Loner or individualist

Consider the word "loner". What do you envisage?

A person out on his own. A misfit. Someone who has few friends if any. Suspicious. Furtive. Not to be trusted. And, where the media are concerned, almost invariably male. General view: negative.

Now consider the word "individualist". What do you envisage now?

A person out on his own. Someone who does not conform, but in a positive sense. He will likely have friends but does not always do what they expect. Entrepreneurial, will take risks, bold, challenging. More likely to be male, but not always. General view: positive.

And when does a loner become an individualist?  Or vice versa.

We live in a world where people who choose to be alone in one way or another are not easily understood. In a business sense though it is much more likely to be seen as a positive quality than in a social sense.

Though quite why baffles me.

It must be some 12 to 15 years ago now, when I was still spending quite a bit of time in the UK, when I saw a stat that some 13% of working adults (one out of every eight) in the UK actually chose to live alone. It is not seen as being an easy option, though quite why ....

Apart from the times when I was in a relationship (that eventually failed) with one girlfriend or another before I finally, late in life, got married, this was the way I lived. One of my closest friends, a likable intelligent, sociable animal if I ever met one also lives like this.

The worst period of my life just about was during my student days when I was sharing accommodation with three people none of whom I really liked. Typical all-male accommodation at the time, untidy, disordered. I would not consider it to have been like the proverbial pig-sty, after all pigs instinctively live a certain way - humans should have the brainpower to do better.    

The standard argument over the years that human contact being what it is you are better off living with someone that you dislike that being on your own.

Sorry, disagree entirely. On your own, you have control. You are not subject to (at best) the whims or (at worst) the bullying of other people. Occasionally you get lonely, occasionally you get depressed.

But that sense of loneliness and depression can be a sight worse when subject to being stressed by the presence of an undesirable person (at least from your perspective) who is not going to go away any time soon.

I personally think that "loners" get a bad rap. I have travelled to a lot of places on my own, and had the chance to make a lot of occasional new friends through having nothing to slow or tie me down. You are master of your own fate and your own schedule. I think that my wife is a wonderful lady, but we do not travel well together - the expectations are totally different.   

There are also times when at home my train of thought is clearer when there is nobody around to disturb me (and the times that I feel like getting up and turning the television off when she is here, fume, fume! But you have to make allowances!). Furtive, suspicious? Hardly. Who knows, if I could make a greater success of my life in a business context (and pigs will fly before that happens!), I could well turn into an individualist!