I realized I enjoy my own company more than most plans—and that changed everything

It was a Saturday afternoon about three years ago, when I finally realized I preferred my own company.

I’d had plans—a group thing, a dinner, the kind of social occasion I would have said yes to automatically without thinking too hard about whether I actually wanted to go.

A few hours before I was supposed to leave, the plans fell through. The group chat sent its apologies.

And I noticed, before I could think about it, that my first response wasn’t disappointment. It was something closer to relief.

I sat with that for a while, because it surprised me.

I like the people in that group. I like dinners. I’m not someone who considers herself a hermit or a loner or someone who struggles socially. But there was something real and unambiguous in that initial response that I couldn’t entirely explain away.

What followed was a quieter Saturday than I’d planned, and a better one.

I cooked something I’d been meaning to try. I read without keeping track of time. I went to bed early and woke up feeling like I’d actually rested. And I found myself wondering—not for the first time, but more honestly than usual—whether I’d been saying yes to a lot of things I didn’t actually want, out of habit, or obligation, or some assumption that more social activity was always better than less.

It’s not that I don’t like people. I just like this more.

That turned out to be a more useful thought than I expected. Once I let myself mean it, things got clearer. Here’s what changed.

1. I stopped treating solitude as something to justify

For a long time, choosing to stay in felt like it required a reason. Tired. Busy. Not feeling well. Something that made staying in defensible rather than just chosen.

Without a reason, it felt vaguely self-indulgent—like I was opting out of something I was supposed to be doing.

What I eventually stopped believing was that wanting to be alone needed to be justified more than wanting to be with people did. Nobody asks why you want to go to the party. The asymmetry had always been there; I’d just accepted it without noticing. Once I started treating time alone as a preference rather than a consolation prize, the whole calculus of how I made decisions shifted.

2. I got better at knowing what I actually need

There’s a version of social busyness that functions as avoidance—of quiet, of whatever thoughts come up when the noise stops. I’m not immune to this.

But years of choosing my own company more deliberately have made me better at distinguishing between wanting people because I genuinely want them and wanting people because I don’t want to be alone with whatever’s going on.

Studies on solitude show that people who regularly spend intentional time alone—not just by accident—tend to understand their emotions better and get clearer on what really matters to them.

The quiet surfaces things. People who sit with it long enough tend to know themselves better for it.

3. I started showing up differently when I did see people

This was the unexpected part. I assumed enjoying my own company more would mean seeing people less and caring less. The opposite happened.

Because I was saying no more often, the things I said yes to actually mattered. I showed up differently. More present, more genuinely interested, less going through the motions.

I think about this when I’m tempted to fill a weekend out of vague obligation. The plans I make from a place of genuine wanting are different from the plans I make because I think I should be doing something. The people at the other end of those plans can usually feel the difference too.

4. I stopped feeling like I was missing out

FOMO is a strange thing when you actually look at it. It’s not usually about wanting the specific event—it’s about a fear of being on the wrong side of something, of everyone else being somewhere together while you’re elsewhere alone.

That fear has almost nothing to do with whether you’d actually enjoy the thing.

Research on social comparison keeps showing that FOMO fades when people feel grounded in their own choices—when you really feel like ‘this is where I want to be,’ the alternatives just don’t have the same pull. For me, that sense of settling came slowly. Eventually, the other options stopped feeling like things I was missing.

5. I stopped acting like my energy was unlimited

I’d heard the introvert/extrovert framework described in terms of energy—that some people gain it from being around others, some people spend it—but it hadn’t quite clicked as something that applied to me personally until I started paying attention. I’m not categorically introverted. I have plenty of social energy in the right context. But that energy is finite, and for a long time, I was spending it without tracking the account at all.

Research on social fatigue shows that even fun social interactions take a lot out of us—mentally and emotionally. People who treat alone time as real recovery, instead of just something to get through, usually show up more fully when they’re with others. Alone time isn’t withdrawal—it’s maintenance.

6. I stopped explaining myself so much

There’s a specific social tax that comes with preferring your own company: the explaining. Why you didn’t come. Why you’re leaving early. The cumulative effect of justifying your own preferences is that you start to believe they need justifying.

At some point, I stopped providing the explanations and noticed that most people weren’t as interested in the answer as I’d assumed. They asked as a social reflex. A simple, warm “I had something going on” handled it. The moment I stopped performing guilt about my choices, other people stopped expecting it. That was a lesson I should have learned earlier.

7. I found out what I actually liked doing

This sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but it took me longer than it should have: spending time alone gives you the chance to find out what you actually enjoy when no one else’s preferences are shaping the options. Not what you’d choose from a menu of social possibilities, but what you’d do with an entirely open afternoon if filling it were entirely up to you.

Psychologists who study how people spend their free time have found that when people do things they genuinely enjoy—rather than what’s expected of them—they feel a lot more satisfied.

I discovered I like to cook things that take a long time. I like reading things no one around me is reading. Long walks without a destination. None of it is interesting. All of it is mine.

8. I got comfortable with silence

Most people are less comfortable with quiet than they realize, because they’ve arranged their lives to avoid finding out. Sound is always available. When I started choosing my own company more, I started experiencing the quiet more—and there was an adjustment period nobody tells you about.

The adjustment was worth it. What comes after the discomfort is something that’s genuinely hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it: a kind of settled quality to the air, a sense of being in the room rather than just in your own head. I don’t always get there. But when I do, it’s one of the better things I know how to access.

9. I let some relationships be what they actually were

When you’re clearer about what you actually want, relationships that were mostly built on proximity or habit become easier to see. Some are still genuinely valuable. Some were being maintained by your availability more than a real connection.

The relationships that survived my being less available got better. The ones that depended on me showing up to fill space quietly reorganized around my absence. Both outcomes were fine.

10. I stopped waiting to feel like myself again

There was a version of me, for years, that felt perpetually slightly behind—like the real, settled, fully-functional version was just around the corner, after the next thing was handled or the next period was over.

That feeling had a lot of sources, but one of them, I think, was that I’d built very little into the life that was purely for me, in the specific sense of time that was genuinely quiet and genuinely mine.

That version doesn’t wait anymore. She knows where to find herself.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.