psychology Archives - Page 2 of 3

Our City Is a Womb (A Short Story)

Visiting OHD Museum, an art museum in Magelang, Indonesia, I saw this piece of art: “*Reflion”* by Meretas Solusi. This story popped into my head to explain the piece. I am not sure if it’s anywhere near what the artist was originally going for, however.

What even is this place? I sit drinking my glass of wine on the edge of my window overlooking the drop-off. Before me is a vast forest, and in the horizon, I can make out the nearest city. It looks like another big blob in the sky. Tons of houses facing the edge of a human-made cliff, just like mine.

Our city is a womb. Are we a society that never truly left its home? We are too afraid of what our people did to the world when we did venture out. Maybe it’s better to stay inside.

This endless forest, this is what we created. I can see the trees swaying in the wind. I am a little too high up to see the forest floor, but I see the occasional perched bird in the trees fly away. The forest looks green. I still remember when the trees were an unholy orange. It took us decades to grow it back, and if staying inside the confines of the city is what is necessary to keep safe, then so be it.

I am old, though, so this is much easier for me to say. The youth are the ones who want to venture back out. They feel confined by the city. Yes, we have paths leading to the other cities, but these are not enough. They yearn to explore the world of the trees, birds, and mountains. I can’t blame them. I lived in a time when this was common. I wish we could venture back out without creating the same problems we did before.

They will send scientists and filmmakers into the world, trained in how to leave no trace in the wilderness to take videos and pictures. Our city consumes clips of strange animals and majestic landscapes with the same carnivorous energy we once hunted each other with. Many youth want to be on their crew of adventurers, but only a handful get selected. They become the new celebrities in our cloistered world.

I wish there was a way to send more out without creating the same consumptive craving that plagued humanity for centuries. The Council seems skeptical. Being older, like me, they all saw the perils humanity could unleash. They treat them like a fallen piece of wood to be rehammered back into place. That isn’t fair to them. They are just curious and want adventure. Every generation is like that when they are young. They see beauty and want to live in it up-close. If only we could.

I take another sip of wine.

The Rabbit amidst the Flood (A Short Story)

I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. (Genesis 6:17, NIV Translation)

“We aren’t enough,” the rabbit cried to the others. They all looked equally perplexed and hurt.

“But why?” One stammered.

“I don’t know. God wants to do us all over again. That’s what he said. I was there when he spoke to the human.”

“But how would he expect to do that?”

“A giant flood.”

The statement washed over them. No one knew what to say. The rabbit sat there, but he could tell they couldn’t handle his presence anymore, so he left.

He stared out into the great vast night thinking about what would happen. Was God really going to drown them all? Did he do something wrong to deserve this? Was he or those he loved really so bad to deserve this?

God had said this newest species, the humans, had done something wrong, and he now regretted making them and all the other animals. But why single out all other animals as well? God couldn’t have been giving the whole story to this human. Maybe God only mentioned human wrongdoing to this human. The animals must have been something bad to get lumped in with the humans like this, and that was what he was going to find out.

Over the next several days, the rabbits spread the message of doom among the other animals.

The rabbit tried to work with the other creatures to form an action plan, but at first, the other animals just freaked out. They tried to think of as many ways as they could to pacify the deity and to convince him that their lives were worth continuing. They built altars to self-conflagrate, hoping this would appease God. Some even offered themselves to be sacrificed on the hope that their deaths might save all the other creatures.

Others turned to asceticism, convinced that we all must be too involved in the pleasures of the world. That must be why God is doing this. If they denied these to themselves, they thought they could save themselves or maybe even all the creatures of the world. Some predators even renounced eating their fellow animals entirely, until they withered nearly to the point of starvation.

God remained silent, never seeming to budge or care about how these animals harmed themselves on his behalf, but the rabbit could not get them to sit down and listen. So, he decided he needed to move on.

He went to the ocean, maybe the creatures of the sea had ideas on what to do. He sat at the edge of the water, striking up a conversation with a few sharks. As the rabbit asked for advice, they just laughed.

“There’s nothing you can do,” one shouted back. “Whatever you did wrong; you must accept your fate. Soon enough we will feast on the bounty of your corpses.”

He couldn’t get anything useful from them. The lucky freaks were immune, which they had come to see as a type of ordained privilege, as if they deserved to survive unlike these damned landed creatures. The fish did not see their land as kin but simply as an upcoming harvest.

These fish had given him an idea. They felt fine because they did not think they would be hurt by the danger. With proper hope for survival, his fellow landed creatures would be able to keep going. As a community, if they worked together, they might be able to influence the mind of God.

When he returned to his neighborhood, things had changed drastically. Anger had swept the terrestrial creatures. How could this god smite them for the evil the humans had done? They had each found their own way to curse God and die. Some retreated to their own worlds, where they could be by themselves. Even creatures that usually lived in flocks turned on each other and left for their own wildness.

Others sought to destroy the world around them. It was all going to wash away anyways. Who cares? They attacked other animals without thought or concern, seeming to revel in destruction. A few channeled their anger at the human building the ark, attacking him, his family, and the ark itself. He and his family were always able to hunt down the creatures that went after them, though, like God was protecting them.

Evidently, the other humans did not believe him about what God had said and criticized him for building the ark, but these animals strategically attacking him seemed to convince them that some unforeseen divine initiative was afoot. He thought some supernatural beings were sending him waves of animals to try to prevent him from fulfilling God’s command. This caused the humans to leave him alone and let him face his fate with the divine alone. For them, the gods must be having an argument, and they would wait to decide which side won.

The rabbit developed the idea to try to build his own ark. He organized a group of creatures with different sizes and skills, and they started by watching the human see how to build one. But they were never able to replicate his tools. They had no thumbs to hammer or even form the hammers and nails in the first place.

What they constructed never got off the ground. He could only compare his failure with the providential success of the man’s even more massive boat. He slowly realized all hope was lost. He was going to die. This God had decided to kill them, and there was nothing they could do about it. And for what? For the evils of some humans beyond their control. He really hated these humans.

He sunk into his burrow refusing comfort. As his daughter, I tried to get food for him to keep him going, but there seemed little point. He had already accepted that he was going to die, and nothing would change his mind.

In the process of finding food, the ark-building human found me. I had been chosen, as one of only two rabbits to survive on his boat. I desperately wanted to be with my father, but I guess I had another calling. God himself seemed to pick me, because no matter how much I tried to escape to see my father in his last moments, I could not.

As the waters engulfed the earth and we remained in our protective kiln of ark, I looked at the darkening world. As the waters rose, I could see my father salvaging the last bits of his makeshift boat, trying to keep his raft together on top of the coming storm, only for one extra-large wave to sink him into the depths.

This is the story I tell to you my children. Tell the story of your Great Rabbit Father. Remember the loss that God wrought onto us animals because of the humans. Trust no one. Humanity and their God least of all. Once we hopped in pride, but we must be vigilant. The world is dark and horrifying, and all we can do is try our best to survive.

Seeing People’s Inner Child: De-escalating Adult Conflicts by Addressing Unmet Needs

Many adults still act like children. Some routinely; others only on their bad days. When you see someone lashing out impulsively or defensively when they argue with you, it can be helpful to step back and see their inner child to put their behavior into perspective.

This is not the same as agreeing with them: they still may be wrong. But seeing their tantruming inner child can help you understand what needs they feel are not being met and are causing them to lash out. This can be something you address directly. Figuring out a workable way to acknowledge and maybe address that need within the bounds of your own goals can be a practical way to get through the moment, especially when they are in a position of authority over you. This usually slows them down and helps deescalate the situation.

At the very least, it can help empathize with them. Empathizing is not the same as agreeing, nor is it the same as allowing or enabling any inappropriate behavior they may be doing. It is understanding their behavior enough to see the human inside, often a series of needs screaming to be heard, and confronting it directly. Even if your empathy is not safe to show in the moment or if they reject your empathy, empathetically acknowledging the feelings of another is about maintaining your own humanity and not allowing another’s behavior to curb your ability to acknowledge and address the humanity of others around you.

So, how can this help you respond? Others have spoken at length about how to use understanding to negotiate and reduce conflict (see this for example). One can use empathy to diffuse a situation by acknowledging their side, to demonstrate mutual self-respect, or if necessary, to set proper boundaries for one’s own needs.

Pausing to reflect on the needs the other has can help remove you from the intensity of the situation, which would help you form the nuanced response necessary. It can allow you to understand not only their needs, but your needs and develop an effective strategy for how to meet those needs in the moment. Often, when someone seems to come after us, our bodies move immediately into a reactive, defensive response. The perceived threat puts us into “go mode” and taking an extra second to understand empathetically gives us the space to pull back, assess the situation anew, and use both our emotions and reason to develop a better, strategic response.

Instead of launching, you pause and force yourself to think about it from their perspective, sometimes you realize aspects of your behavior that you do need to address. Worst case scenario, after you reflect for a bit, you still conclude that you are wrong, and in that situation, taking a step back allows you to help confirm that, and you are now in a better mental space to respond appropriately.

What You Can Learn about People based on the Questions They Ask

You can learn about some by the questions they ask. You not only learn what people think but more importantly, what people want to know about the world around them. This provides a window into who they are.

Here are a few common patterns of question askers to look out for:

1) Those who ask confirming questions:

When talking with you, these people ask questions to confirm what they already suspect. This can be a sign that they primarily resonate with their own past experiences.

Confirming questions are often close-ended, even yes/no questions. Examples might include:

“Oh you went to Italy. Did you like the pasta? I heard it was fantastic there.”

“Was that exam easy? I found that exam easy when I took it last year.”

These people expect a certain thing to be true, and only ask questions based on their past experiences or what they have heard to be the case. Obviously they may be wrong. For the above questions, maybe you found that exam difficult or did not enjoy or eat much pasta in Italy.

Habitually asking close-ended questions can demonstrate a retrospective orientation: they often consciously or subliminally are thinking about their past experiences, whether their own experiences or the experiences they have heard from others. Either way, their mental process for these questions often involves determining parallels from past experiences and using that to determine what must be the case for you in your situation.

2) Those who ask questions about facts

Another type of question asker asks about the facts or specific details of the situation, including the “who”, “what”, “when”, and “where”. For personal stories, their questions may focus on the details of the environment or on people’s external behavior rather than trying to understand internally what people were thinking or feeling.

Examples:

“What color was the car that cut you off?”

“What was the name of the town you visited?”

“What did she look like?”

Sometimes they can feel like detectives, uncovering the details for their police report. Sometimes a few of these questions can be helpful to understand to grasp what happened, but for emotionally intense experiences, for example, too many factual follow-up questions can form a type of distraction.

It can show a fixation of surface-level facts over emotional experiences. I often find these questions most frequently asked by people who are less likely to discuss feelings, preferring a more distant, action-oriented veneer.

3) Those who ask questions about feelings

Talking to this type of person can feel like you are talking to a therapist:

“How did that make you feel?”

“How do you feel about that now?”

“What was it like having that happen to you?”

In regular conversation, I find these less common than Type 2, but I still encounter them from time to time. They focus on how you feel and often seek to sympathize or empathize with your experience. I personally usually really enjoy these questions and frequently ask them, but some who are not used to talking about their emotions may find it overwhelming. This type tends to want to focus on and understand your subjective experience as a fellow human.

4) Those who ask questions about ideas

This type intellectualizes pretty much anything you are talking about. A philosophical conversation about the theory or social implications of the phenomena may seem like their favorite kind of conversation.

I will often see people who do this abstracting the specific things you are discussing into a broader theme to then discuss the merits of in the abstract (e.g. “I’m sorry you got broken up. What do you think the ideal person would look like for you?”). Some people may enjoy moving the conversation into such an abstract direction, but sometimes, it can also detract from the specific experience you want to talk about.

Some may also generalize to understand the social implications of the specific topic at hand (e.g. “I’m sorry that you had that experience during your last doctor’s visit. How do you think we should change the healthcare system to help prevent that from happening again?”). Doing this can veer the conversation close to “politics”, which may or may not be a good thing depending on the conversation.

People who ask these questions tend to themselves be abstract thinkers, those who generally prefer thinking about more theoretical rather than tangible topics.

5) Those who do not ask any questions at all

When speaking in one-on-one conversations, this type is the easiest to spot. They simply stand there listening to when you are done talking and do not ask any questions at all.

This group has two subtypes:

A) Those who seem to prefer to not talk at all: They may not ask any follow-up questions. That can mean they were not interested in talking with you or about that topic, whether they weren’t interested in talking with you specifically or they do not like talking in general.

B) Those who ask one or two simple questions (most often confirmation questions of what they already think like the first group) before ending the conversation. They also may not be interested in talking with you, but sometimes I will see people who seem genuinely interested in talking about the topic but not be able to ask more than one or two follow-up questions about the topic. This can mean they are an internal processor and may need your help guiding them through what about the topic you two should explore in more detail.

C) Those who, instead of asking follow-up questions, wait until you are done talking (or interrupt you) and go into their own point or story. Everyone can do this from time to time, but people who habitually do this often are not listening. Without being aware of it, they think of themselves and their experiences first and foremost.

6) Those who ask open-ended questions

This final group can be the most interesting but also the most complex. They usually ask follow-up questions, whether about your feelings, thoughts, or ideas of your topic. Good follow-up questions keep you within your own thought process and prompt you to explore it in more depth, but sometimes people will also ask open-ended follow-up questions that seek to extend or move your point or story to a related topic.

Examples:

“What do you think of what he did?”

“How would you have approached that differently if it happened to you now?”

“How has your perspective on that changed over time?”

They often have a genuine interest in understanding your perspective, but these questions can often be the most complex to answer, since they require you to think through how you would answer them.

“The Good Place”, Annihilationism, and How Finitude Shapes Our Passions (Reflection #7 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

Chidi and Eleanor experience complete contentedness together in the Good Place.

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. Here are the previous reflection and the next reflection in the series. I hope you enjoy.

I find it fascinating that at the end of the series, “The Good Place” ends up advocating a form of optional annihilationism. Annihilationism is, broadly speaking, a form of the afterlife where persons (their souls, essences, or whatever you want to call what them) ceases to exist. It mostly refers to an idea within some forms of Christianity that God makes the damned cease to exist instead of eternal torment hell like most Christians argue. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church, for example, has historically advocated this view.

The Good Place’s annihilationism is rather different: the humans in heaven/Good Place can choose to cease to exist whenever they get tired of heaven. After they have chosen to complete all they want to, they can cease to exist, where their self gets “recycled” back into the universe through what seems like a vague form of reincarnation. In the show, the eternity of heaven made it into a type of hell: no matter what people did, they continued to exist for all time. The never-ending accumulation of experiences eventually made everyone there feel lethargic like their mind was in a fog. They would indulge themselves in gratifying activities (like for a scholar, learning about whatever she wants), but no matter how long she does this for, there is still an infinite length afterwards. Eventually within this eternity, she forgot almost everything she learned and started doing the minimal amount necessary to function each day. In response to this, ceasing to exist was a potential release. Whenever they have become who they want to be and done all they want to do in Paradise, however long that takes, they can choose to cease to exist. The show implies that pretty much all humans (with Tahini being the only potential exception) will eventually choose to not exist in this way.

This is a very interesting idea. Would this be what an eternal existence in the afterlife would feel like? To answer that question, one would have to determine who or what we would be in such an afterlife, and based on that, to what extent would our present psychology apply to this “self” there. These are not simple questions. Many views of the afterlife chronicle some kind of change to who we are, both as individuals and collectively as a species, which raises all sorts of other questions. One big one is, If we do change, how can we know that these “changed selves” are really us and not a new entity in a new world based on ourselves? I am not sure we could ultimately answer these questions without experiencing existence in this fundamentally changed way, so instead of trying to weigh into those debates, I will focus on the implications of the Good Place’s answer to our current temporal existence.

The Good Place’s answers take cues from human psychology in this world where limited time produces important constraints that shape our desires and motivations. In many ways, our minds seem built to keep us through conflicts and tribulations. These can range from the overarching life goals that span years, decades, or even one’s entire life to mid-term quests that take maybe a few months to complete to daily needs or challenges. For this, time itself plays a major role in defining and setting constraints on these conflicts. Humans do seem very goal-oriented: we produce goals and actively strive to do specific things in the quest to resolve the conflicts we face.

A lot of psychology literature seems to indicate that these goals give us meaning and orient our lives. When we don’t have enough to do, boredom kicks in, stimulating us to go out and determine new activities with new potential conflicts to overcome and goals to attain. Now, rest is also crucial psychologically, and people can try to do too much. Workaholics, for example, may constantly try to do more and more without taking sufficient time to rest. Among other problems, this can lead them not giving sufficient time to reflect, which best happens when you slow down and pause your inner drive. But, Our drives still keep us centered in who we are, and humans tend to be most satisfied when balancing rest and activity.

All of this seems very adaptive to our current lives. Here we need to actively pursue things in order to survive yet ultimately have a limited amount of time on earth to complete what we set out to. The Good Place’s heaven demonstrates how connected our psychology is to such an existence by showing how if you remove finiteness from our lives, suddenly these human psychological drives don’t make sense. Heaven removed people from conflict to survive; they don’t have to make sure they eat, drink, sleep, and do other activities to stay alive. This leaves only goals they actively choose to pursue. It makes perfect sense that this would not be able to last eternally. Our own passions in this world (including our curiosity and desire to learn more) were adapted to keep us going for a finite number of years. In the show, most supernatural beings seem content to exist eternally, but humans would have to become a seismically different being to become like them.

That is my main takeaway from the Good Place’s argument in favor of the “annihilationist option.” Trying to analyze to what extent it is an accurate or necessary depiction of a good afterlife would be too difficult, since we do not know enough about the supposed afterlife in the first place. In particular, we do not know enough about what human persons in any so-called afterlife would be to tell whether such a move would benefit or otherwise be necessary for those humans. But, through its contrast with our current existence, it makes a statement about how our current psychology seems adaptive to our finite existence. What would curiosity or the desire to have fun look like without our physical needs? As much as we in Western culture like to separate these supposedly “higher pursuits” from our physical needs, I am not sure we could have them in a way similar to how we think of them now without our current constraints of time and potential death.

What Journeying throughout South America Taught Me about Find Meaning in Everyday Life

These are some of the lessons about life I learned during my trip in South America in 2024:

1) The Importance of Balance: I think I tried to do too much during the trip, hurting my mental health. Each day I gave myself too many items on my to-do list. This made me less in the moment, detracting from my ability to meet people and be open where I was. It also made me more stressed and irritable.

2) Always another adventure: No matter what happens, life goes on. There’s always another day, another struggle. When you travel, you don’t stay in a place long enough to really experience the benefits of community or the long-term consequences of your actions. You can keep certain positive things – like your memories, photos and most importantly, any good relationships you made along the way – but many negatives you can continue to leave behind. That person you accidentally offended because of a cross-cultural difference, you will never have to see again, for example.

This can create a type of Groundhog Day-like nihilistic feeling, if you allow it to. You are freed from certain types of consequences and can focus on those personal experiences, memories, and relationships that you do take with you. Navigating this can be very different from regular, settled life, and it took me many months to get used to that. You must create your own meaning as you go.

3) Finding Meaning: I think this trip made me think more about how I should find meaning and fulfillment in life. I learned how vacuous the typical “career life” can be, and how beautiful and fascinating other parts of the world are. At the same time, seeing more and more places took some of the novelty of adventure. It forced me to be more at peace with myself. I had to pause during the key moments and realize that I will be forever who I am and that I need to figure out how to find satisfaction in that.

Contentedness does not mean I do not have passions or strive to do new things: knowing myself, I would not feel fulfilled with stasis. Contentedness, for me at least, means that I feel fulfilled as I follow my passions: that’s how I find satisfaction each day of my life.

4) Every day of traveling won’t feel magical: Endless amazement only exists in one’s mind. Some days feel drab, tiring, or just plain annoying, and you need these days to make the wondrous ones feel magical. Happiness and satisfaction are really in your mindset. I can do an activity one day and love it, and do an activity another day and find it mediocre or even taxing, and the main difference is my attitude. Maybe the trick to finding satisfaction in life is to align one’s passions with what one is doing so that the winds feel at your sails as you do it.

5) The importance of communication: Traveling with my girlfriend, I learned that communicating your expectations is crucial. I think I overall did a bad job at this, and we had two different expectations for how we were traveling. In addition to getting on the same page at the beginning, communicating expectations is a constant, iterative process at almost every stage of travel. We constantly navigated between what I wanted and what she wanted while traveling. This was a constant dance that we had to work on together.

All this said, the most important lesson I learned is that traveling the world is amazing, and I would recommend it for anyone who wants an adventure.

The Hamster amidst Gerbils (A Short Story)

Leah the Hamster lived in a terrarium full of gerbils.

And everyday, she felt different. She looked like a hamster, behaved like a hamster, thought like a hamster. When she was a pup, her mother used to tell her, “You don’t think like them. Be careful. You may misunderstand their cues and get yourself in trouble.”

And so, she grew up always scared. Scared that she couldn’t understand or relate to the gerbils around her. Every time she talked with the gerbils, she was afraid she might misunderstand something and get herself in trouble. And some days, some gerbils would make fun of her for being different.

So, she mostly stayed in her den with her toys, worried that any gerbil she talked to would hurt her.

But one day, she got fed up with being home and decided to approach a few new gerbils who had just been brought into the terrarium.

She told them, “I’m sorry. I feel so nervous talking with you. I feel like I am messing up. I just wish to have a pleasant conversation, but I don’t always understand you gerbils and how you think,” afraid that they would gnaw their teeth at her and scurry away.

But instead, this encouraged them to also share how they felt: how they felt out of place in this new community and how they were constantly messing up.

They formed a group of friends who could relate to feeling different from everyone else and slowly helped the others in their community who always fit in to understand their own feelings in the moments they didn’t quite belong. Through this, they built a more accepting community together.

She learned a valuable lesson that day: that being genuine about how she feels to others allows them to relate to her and encourages them to reflect on and be honest about their own feelings. Feeling different forced her to turn inward and understand her feelings in a way that the normal gerbils that fit in did not have to. This was a gift she brought to others around her.

Staring Back (A Short Story)

He had a long day at work, and he drove home exhausted, finally free to let his mind unwind. He looked out into the suburban expanse before him, full of businesses, parks with kids playing, and a few uncultivated fields. That’s where he first saw it. It was a skinny, pale figure, maybe six and a half feet tall, in a field about 50 yards away. It seemed to just stand there looking towards him. What a strange scarecrow, he thought? He felt momentarily gripped by its wilting look making him think about how life slowly erodes us just like erosion conquers hillsides over the centuries. Then his mind moved on to other things.

He felt weird when he saw it again during his drive a few days later. This time it was in the small woods next to someone’s suburban property, only 20 yards away. At this distance, he could get a better look at it. Like before, it was skinny, and pale, but he could not tell its gender. It just stared at him. Its expression was like that of curiosity that had slowly wilted away into a tired indifference. What was it doing, and how did it get here?

He would frequently see it on his drives home from work, sometimes multiple times. He always sensed that it was always there, but he only really noticed it when his mind was tired, bored, or otherwise wandering. He wasn’t sure why his mind would drift towards the figure. All he knew was that when he was busy, he didn’t think about or see it. But when he took a break, out there in the grass or by a tree somewhere, it was, staring right back at him with its expressionless face. Just thinking about it made him feel exhausted.

He didn’t tell his friends or family about it for fear that they would think he was crazy. Deep down, he couldn’t shake his own fear that he was going crazy, and he assumed if he told others, they would write him off as such. He even felt too ashamed to think about it and would do all he could to remove it from his mind.

One Saturday, he felt it all day. He tried to fill his day with activities like chores, striking conversations with random strangers he met, all in the hope that he could distract himself from knowing that the figure was there with him.

That night, when he went to bed, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He glanced out the window and saw it there in the backyard staring up at him, a stone’s throw away. He slammed the curtains shut, and all the other curtains in his house. But that didn’t matter. He couldn’t sleep, knowing it was out there. He finally decided to open his bedroom window and confront it.

“What do you want?” he shouted. No response. He desperately continued shouting, his demands transitioning into begging, “What are you, and what do you want with me? Why do you keep following me?” But it said nothing. It just stared back at him with the same indifferent, lethargic expression it always has.

Furious, he finally decided enough is enough. He went outside to attack it. He rushed right up to it, but each step he took towards it, it seemed to move away. Floating above the ground, it slid backwards maintaining the same distance of about 20 feet from him. He chased it down the street in the middle of the night. It could not go through objects, opting to go around cars, poles, and other obstructions with ease, as it continued to stare at him. Finally, he had it trapped in a street with a deadend, but it somehow disappeared behind the fence of a house, where he was unable to follow. He went home defeated.

He was never able to elude the figure. As he tried to live his life, some days he saw it only once; others multiple times. He couldn’t avoid thinking about it, whenever he went outside, he wondered whether he would see it in the background somewhere, and whenever he was indoors, he wondered whether it was watching him. Slowly, he became too exhausted to handle many of his daily activities. He stopped wanting to see friends and family, only doing the bare minimum at work. Others told him he looked tired and indifferent, and one day he looked in the mirror only to realize that other than several wrinkles from the stress, his exhausted face looked just like that of the figure.

Unlocking the World: Balancing Exploration and Reflection While Traveling

One lesson I have learned while traveling is that in order to learn from the world around you, you must first be open to listen, and to be open to listen, you must be comfortable with yourself.

You no matter where you are in the world, you are always yourself. People often think that when they travel, they will magically become a completely different person with a completely different set of interests, but that is never the case. You are who you are, no matter what continent you are on, and when traveling, you will have to face the same inner demons and flaws you already struggle with.

At the same time, the ability to learn from the world around you opens up new possibilities; the trick is to use them wisely. By learning about the world and engaging with others, you both encounter new rhythms that can get you out of your cycles, try on different identities that may offer innovative ways to resolve some of your inner issues, and can learn from other lifestyles and ways of thinking.

But how to best leverage these gains is easier said than done. I find the trick is to balance extrovertedly exploring and learning about wherever I am and introvertedly reflecting and processing.

The more I explore and learn, the more I get my own internal juices going. Learning and creatively are multiplicative: innovation connections produce even more innovative connections, cascading out overtime, and new thinking from the culture I am currently in will naturally spill over into innovative thinking in my personal life.

An S-Curve: Ramping up suddenly and then slowing

But such innovation grows exponentially and can thus become overwhelming. I need alone time to rest and process all of it. Like the s-curve models of the spread of diseases in populations (common on the news during the Covid pandemic), my learning at first shoots up rapidly but then slows down significantly as my brain becomes too filled with new ideas to handle new ones. That’s when I need to rest and process what I have learned so far. If I don’t, I will become tired and often cranky. After taking the time to process it all, I can go back out and learn some more.

That is how I navigate between both personal growth and learning while traveling the world. How you do it may be different based on your different personality, but I hope this provides good food for thought. When doing something as long-term intense as traveling the world, intentionally strategizing how you meet your mental needs and work on yourself while experiencing a literal world of things is important.

What Are Emotions, and What Do They Tell Us About Ourselves?

Many are critical of emotions, seeing feelings as something that stifles them, as something they must overcome with reason and rationality, but that is foolish in the long run. We should be aware of our emotions because they teach us crucial lessons about ourselves and our needs.

Emotions are one of our internal mechanisms to orient us towards what we need. Thus, they are crucial. Even though sometimes emotions can be overwhelming or lead people to make decisions in the moment that turn out to be poor ones, we should not ignore or suppress our emotions.

Instead, we should seek to understand what they are telling us about what we need. Anxiety is a sign that we consider whatever we are anticipating as important. Worry and fear area signs that we are concerned about our wellbeing. Anger is a sign that we feel an injustice has threatened ourselves or others we care about.

At the end of the day, they are signals. Signals that can turn out to be correct or incorrect. Sometimes we are angry at something that we discover is not a real injustice, and sometimes, what we fear turns out not to be much of a concern. But often they are not wrong: our minds can be very good at assessing what is important.

Either way, it’s important to process the emotion, understand why you feel it, and then determine the best response to having the emotion. Through this, we can synchronize our emotions with our rational thinking. Using our reason to think about whether our emotion’s assessments are missing important information, and in turn, determining whether our rational self is ignoring something our emotions are picking up on.

A successful marriage between the two is a healthier way to respond to our emotions than suppression and a better way to use the tools in our psychological toolset to engage the world and live a good life.