How To Be Alone Forever by Anonymous © Copyright 2018 Published as a free ebook March 2018 1 My dear, accept this dedication; it is given over, as it were, blindfolded, but therefore undisturbed by any consideration, in sincerity. Who you are, I know not; where you are, I know not; what your name is, I know not. Yet you are my hope, my joy, my pride, and my unknown honour. –Soren Kierkegaard ‘The Crowd is Untruth’ 2 CONTENTS Introduction Part One: Looking After Yourself Alone Part Two: Hell Is Other People Part Three: Alone Forever From Day To Day Part Four: Exit Strategies Part Five: Media Part Six: Escape From Alone Forever Part Seven: How To Be Alone Forever Postscript: Das Boot Appendix: The Practical Tips 3 Introduction A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you. -Rumi 4 How To Be Alone Forever is a practical guide to daily life for those who are completely alone in the world. That bears repeating, using slightly different words: This book is about how to live from day to day, in the short, medium, and long terms, whilst being completely Alone. Forever. To be Alone Forever, in the near-literal sense, is a rare and strange state to be in. One of its many peculiarities is that the condition is only explicable to those who are in it. If you are not Alone Forever, this book is not for you. What does it mean to be Alone Forever? This turns out to be an unexpectedly tricky question to answer. The shortest and simplest answer is that the person who is Alone Forever is not in any kind of romantic relationship with another person, never has been in one, and most likely never will be in one. Being Alone Forever brings with it a range of practical challenges. Which is what this book is primarily about. The reason for being Alone Forever is of secondary importance to the fact of being so. Regular people cannot understand Alone Forever. The Alone Forever understand it well enough – they are it – but nobody else does. So it does bear repeating, many times. If you are Alone Forever, you are not now (and nor have you ever been) in a romantic relationship with another person, and there is little prospect of you ever being in one. You will also, typically, have very few friends – usually only one or two good ones. You might even have no friends at all. All of society’s customs, traditions, institutions and assumptions are built around the presupposition that people are connected to other people in a multitude of intimate ways that you, being Alone Forever, are not. There are consequences. Daily life for you is vastly different to daily life for everybody else in your world. Your life is unrecognisable to them. You are effectively 5 invisible. You have to get through life completely alone, without any of the practical and emotional support that people commonly provide each other. It all poses a multitude of practical problems, that this book provides assistance with. What kinds of problems? Everybody has somebody. You don’t. Unless you are a literal hermit, your life will still intersect with other people on a regular basis. Even if that’s just at work, or within whatever remains to you of your biological family. Those other people, whoever they are and wherever you encounter them, will have lives. They will assume that you too must have a life: a world of people and events and friendship and love and sex. How do you deal with other people when they are curious and ask you questions about this non-existent life? And conversely, how do you deal with other people when they show no curiosity about you, and ask you no questions (as is more often the case)? How do you care for your own health, mental and physical, as time passes? How do you cope with a suffocating sense of being the most complete, abject failure who ever walked the Earth? What will you do with all your spare time? Other people have family and friends to spend time with. You are Alone Forever. What can possibly occupy the thousands of empty hours that other people occupy with… other people? As you get older, how do you deal with issues that arise from the natural ageing process? You will have nobody to help you when you are old and sick. What will you do, when your old age comes? What steps can you take now, to help yourself then? Why do anything? Why bother living out a natural lifespan at all? One of the most common sub-types of Alone Forever is made up of those who are certain they will not reach old age, or even middle age. If you are one of these, do you just hope to randomly die at some point? Or should you make… arrangements? Should you commit suicide? If so, how, and when? If not, why not? Suicide is never completely off the table for the Alone Forever. We have a unique perspective on the question. We know that suicide can be a sensible solution to a set of practical problems, rather than an act of life-denying, abject despair. 6 What about escaping from Alone Forever? Why not get out, and climb aboard the same boat that everybody else is on? Would you still want to escape, if you could? Is escape even still possible? Where are the escape routes located? How do you get there? All these, and more, are questions that will be addressed in this book. If you have read this far and you still don’t understand what it means to be Alone Forever, congratulations, you are not Alone Forever, and this book is certainly not for you. As for the rest of you – I will see you on the next page. 7 TYPES AND SUBTYPES When we think of the future, we imagine it as the outcome of our present circumstances. We extrapolate from where we are now, to envision where we will end up. We who are Alone Forever tend to have vivid imaginations. We believe we know how things will end for us. The life lived by somebody who is Alone Forever has several distinct possible outcomes. Here are the most common: 1) You escape being Alone Forever while you’re still young. Many of the teenagers and twentysomethings who pick up this book will escape. Seems impossible now, but you will escape. Sooner than you think, you will no longer be Alone Forever. If you’re a young person, you’re almost certainly going to find a way, or a way will find you. Being Alone Forever, for most young people, is just a stage you are passing through, even if you don’t currently know it. 2) You succumb to the despair of being Alone Forever, and kill yourself. A relatively rare outcome, this one. I don’t have any hard data (the Alone Forever are not a well-studied tribe of people), but it seems intuitively correct to say that most people who are Alone Forever refrain from killing themselves. If we have serious illnesses, mental or physical, then yes, we’re rather keen to get on with it and get out of this place. But otherwise? Nope. We go on, living our empty, pointless lives, until nature does the job for us. It is hard to kill yourself. It’s hard to steel yourself to do it. It’s hard to find a good method of doing it. Easier to plod along, day to day, hoping something will turn up. This is the manner – plodding along from day to day – in which most of us get through the danger zone when suicide is most likely. I’ll talk some more about this in the later section on Suicide. 8 3) You bumble through, somehow, and get into your 30s and 40s, where you make a concerted effort – or you just get lucky – and manage to scramble onto the lifeboat just before your strength gives out. This will be the path followed by a goodly sized portion of this book’s readership. Escape for you will come along a lot later than for others, but escape is still escape. Well done, and don’t kid yourself that you miss your old Alone Forever life. 4) Nothing ever happens to you. You never escape. You live your entire lifespan, however long that is, just as you are right now. Alone Forever. This is the group for whom this book was written. I am a member of this group. For you to extract the maximum benefit from this book, you should be, too. Those of us in this 4th category eventually reach some sort of accommodation with ourselves. We discover that the state of being Alone Forever is not so bad after all. We’re perfectly fine with being who we are. The days when we made massive efforts to pretend to be somebody else are a long way behind us. Now the only outstanding question is: what to do about everything? At this point, you might think you know what kind of book this book is going to be. ‘Oh, this is one of those make-the-best-of-what-you’ve-got types of self-help books…’ Well, it is, and it isn’t. All I’m here to do is show you how things have gone for me, and make some practical recommendations for daily living that will be useful to anybody who is Alone Forever. Whatever type you are and whatever stage you’re at, there is something in this book for you. Perhaps you’re just starting out, just realising something is very wrong. Maybe you’re a scared teenager, watching all your peers embark on their lives, with a horrible, sinking feeling in your stomach. Or you’re somewhere in the middle, a young adult moving through your twenties, and having to watch your few remaining friends getting married and starting their own actual ‘lives’. While you get on with… while you get on with what? While you get on with nothing. Going for walks. Watching TV. Reading! 9 Or perhaps you’re a long way past the opening acts of the Alone Forever drama. You’re an older adult now. You’re nearing middle-age. Or you are middle-aged. You get up, you go to work, you watch TV, you read a few pages of a book, you go to bed. Your life is a peculiar sort of joke. You’re constantly surprised that you haven’t got around to killing yourself yet. Or perhaps you’re near the stage where I currently am. Alone Forever and… not minding it. Seriously. It is possible to get here, and for ‘here’ to be your permanent mode. Most of the misery of being Alone Forever comes from struggling against it, twisting and turning on the spot, trying to escape because you think that’s what you have to do – because you think that’s what you should do. And you should struggle. At the early-to-middle stages of being Alone Forever, you definitely can and should do your best to escape. But by the middle-to-end stages of the process, the calculus changes. After a certain point of being Alone Forever, if escape has not happened, escape can never happen. This book has been written primarily for those who are at or approaching this crucial inflection point, or who need a helping hand to get there. Clarity and contentment arise when we stop fighting who we plainly are, and wholeheartedly embrace these peculiar Alone Forever lives that fate has provided us. 10