Isolation may be kinda chic

I have developed, over the years, a surprisingly sophisticated relationship with chairs. Not all chairs, obviously. I have strong feelings about the one at my desk. I have stronger feelings about my recliner at home.Chairs in rooms full of people, thats a different story altogether.

There is a peculiar social ritual involved in entering one of these rooms. You walk in, scan the place, identify the people you know, and wait for that tiny gesture that determines the trajectory of your next half hour. A wave. A hand pointing toward an empty seat. A bag being moved. That wonderful little come sit here. Or nothing. Nothing is interesting because nobody has technically done anything wrong. Nobody stood up and announced, “We have discussed it collectively and would prefer that Aditya sit elsewhere.” They’re just talking. Perhaps they didn’t see you. Perhaps they assumed you’d sit somewhere else. There are many perfectly reasonable explanations. Unfortunately, your brain has already selected an unreasonable one: They don’t want you there.

So you do what any emotionally intelligent, well-adjusted adult would do—you pretend you were never looking at them. This requires technique. You cannot suddenly turn around; that would make you look wounded. You have to continue walking as though your destination was always somewhere considerably more important. You pull out your phone. You look vaguely into the distance. Once you’ve practiced enough, you can walk into a room without appearing to look for anyone at all.

Eventually, I discovered an even better strategy: choose the empty chair yourself. There is tremendous power in voluntary isolation. If you choose to sit alone, that is no longer rejection—it is a lifestyle choice. You lean back. Cross your legs. Look comfortable. Swag. The empty chair beside you becomes part of the aesthetic, only further enhancing your aura. Someone looking from across the room might think, Wow. Look at that dude. Completely comfortable by himself. They don't need to know that five minutes earlier, you conducted a comprehensive visual survey of the room and concluded that sitting alone offered the lowest probability of humiliation.

And after a while, you genuinely do become comfortable with it. You stop checking whether somebody waved. You walk past familiar faces without looking too closely, because if you don’t notice them, you don’t have to notice whether they noticed you. It’s an extraordinarily efficient system that I think I’ve started doing it outside rooms, too.

Before we unnecessarily psychoanalyze this, there is also a practical argument for sitting alone: people are disgusting. I include myself in this assessment. Sitting next to someone is an unexpectedly intimate arrangement. You are, for an unspecified period, experiencing another human being at close range. They can hear your stomach rumble. You can hear theirs. They become aware of the frankly unreasonable amount of heat your body produces. Your breath, your sweat, the little noises you make when you move, whether your elbows have violated internationally recognized borders determined by the Armrest Protocol. Distance is excellent PR. From far enough away, you remain whatever version of yourself somebody has imagined. I began enjoying the empty chair because nobody sitting there could discover that the person who seemed perfectly acceptable from across the room was, at close range, warm, awkward, and incapable of digesting stuff silently.

This worked remarkably well until, occasionally, somebody came along who made me want to abandon the entire system. The perfect person to sit next to. They are funny, but not exhausting. Interesting. They know when to talk and, more importantly, when not to. They even move their bag before you ask. Dangerous people if you ask me.

For a while, sitting beside them feels surprisingly easy. You stop wondering what your hands are doing. You don’t check your phone every thirty seconds. You forget to maintain whatever mysterious persona you had been projecting from across the room. You begin to think that perhaps you’ve been rather silly about this whole chair business.

And that, naturally, is when you begin looking for problems. Maybe they breathe too loudly. Maybe they interrupt occasionally. Maybe they hog the armrest. Every flaw becomes reassuring proof that sitting alone was better after all.

And when finding faults isn’t enough, you simply stop showing up. You decline an invitation here, find an excuse there. Eventually, people learn to stop expecting you. You hope they find someone nice to sit next to—someone who shows up without turning the whole thing into, well, a whole thing.

Then you make your way back to your own chair. Your throne of unlimited swagger and solitude. Nobody can get close enough to discover the things you’re ashamed of, and you never have to discover those things about them either. Objectively speaking, it remains an excellent system.

The only problem is that sometimes, after everyone has found their seats and the room has settled into conversation, you look at the empty chair beside you and realize something rather uncomfortable: You don’t remember whether nobody wanted to sit there or whether you didn't want anyone there.

But maybe I’m overthinking all this. Isolation may be kinda chic if you ask me.