The Choice Isolation Withholds
Walking with Matsuo Bashō
Helen sits alone at a small table in the office cafeteria. A few tables away, her colleagues huddle over lunch. They speak softly and glance her way now and then. Since Helen got promoted after just six months — overtaking a senior colleague who expected the role — an invisible barrier has formed. As she stares at her plate, pushing her food around, she feels the sting of exclusion. She also feels sympathy for her passed-over peer. Helen has been on the losing side before and knows that disappointment, but that empathy doesn’t close the gap between their table and hers.
The friction in Helen’s situation reveals an uncomfortable truth about how we can feel separate from others. We often think that being alone is either a choice — a simple desire for space — or a sign of being antisocial. Yet Helen has done nothing wrong; she has simply succeeded. Her aloneness is neither a punishment nor a chosen retreat. It is an involuntary state imposed entirely from the outside. Sitting just twenty feet from people she spoke with freely yesterday, she feels stranded in plain sight. She is cut off from the group but remains fully aware of their quiet judgment.
The standard psychological and sociological explanation for Helen’s distress is both intuitive and scientifically grounded. Humans are social creatures, and our survival has historically depended on group cohesion. When a group closes ranks, our biology treats exclusion as a serious threat. Modern research shows that social rejection can activate the same neural systems that process physical pain. In this view, Helen’s discomfort acts as a natural alarm. By moving up in the workplace hierarchy, she has disrupted the group’s balance, turning former peers into a defensive in-group. Her distress isn’t a personal weakness; it’s the expected psychological toll of being ostracised.
This account explains why rejection hurts. It also raises a bigger question: why does being alone sometimes feel terrible, while at other times it feels liberating? If physical aloneness were inherently an evolutionary injury, every instance of being alone would feel like a wound. The person who feels small in a noisy cafeteria may find deep peace on a quiet Saturday afternoon sitting on a park bench. The psychological model explains the pain of a forced social break, but it doesn’t explain how the meaning and quality of being alone can change.
Bashō’s journey in The Narrow Road to the Deep North suggests what can happen when we choose to leave our everyday routines. For the 17th-century Japanese poet, walking the road was a chosen departure. By leaving behind domestic routines and the settled life, he opened himself to a different way of seeing, a way less concerned with social position than with direct, attentive engagement with the fleeting world. Along a challenging mountain pass on the Ōtsu Road, he recorded the results of this outward attention:
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Traveling this high
mountain trail, delighted
by wild violets
This is where Bashō’s journey becomes relevant to Helen. Her isolation isn’t the space between tables; it’s her focus on the social scene that excluded her. Even in silence, she fixates on their whispers, their judgment, and her own sense of rejection.
What if Helen left the cafeteria? Walking to a nearby park wouldn’t be enough. She might spend the whole walk replaying the slight, wondering what they’re saying. Physically gone, she’d still be mentally trapped. Her departure matters only if she changes her focus. She needs to ease her grip on their judgment and look beyond herself.
This doesn’t mean changing focus will erase rejection or cure isolation. It shows that the group that excluded us doesn’t fully define being alone. Isolation can come from outside, leaving our minds anchored to what we’ve lost. Solitude, in this sense, can’t simply be forced; it requires us to choose how we experience being alone.
Ultimately, solitude is a choice that isolation doesn’t allow . Even if we can’t control our isolation, we can decide how we face that aloneness. We can choose to dwell on the group that’s absent or embrace the lively, unscripted world around us.
Next time you feel left out, stop and think: When I find myself alone, am I merely experiencing the absence of others — or can I choose what kind of relation I will have with the world that remains?
Photo by Paola Chaaya on Unsplash
Originally published at https://laurentcailliette.substack.com on August 29, 2026.
