I still belong to myself!

Last week, I was eating noodles alone at a restaurant in Dubai downtown. No phone, no book, I was not pretending to be busy, just chewing and wasn’t even watching people pass by. A couple next to me glanced over, then back at their phones. A waiter stopped to ask if I was waiting for someone.

I said no. He smiled politely, confused. But to me, it felt like rebellion. The quiet kind.

Not the dramatic leave me alone kind. Just the kind where you sit with your food, your thoughts, and no need to perform. No story to post. Didn’t take pictures of the food even, and most of all no one to entertain. I was just present at the table. I’ve come to treasure these small silences. They help me notice what I’m carrying that no longer needs to be carried. They let me choose what to keep, what to release.

Because most of the time, I’m toggling between five opinions, six open tabs, and seven dopamine hits disguised as work. We live in a time where everything can be optimized, reach, followers, fun, productivity. The algorithm doesn’t sleep. More has become the baseline. More hustle. More content. More stimulation. Too many pleasure points don’t make life richer. They just make it noisier.

And in that noise, it’s dangerously easy to forget what feeds you. What nourishes, not just distracts. Someone recently told me, “Write on more outrage concepts and ideas. Stir things up. Hot takes perform. It wasn’t bad advice. Just empty.

Because so much of what’s written now isn’t to reflect or understand. It’s to perform. To provoke. To sell. It’s writing with the algorithm in mind not with your gut.

And I get it. That kind of content works. But I can’t help asking, when did that become the standard?

It reminded me of Van Gogh. He didn’t paint for likes. He painted because it was the only way he knew how to survive himself. Every brushstroke was a way to stay alive, not a brand strategy. Leonard Cohen once said, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.” They weren’t crafting for applause. They were crafting to stay human.

That’s a kind of selfishness we don’t talk about enough. Not greed. Not ego. Just the raw need to do what keeps you sane, even if no one claps. But we’re not taught to value that. From early on, we’re trained to be useful. Be impressive, but not too proud. Be unique, but don’t stand out. Be agreeable. Be likable.

The result? A life lived in reaction to other people’s expectations. A friend once told me she hated eating alone. It made her feel invisible. I get that. But for me, it’s the opposite. It’s the only time I don’t have to explain myself.

And I think that’s why it takes most people decades, sometimes a whole lifetime, to finally start saying no without guilt. The elderly aren’t wise because they’ve read more books. They’re wise because they’ve seen how much life can slip by doing things you never really chose.

What makes it harder now is how performative everything’s become. You can’t just hang out with friends, you need to film it. You can’t just rest, you have to document the wellness of it. There’s no such thing as private joy anymore. Everything’s content.

But what if I don’t want my joy to be scalable? What if I want it quiet, unbranded, and unsharable? What’s my purpose then?

I don’t have a neat answer.

Purpose isn’t a mission statement. It’s not something you carve into a LinkedIn bio. Maybe it’s as simple as listening to yourself again. Not to the trends. Not to the feedback. Not to the noise. Maybe it’s about living a little more like Van Gogh painted. Not to please. Just because that’s how you stay alive.

William Deresiewicz argues that social media erodes solitude and genuine creativity, "doesn’t let you be alone" and pushes a compulsive seek-for-feedback culture

Michael John Harris, in The End of Absence and Solitude, sees solitude as a depleted resource in a hyperconnected world, something worthy of preservation

Jenny Odell and Cal Newport, in reflections like How to Do Nothing and Digital Minimalism, offer philosophical tools for resisting the attention economy and reclaiming focus - The New Yorker

And maybe lunch alone isn’t lonely after all. Maybe it’s a small act of resistance. A daily pause. A way to say, I still belong to myself.

Written By,

Chaya Mathew