The Sum of Who I Am pt. 2: Isolation

When it comes to completing measurable intellectual work, such as writing or reading, I prefer quiet and minimal distractions.

This is not unlike most people.

When it comes to thinking clearly and reaching important insights, however, my ideal environments are all but typical.

The following are the places where I regularly do my best thinking:

· Airplanes, trains, and, to a lesser extent, buses

· Nightclubs

· Skateboarding and snowboarding

· Watching movies in theaters

· Bathrooms and showers

All of these places and activities share two traits, which in other circumstances could seem paradoxical: isolation and stimulation. Even in a nightclub (well, a good one at least) there’s little expectation of actual interaction with others — if you dance fiercely, and independently, enough, few will interrupt your focus. It was at such an event, on New Years Eve (though more of a converted warehouse than a nightclub,) when I had a realization that has preoccupied me since:

I haven’t truly been alone in years.

The last time I had more than a few waking hours of mental isolation was when I was in China well over a year ago — and even then, I was traveling from city to city speaking at events and representing my start-up. Before that was when I transferred to the University of Michigan, almost three years ago to the day. I had to come early for orientation and none of my flatmates for a few days after me. Ever since, due to my increasingly insane schedule and tendencies, in addition to running a nutty house, friends, colleagues, and family have surrounded me, in near perpetuity, for three years.

My life wasn’t always so crazy. In fact, the majority of my life has been accompanied by periods of solitude. As an only-child in a small college town with parents who worked full-time, I often was expected to keep myself entertained. I was allowed a half-hour of “educational” television each day and a half-hour of entertainment. As I got a bit older, and video games and dial-up Internet made their way into my home, I would be granted no more than hour of those mediums. While I fought tooth-and-nail for every extra minute on those devices (and snuck in countless extra hours in ingenious ways), for the most part, I had to find ways to entertain myself.

It feels disingenuous to provide a hindsight analysis of my emotional state before adolescence. However, I had a lot of energy as a child (they very accurately diagnosed me with ADHD by the time I was seven.) This inevitably led me to a fair deal of “time-outs” and processions to the principal’s office. Yet my overall recollection of my childhood is overwhelmingly positive.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for my adolescence.

It began when I was twelve, and I had my first run-in with the law. That was the summer before I started middle school, my first time at a new academic institution. It went entirely downhill from there. Suspensions, arrests, probation, and unremitting conflict with authority defined my early adolescence and continued to afflict me for nearly a decade. Hormonal changes did not treat me kindly, to say the least.

I saw shrinks, went on meds — the whole nine yards. Nobody had an answer for my behavior, least of all me. I remember one prognosis from the period in particular, though. It was the dean of students at the first of three high schools I attended. He admonished, in a distinct Boston-Irish accent, “You’re not stupid, but it’s hard to imagine you not being dead, addicted to drugs, or in prison by the time you’re 25.” (To give him credit: it may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy had his attempt, weeks later, after the school year ended and I declared I was transferring, to have me expelled for unrelated shenanigans.) While I wanted to believe otherwise, even I didn’t have high hopes. My grades were abysmal; I wasn’t good at sports, or any extracurricular activity for that matter, and my rap sheet, even at fourteen, made my rabid interest in politics seem unrealistic.

My difficult personality at this age had two effects. Firstly, I became isolated socially. I would switch between unpopular private school brat during the week, and unpopular, street-urchin brat on the weekend (each identity earned me my fair share of bullying.) Almost fortunately, then, I became isolated physically, when I headed off to boarding school in rural New Hampshire and could not seem to fit in there, either. This led to the second effect: I became increasingly self-aware.

I had a deep desire to understand the anger and sadness that felt so pent up inside me, as well as my inability to relate to others. It felt as out of my control as my classroom misbehavior. Unlike many youth today, I had little time to take respite in the Internet or video games. But my boarding school in N did afford me three thousand acres of woodlands to explore and plenty of time to adventure on my own. Then, in my junior year, I did a “semester-at-sea,” sailing down the Eastern seaboard and throughout the Caribbean on a small 125-foot schooner with nineteen other students, leading to a very healthy forced socialization.

These experiences as an adolescent probably helped save me from the fate augured by that spiteful student dean. But it is hard to imagine how differently it would have been to come-of-age if I had been born only a few years later. Today’s hyper-connected society grants very little reprieve from our daily lives. It makes me wonder if my anger at that age would have manifested into something more dangerous, more vengeful. Would I have been absorbed into the dark corners of the Internet, or been attached to a smartphone that constantly reaffirmed my social outlier status, instead of working towards self-improvement?

It’s hard to say. I can only hope that my own children, one day, will not undergo the pain I felt. But if they do, I will certainly feel well prepared. Or will I?

My realization on News Year Eve, that I had not spent time by myself for so long, gripped me, even amongst the revelry and madness of that night.

I stopped dancing.

I sat down.

My friends kept asking if I was ok, given such uncharacteristic behavior, which irked me because I was trying to reflect on this realization (hence why nightclub environments are only conducive to thinking while dancing.)

In the past couple of years, I have been overcome at times with the sense that I have entered a bizarre, elaborate dream or, more often, feel plagued by guilt. These sensations stem from my adolescence and early adulthood. Much of my sense of self developed out of the various stigmas that had been attached to me: delinquent, troublemaker, stupid, ADHD, loser, stoner, criminal, failure, etc. My “dream-state” experience is a direct product of unshackling myself and flying beyond any expectation that had ever been set for me.

Of course, it’s hard to articulate or empathize with the improbability of whatever modicum of success I have had so far today given my inherent privilege. As Erving Goffman poignantly explains in his landmark sociological text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, certain stigmas have different amount of “stickiness.” Except my particularly apparent attention deficit, there have been no labels I have been unable to shed as a white, straight, educated man. And that’s where my sense of guilt arises out of — a knowledge that many factors, including insidious societal prejudices, over which I had no control, allowed me to be able to perpetually redefine myself in a way that others might not. While anyone can radically alter themselves backstage, Goffman explained, it can be much more difficult to change how your audience (society) perceives you once they’ve made judgments about your on-stage (public) persona.

It is with this understanding of myself that I experienced a mild existential crisis on New Years Eve. If I have a genuine desire to become more mindful, compassionate, helpful, and grateful, amongst other traits I do unambiguously seek to improve, then I need to start being alone more. It is in mental isolation that so much personal growth of mine has stemmed from. I must be willing to be uncomfortable. If being alone makes me sad, that is a fear I need to overcome. If I am going to shed myself of guilt, I need to be less of an asshole. That requires reflecting, not talking.

I have spent three years totally devoid of any alone time. They have also been the most mind-boggling, life-changing, and best years of my life. But in less than a week, I turn twenty-five years old, a quarter century. That means, from a neurological perspective, my brain is quickly becoming less malleable. My personality, much of which was defined before I was five, but also greatly developing since I was eighteen (this is science), is becoming ingrained. While I believe in constant and perpetual self-improvement, it certainly becomes more difficult after one’s late twenties.

So amongst this madness, and in the past couple of weeks, I have made a commitment to be alone, to reflect, and to write more often. I bought an annual membership to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and begun walking as much as possible, to create spaces for being mentally alone. Lastly, in between business trips, I am spending several days, including my birthday, by myself in Cuba. The island nation is one that I have always wanted to explore and it will force me to remove myself from all attachment I have to my current reality (I won’t have Internet or cellular service.) This will be the first time in a very long time that I will be so isolated (though overwhelmingly stimulated in so many other ways.)

Lastly, I have no idea if this sort of realization comes off as aloof, and should have been self-evident, or if it is perhaps is a broader symptom of humanity’s newfound hyper-connectedness. It is a strange thought that I am part of the last generation to remember a world without the ubiquity of the Internet. I have a strong feeling I am not the only one that could benefit from disconnecting for a bit.