Last week, someone I used to work with reached out. She’d moved to Copenhagen for work and wanted to tell me something: “Everyone here just… sits alone at cafes. And nobody thinks they’re sad.” She laughed, but I heard something else in her voice — relief, maybe. Permission.
For years, she’d treated her need for solitude like a symptom to cure, scheduling every lunch with colleagues, filling weekends with plans she didn’t want. Now she was learning what Scandinavians seem to know in their bones: being alone isn’t broken. We’re the ones who’ve been treating it wrong.
I’ve been thinking about this since I left clinical practice. We pathologize solitude in ways that would baffle most Scandinavians. We say “table for one?” with that particular inflection. We ask single people when they’re going to “find someone,” as if their current state is a waiting room.
We’ve created an entire therapeutic vocabulary around the supposed dangers of isolation, but we’ve confused chosen solitude with unwanted loneliness so thoroughly that we can’t tell them apart anymore.
The difference between alone and lonely
Here’s what twelve years of listening to people taught me: most of us don’t actually know what solitude feels like because we’ve never let ourselves have it. We fill every gap with podcasts, scroll through transitions, schedule ourselves into exhaustion. Then we wonder why we feel disconnected — not from others, but from ourselves.
In Scandinavian cultures, there’s a different baseline assumption. Time alone isn’t empty space waiting to be filled. It’s necessary architecture. Karl Ove Knausgård, the Norwegian author, puts it simply: “It’s good to be alone.” Not sometimes good, not good for certain people — just good, period, like sleep or water.
I notice this difference most clearly in my morning routine now. Three mornings a week, I work from a coffee shop in Northeast Portland. I have my corner spot, order the same thing, and sit there for hours without talking to anyone. In another cultural context, this might read as isolation. But I’m doing exactly what I watched happen in Stockholm cafes during a conference years ago — people sitting alone, reading, writing, thinking, completely comfortable in their own company. No performance of productivity, no apologetic body language. Just presence.
The research backs this up. A study examining solo nature experiences across Norway, Germany, and New Zealand found that solo time in natural settings was consistently associated with positive emotions and a sense of connection, with the effect being particularly pronounced in Norway. This isn’t about introversion or social anxiety. It’s about a cultural understanding that solitude serves a function.
What solitude actually does
We talk about self-care like it’s bubble baths and face masks, but real self-care might be simpler: learning to be alone without panic. After my divorce, I lived alone for the first time in my adult life. The first month was brutal — not because I missed my ex, but because I’d never had to figure out my own rhythms without negotiating them against someone else’s.
Did I actually like eating dinner at 5:30, or had that been a compromise? Did I want background music while I cooked, or had I been filling someone else’s need for sound? These seem like small questions, but they add up to something larger: without solitude, we lose track of where we end and others begin.
This is what attachment theory gets at, though we rarely frame it this way. Secure attachment isn’t just about connection — it’s about being able to tolerate separation without losing yourself. It’s knowing you exist even when nobody’s watching. Most of us never developed this because we went from family homes to dorms to partnerships, with maybe a few months of studio apartment living that we treated like a crisis to resolve.
I see it in my own resistance sometimes. Last weekend, I had plans cancel and found myself with an entire Saturday free. My first instinct was to text other people, find replacement plans. Instead, I went hiking in the Gorge alone.
Not because I’m particularly outdoorsy — I’m not — but because altitude and effort do something to my thinking that nothing else quite manages. Halfway up the trail, I remembered why I do this: in solitude, you can’t hide from your own thoughts. You have to actually process what you’re carrying.
The practice of being alone
Scandinavian cultures have structures for this. They have words we don’t — Danish *hygge* isn’t just about cozy gatherings, it’s also about creating comfortable solitude. Swedish *lagom* suggests moderation, including in social interaction. Finnish people have a whole culture around sitting in saunas in silence, even with others present.
We could learn from this structural approach. Solitude isn’t something that just happens; it’s something you practice. I read in the evenings now — actual books, not screens — as a matter of principle. It’s my defense against doomscrolling, which I’ve come to understand as a form of self-harm I recognize completely and resist imperfectly. But the reading isn’t the point. The point is the ritual of ending the day in my own company, not numbing out but actually present.
When I was practicing, I’d see this pattern repeatedly: clients who couldn’t stand to be alone with themselves for twenty minutes, who filled every silence with noise, every pause with activity. They weren’t clinically anxious or depressed. They were culturally trained to treat solitude as failure. The ones who learned to be alone — really alone, without distraction or numbing — invariably reported the same thing: they finally understood what they actually wanted, not what they thought they should want.
Making space for solitude
This isn’t about becoming a hermit or rejecting connection. It’s about recognizing that solitude and connection aren’t opposites — they’re complementary. You can’t give what you don’t have, and if you’ve never met yourself in silence, what exactly are you offering in relationship?
I think about this when I see people photographing their coffee cups for Instagram, performing solitude rather than experiencing it. Real solitude doesn’t photograph well. It looks like staring out a window for ten minutes. It looks like walking without podcasts. It looks like eating dinner without a screen.
Start small if this feels foreign. Five minutes of actual quiet in the morning before you check your phone. A walk around the block without input. Eating one meal a week in actual silence. Notice the discomfort — it’s supposed to be there at first. We’ve trained ourselves to treat alone as emergency, so of course the alarm bells ring.
But underneath that discomfort, if you wait long enough, something else emerges. Not loneliness but presence. Not isolation but clarity. The Scandinavians have words for this too, but maybe we don’t need them. Maybe we just need to stop treating solitude like a problem and start treating it like what it actually is: a basic human need we’ve been taught to fear.
Conclusion
The paradox is that in avoiding solitude, we’ve created more loneliness. We’re surrounded by people but disconnected from ourselves, performing connection rather than experiencing it. The Scandinavian approach offers a different model: solitude as foundation, not failure. Being alone as skill, not symptom.
The person who reached out from Copenhagen sent a follow-up message last week. She’s been going to cafes alone every Sunday morning now, reading for hours. “Nobody asks if I’m okay,” she wrote. “They assume I am.” And for the first time in years, she actually is. Not because she’s learned to be around people better, but because she’s finally learned to be alone.