Alleingänger

"I can scarcely go on. No despair, no happiness, no anxiety. I have not lost the mastery of my feelings, there are actually no more feelings. I consist only of will. After each few meters this too fizzles out in unending tiredness. Then I think nothing. I let myself fall, just lie there. For an indefinite time I remain completely irresolute. Then I make a few steps again." (Reinhold Messner, alone, near the top)

Every private pilot remembers the first solo - not the license, not the first passenger, but the first time the right seat is empty and nothing gets fixed by anyone else. Solo mountaineers remember the same event; Messner climbed Everest alone, without oxygen, and the argument about it has not ended. What deserves attention is the direction of the trend. Undertakings that once required an expedition now require one person and adequate tools, and the frontier of the solo keeps widening - founders, projects, whole disciplines. Why would anyone choose it? Considered superficially, the choice is puzzling; considered carefully, it is overdetermined.

A few deliberately unsorted notes on the reasons:

(1) Freedom - which is mostly freedom from. From being judged, from the noise that rides along with every human interaction: other people's opinions, schedules, states, all requiring management. These are the reasons people admit to, and they are slightly embarrassing, because they are still about other people. (The tell: those who actually do high-stakes things alone stopped tracking your opinion long ago. They are not on the north face to escape it.) Judgment-avoidance is a reason - but it is the reason one grows out of, on the way to the real ones.

(2) Variable reduction. Every collaborator is latency and overhead; coordination is a cost that scales badly, and most of what is called 'teamwork' is that cost, rebranded as virtue. Going solo removes the coordination problem by removing the coordinatees. Exactly one variable enters the contest from your side - yourself - and everything that subsequently goes wrong is legible, because there is only one place it could have come from. (This is also, quietly, what 'shyness' is: not fear of people, but a correctly calibrated reluctance to add someone else's dimensions to a search space already high-dimensional and badly conditioned. The flinch is not a defect; it is calibration.)

(3) The whole beauty. With a partner present, one sometimes forgets to look at the mountains; alone, no stick or stone fails to captivate. (Beth Dutton supplies the ugly-honest version: I don't like to share the things I find beautiful.) This is less petty than it sounds. Beauty is an experience of truth (Nick Land), truth is just reality, and the contest with reality is the most direct experience of reality there is. Wanting the beauty undivided and wanting the contact unmediated turn out to be the same wish. A partner is a layer of indirection nobody ordered.

(4) Ownership. The solo undertaking returns one hundred percent of the result - no less, whatever it turns out to be, win or fail. There is no evasion of accountability before heaven, fate, or whatever else keeps the books. Every alibi is gone, and the absence of alibis is not a burden but the point. It is the subtraction of alibis that makes the summit clean. Nothing in the outcome belongs to anyone else.

One more layer runs beneath the notes:

Failure does not come from conspiratorial counter-moves by hidden forces. It comes from the entropy of reality itself, which is chaotic and always entropy-maxxing; most of what feels like 'opposition' is the second law, doing its job. Now consider what is doing the resisting. A thing that emerged from the Big Bang through symmetry breaking, the separation of forces, nucleosynthesis, collapsing gas, rock, soup, life, consciousness, and finally agency - an improbable chain of local order pulled out of an expanding furnace, terminating in something that says 'I am' and strives against the very entropy it climbed out of. Life is local entropy reduction and nothing else. Agency is its cutting edge, and the Alleingänger - alone with his own self-consciousness - is the reduction in its purest available form: one ordered thing against all the disorder, counting on nobody.

So: why solo? A superposition of all of the above, with varying coefficients, several of the terms being the same term written twice. For me it collapses to two amplitudes that are also, somehow, one - the rational (signal over noise, minimum latency, one variable entering the contest) and the esoteric (the far end of that chain from the Big Bang exists to push back on entropy, and the cleanest push is made alone). What keeps the esoteric term from curdling into mysticism: reality remains incalculable - unberechenbar, in Messner's word for the mountains - P versus NP all the way down. It is contested, never precomputed.

Two rules fall out. First: this is not for everyone, and to solo in a state of self-doubt is a crime - the doubt will kill you, and it will deserve to. If that sentence reads as cruelty, this practice is not for you; you do not need it. Second - and this is the strange part - the doubt disappears at the moment of actual commitment. Once it is only on you to unfuck whatever you fuck up, the wobble goes. The disqualifying condition is dissolved by the act it was supposed to forbid. The commitment is the cure.

That answers the way up. The summit, however, is not a place to stay: the descent is built into the climb, and it ends where the people are. Total disconnection from the noosphere is an illusion in any case; the connection survives even when the company does not. (The only reason to ever stop would be to meet the one person who is the lost part of you. Most Alleingänger never do - and go anyway.)

So the real question was never how to leave society, since that cannot be done. The question is at what distance to stand from it. Schopenhauer wrote the protocol two centuries ago, in the Counsels: take some of your solitude with you into company; be alone even while moving amongst them; do not say at once what you think, do not attach too precise a meaning to what they say, expect little of them morally or intellectually, and let their opinion of you fall below the noise floor where it belongs. The relation becomes purely objective. Present, even pleasant - and not there.

This is not misanthropy; it is impedance matching. Society is a fire: the wise man warms himself at a proper distance, while the fool grabs at it, gets scorched, and runs off to shiver in solitude, loudly complaining that fire burns. (The fool is the one from note (1), soloing to escape judgment - his distance is a recoil, not a setting.) Couple too tightly and you thermalize into the crowd; decouple completely and you freeze. The correct coupling is weak but nonzero: enough to take the warmth, never enough to take the shape.

Solitude, then, is not a place one goes. It is a state one carries, and the mountain is merely where it is first learned to be held; held there once, it can be held anywhere. The Alleingänger never fully arrives, even when present. That is not a wound, and it is not a cost. It is the finished form of the thing.

(Messner again, from the same altitude: "Only when I move does it become possible for me to accept this loneliness." The descent, too, is made in steps …)

Written by

l4rz