20160828 Essay 4: Alone vs With Friends

“No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.”, said the poem ‘for whom the bell tolls’ by John Donne. Like this sentence, we, human beings, are considered as social beings that interact with others to be mature. However, can humans find their values or meaning of existences only in social communication? The answer, on my own, is: Absolutely no. Although being with friends enables us to share our ideas with them and develop our ideas, we can think much deeply through a process called self-reflection; we recall our behaviors of the past and try to improve them to much rational aspects in the course. So I regard the self-reflection as more important thing to practise than interacting with others, so as to grow myself up.

First, spending time alone makes my feeling much stable. Some people might claim that our feelings are things to share with others so that we can be more comfortable, holding up a synonym “A Sorrow shared is half a trouble, but a joy that`s shared is a joy made double” as an example. But in this case also, we cannot get rid of concerns about the turbulence of human relationships. For instance, students often tend to evaluate others by their statements, and if there’s a bad estimation on someone, people usually spread the bad evaluation and gather to isolate the person so he would be lonely because of the evaluation and relationship. However, if being alone, we can retain our feelings much stably.

Second, investing time to myself enables self-improvement. Some insist that being with friends are more reasonable than being alone for it increases sociality. However, time for my own can also contribute to the society since I can reflect myself of the past calmly and know myself well to consider the ways to improve my actions. And in the procedure, our actions can be approached closer to the social ethics, which requires continuous self-criticizing, according to a philosophy professor Namsun Gang. Also, since each person gathers to make a society, and we interact with other members of society, having improved social ethics of myself would make for the entire society’s ethics to be better.

To conclude, I prefer to spend my time alone than with friends because it makes me be stable and give chances to improve more. Time never runs back: I hope we spend our time much efficiently which would be helpful to our life, by self-reflection and improvement.