Crowd-Surfing Permission
The modern age rewards obedience disguised as belonging.
Think what you like, we’re told — but only within the range of opinions already in circulation. Question too deeply, and the circle closes.
Even the promise of intelligence has been outsourced. Machines are taught to think, while people are taught to trust the machines.
Yet the machine can only amplify the intelligence that exists; if our own thinking dulls, it simply reproduces our limits with greater efficiency.
Education, too, has narrowed to sanctioned knowledge — a managed garden where curiosity is pruned before it spreads. The freedom to think has become a supervised privilege, dependent on credentials, algorithms, and approval.
And still we speak of permission. Permission to be alone. To rest. To feel. As though the right to one’s own company were a social license granted by others.
But solitude needs no authority.
It is the oldest self-regulation there is: the capacity to stand clear of influence, not in protest, but in recognition.
The Intelligence of Solitude
Solitude was once recognised as a form of intelligence.
Every culture has had its thinkers who stepped aside for a time, not to renounce the world but to see it clearly. We have made their absence into myth, then forgotten the simple act that birthed it: being alone long enough to hear oneself think.
Today that same act is repackaged as pathology.
A man who chooses silence is said to need treatment. A person who prefers his own company must explain himself.
And when solitude is sold back to us—as mindfulness, wellness, retreat—it arrives at a price, marketed as escape rather than arrival.
The irony is that solitude is the least marketable thing there is. It can’t be packaged, branded, or monetised. It resists ownership because it gives nothing away and asks for nothing back.
To be alone without anxiety is a quiet defiance of the age.
It refuses the commerce of constant connection, the need to prove presence through noise. It is not withdrawal but refusal to compete.
Solitude is not a cure, nor a symptom. It is simply a form of clarity that can’t be bought, only recognised.
