Pack plenty of books and take yourself into internal exile in 2025

27 December 2024

The introverts among us live almost permanently in a sort of internal exile, or a rich inner life, as Waleed Aly referred to it during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

But the idea of getting away from it all, without actually going anywhere, is gaining traction more widely, writes Jacqueline Maley, for The Sydney Morning Herald. This as 2025, and the greater uncertainty that many people are anticipating, looms:

In recent months, I have been reading about the concept of “internal exile” or “internal emigration’. The term comes from the Russian, “vnutrennaya emigratsia” and means a sort of travelling into oneself, to take comfort in small pleasures – often solitary pleasures of the mind, like reading, or listening to music, or gardening or making a pleasant home.