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SD#68: Solitude, friends, and the age of average

Written by

Tomas Ausra

August 6, 2023

Welcome to the 68 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here. 

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Hi friends,

I read 30-50 newsletters every week to curate Seven Dawns. Mostly it gives me a vast array of topics and themes that emerge, but once in a while, something happens in the universe, a star falls, and multiple people independently start writing on a similar theme. This happened to me with this week’s newsletter as I started exploring solitude, first which was quickly challenged by an essay and then amplified by cases of living near friends and how to do it.

🔎 Our seven ideas this week:


1. Loneliness or solitude? The case for being alone

Loneliness is a common but uncomfortable human emotion. Loneliness is the subjective experience in which a person is alone and which produces a feeling of desolation. When fleeting, it’s perfectly fine to feel lonely. It can be a way to process some feelings, which can be difficult but necessary. However, when loneliness becomes a constant feeling, it can actually be harmful to your health. A review of the research literature suggests that loneliness increases mortality risk by 26%. And the experience hurts. We are social animals and we need to feel that we belong. Researchers have found that pain from loneliness and social rejection activates the same parts of the brain as physical pain.

In contrast, solitude is just the state of being alone. The concept of solitude doesn’t have any negative feelings attached to it. Which is why it can actually be enjoyable, or just neutral. How we perceive being alone makes all the difference in whether we will experience it as loneliness or solitude. When we focus on the feeling of isolation from others and the world, being alone can produce a spiral of negative thoughts. When appreciated as a generative moment of self-discovery and reconnection with oneself, being alone can yield powerful insights and support your mental health.

👉 Ness Labs
2. It is a cruel and fundamentally inhuman tragedy that the culture has convinced so many of us that we must be healed in isolation

Being surrounded by people — people who love us, care for us, or are willing to sit in the same room with us while we clean up our messes — is about the only way that we have ever been able to get better. 

Rather than being a gradual, non-linear journey towards realisation and fulfilment, we’ve begun to imagine “healing” as a series of personal-discovery tasks that exist to make the self more comprehensible. We’re encouraged to enumerate our flaws, systemically comb through our childhoods for neat, pert little stories that can explain how each of them came to be, and then destroy them. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to understand ourselves. But if going to therapy has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is actually solved by intellectualising and pathologising every part of what we feel — and when we try, we’re usually sort of wrong anyway. Your emotions, by and large, are not a problem to be fixed in service of producing a better, more manageable, more loveable self. They just want to be felt.

The process of becoming yourself is not a corporate desk job, it is not homework, and it is not an unticked box languishing on a to-do list. You do not have to treat your flaws like action items that must be systematically targeted and eliminated to receive a return on investment. You have no supervisor; you should not be punished when you fail. Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other. 

👉 Internet princess
3. You’d be happier living closer to friends but there are many reasons we aren’t

A study found that friends living within a mile of each other are 25 percent more likely to feel happy (I know I know, what is happiness, etc, but you get the point). You have all the convenience that comes with knowing your neighbours; you get more adults to help with the kids and more kids to also help with the kids. You can still live alone but have the benefits of not living alone. Turns out that living close to friends is practical and lovely!

So for people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, in the thick of figuring out adulthood and family support systems and the set-ups that nurture them: why don’t we do this? The fetishisation of the nuclear family, of course, as well as the building and zoning codes that facilitate that fetishisation. If a society’s understanding of “success” is a partnership, children, and home ownership, it makes sense that so many people’s quest for the last thing on the list sometimes brings them far from their friends, because that’s the only place they feel they can find the “right” house. These are the people who often want and need to move near friends most, because they’re not just far from the people they love, they’re hours or days from anything resembling a support system. Why is this happening?

Firstly, we’re not socialised to prioritise friendship. Not over career, not over partners, especially not over parenting — even though proximity to intimate friendship can make all of those things a whole lot easier. The friends are also scattered all over the globe. 

As of 2017, US millennials had the lowest level of geographical mobility in fifty years. The stat is particularly striking given that millennials are getting married less, buying houses less, and having fewer children — all things that generally keep you tethered to a place. But millennials also have less economic stability, less of the sort of savings/wealth that would allow them to enter the housing market — and if they can, they often have very little control over where that house will be.

We also tend to seek solutions within the family unit – not outside of it. Families can be great. Families can provide so much support. And families are not enough.

👉 Culture Study
 
4. How to live near your friends

Clustering your friends is a hard problem. Otherwise, you would have done it already. There are no shortcuts here – but the end result is worth it. Here are a few ideas:

1) Host regularly. Host it because of the magical friendship group juju that arises out of regularity. But a side effect is that friends become very familiar with the neighbourhood. 2) Enable short-term stays. Usually, when we pitch friends on moving nearby, they’re curious but hesitant. They love the idea of living near friends, but they can’t see themselves here. The trick, in each of these cases, is to offer them a one-month sublet. In that month, your friends will experience the benefits of living near friends. 3) Help your friends get leases. In high-demand housing markets, finding housing is stressful. Your friends might want to move nearby, but they’re also busy with work, their social lives, or other life stuff. They know they’d be happier in a different home, but getting from point A to point B is a lot of work. 4) Roommate matchmaking. 5) Make friends nearby. 

👉 offscript
5. Stop aiming for the same obvious target as everyone else. Figure out your first principles as a person—the Lego blocks of your talents, interests, and preferences—and paint the target around them

Your first principles are often the qualities you suppress the most—because they make you weird or different from other people. At some point in your life, you were probably shamed for embodying those qualities, so you learned to conceal them. But here’s the thing: we notice things because of contrast. Something stands out because it’s different from what surrounds it. If you blend into the background—if you show no idiosyncrasy, no fingerprints, no contrast, no anomaly—you become invisible. You become the background. It’s only by embracing, rather than erasing, your idiosyncrasies that you can become extraordinary.

Bruce Springsteen readily admits that his voice isn’t amazing. He can play the guitar but there are plenty of good guitar players, many of whom are better. Instead of aiming for the same target as other musicians—trying to out-sing or out-play them—Springsteen instead doubled down on the quality that made him unique: his ability to write song lyrics. The same man initially dismissed by audiences, agents, bandmates, and just about everyone else eventually became a rock ’n’ roll sensation.

👉 Ozan Varol
6. From film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same. It’s the age of the average

The coffee roaster Four Barrel in San Francisco looks like the Australian Toby’s Estate in Brooklyn looks like The Coffee Collective in Copenhagen looks like Bear Pond Espresso in Tokyo. You can get a dry cortado with perfect latte art at any of them, then Instagram it on a marble countertop and further spread the aesthetic to your followers, according to The Verge. Cities once felt rooted in time and place. The Victorian grandeur of London. The Art Deco glamour of New York. The neon modernity of Tokyo. But with anodyne architecture spreading across the United States, cities are beginning to lose their contextual identities. They are all starting to look the same. And it isn’t just the design of our residential buildings but our professional ones as well.

So, the places where we live and work have begun to converge upon a single style, but we’re also seeing the same trend occur in the way we travel between them. There was a time when you could identify the country the car came from. But today, basically every company makes cars for basically every country. Cars are now designed for the broadest possible audience, across the broadest number of countries, to be manufactured in the most efficient possible way. In today’s extremely-online world, the vast availability of reference imagery has, perhaps counterintuitively, led to narrower thinking and shallower visual ideation. Designers use the same online platforms, draw inspiration from the same sorts of imagery and, in turn, create broadly the same types of creative.

The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.

👉 Alex Murrell
7. Scarcity is key to irrational prices

Beachfront property is scarce and, regardless of the economic cycle, always in demand. You can also manufacture scarcity with similar results (crazy-town prices). Spoiler alert: Hermès could produce more Birkin bags and yet decides not to. The choking of supply adds heft to the narrative that this is a special bag, and it adds credibility to the urgency — you may be shit out of luck next week if you don’t plunk down $14,000 now.

The strongest brands in the world — MIT, Apple, Hermès, the U.S. — are built on the artificial choking of supply via rejectionist admissions, pricing strategies, production, and visas. The richest man in the world doesn’t make cars, rockets, or enterprise software — he makes handbags. Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, is now worth more than Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg combined. He’s made his fortune not selling things people need, but things they want. LVMH controls the most prestigious luxury brands in the world, from Tiffany & Co. to Loro Piana to Louis Vuitton.

👉 No Mercy / No malice

👨‍🏫 Quote of the week:


Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think. So start each day by thinking of all the things you have to be thankful for. Your future will depend very largely on the thoughts you think today. So think thoughts of hope and confidence and love and success.

Dale Carnegie

🎁 Fun things to click on:


With Opinionate.io you can pose questions and have the tool simulate a debate between two debaters and a moderator, providing informative introduction to important discussions on any controversial topic you ask it. Check your pace of life. Japanese manhole covers are works of art, here’s how they’re made.


Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.

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Speak soon,

Tom

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SD#67: Default definitions, creativity and fear of judgement

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SD#69: Isolation, creative process, and success