In his iconic Brave New World, one of Aldous Huxley’s recurring themes is the desire and mandate to never be alone. The whole life is taken up with working at a pre-determined vocation and otherwise being entertained in large groups. The eventual hero, The Savage, gravitated finally to an old lighthouse and hung himself when people came to gawk at him.

Although we don’t have the breeding centers and embryo development factories in that book, we appear, as a culture, to embrace the “never alone” aspects. Social media and TikTok addiction crowd out quiet contemplation and solitude’s many benefits. Nearly all strategically results-oriented self-worth remediation programs include periods of solitary meditation, thought, and self-awareness discovery. Quiet contemplation not only stimulates innovation but also helps us know who we are within our relational context.

As a full-time farmer, I spend many hours alone and find this time especially rewarding. Unplugging from the hurried-harried frenetic-frenzied life brings healing and progress on many levels. But one time in my life launched everything since. …

And read. And read. This was long before the Internet. We had snail mail and phone calls. The media was still on paper. What did I do? With this self-imposed two-month solitude, I read the ecological farming classics. The 1,200-page Complete Book of Composting. The scientific Acres USA Primer. The insect-communication Tuning Into Nature. Wendell Berry’s iconic The Unsettling of America. All the Louis Bromfield books: Malabar Farm; Out of the Earth; Pleasant Valley. D. Howard Doane’s classic book on direct marketing and value adding: Vertical Farm Diversification.

Day after day after day, I devoured the foundations of farming eco-think. Two things happened. First, I drank the Kool-Aid. In other words, I bought it, completely. I owned the practice and philosophy of ecological farming; or perhaps it owned me. But I was totally converted; I went to the altar and baptized myself into this wonderful world.

Second, I became knowledgeable enough to articulately and confidently defend and promote a chemical-free food and farming paradigm. Even today, much of my writing and speaking repeats phrases and concepts originally discovered during that solitary two-month reading marathon. No question, those two months made me the committed devotee I am today, but also armed me to be a leading spokesman in the movement. And ultimately to write 16 books (as of today) on my own.

Did I miss the income? Yes, desperately. But I had something far more valuable – information and confidence. I’ve leveraged that every day since then. Fortunately, between a wife more frugal than I am and my own confident stubbornness and persistence, we weathered the financials and survived…barely. In three years, we exhaled. We could breathe and realized we would make it on the farm.

I wonder what personal development young adults and even teens might enjoy, being locked away, masters. I’m grateful every day for those two months. I’ll never forget them or regret them. Solitude leveraged with strategic self-developmental learning beats TikTok and social media addiction any time of day. I highly recommend it as the best Return On Investment.