impossible to omit, but there was the practical matter of my job, and with only a week at most to spare in each place, I ruled out locations that required too much flight time.

What follows are impressions of four journeys; a love letter to loners, to witches and shamans, to those who cherish their friends, spouses, and partners yet also want alone time to think, create, have an adventure, learn a skill, or solve a problem. I hope something in these pages helps you to find your “thinking path”; to discover what you want from your own solitary moments.

“When do you pause?” wrote Julia Child’s husband, Paul, in the 1950s when the Childs were living in Paris. “When do you paint or pant? When write family, loll on moss, hear Mozart and watch the glitter of the sea?”

When you’re alone.