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How to Overcome the Nomad Nihilism

Traveling can encourage a certain type of nihilism. Often every few weeks (or sometimes every few days), you are in a new place. This can produce a constant sense of churn, kind of like a time loop movie, where you constantly reexperience new things and a new setting of people going about their lives. You don’t usually stay in a place long enough to experience the long-term consequences of your actions or to develop roots. Thus, like some of Phil’s benders in “Groundhog Day,” you could, in theory, live as hedonistically as you would like (as long as you do not break any laws) if you really wanted to. Pure hedonism was never really my thing, but I could understand its pull on many travelers.

Each new place starts to fit into the standard pattern of all other locations. You end up looking at people going about their lives, removed from the signals of meaning that ground most humans in their daily lives. You technically don’t need to wake up at a certain time (unless you choose to impose that on yourself), go to work at a certain time, or otherwise follow the rhythms that produce the structure for most people’s lives.

Likewise, you are not connected in the web of relationships that many encounter in their daily life. Instead, you witness an endless stream of new people you meet along the way. If you do not click with a certain person or even those in an entire community, you can simply move on to another place. This produces the advantages of flexibility. You are not stuck with the same people over and over again like how many people are forced to tolerate their neighbors for years on end. This allows you to be yourself. At the same time, though, you are presented with endless choices and often do not have to experience the social consequences of social sanctions for your actions.

All of this can give the feel of endless cycles, leading to a type of nihilism. I can understand Phil’s “whatever” attitude in Groundhog Day much better after experiencing tons of new places in rapid succession. After a while of being in new places again and again, it can feel about the same after a while. What do you want to do today? Whatever you want. Some days that is a grand adventure, but others it’s sitting on the couch and doing nothing. It’s all been done before, and any grand adventure is probably similar to ones you have already done many times.

I call nomad nihilism. It’s the dark side of flexibility. After a while, you can start to feel meh about the specifics of where you are (the new people you meet, the new sites you see, and so on) since to you, it’s all been done before.

Unlike in Groundhog Day, you are in new places, which can produce new dynamics. This only goes so far and eventually these small novelties start to compress into a singular lull. Within this, though, lies the start of the solution.

You still take some things with you, however: your memories, photographs and any other physical or written artifacts, and most importantly, any relationships you made along the way. These grounded me against the meaningless lull of novelty. Notice these are mostly the positives of the places you have been to: the people you clicked with and maybe form a lasting friendship with, not those who never clicked with; the beautiful photographs of the places you found interesting, not the ugly places or tourist traps you wouldn’t go back to again, etc. Except for memories, which are always with us no matter how harmful, you have the choice, meaning you can focus exclusively on the positives.

This produces a significantly different dynamic than regular, settled life. On the one hand, you have significantly greater control to craft the experience that works best for you. You can decide where in the world to go, what to visit in each place, and when to interact with others in a locale with less “intrusions” into your time by others than in settled life. At the same time, this means your decisions do more to craft the experience you have. That day, you can choose to be hypersocial and speak with tons of people you can, or you can choose to be a hermit talking to no one (or anywhere in between).

Over time, your choices influence your overall experience over the long-run. If you choose to focus on yourself or your work in the short term, that is often fine, but if you do that all the time, you run the risk of never finding time for those around you and creating an overall less immersive, less vibrant experience for yourself. The freedom to craft your own experience comes with more responsibility as you are often what stands in the way of living your joy.

Constantly changing environments can also help you see the arbitrary constructions of human existence. Constantly witnessing new environments with new variations of the human experiences can make you notice the parameters that form normal human affairs, whether that be a conversation or seeing how a specific community celebrates a particular holiday. This removes some of the “magic” of normal life that someone may experience if they only lived within one community. The external world losing some of its muster can make retreating into your own world more appealing.

It seemingly hyperindividualizes you. Our society glorifies being completely able to choose when and how you interact with others, and traveling the world is an ultimate manifestation of that. You both learn much more about humanity from seeing the diversity of experiences around the world, and you have the freedom to construct the experiences that you want. It enables you to see the strings that hold communities together, but such a removed perspective can also feel distancing, reducing community to the assemblage of specific factors. To work through its cons, you must figure out how to take time to engage with the communities in which you are in.

You ultimately need a balance between solitude and external. You need to explore, learn new things, and meet new people. These relationships, in particular, help center us, both who we are and how we regulate our emotions. You also need to relax and rest. Finally, creativity is crucial too: I agree with the Youtuber Sisphysus55 that art or creativity is the ultimate solution to burnout. Producing whether for others, just ourselves, serious, or whimsical helps reorient ourselves as well. I found these three to be the pillars of overcoming nihilism: relationships, rest, and creativity.

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.

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.

Navigating the Afterlife’s Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Empathy, and Organization Change (Reflection #2 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

Part Two of my Good Place Series. Click here for Reflection One, Reflection Three, and for all my other reflections on the Good Place.

Organizational change is a quiet yet constant theme in “The Good Place”. Its explicit discussion of philosophy, ethics, justice, and the afterlife get more attention, but at the end of the day, the series’ plot mostly revolves around a series of organizational changes within the complex and traditionalist afterlife bureaucracy.

Through all of this, the characters’ primary conflict is convincing the established bureaucracy to refine the system. In this quest, Michael is the primary protagonist. He consistently advocates for organizational change throughout the series, starting as an innovative form of torture and morphing into a reform of the entire afterlife system.

Often the show creates one specific “leader” character to personify the system itself. Being in charge, this is the sole character they must convince, a move which not only gives a tangible strategy to enact their goals (they must convince this stubborn leader) but also a symbolic representation of the system itself. These leaders start complacent in the system unwilling to listen to its problems, very realistic for anyone who has tried to enact organizational change. Four such leader characters represent the types of complacency in the system:

1) “Not my problem” with the Head Accountant: The head of the cosmos’s accounting department (primarily tasked with creating the supposedly objective points system that damns all modern humans. When confronted with the problem, he responds that the system is objective and cannot be wrong. When pushed on that, his basic response is, “It’s not my problem.” He and the accounting department have a job/role, and such a change goes beyond their directives. Thus, it is the problem of whoever else is in charge of that.

2) Slow, ineffective action by the Head “Angel” of the Good Place: This character is in charge of the Good Place, along with a team of angelic beings. He listens to the team’s concerns and believes them unequivocally. He raises the alarm bells to do something, but his (and his angelic team’s) plans are too slow to be of much use. Developing a committee (including developing a committee to develop the committee), then more time to develop the name of the committee, and then after an even longer to research the matter before in effect writing a strongly worded memo to the powers-that-be to look into this.

3) Anger towards Change by the Head Demon: The Head Demon of the Bad Place, who serves as the primary antagonist for most of the show, represents the visceral anger towards institutional change and the desire to continue doing things as they always have. He tortures other characters for fun (including abusing his power as head demon to torture his own demon minions after they are done helping him). His anger manifests as visceral anger to those around him, personifying the often angry pushback for things to remain the same (which just so happens to be violent torture in this context) that occurs during attempts to make organizational change. At the end of the show, he finally concludes that torturing is boring, unfulfilling, and that he is unhappy, the only reason he is willing to agree to the change.

4) The Judge’s lack of empathy: When confronting the problem with the judge, she responds with a basic response of “Well, that’s just how it is.” This embodies the empathetic response one also finds when trying to advocate for change. She is not the only one; multiple supernatural beings fundamentally do not understand human existence, existing in their eternal state unaware of experientially what life is like on planet earth. Because of this, they cannot understand the difficulty of what life is like in the “real world” (aka human world) and the system developed did not take into consideration the complexities of life on earth. Embodying a perspective removed from the ground, bureaucracies and other organizations often oversimplify complex phenomena from their vantage point into easy to quantify metrics in a way that filters out the nuance and humanity of the individuals involved.

The cure for this lack of empathy is to inhabit the human world and experience what it is like to be a human. Even though most of the supernatural being’s exhibit this lack of empathy (with the potential exception being the angels discussed in 2, who are empathetic and willing to make a change, just ineffective), the Judge actually becomes empathetic, by going to Earth and living there for a time. This causes her to realize how complex life is and how unfair the afterlife system is. The show portrays walking in another’s shoes as the best way to cultivate empathy, and such empathy as being necessary to understand the faults inherent in the bureaucratic machine.

All of this demonstrates the complexities of organizational change. Modern sitcoms do not usually handle the intricate themes of organizational change within bureaucratic structures, and I am glad that the Good Place does. Though the show often lessens the intricacies of organizational change by narrowing them into a conversation with a few head leaders. The characters egregiously break the rules of the system until the leader of the system comes to accept such actions as necessary, rule-breaking common in Hollywood that would probably not fly in the real world. The sitcom format may be difficult to portray the slow minutiae and give-and-take that real-life organizational change often requires, so to me, that is forgivable.

Its take on the forces that oppose organizational change is accurate and compelling even if how they overcome them was unrealistic. I found it refreshing that a show decided to discuss these forces in the first place.

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.

A Year Traveling the World: A Reflection on 2024 and What to Expect in 2025

I hope for three things in 2025 as I travel around the world:

1) Find balance

This past year, I ended up discovering how I want to live my life (or this current chapter of my life at least), and this year, I need to learn how to live that life in a balanced, sustainable fashion. In 2024, my girlfriend and I decided to start to travel the world. 2024 served as its childhood to develop, refine, and mature how to travel the world.

Now, I suspect 2025 will see an adolescence and introduction to adulthood. During the “childhood” of 2024, I determined whether I enjoyed this life, which I do, but then also encountered practical problems in how to bring it about. Like, how should I balance adventuring and seeing new places with the desire to do creative projects and other things like keeping up with friends, daily chores, etc.? What kind of stuff am I most interested in creating or doing? How do my girlfriend and I juggle our respective needs and paces when traveling together?

In childhood (in Western beliefs around psychological development at least), one also focuses on general skill exploration and development. You explore the world and attend school where you are supposed to learn the most basic foundational skills for your society. Likewise, in 2024, I have been similarly focusing a lot of my time on my own general skill development without knowing it.

Then in Western psychology, adolescence is the time when individuals most wrestle with their identities and emotionally how they will resolve the issues that come their way. One reason teenagers have so many mood swings is because they are encountering adult stressors for the first time and are initially developing their emotional techniques for how to respond. As they get older, these emotional techniques become ingrained as the patterns for how they will react when they encounter similar stressors, and thus they do not need to adjudicate between as many potential emotional responses as when they were a teenager.

Similarly, by the end of 2024, I seem to have encountered some of the big issues I will face traveling the world while also trying to do creative work), and I suspect I will use the beginning of 2025 to wrestle with how to best juggle all my priorities and how to overcome these potential problems. For example, I felt like I was not sufficiently in the moment and did not ingratiate form as much cross-cultural connections as I would have liked. Instead, I got too caught up and stressed out by the many many items I put on my to do list. I will likely test out different approaches, some of which will help and some won’t, determining over time what works best for me.This I consider my adolescent period for traveling the world.

As I finalize figuring that out, I predict my lifestyle will eventually transition sometime later in 2025 into a “young adult period” where I start to find my groove. How long will the adolescent period take? I predict I will be done and have a sense of balance by the first half of the year, with a decent likelihood I will be done by March or April, but I really don’t know. That may be way too optimistic, like maybe this adolescence will take the whole year, and if I read this in the future, I may chuckle at my own naivety. But I am still going to tentatively go with it.

2) Create something I am proud of

I would like to develop something insightful and useful for the world in 2025. In 2024, I focused on my own exploring, learning, and experience: being able to see interesting and great places in the world, having my own adventures, and learning about the world. But as I work through my adolescent stage and hit my stride, I would like to take those skills to good use and produce something interesting, insightful, and potentially useful to others.

I will still explore new parts of the world (don’t get me wrong), but I would like to spend more energy trying to produce something as well. Right now, my thoughts are writing a book or starting a podcast series, but I have a nearly endless list of other minor or less thought out ideas. I predict I will set my ambitions too high like I always do at first, but I will ultimately produce something that I am proud of.

Rethinking Presentations: Why You Should Stop Treating Presentations like Lectures

During my years of teaching teenagers, I have learned an important principle about trying to teach or otherwise foster knowledge in the world:

When teaching, those doing most of the mental work during your lesson are the ones doing most of the learning.

By this principle, if you want to teach something, then it is best to put them, not you, in the driver’s seat. To do so, position them to do most of the mental work during your lesson.

For example, take a classroom setting. In a lecture, the teacher does the most work: talking and thinking about how to explain things. Students are left with the mostly passive activity of listening (sometimes with some mild active activities like taking notes). ‘

Thus, lectures are designed to teach teachers, not the students, which is exactly backwards from what is supposed to do. I remember hearing this from many presenters: the act of preparing and then giving a presentation teaches them so much about the topic than anyone from their audience will ever be able to glean from it. This is because they are the ones doing most of the mental work.

This is similar in a workplace environment: presentations are one of the worst approaches to teach anything. If you want someone to learn or reflect on something you yourself have learned, it might be helpful to pause to reflect:

How did I learn this material, and how can I replicate that process during the time I have?

What kind of environment or activities would work to have my participants explore the activity on their own? How can I produce that kind of environment?

These would likely give you ideas for how to make interactive lessons where your participants, not you, are doing most of the active thinking.

In regular conversations, the principle applies the same. If you are talking with someone about a life problem, have them do most of the talking or other forms of thinking. In my experience, too many people interject and go into a type of lecture mode when they sense they have something to teach someone.

Not only do you not always have something to “teach” when only hearing a few short sentences about someone’s life, but more importantly, even if you do have something to teach, asking questions to get them to think it through themselves is almost always a better way to teach that thing. As you ask questions and hear them out, you can get them to come to your suggestion on their own terms.

Everywhere You Go Is Normal: How You Can Use This to Change How You Travel

When you visit a new place in the world that you have never been to before, that place can often seem really exotic or really scary. Having never been there, we can feel an ambiguity when we think about it. Our mind sometimes casts that ambiguity into one of two extremes: the most amazing place on earth or a horrible, scary place where we will constantly have to be worried about safety concerns. Which one you pick often has to do with whether we have built positive or negative associations based on the types of stories we have heard about that place.

Psychologically, this is normal, but these initial conceptions unsurprisingly turn out to be completely wrong. You may initially see what you think you will see, but if you stay long enough or keep an open mind, you will slowly discover all the ways in which you were wrong.

For me, one of the most important lessons I learn when traveling to a new place is that this place, in all of its wonderful unusualness, is normal for the people who live there. When I visit a new part of the world, instead of thinking about how strange it is – whether strange in the exoticness or strange in the weird or scary sense – I try to think about how those who live there can consider it normal. For every place is normal for someone.

By thinking about how weird it is, I mentally separate myself from the place, but by conceiving of how this too is normal for some, I force myself to confront one of the most perplexing things about humanity and the world: how we can create so many different types of normal. Thus, I come to terms with how in its distinctiveness, it still has something major in common with the place that I call home: that it is a home for the people there.

The Importance of Singleness

One of the most common mistakes I see US Americans making about dating is to assume they must be with someone. US society has subconsciously taught us that to live a successful life, you must have found someone, and this can cause people to rush into relationships without really examining whether that person is a good fit for them.

Someone once told me that as an adult, she had only been single for a handful of times, and that these were the worst periods in her life. The longest was a two year period after breaking up with someone before finding someone else. She lamented how bad she felt about being single. She had internalized the societal messages that you are supposed to be with someone and had assumed that during these periods of singleness that she was doing something “wrong” in need of correction. She wished she had better used these opportunities rather than spending her time immediately rushing into a relationship.

Our single periods are precisely that: opportunities. Opportunities to learn about yourself, who you are, and what makes you happy in life. When we view singleness as an issue in need of correction, we fail to learn from that time what we can.

We should be more comfortable being single. Some people might want to be single their whole lives, and that’s fine. And some people might ultimately want to be in a long-term relationship, and that is fine too. But, periods of singleness are excellent opportunities to become comfortable with who we are and what we most value in our lives. They are an asset, not a liability.

The mindset that we ought to find someone can make us do one of the worst things in a relationship: settle. By viewing not being hitched as a problem to be solved, it turns whatever potential partner in front of us to a potential “solution.” Is this person “good enough” to be someone that we can use to meet this requirement? That can produce a sense that if they check certain boxes, they are good enough to be the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with.

But, if we are fine being single, the question becomes more open and genuine: Do I enjoy spending time with this person enough to spend the rest of my life with them? If you are comfortable being single, you can always move on and continue your single life until you find someone who you do want to spend your life with.

If you need to find someone, then your threshold for what kind of things you cannot tolerate must be much lower. This can lead to people staying in relationships that are not a good fit – or even with people who mistreat them – because they feel like the psychological or social cost of leaving is that much higher. Relationships built on such a premise are also much more likely to become unhappy, have problems (like abuse, adultery, etc.), or to end in divorce later (cite).

Spending your whole life with someone is no small matter, so it should be taken lightly. And trying to force your way into a relationship only disrespects and lowers the effectiveness of the process. Ironically, the best way to take the question seriously is to make it only one option in the first place.