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 their first solo. Not their license, not their first passenger, the first time the right seat is empty and there is no one to fix it if you get it wrong. Solo mountaineers remember the same thing; Messner soloed Everest without oxygen and the mountaineering world has been arguing about it ever since. The interesting development is that the frontier keeps widening. Solo founders. Solo projects. Things that used to require an expedition now require one person and good enough tools. So it is worth asking, seriously, why anyone chooses to do things alone.

Freedom from the noise

Start at the bottom, with the petty reasons, because they are real even if they are not the point.

Solo is freedom, and freedom is mostly freedom from. Free from being judged. Free from the noise that rides along with every human interaction: having to hear and bear other people's opinions, adjust to their schedules, manage their state. These are the reasons people give out loud, and they are a little embarrassing, because they are about other people. The tell is that the ones who actually do high stakes things solo seem to be past this already. They are not soloing the north face to avoid your opinion of them. They stopped tracking your opinion a long time ago. So judgment is a reason, but it is the reason you grow out of on the way to the real ones.

Reducing the variables

Then come the rational reasons, and these hold up.

Every collaborator is latency and overhead. Coordination is a cost that scales badly, and most of what people call teamwork is just paying that cost and calling it virtue. Going solo removes the coordination problem by removing the coordinates. You bring exactly one variable from your side into the contest, yourself, and everything that goes wrong from here is legible because there is only one place it could have come from.

This is also, quietly, what "shyness" is. Shyness is not fear of people. Shyness is unwillingness to further complicate an already complicated search space. You are looking at a hard problem, the space is high dimensional and badly conditioned, and someone wants to add their dimensions to it. Of course you flinch. It is not a social defect, it is a correctly calibrated reluctance to make the optimization harder than it already is.

The whole beauty

There is an aesthetic reason too, and it is less petty than it sounds.

If you have a partner with you, you sometimes forget to look at the mountains. Alone, no stick or stone fails to captivate your heart. Beth Dutton put the ugly honest version: I don't like to share the things I find beautiful. And this connects to something larger than taste. As Nick Land eloquently put it, Beauty is an experience of truth, truth is just reality, and the contest with reality is the most direct experience of it there is. So wanting the whole beauty undivided and wanting the unmediated contact with reality turn out to be the same wish. The partner is, gently, a layer of indirection you did not ask for.

Owning the result

Now the ultimate reason, the one the others were standing in front of.

You do things solo because you want to own one hundred percent of the result, no less, whatever it turns out to be, win or fail. It is the manifestation of absolute responsibility. You cannot pass the buck when you are solo. It is all yours; you succeed or you disappear completely. There is no evasion of accountability before heaven, or fate, or whatever you want to call the thing that keeps the books. Every alibi is gone, and the absence of alibis is not a burden, it is the point. The clarity people chase on the wall is mostly just this: for a few hours nothing in the outcome belongs to anyone else.

Agency against entropy

Under all of that there is one more layer, and it is the only one I actually believe without irony.

Failure does not come from secret conspiratorial counter-moves by hidden forces. It comes from the entropy of reality itself. Reality is chaotic and reality is always entropy-maxxing, and most of what feels like opposition is just the second law doing its job. Now consider what you are. You are what emerged from the Big Bang: symmetry breaking, the separation of forces, nucleosynthesis, gas collapsing into stars, rock, the primordial soup, life, consciousness, and finally agency, this whole improbable chain of local order pulled out of an expanding furnace. And this "you", this thing with an "I am", strives against the very entropy it climbed out of.

Agency is the only counterforce to entropy. Life is local entropy reduction and nothing else, and the Alleingänger, alone with his own self-consciousness, is that reduction in its purest form: one ordered thing standing against all the disorder, counting on nobody.

The superposition

So why solo, in the end. It is a superposition of all of the above, with varying coefficients, and some of the terms overlap or are quietly the same term written twice. For me personally it collapses to two amplitudes that are also, somehow, one:

The rational one: signal over noise, minimum latency, minimum uncertainty, exactly one variable from my side entering the contest with reality.

The esoteric one: at some point you understand what you are, the far end of that chain from the Big Bang, and you understand that this you exists to push back on entropy, and the cleanest form of that push is alone.

I keep one clamp on the esoteric one so it does not become mysticism. Reality stays incalculable; as Messner said, life in the mountains is unberechenbar. P versus NP all the way down. You contest it, you do not get to precompute it.

Two rules fall out of all this. 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. Second, and this is the strange part, the self-doubt disappears the moment you actually commit. Once you know it is only on you to unfuck whatever you fuck up, the wobble just goes. The commitment is the cure.

The descent

That answers the why. But there is a question the summit does not settle, the one you only meet on the way down: you cannot stay up there, and you cannot leave them either. It is an illusion that you can ever truly be alone, disconnected from the noosphere; the connection survives even when the company does not. The only reason to ever stop would be to encounter the one person who is the lost part of you, and most Alleingänger never do, and go anyway.

So the real question was never how to leave society, since you cannot. 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 you appear to move amongst them. Do not say at once what you think, do not attach too precise a meaning to what they say, do not expect much of them morally or intellectually, and let their opinion of you fall below the noise floor where it belongs. Your relation to them becomes purely objective. You are present, you are even pleasant, and you are 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, loud in his complaint that the fire burns. The fool is the one from the first section, 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 just freeze. The correct coupling is weak but nonzero, enough to take the warmth, never enough to take the shape.

So solitude turns out not to be a place you go. It is a state you carry, and the mountain is just where you first learn to hold it. Once you can hold it there, you can hold it anywhere. You never fully arrive, even when present. That is not a wound and it is not a cost. It is the finished form of the thing.

*"Only when I move does it become possible for me to accept this loneliness." Then keep moving.*

Written by

l4rz