Being alone is your superpower.
Being alone is your superpower.
And stress that comes with it will make you smile. Eventually.
Check out the previous post on how you cannot run away from talking to people.
The case for going out with your friends.
When you go into a space where you know absolutely no one, most often there are two feelings you start experiencing. Wanting to anxiously run away or find someone you know, have your buddy at hand so you can cling to them and hope for the best.
Or the other way around. You don’t even move towards any space or activity since there’s no friend out there, you can lean on. There’s no extrovert with you to take care of those talking folks. There’s no one who can take some burden off your shoulders. So we don’t bother.
I hated attending events alone. I hated traveling alone. I hated feeling uncomfortable alone.
Until I started embracing those things, despite my hatred.
And I’m gonna tell you to do the same.
“You’re crazy, I’m out.”
Okay, but don’t run away just yet. First of all - it won’t be a text about ditching your friends and coworkers, glorifying the Lone Wolf template. We’ll be focusing on their absence tho. Just temporarily, for the sake of our personal growth.
Second of all - if you roll your eyes or cringe - I don’t mind. But feel encouraged to explore that feeling and check if our basic lessons are truly internalized or just “known” by our ego.
In the end - everything boils down to basic principles we forget to apply.
The story of an extra wheel, antifragility, and Sicilian roads.
Let’s explore and internalize a simple, well-known concept. Then talk about one of the hottest books in recent years. And finally, listen to my personal story as I put the words where my mouth is.
Cliche beginnings. Riding a bike.
When we start learning how to ride a bicycle, most often our patrons guard and lead us by holding onto us. So we can get over initial anxiety and feel confident in the saddle. Later on, there’s the extra wheel, with the overseer standing somewhere in the back. In the end, we’re having road trips as equals. Everyone is on their own bike, enjoying the exercise and company themselves.
Simple enough, one may say. Got the image? You first get the support, then start being independent - which doesn’t mean you need to travel alone.
So why the hell do we clutch to our human ride support and decline to do quite a lot of stuff without it? Because we never experienced letting go of the said wheel. As we’re bloody social (even if introvert, you’re still living in a society, amongst its cultural codes!). And we like to cede responsibilities we don’t enjoy to others.
Call me the party pooper but I’d love for us to ride the social bike as equals.
I believe you understand the metaphor I’m trying to convey here. But for the sake of my peace of mind and personal credo of trying not to leave grey areas, let me put it bluntly. People are wonderful to have them by your side. But you need to experience things on your own for them to be your journey pals and not crutches you lean on.
Been there, done that. Delegating someone things I didn’t feel confident with while pursuing goals within my zone of comfort. And it felt right. No one is “fit-it-all”, right?
Growth under stress. Antifragility.
Right. But muscles grow under stress. Flow state is achieved on the brink of comfort and competence. New concepts emerge out of challenging the status quo.
There’s a concept of antifragility by N. N. Taleb. Where the unit (or system) grows under stress, randomness, and shock, instead of breaking or shrinking. His recommendation is to create systems that don’t shun away from discomfort by ensuring safety and lack of randomness but embrace it as something desired. And that approach is to be applied on every level there is. Personal, social group, corporate, or national. Just teach people mental models to become antifragile.
And this is also the text about me asking you to try being antifragile.
And also, bloody hell, that’s really tough.
Thus push yourself into a situation where you cannot back off and cannot lean on anyone. Allow yourself to play a fool and embrace whatever comes. Go from overthinking the next steps to listening to my guts. Initially, it’s not going to be fun. With time, you may start working out solutions. With time, you will find your own answer to the question “How do I find myself and start playing by my rules in a situation that makes me uncomfortable?”.
With said answer, you would be ready to face whatever comes your way. With or without friendly faces around.
Remember, you can start small! Going out to grab a meal at the restaurant on your own, without taking your phone with you, is an interesting initial experience for many. Go to a museum, a concert, or a networking event. Whatever that you never did on your own but always with someone. And don’t run away or into your phone.
Allow yourself to fail and do things sub-optimally. It’s a learning curve.
Those Sicilian roads.
Those stressful situations, coming at you completely at random, without any option to back off, just recently were my daily bread for a month. As for the first time in my life, I decided to take a long backpacking trip all by myself, without any plan other than “Here’s the plane ticket, go figure it out as it goes”. And I was always the guy traveling in a pack, with a complete itinerary prepared and laid out long before the trip.
Every day, a new challenge. Every day, I’m on my own to discover where I’m going, what I’m doing, and how I get around that Italian countryside. And every day I allowed myself to get surprised. With both my decisions and the places I was visiting. To add even more spice to the whole experience, it was during my second recovery from long covid, with semi-functional lungs and brain fogs.
What can I tell you? The experience of randomly landing in the middle of the island, without food or water left, with a long climb up the mountain to get to some civilization is an experience I won’t forget. And I won’t forget how my thinking changed on how to experience the world around me just on my own. Which felt SO STRANGE. You know, one has traveled the world plenty of times already. One would think, how does it differ from any other case?
It does. Discovering loneliness in situations you never had to does wonders.
There are no quick fixes. It’s a model you have to embrace on your own terms.
I stopped hating going to events on my own. I stopped hating traveling alone. I still tend to feel uncomfortable alone.
But then, I try to come back to my beliefs, experiences, and mental models. Remembering there are possibilities to play the game on my own terms. Explore emerging feelings and ask them questions that allow me to get to know myself better.
There’s anxiety, making a fool of oneself. There’s also pride and satisfaction. But it comes with time. And our reptile brain doesn’t seem to like it. For it, there’s only “Fight, Flee, Freeze”.
Well, my dear ancient particle. I’d rather go with “Embrace” whenever possible. It may not work out every time as intended. It may require us to retreat to a safe space to charge our batteries afterward. Which is absolutely okay.
As embracing loneliness makes you both a better social animal and individual.
You can ride the bike on your own. Or join the cycling team.
But for that, you need to let go of your third wheel.
Embrace.
