True solitude is being uninterrupted by the thoughts of others, or at least that’s what I’ve been telling people for years, since 2019 actually when I first heard someone say it on the Ezra Klein Show, and I’ve been telling people it was Will Storr because I guess I also listened to his interview with Ezra Klein and it seems like something he’d say, and yet it turns out that it was Cal Newport (or that’s what ChatGPT Deep Research tells me because of course that’s how I checked), and for some reason I think I’d have repeated it less if I had remembered it was Cal Newport and not Will Storr, but I can’t really tell you why, though I wonder if it’s because I enjoy Will Storr as an author more than Cal Newport, or actually if it’s because Cal Newport speaks like Simon Sinek giving a TED Talk, which… I literally don’t know if he does, but in my memory he does, and anyway, what’s the matter with that, and what do I have against Simon Sinek, because I can’t think of much except that I worked with a consultant once who quoted him every five bloody minutes, and I think that made me dislike Simon Sinek a little bit, which is unreasonable but true… so wait a minute, I like the idea less because a consultant annoyed me into disliking Simon Sinek and Cal Newport maybe-but-might-not-actually-sound-like Simon Sinek giving a TED Talk, and I’m sitting here by myself trying to decide what I think and actually I’m just being interrupted by the thoughts of others, and even if all of that wasn’t true I’d be sat here by myself thinking about solitude and the strongest idea I have comes from someone else six years ago, so I can’t even consider solitude without being interrupted by the thoughts of others, in which case I’ll never experience solitude, at least by that definition, but maybe I’m supposed to come up with my own, and now because I cannot stop myself from being interrupted by the thoughts of others and because I remembered something you’re supposed to forget I’ve lost the game, and if you’re reading this you’re both being interrupted by my thoughts (and the thoughts of not-Will-Storr-also-known-as-Cal-Newport and Simon Sinek and some consultant and maybe every TED speaker you’ve ever listened to and maybe Ezra Klein and every guest he’s ever spoken with) and AND and you have also lost the game, and if you don’t know what the game is you might Google the game and land on the Wikipedia page and be interrupted by that and every other link on the page and every other tab in your browser, and finally you might tell someone about the game and the fact that you’ve lost the game and they might or might not know about the game and they’ll both lose it and learn about it and… and.