Going alone: Bohnice, Solitude, and Unfiltered Noise
Maybe it’s all in my head, but it seems like there’s an unspoken stigma around doing certain things alone. I especially feel it here in Czechia. Dining at nice restaurants, traveling, going to the movies.
Yet it’s completely paradoxical. Our national ethos is practically built on a stubborn, grumpy misanthropy; we generally detest the company of other people, cultivate distance as an art form, and yet the second someone takes that anti-social philosophy to its logical conclusion in public, eyebrows go up. The collective gaze snaps to attention. It is Sartre’s L'enfer, c'est les autres played out in real time - you want nothing to do with the crowd, but you are instantly paralyzed by the fear of being objectified by them as "that person sitting alone."
Of course, I’ve done all those things solo, but I definitely felt self-conscious. Traveling for work, I’d eat at the nice places by myself, deliberately unmoored from coworkers. Going abroad alone can be an incredibly rewarding experience. Hell, even just loading up a pack and heading out for a few days in the wilderness can be life-changing - pure, unmediated engagement with the world where your coordinates in spacetime belong entirely to you.
And then, there’s the movies. I don’t know why, but it feels weird.
I’ve often decided with absolute clarity that I’d just go on my own. But right when I’m about to buy the ticket for whatever movie, something stops me. A sudden, irrational friction. I just couldn’t do it. It’s stupid, but I realized I’d feel profoundly weird sitting in the theater by myself - an isolated monad adrift in a sea of synchronized social units.
So, I ended up downloading it.
Naturally, I fired up the grand intellectual apparatus of rationalization: I told myself I have absolute sovereignty over my own environment. No glaring phone screens cutting through the chiaroscuro, no teenagers accelerating the acoustic entropy of the room by aggressively masticating popcorn like bovine spectators, and I save a ton of money. A textbook case of bad faith (mauvaise foi). Deep down, beneath all the self-justifying dialectics, I know the truth: I simply flinched.
It’s just weird.
As for the Weekend
I’ve realized that many of my recent posts have been themed in some way. I’ll have a topic in mind and put serious effort into addressing it systematically, almost trying to build a tidy little philosophical framework around it. There's nothing inherently wrong with that; it's just not why I started writing here.
I think I noticed some decent readership and subtly felt compelled to write more focused, curated posts - quietly succumbing to the teleological trap of content creation, where every sentence must justify its existence to an invisible audience. But I’m here to ramble. I’m not here to conduct academic research, to obsessively rewrite, or to anticipate what some hypothetical reader might find palatable.
I’ll never be a professional writer, a popular "blogger", or much of anything of public note, really. I’m entirely okay with that. There is immense quiet freedom in the Epicurean decree to lathe biōsas - to live unnoticed, outside the panopticon of internet validation. Sometimes I just like to take raw concepts from my head and dump them onto the screen. The mechanical clack of the keyboard and the mental equilibrium that follows, however short-lived that thermodynamic reset is.
I had no plans for the weekend. Just a lazy Bohnice Saturday for me and my head.
I’ll enjoy coffee and silence.