Anna Goldfarb, who writes the newsletter Friendship Explained, has a framework for why this happens, and it has nothing to do with being unlikeable. It has to do with tiers.

Goldfarb maps our social lives across five distinct layers, each named after a body of water. At the innermost ring is the Bathtub (one or two people with full, unfiltered access to you: a partner, a lifelong best friend, someone who has seen you cry in an airport). Then the Jacuzzi (three to five people), your core emotional support crew. Then a Swimming Pool, a High Tide, and finally the Water Park, which caps out near Robin Dunbar’s famous 150-person limit for meaningful social recognition.

The framework is elegant, and its central diagnosis is hard to argue with. Most of the modern loneliness epidemic isn’t happening at the Water Park. We’ve gotten very good at accumulating weak ties, mistaking the noise for nourishment. What’s actually suffering is the Jacuzzi. Anna Goldfarb writes:

“The loneliness epidemic isn’t really a water park problem. Most lonely people have an overflowing cornucopia of acquaintances. What they’re missing are those valuable Jacuzzi people.”

Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running happiness study on record, found the same pattern from a different angle:

“The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health.”

Wealth and career success barely feature. The three to five people who know you well enough to tell you the truth: that’s the tier that keeps you healthy and sane. As we’ve explored before, making those connections as an adult is harder than most people expect, and the deficit is real.

“Making friends as an adult isn’t impossible. It’s just different. It requires more intention, more effort, and more courage than it did when we were seven.”

So the framework earns its keep. Where it gets shakier is in the assumptions quietly baked into its architecture.

Yes, it’s true that quite likely the Bathtub accurately describes those in traditional monogamous relationships, but even then, you must be careful not to audit your life - do I have three to five people in my Jacuzzi - is eight too many? How come I only have two?

The pyramid works cleanly if your social life follows a fairly conventional shape. But the assumptions it rests on aren’t always visible until you step outside them. Someone who is polyamorous or ethically non-monogamous might have two or three Bathtub-level relationships simultaneously, partners who each carry genuine depth and know the unguarded version, and the tier model doesn’t quite know what to do with that.

Some people have intense long-term relationships with others online, without ever meeting in person. Some are finding comfort and connection with AI chats. An extrovert might find a 150-person Water Park a source of energy, but for an introvert, that’s a definition of hell. That’s the risk with any framework: it is by nature prescriptive. And that’s fine, provided you don’t get too bound up in the literalness.

The pyramid is a useful tool to notice where your connections might be thin on the ground. You might have an intense, close relationship with your partner, but perhaps your wider constellation is lacking. But it’s important to remember that building an authentic connection has to start with your own life, not by trying to fit it to someone else’s map.

“It’s not just about finding someone who ‘gets me’. You need to be equipped and develop emotional intelligence to understand yourself and the people you associate with, ensuring you can navigate the differing experiences and perspectives.”

The world is a broad and colourful canvas. Some people will find their version of the Jacuzzi in a partner and two lifelong friends. Others will find it in a rotating constellation of people, each holding a different facet of who they are. Some will have a Water Park that matters enormously to them; others will have let that tier go and feel no loss. None of these configurations is a failure of the framework. They’re just lives.

Use the map, but don’t let it use you.

Back in the 90s, when working for the local government in Bendigo, the CEO had us all take a Myers-Briggs test. Mine came in as ENTP:

• E (Extrovert): Extroverts draw energy from being around other people rather than from time alone.

• N (Intuitive): Intuitive types focus on patterns and possibilities rather than concrete facts and details.

• T (Thinking): Thinking types make decisions based on logic and objective analysis rather than feelings or personal values.

• P (Perception): Perceiving types prefer to stay open and flexible rather than making firm plans and sticking to them.

My E and P were borderline (the opposites are Introvert and Judgement).

Those who know me will often have seen me in group settings, both personal and professional, as pretty social, interested in talking to people, and happy to march up to someone I don’t know and introduce myself. What people don’t see is the drive home and my need to decompress. It’s not because there was any conflict or concern, but because my battery ran out and I need some quiet time to recharge. There’s my introvert kicking in. If I need to be ‘on’ for a few days in a row, for example, working a tradeshow and interacting with many people, it takes a couple of days to recoup my energy. It’s not that I feel there is something wrong, rather a kind of unexplained sense that I’m struggling.

Writing as a guest on Dr Marisa G. Franco’s Substack, clinical psychologist Ellen Hendriksen, author of How to Be Yourself, offers a useful comparison: a meeting with one colleague versus the Monday team meeting goes “from playing catch to nine innings of baseball.” In a group, you are simultaneously tracking multiple voices, reading emotional undercurrents, monitoring who is being left out, and negotiating conversational turns. Hendriksen says:

“In groups, we have to follow and respond to multiple people’s words, emotions, and interpersonal dynamics, not to mention interruptions and side convos. There’s a greater load on our cognitive capacity, social battery, and emotional bandwidth.”

Group dynamics are much harder to navigate than one-on-one interactions. It’s not that you don’t have the tools or that you’re awkward; groups are just awkward. It’s not you; it’s the nature of how much work you’ve done.

There is an extra layer of complexity when the gathering involves people who know you well. You are not simply navigating a room of strangers. You are trying to show up consistently across several overlapping versions of yourself: the funny one, the capable one, the one who more or less has things together (the latter is an impression I’m very good at projecting whilst it is not necessarily true).

As I explored in The Quiet Exhaustion of Keeping Parts of Yourself Hidden, the exhaustion doesn’t come from hiding the flawed pieces; it comes from the ongoing vigilance required to decide, moment by moment, what stays visible.

“All of us hide something of ourselves. It’s why we very rarely (I’d hope) tell people to fuck off when we don’t agree with them in work meetings. The most exhausting thing is not hiding who you are, but carrying the constant awareness that you are doing it.”

It’s even harder when different circles of friends are in the same room, some knowing something about you that others don’t. The burden increases because you are straddling two pathways simultaneously.

Hendriksen draws a distinction between social performance and social connection. Social performance focuses on external actions: saying the right things, avoiding mistakes, meeting whatever unspoken standard you imagine is operating. Social connection focuses on the relationships themselves,

“knowing, trusting, accepting, and supporting each other through experiences shared both directly and verbally.”

The two can look the same from the outside, but they feel completely different from the inside. I’ve written before about performative socialising and how you might be liked without feeling seen - this is that dynamic, operating at the level of a single evening.

Her practical advice follows the same logic. When someone asks what’s going on with you, you don’t have to file a tidy report on work, family, and other. You can tell a story. You can ask for advice on something you’ve been chewing over. You can riff on what someone else just said. The goal, as she puts it, is simple:

“Talk about what you’re jazzed to share.”

And when all eyes in the room turn toward you at once, the job isn’t to perform adequately. It’s just to show up as you actually are, which is enough even when it doesn’t feel like it.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how we stall on our own decisions, not because the choice is hard, but because we can’t stand the uncertainty of what comes next.

“None of us can see the future. We might make a decision, but there may be hidden information, an element of luck or external forces that, even if our decision seems sound, may still all fall apart. Alternatively, a shitty, reckless decision may pay off through sheer luck.”

But this plays the other way round as well, because most of us don’t just freeze on our own decisions. We also jump too quickly on other people’s. Not to take over, exactly, but to prevent something uncomfortable from happening to them. We smooth the path, absorb the friction, say the thing before the silence becomes too awkward. We tell ourselves it’s love.

The Anxious Overachiever put it plainly: we tend to mistake distress-prevention for love. And once you see it, you see it everywhere.

As parents, our natural instinct is to protect our child, but maybe we are jumping in before they have a chance to work it out on their own. Or, and I am so guilty of this, taking on a task from a team member because waiting for them to work through the task feels worse than just doing it myself. Or maybe we soften a hard truth for a partner or close friend because we love them and can’t bear to see them sitting with difficult news.=

Jonathan Haidt, in The Coddling of the American Mind, argues that this instinct, played out across a generation of parenting, has produced adults less equipped to handle ordinary adversity. His guiding principle is simple and well known:

“Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

It applies equally to anyone you’re leading or loving. When we over-function for others, fixing problems before they can attempt them, managing feelings before they can process them, we’re not being kind. We’re managing our own discomfort at their expense.

The harder truth is that emotional courage rarely looks dramatic. It usually looks like not doing something. Not jumping in, not explaining, not rescuing. Staying present while someone else sits with difficulty and finds their own way through it. Putting it plainly, sometimes we need to suck it up.

Brené Brown, in Daring Greatly, frames what that actually costs us:

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.”

It is only natural to want to share the load with someone we love. It’s tough watching them struggle with something difficult and unsettling. We can’t know how that struggle will resolve, yet intervening early is likely more for us than them.

We must learn to notice the moments that we feel we must jump in and save our friend, resist the impulse to dive into the swirling waters - because it’s entirely possible we’ll both drown. It’s not up to us to fix something that isn’t ours to fix.

We must trust that our friend is capable of fighting their own battle and give them the space to resolve their conflicts. Usually, they are way more capable than we give them credit for.

I’ve never been to a fortune teller, although I’ve seen plenty on television, gypsy characters in a headscarf huddled over a crystal ball, riffing on themes until they find one that lands with the customer. The reality is nobody can predict our futures nor read our minds. Mentalism is an art form, verbal gymnastics wrapped in mystical smoke and mirrors for entertainment.

Given that we all know this, why do we think our friends, family, and people in our world are also mind readers? Yet internally, we can experience flare-ups because someone misses a cue, maybe doesn’t recognise that we are overwhelmed or troubled? Maybe they ask the wrong question at the wrong time, but carry on not understanding that they have triggered something inside us? “How dare they not know?” is our reaction - yet that’s completely unreasonable and irrational.

Kathleen Smith, writing in The Anxious Overachiever, calls this a “How Dare You” moment: the specific frustration we feel when someone fails to read our minds. It’s a pattern that’s more common than most of us would like to admit. The frustration isn’t really about what the other person did. It’s about what they failed to read.

Some people genuinely are very empathetic and great at reading faces and vibes. I remember doing an executive EQ review once, where I was shown a series of faces, and asked to name the emotion each was experiencing. It’s an interesting exercise, some are obvious - sad, happy - but so many facial expressions are subtle and difficult to discern. I know I found it challenging, although interestingly, I scored reasonably well.

Psychologists call this the Illusion of Transparency. In a 1998 study, Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, and Victoria Husted Medvec found that people consistently overestimate how visible their internal states are to others. We feel our distress or frustration so acutely that it seems impossible those around us wouldn’t notice, and yet they usually don’t, because they aren’t inside our heads - they don’t have a crystal ball, and not everyone scores perfectly on an EQ test.

A vicious circle forms, and we can develop a martyr complex: we don’t ask for what we need, our friends can’t read our emotions, we absorb the disappointment silently, our emotions rise further, yet nobody notices, leading to resentment. How the heck haven’t they noticed!

There’s a kind of righteous suffering born of resentment. I’m carrying all this load, and nobody notices or cares. Which is true insofar as that goes, but the real problem is we didn’t tell them. How can we expect someone to meet a need we have without asking them? Without sinking into vulnerability.

I’ve written previously in Building Authentic Connections about how we create a mask:

“We curate our lives like museum exhibitions, showing only the polished pieces whilst hiding anything that might be considered flawed or messy.”

“To connect, we need to feel safe enough to be seen.”

We expect someone to meet a need we never articulate, and we want to be known without the vulnerability of being known. That tension sits at the heart of so much adult loneliness. As I’ve written in both Building Authentic Connections and Why Is It So Hard to Make Friends as an Adult?, vulnerability is the entry price for being genuinely seen, and most of us would rather wait to be found than risk paying it.

Explicit communication might feel unromantic - and let’s be blunt, downright scary - but the alternative is the slow accumulation of resentment toward people who, in most cases, simply didn’t know.

Next time you feel indignation rising, try reframing your thoughts. Instead of ‘how dare they not know?’, ask ‘what do I need here, and have I actually said it?’

Monika Jiang wrote recently on her The Oneliness Project substack about returning to Berlin after an extended stay in Vietnam, and how life felt different there:

“Time feels different there. Not because people are less busy or work less hard, but because there seems to be spaciousness alongside the work. Perhaps because time doesn’t operate primarily through linear, Western logic, but moves through the cycles of the moon, the rise and set of each day, the rhythms of collective life, rather than the isolated individual one.”

I think I can relate. I have been going down a rabbit hole lately, the tiny house kind. Over the past year or so, I have been steadily clearing out the accumulated remnants of decades of living, and the more I clear, the more I find myself returning to something I think I have always believed: that I care more about people than things. I have never been particularly motivated by money; I am only motivated by what interests me and what I can become passionate about. I suspect that has cost me dearly financially over the years.

But it does clarify what the tiny house project is actually about. It is not austerity. It is stepping away from the idea that accumulation (of things, of trophies, of visible markers of success) says anything meaningful about a life.

That logic runs deeper than we think, though. It does not just govern our stuff; it governs our time.

As Edward T. Hall wrote in The Silent Language:

“Time with us handled much like a material; we earn it, spend it, save it, waste it.”

This linear, productivity-driven model creates a phantom pressure that follows us from the moment we wake up. You might find yourself checking your watch at 7:00 AM and feeling an odd sense of panic: it is early, but you already feel late.

The term for this is chrono-colonialism: the gradual imposition of Western clock time on cultures with their own, more communal rhythms. Monika’s experience of Vietnam is the counterpoint: time there still bends around people rather than schedules. Community needs, rather than a spreadsheet, govern the day. A coffee stall is not just a caffeine fix; it is a “third place” where time is shared.

In The Dance of Life, Hall returned to this:

“Polychronic cultures are by their very nature oriented to people. If you value people, you must hear them out and cannot cut them off simply because of a schedule.”

When we live exclusively in a monochronic world, a spontaneous chat with a neighbour becomes an interruption to our “real” work. We schedule our friends weeks in advance, and the organic spontaneity that genuine connection requires quietly dies.

Byung-Chul Han, in The Scent of Time, put it plainly:

“Whoever tries to live faster, will ultimately also die faster. It is not the total number of events but the experience of duration which makes life more fulfilling.”

When time has no narrative or ritual, it becomes a series of disjointed points. We rush from one to the next but never feel we have arrived.

Living well might require something similar to what draws me toward the tiny house dream: less accumulation, more intention. The people in our lives are not a cost to our time. They are the reason for it.

Nobody ever felt less lonely because they were on time. Presence is a different kind of punctuality.

R U OK? is a genuinely good idea, not just as a charity or a day on the calendar, but as an actual practice: noticing someone in your life who seems to be doing it hard and asking them, with real care, how they’re going. That question, asked sincerely and outwardly, can change things.

I’m interested in a different question, one that looks almost identical but works very differently.

In the aftermath of a disagreement with a friend or partner, you may think the air has cleared, but as the minutes pass, that familiar prickly heat (the kind I wrote about in Prickly Heat Sucks. Just Like Loneliness) begins to rise in your chest, and you find yourself re-reading their last message or statement, trying to detect something in the punctuation or tone. Then the natural urge surfaces: Are we really okay?

Could this be you outsourcing your own discomfort?

Thomas Joiner, a psychologist at Florida State University who has spent decades studying distress in close relationships, defined ‘Excessive Reassurance Seeking’ in a landmark 2001 study as

“the relatively stable tendency to excessively and persistently seek assurances from others that one is lovable and worthy, regardless of whether such assurance has already been provided.”

The temporary relief it offers is real, but the longer-term effect is corrosive: the more we seek reassurance, the less capacity we build to sit with uncertainty, and the person on the other end gradually finds it exhausting. What starts as a bid for closeness can quietly create the very distance we were trying to close.

As I explored in Loneliness in Relationships: When Being With Someone Isn’t Enough, conflict doesn’t just create friction; it breeds its own particular loneliness, particularly for those whose anxious attachment style makes a partner’s post-conflict silence feel unbearable rather than temporary.

“All too often, communication lies at the heart of the disconnection. If you are clashing and disagreeing, the connection is weakened at each outburst.”

There’s also a timing issue. After conflict, the logical brain often resolves things well before the nervous system does, so even when we know the disagreement is finished, our body hasn’t quite caught up yet. Reaching for reassurance in that window is less about genuinely checking in on the relationship and more about forcing an emotional resolution our nervous system craves before it’s ready to arrive on its own.

We must ask ourselves: are we reacting to what is actually happening, or to a pattern we’ve carried from somewhere else? Can we trust the history of this relationship more than we trust your current anxiety? What actually happens if things stay a little quiet for the next hour?

Not every silence after a conflict is a warning. Some of it is just two people coming back to themselves at different speeds, and building the capacity to believe the relationship is solid enough to survive that gap, without needing a status update to confirm it, is one of the quieter and more useful things you can develop in any close relationship. Michel de Montaigne put it plainly:

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”

The most durable sense of safety isn’t the one you ask for. It’s the one you build in yourself when the room goes quiet.

Are you okay with not being okay for a moment?

We have all sat at a crossroads pondering a decision, whether in life or at work. We consider what we know about the choices, maybe we want some more data, more advice, another perspective to help us choose a path.

Some of us are more impulsive than others - I’ve done an executive profiling exercise for work that shows I don’t need much data to make a decision. In my work life, I tend to make decisions quickly; it’s a combination of natural impatience, time scarcity, and pressure from my team to be the ‘solver’.

I don’t pore over a spreadsheet for hours. I look at the summary, try to see the bigger picture, and move on whatever impulse surfaces. And of course, that’s not always going to prove the right decision, but I’d rather keep the forward momentum than become bogged down in the mire of indecisiveness.

But I also worry about consequences. Too often, we pause too long at the crossroads because we’re concerned about the uncertainty of what will happen.

Annie Duke, former professional poker player and author of Thinking in Bets, puts it plainly:

“What makes a great decision is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process.”

The trap she calls “resulting” is the reverse: judging a decision entirely by what happens next. If things go well, we assume we made a great choice. If they go poorly, we berate ourselves. The latter is what has me awake at 2 a.m., churning over the outcome.

That 2 am spiral is its own kind of punishment. As I wrote in Speaking Kindness to the Mirror (check out the photo!), the harshest critic in the room is usually the one living rent-free inside our own head.

Let’s take a reality check. None of us can see the future. We might make a decision, but there may be hidden information, an element of luck or external forces that, even if our decision seems sound, may still all fall apart. Alternatively, a shitty, reckless decision may pay off through sheer luck.

We’re trying to buy an insurance policy that doesn’t exist. We research and consider our decision - and in some instances procrastinate - to allay our fears.

Psychologists refer to this as Intolerance of Uncertainty. For many of us, the brain treats an unknown future as a physical threat. I stay awake at night not because the options are equal, but because I am trying to solve for a future I cannot yet see.

You can’t control what happens next. You can only control how you made the call. Those are two very different things, and conflating them is where the 2am spiral starts.

We might ask ourselves: Did I act in accordance with my values? Did I look at the facts honestly? Did I treat people well in the process?

If the answer is yes, then the decision was a good one, regardless of whether the clouds cleared or the rain fell. We cannot control the wind, but we can be certain about how we set the sail.

I explored this in The Quiet Strength of Being Unsure - the goal isn’t to become more certain:

“When we stop chasing the illusion of certainty, we become more honest team members and more reliable friends. We stop pretending to have all the answers and start showing up with the quiet assurance that, whatever happens, we can figure it out together.”

No one gets it right every time. The question isn’t whether you’ll make a perfect call. It’s about making a decent one and then letting it go.

How much of what’s eating at you right now is the choice itself? And how much is just the waiting?

The other day, I was driving behind a HiLux ute with a ‘Rogue’ badge. If you look around on the roads, these kinds of large pickup trucks with gladiatorial names are everywhere.

Australia’s best-selling vehicle in 2025 was the Ford Ranger. Third year running. 56,555 units. You know its variants: Wildtrak. Raptor. You’ve seen its colleagues: the HiLux Rugged X, the Nissan Navara Warrior, the Nissan Patrol Warrior, the RAM 1500 Rebel, the Jeep Gladiator, the Ford Mustang Dark Horse, and the GWM Tank 300.

Say those names out loud. Feel what they’re doing.

They’re not describing the vehicles. They’re describing you, or at least the version of you the marketing team decided you want to be. Independent. Battle-ready. A little dangerous. Not suburban, even when you’re doing the school run.

SUVs and utes now make up nearly 80% of all new vehicles sold in Australia. Passenger car sales are down to 17%. This is not a niche. This is the centre of Australian culture, deliberately constructed around a particular vision of masculinity: armoured, elevated, dominant.

Here’s what those names don’t tell you - and the salesperson in the car yard most definitely won’t.

When a light commercial vehicle and a light passenger vehicle collide, occupants of the smaller car are four times more likely to die. That’s from BITRE, the Australian government’s own road safety body. Not four times more likely to crash. Four times more likely to die in a crash.

For pedestrians, it’s worse. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that vehicles with bonnet heights over 40 inches (which describes most of these utes and large SUVs) are 45% more likely to cause pedestrian fatalities than lower-profile cars. It’s not just the weight. It’s the height. A normal car tends to strike a pedestrian below the hip and roll them onto the bonnet. A Ranger or HiLux hits them in the chest or head and can push them under.

These vehicles feel safer because, for the person inside them, they often are. What the marketing carefully obscures is that a significant portion of that safety is borrowed from everyone else on the road.

That’s the trade. You get the feeling of toughness. Pedestrians, cyclists, and I in my VW Golf pay for it.

The market is selling you emotional safety in the form of physical dominance. It has correctly identified something real: men want to feel capable, protected, and grounded. Those are not shallow desires. They are legitimate needs. The problem is the product. As I’ve written before, we tend to go looking for oranges in a hardware store. A $75,000 ute with aggressive typography on the tailgate is an external answer to an internal question.

Real toughness doesn’t need a name badge. It doesn’t need to sit 40 inches high to feel significant. As I explored in The Quiet Power of True Confidence, genuine confidence is quieter and harder to come by than that. It shows up in the patience you hold when the traffic is bad, the awareness you carry about who is around you, and the way you move through the world knowing your choices have weight.

The Stoics had a word for this: virtus. Strength as an inner quality, not outward performance. You cannot buy it on a forecourt. You cannot lease it for five years.

As I noted in The Quiet Strength Of Being Unsure, Dunning and Kruger’s research showed that the least competent person tends to project the highest certainty. It’s an uncomfortable observation to hold next to a dealership forecourt. The man who genuinely feels capable and grounded doesn’t need the vehicle name to confirm it. The badge is the tell. Certainty you have to advertise is the kind that hasn’t quite convinced itself yet.

The best-selling Ranger in Australia is called the Raptor. It’s named after a predator. Most of the men who drive it are not predators. They’re decent people who got sold a fable about what strength looks like.

I was having a glass of wine with a friend the other afternoon. We’re both separated after long-term relationships, and we both consider that we’ve come a long way since then. We’ve both had oodles of therapy and spent time reading and building new connections and friendships. I was telling them how physically different I am from how I was six or seven years ago. I’ve gone from a buzz cut to a ponytail. From no tattoos to a bunch, including the gorgeous phoenix on my right forearm, to celebrate new beginnings.

We swapped reflections on how we have changed as people and on how we connect and relate to those around us. We both agreed how we are so careful about the people we bring into our respective constellations now, leaving behind connections that at the time seemed strong - particularly as parents with other parents - but yet evaporated as soon as we no longer were a relationship escalator-typical couple.

But there’s a challenge in the way you relate to the people who have been in your lives for decades - your family. There can be a dissonance when spending time with people you have known your whole life. They connect to you with a deep, assumed familiarity. You all laugh at the same old stories, rather than create new ones.

On the surface, it looks like belonging. But internally, it can feel uneasy, like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

This is the loneliness of being remembered wrong. It is the isolation of being stuck in someone else’s outdated mental filing system. While you have done the hard work of evolving, the people around the table are often still talking to a ghost.

Sociologists sometimes refer to this through the lens of Self-Verification Theory.

“Self-verification is a social psychological theory that asserts people want to be known and understood by others according to their firmly held beliefs and feelings about themselves,[1] that is self-views (including self-concepts and self-esteem). It is one of the motives that drive self-evaluation, along with self-enhancement and self-assessment. “

We want to be known and understood by those around us according to our internal beliefs, but when there is a gap between that internal dialogue and our family, it creates friction. Do we maintain a facade that seems pliant to their long-held understanding? Do we try to ‘let them in’ and explain? If we do, will they comprehend?

It’s a dichotomy, our family has effectively frozen an image of us from years ago in their collective consciousness. They’ve labelled us:

“If you move through the world convinced that someone cannot cope, you will act accordingly and potentially intervene. If you label a child as fragile, you will naturally rush to rescue them. Your rescue then reinforces their belief that they cannot cope. The label creates a loop where everyone plays their assigned part, and no one gets to grow.”

It is easier to keep you in the “reckless younger brother” or “quiet daughter” box than it is to acknowledge the complex, nuanced adult standing in front of them.

The weight of this is felt most acutely in the performance. You find yourself “masking”, slipping into old speech patterns or suppressing current opinions just to keep the peace. You play the role of your expired self because it’s the only version they know how to love.

There is a quiet grief in this. You realise that to remain connected to your history, you must occasionally participate in erasing your present.

In The Principles of Psychology, William James wrote that a man:

“has many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him and carry an image of him in their mind.”

The trouble arises when those images become fossils.

True intimacy requires more than just shared history. It requires synchronisation. It is the willingness of both parties to constantly hit the “refresh” button on their perception of the other.

Without that update, we remain strangers in our own family photos. We are physically present, yet entirely unseen. If we want to live well and relate well, we have to decide how much of our current self we are willing to advocate for in rooms that only want the old version.

Have you ever felt the need to reintroduce yourself to the people who are supposed to know you best?

It is a specific, hollow sensation. You are seated at a dinner table or standing in a busy bar, surrounded by people who know your name and like your company. By any external metric, you are socially successful. Yet, as the laughter rises, you feel a sharp sense of being entirely alone.

We often treat loneliness as a numbers problem. We assume the cure is a larger contact list or more invitations. But for many, the issue is not a lack of people. It is a lack of resonance.

This “crowded loneliness” usually stems from the gap between the person we present to the world and the person we actually are. If you spend your time performatively socialising (moulding your opinions and energy to fit the group) you might be liked, but you will not feel seen. As Dr Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, observed in Braving the Wilderness:

“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

When we mask our true selves to maintain a large social circle, we are effectively abandoned by our own design. We are physically present, but emotionally invisible.

There is also a hard biological ceiling to this. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar found that humans can sustain roughly 150 stable relationships, but only about five sit in the innermost ring. These are the people we actually lean on when things go sideways. Spread yourself across fifty acquaintances, and you end up too thin to properly tend the handful who matter. We collect contacts. We lose closeness.

Technology has amplified this. We can now carry hundreds of digital connections in our pockets and mistake the noise for the real thing. As I wrote in Loneliness in a Hyperconnected World, one can be “alone in a crowded room.” The digital crowd makes it that much harder to escape.

This is not to say that large networks are useless. They provide “weak ties” that help with career opportunities and fresh ideas. However, they are not designed to hold the weight of our emotional lives.

If you feel lonely in a crowd, it is probably not the people. It is more likely the distance between who you are and what you are letting them see. Being genuinely known takes nerve. Most of us find it easier to stay behind the version of ourselves we have decided is acceptable.

The cure for crowded loneliness usually starts with a quiet pruning. It involves spending less energy on the many and more on the few. Most importantly, it requires the courage to stop performative socialising and start showing up as a person rather than a persona.

Who in your life would you feel comfortable being genuinely sad or unremarkable in front of? If the answer is “nobody”, no amount of dinner parties will fill the gap.

How much of your social life is spent maintaining a version of yourself that doesn’t actually exist?

A major seven-year European study published in Aging & Mental Health in 2026 tracked 10,217 adults aged 65 to 94 across 12 countries and found that loneliness was associated with significantly lower baseline memory scores.

Lead author Dr Luis Carlos Venegas-Sanabria of the Universidad del Rosario said:

“The finding that loneliness significantly impacted memory, but not the speed of decline in memory over time, was a surprising outcome. It suggests that loneliness may play a more prominent role in the initial state of memory than in its progressive decline.”

Think of it as beginning a race several hundred metres behind everyone else. You might run at the same pace, but you are unlikely to ever catch up to the pack.

This finding invites a deeper question: what happens to a human being when they no longer have a witness to their life? Our brains are not solitary computers processing data in a vacuum. They are social organs, evolved over millennia to navigate the complex terrain of human relationships.

Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford who has spent thirty years developing his Social Brain Hypothesis, puts it plainly:

“Why do primates have such big brains? Well, it must have to do with the fact they live in very large, complicated societies. They need a big computer to manage all the relationships.”

When we remove that social stimulus, it is as if a vital piece of hardware is left to idle. Without the regular workout of conversation, empathy, and shared storytelling, our cognitive reserve begins to thin.

There is also the physiological toll. A 2023 review in Brain, Behaviour and Immunity found that chronic loneliness activates stress-response pathways, elevates cortisol, and promotes systemic inflammation. The hippocampus, the region critical for forming new memories, is particularly vulnerable to these changes. In a very real sense, the Archipelago of the Self is a difficult place to maintain a healthy mind.

Then there is the “chicken or egg” problem. Does loneliness cause memory loss, or does the early, silent onset of cognitive decline cause us to withdraw? If socialising becomes more taxing because we cannot quite grasp the right word or remember the thread of a story, we often choose the safety of solitude over the risk of embarrassment.

But there is hope. Dr. Venegas-Sanabria concluded that his findings

“underscore the importance of addressing loneliness as a significant factor in the context of cognitive performance in older adults.”

If memory scores are lower due to baseline loneliness, social connection is not a nice extra. It is a foundational requirement.

We talk about brain-training apps or crosswords as paths to a sharper mind (I do my Wordle every day!). Yet as Dunbar puts it, “All you have to do is go and spend a bit of time with your friends.”

Our memories are not just private archives. They are shared treasures. When we choose to relate well to others, we are not just being “good humans.” We are quite literally keeping our minds alive.

How different would our lives look if we treated social connection with the same clinical importance as our blood pressure or our diet?

We are often told that being a good human requires an active performance. We are encouraged to practice “active listening”, to maintain intense eye contact, and to offer “emotional labour” as a form of social currency. While well-intended, this focus on performance can make connection feel like a chore.

There is another way to relate that is much older and far more grounded. It is the simple act of being physically present without an agenda. It is the practice of sitting in the same room as someone else, perhaps reading different books or working on separate tasks, without the pressure to entertain or fix anything.

In my own life, I have realised that my most profound moments of connection did not always involve a deep conversation. Instead, they happened in the quiet gaps.

According to Dr Stephen Porges, the developer of Polyvagal Theory, our nervous systems are running a continuous background process he calls “neuroception“:

“a neural process, distinct from perception, capable of distinguishing environmental and visceral features that are safe, dangerous, or life-threatening.”

The physical presence of a trusted person activates this system in our favour, signalling our bodies to shift from hyper-vigilance into rest. This is co-regulation: my calm can literally help settle your storm, simply because we occupy the same square footage.

This is why “body doubling“ is so effective for focus, and why children play more confidently when a caregiver is simply “there” in the background. It is what some call the “ministry of presence”. It is the realisation that 90 per cent of support comes down to just showing up and staying put.

The Japanese have a word for this that has no clean equivalent in English: ibasho. Roughly translated, it means “a place where one can be” - a space, or a person, in whose presence your existence requires no justification. You do not need to be useful, entertaining, or emotionally available. You simply need to be there. For a culture often associated with social obligation and performance, the ibasho concept is quietly radical: it names, and therefore protects, the right to be present without performing.

Alongside it sits ma - the Japanese concept of meaningful pause, the space between things. Western thinking tends to treat silence as something to be filled. Ma treats it as substance in its own right: the gap between two notes is part of the music; the empty space in a room is part of the room. Applied to human connection, ma suggests that the quiet moments between us are not failures of conversation. They are the conversation.

The digital world has tricked us into thinking that being “reachable” is the same as being “present”. But a video call is a poor substitute for the biology of proximity. On a screen, we are forced into a high-intensity gaze that is biologically exhausting. We lose the subtle cues of scent, peripheral movement, and the shared atmosphere of a room. Digital connectivity is a scheduled meeting; physical presence is a shared existence.

To be a good human in an age of distraction, we might need to lower the stakes of our interactions. We don’t always need to have the right words. We don’t need a list of questions or a clever insight. We just need to turn up.

When we remove the agenda, we create a new kind of safety. In the absence of being “interviewed” or “managed”, people often find the space to say what they actually feel. Vulnerability usually emerges in the silence, not the interrogation.

Perhaps the greatest gift you can give someone this week is not your advice, your energy, or your “active” focus. It is your physical self. Sit on the couch. Potter in the garden while they work. Be a warm radiator in a cold room.

The goal isn’t to do something. The goal is simply to be there.

I recently read a piece by Haley Nahman in her Substack Maybe Baby titled ‘The Desire Trap‘ that I’ve pondered over a bit. The essay is called “The Desire Trap”, and it names something I recognise but not sure I’d really properly thought about: ‘trapdoor desire’.

Haley distinguishes between what she calls front-door desire and the trapdoor variety. A front-door desire is transparent. You want the job because the work appeals to you. You want the friendship because you genuinely like the person. A trapdoor desire is something else:

“I think I’m walking in the front door, but it’s actually a trapdoor that leads me somewhere else.”

It is an attempt to solve an internal problem with an external object, where you believe you want the thing itself when, in fact, you are trying to escape a feeling you haven’t fully named.

When I read this, I thought immediately of a period in our company’s history.

We had tendered for a government contract, the largest we had ever pursued. The value was significant enough that winning it would change the business’s trajectory in ways we had discussed for years. The process dragged on for months. There was a change of government. There were delays on delays. We refreshed our inboxes. We second-guessed the submission. We had the same anxious conversations in circles.

The signed contract, when it was finally confirmed, arrived as an email. And my reaction to opening the email was almost anticlimactic.

I had been waiting so long that the moment itself had nowhere to land. What I had called “wanting to win this contract” had, somewhere in the long months of uncertainty, transformed into wanting the waiting to stop. The wanting and the winning had become one and the same in my mind. They were not the same thing.

This is what Nahman means by the trapdoor. The neuroscientist Kent Berridge has spent years documenting the same split from the other direction. As he writes,

“’The counterpart to ‘liking’ is ‘wanting’ — the incentive motivation to acquire a reward. ‘Liking’ and ‘wanting’ evolved so they usually co-occur. But their brain systems are separable, which gives rise to dissociations of ‘liking’ from ‘wanting’ in some situations.

That helps explain why we can so easily miswant things. The urgency of pursuit can feel like proof that something will satisfy us. Often, it is just proof that we want the waiting to end.

In the Be A Good Human framework that runs through Alone Rangers, I keep returning to presence as the quality most at risk here. When we are living inside a trapdoor desire, we are not in the room we are actually in. We are in the imagined future room, the one where the email has arrived, and everything feels resolved. That future room rarely exists the way we’ve furnished it.

Haley closes her piece with a line that has stayed with me: “I’d just like to fall knowingly.” The goal is not to purge yourself of trapdoor desires, which would be both impossible and probably joyless. It’s easy to recognise one when you’re in it.

To notice that you’re not waiting for the thing. You’re waiting to stop feeling the way you feel right now.

We have all had ‘for fucks sake’ moments. Have you tried to use a chatbot on your bank’s website recently? I’m currently engaged in an ongoing battle to update the connection between my QuickBooks accounting software and my bank due to changes in how you’re allowed to connect them. So far, several phone calls to the bank. Multiple chatbot ‘chats’, which are less ‘chats’ than completely pointless conversations. It’s doing my head in.

There’s a special type of exhaustion that isn’t triggered by some great drama or a singular crisis; rather, it seeps into your soul through a sequence of minor failures. The car won’t start. Then the cat vomits. Then a staff member calls in sick. Then you leave your phone at home. The ‘for fucks sakes’ start to well up. We hit a tipping point where all we want to do is scream into the void.

And let’s not get started on connecting a printer to the wifi.

I tell myself I need to be more resilient; modern life is great at throwing spanners in the works. It’s no wonder some people bail out of city life and move to the country to grow vegetables. It’s not one thing; it’s the accumulation that grows the heavy psychological load.

Rob Cross and Karen Dillon, co-authors of The Microstress Effect, argue that these brief, often unnoticed moments drain our capacity more than major life events. What makes them so insidious is precisely that they fly under the radar. As Cross explains:

“The body doesn’t distinguish between forms of stress. It’s just that the brain tends to recognize the big stress, and we invoke fight or flight, whereas these smaller moments we just persist through, yet our body’s still absorbing it.”

We are being worn down by forces we are not even registering as threats.

Part of the problem is what Craig Lambert, drawing on Ivan Illich, calls “shadow work.” As he writes in Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day:

“most of us do not recognize [it] or realize how much of it we are doing, even as we pump our own gas, scan and bag our own groceries, execute our own stock trades, and assemble our Ikea furniture.”

Tasks once handled by specialists have been quietly externalised onto us, framed as efficiency. The emotional cost never appears on a balance sheet. When the systems fail, the labour of fixing them falls entirely on the individual.

What strikes me is how little of this we share. For those of us working remotely - and that’s an ever-increasing proportion - there is no office floor to absorb the blow. Nobody is watching you swear at the same chatbot loop for the third time. Nobody to laugh with over the printer that won’t connect. The frustration lands in a vacuum, which means it also lands entirely on you. The system externalises the labour, and solitude externalises the shame.

If you feel like you are under siege by inanimate objects and digital loops, you are not failing at life. You are navigating an environment designed for corporate efficiency rather than human well-being.

The antidote isn’t a better productivity app. It’s recognising that these frictions are not a measure of your competence, and that bearing them alone makes them heavier than they actually are.

Sometimes the most radical thing a good human can do is name the small things out loud - to another person, if you have one nearby, or at least to yourself. Not to fix them. Just to stop carrying them in silence.

The word “loneliness” has been around since the 1500s, but for most of that time it meant something closer to remoteness: a physical condition, not an emotional one. It wasn’t until around 1800 that it began to carry the weight we now recognise: the ache of disconnection, the sense of being without. That shift arrived trailing the industrial revolution like smog. Before it, we had “oneliness” - simply the state of being alone, with no judgment attached.

The distinction is subtle but vital. Oneliness originally described a state of being one, a singularity. It was an existential fact, not a clinical deficit. As we moved from factories to suburbs, we began to treat this natural state of being as a pathology. We turned a shared human condition into a personal deficit.

Today, much of modern culture blames individuals for loneliness. We can read endless studies that speak to an epidemic of loneliness in the world, spanning all age groups. We are told we must work harder at our social skills - go join a gardening club or take up a sport, find a new ‘tribe’. But this rather conveniently ignores the world we live in today.

Today’s world profits from isolation. It’s more expensive to live alone, to buy food, and fund our Netflix subscriptions.

In director Akira Kurosawa’s film Ran, an adaptation of King Lear, the fool Kyoami cries out: “In a mad world, only the mad are sane!“

In a world designed to keep us apart, feeling lonely is perhaps the most sane response available to us.

The philosopher and monk Thich Nhat Hanh in his book ‘The Heart of Understanding‘ spoke often of “interbeing”.

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper... And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper... The logger’s father and mother are in it too.”

His premise was simple: nothing can exist by itself.

We are always alone inside our own experience. That part is just true. But we are also, always, held in place by things we didn’t make and can’t see - human history, the work of everyone in our world, the environment.

Oneliness offers something that loneliness does not: a context. It’s saying you are alone, but only in the way that every individual is alone. I’m writing this in my local cafe. It’s school holidays, and the place is buzzing with tables of parents, grandparents, and small children. I might be sitting alone, but I am not alone.

When we shift our lens from loneliness to oneliness, we start to look at the structures around us. We stop looking for a ‘cure’ for what is a part of the human experience.

Practising being a good human means leaning into this paradox. It means accepting our individuality while acknowledging our interdependence on the world around us.

We need to reframe the meaning - we don’t need to be ‘fixed’ - although please feel free to take up indoor soccer or join your local knitting guild. We must always remember that whilst each of us might be distinct, we are never truly separated from the world.

I’ve written before about the difference between loneliness and solitude.

There’s wisdom in recognising that solitude and loneliness are different creatures entirely. Solitude can be restorative, chosen, and peaceful. Loneliness is an unwanted isolation that can have a detrimental impact on our health.

How would your day change if you viewed your solitude not as a gap to be filled, but as a grounded base from which you relate to the rest of the world?

The goal isn’t to never feel lonely. The goal is to realise that even in our loneliest moments, we are still part of the whole.

While you are here, please check out Monika Jiang’s great Oneliness Substack and Podcast.

The Oneliness Project

Essays on loneliness as a structural condition of modern life. Developing Oneliness — a philosophical lens for living differently, alone and in relationship, at the same time.

By Monika Jiang

We’ve all done it. At work, you and your colleagues label your manager as ‘bossy’. We describe a child as ‘anxious’. We feel these adjectives are accurate; they categorise the people around us in a simple, understandable way. Labelling people like this gives us a quick and easy lens through which to filter the relationship.

And there is the pitfall: assigning the label is a thought-stopper. Once you decide your friend is a “narcissist”, you stop being curious about them. You stop looking for their capabilities and start scanning for evidence that confirms your diagnosis. This is what psychologists call “negative sentiment override“ - a filter that ensures you only see the worst in someone, even when they are trying to do better.

There is another cost to the adjective that is easy to miss. The label doesn’t just change how you see the person - it changes where you go looking for what you need. Once you’ve decided someone is cold, or withholding, or unreasonable, you have also decided what they owe you and why they are failing to deliver it. You keep returning to them with the same expectation, getting the same result, and calling it their fault. I wrote recently about the experience of trying to buy oranges from a hardware store - of persisting with a person or situation that has shown you, repeatedly, what it does and doesn’t stock. The adjective is often what keeps us in that queue. We aren’t just frustrated with the person. We have labelled them in a way that makes their limitations feel like a personal affront, rather than simply a fact about who they are.

Therapist Kathleen Smith, in her The Anxious Overachiever Substack, argues that the adjectives we use to describe the people we love reveal more about our own anxious focus than they do about the people we label. Words like fragile, sensitive, or difficult freeze someone in place - they treat personality as static, and ignore the patterns of action and reaction that both people are contributing to.

When we treat people as if these statements are true, we reinforce the behaviors that produce these statements in the first place. Treat a child like they’re very sensitive, and they tend to become more sensitive. Hide the truth from your worrying parents, and they’ll probably worry even more. We don’t cause these behaviors in others. They’re not our fault. But you do have to ask yourself, “What’s my part in all this?”

If you move through the world convinced that someone cannot cope, you will act accordingly and potentially intervene. If you label a child as fragile, you will naturally rush to rescue them. Your rescue then reinforces their belief that they cannot cope. The label creates a loop where everyone plays their assigned part, and no one gets to grow.

The question worth sitting with is not why they are like this, though that’s a start, but how am I adjusting myself because of the label I’ve assigned to them. Label someone selfish, and you probably won’t invite them to dinner. You let the label determine the relationship, and then wonder why the relationship never changes.

But here’s the uncomfortable part: the labelling itself is a way of avoiding responsibility. When I decide you are fragile, I have also decided that my rescuing is reasonable, even necessary. I never have to examine it. I’ve written about this before - the tendency we all have to monitor how other people’s behaviour affects us, while remaining genuinely blind to how our own actions ripple outward. Labelling someone keeps that blind spot intact. It gives us a clean story in which we respond to them rather than co-create the pattern with them.

You cannot force people to change their personalities. Maybe your partner has a very strong opinion on how to stack the dishwasher (I am totally guilty), but that doesn’t make you label them ‘bossy’. A ‘selfish’ friend may seem to be always talking about themselves.

What we can do is choose to stop reacting to the label and be curious, and listen and observe. When we shift from ‘they are always like this’ to ‘why are they like this’ we can start to see the patterns and understand why the person acts as they do.

We must break the nexus created by our labelling, and stop being stuck on the adjective. We don’t need the other person to be different, just for us to set aside the label and take responsibility for the relationship

Breaking that pattern doesn’t require the other person to change. It requires us to put the label down and pick up our own part of the dynamic. When we stop scanning for evidence that confirms the adjective, we sometimes find something we weren’t expecting - capabilities the label was hiding, or a clearer sense of what this person actually offers and what they don’t. That second realisation matters too. Some hardware stores are excellent. The problem was never that they didn’t stock oranges. The problem was the expectation we brought with us and the label we used to explain our disappointment.

Taking responsibility for the label - and for what we do with it - is where these questions get genuinely difficult. But it starts here, with a simpler discipline: noticing the adjective and asking what it’s protecting you from seeing.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? How often do you take a look at yourself in the mirror? I don’t mean squinting as you apply your false eyelashes; I mean taking a moment to pause and examine your reflection. Perhaps ask your reflection a question, or have a conversation? Does your reflection answer back?

I am sure I am not alone, there’s an internal critic inside me that can be almost a bully - there are moments when I say aloud ‘leave it alone’, to force the voice to go away. Most usually, the bully is hyper-focused on a small faux pas, maybe something I said to someone that, on reflection, seems clumsy or ill-judged. The bully has no nuance; it just tells me I’m an idiot. I tell it to go away.

What’s clear is that if you spoke to your friends the way you speak to yourself, you would likely find yourself very much alone. How can you be a good friend to others if you are not a good friend to yourself?

The concept of being one’s own best friend is often dismissed as soft or indulgent. We assume that being “hard on ourselves” is the only way to maintain standards. Yet, the research suggests the opposite.

The leading researcher on self-compassion, Dr Kristin Neff, notes that the number one reason people give for not being more self-compassionate is fear of being “too soft on themselves” - in other words, they confuse self-compassion with self-indulgence.

“Far from encouraging passivity or indulgence, self-compassion provides us with the strength and clarity to confront our weaknesses and make meaningful changes in our lives.”

Dr Neff notes that self-criticism often triggers our “fight or flight” response.

“We turn fight, flight, or freeze inward. So self-criticism is the fight response - like I’m going to beat myself up to try to get myself in line.”

If we beat ourselves up, regard our own failure as a threat, we trigger the stress hormone cortisol - pretty hard to learn and grow when your body is flooded with stress juice. On the flip side, when we respond with kindness and compassion to a friend or family member, we release the happy hormone oxytocin. I know which hormone I want whizzing around my brain!

This is not about excusing our mistakes. We would expect a friend to pull us up on poor behaviour or a mistake, but to do it with compassion and empathy. Sometimes, the truth is difficult to swallow, but when we know our friend is acting from a place of support, and not a desire to wound, they are holding us accountable with love, not shame.

If this is how we would like a friend to treat us, how come we don’t treat ourselves like this?

Psychologist Professor Ethan Kross coined the term ‘distanced self-talk’, opting to talk to ourselves in the third person, ‘hey David, you messed up’ rather than the triggering ‘I messed up’.

Professor Kross describes it this way:

“Distanced self-talk - like when I say to myself, ‘Ethan, you don’t need to worry about this!’ - shifts people’s perspective, making it easier for them to coach themselves through a problem like they were advising a friend. You can see people doing this throughout history, often in contexts in which they’re trying to manage themselves, from Julius Caesar to LeBron James and Malala Yousafzai. It’s not a sign of narcissism or a strange linguistic tick - it’s an emotion regulatory tool.”

This minor shift in language acts as a circuit breaker. It deactivates the amygdala, allowing the more rational parts of the brain to take over. It moves us from being the victim of our own thoughts to being a supportive observer.

Being a good human starts with the person you spend the most time with. If we cannot practice kindness toward ourselves, our capacity to offer it to others will eventually run dry.

Building this internal alliance is a quiet, everyday practice. It is the realisation that you are worthy of the same patience, boundaries, and encouragement you so freely offer to the rest of the world.

How would your internal dialogue change tomorrow if you treated yourself like a mate you actually liked?

Ted totally hustles Rupert, acting the American hick when challenged to a darts match. As the game hangs in the balance, Ted then absolutely nails the last three darts, whilst explaining to Rupert how being judgmental precludes you from curiosity:

Ted: You know, Rupert, guys have underestimated me my entire life. And for years, I never understood why. It used to really bother me. But then one day, I was driving my little boy to school and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman and it was painted on the wall there. It said, “Be curious, not judgmental.” I like that.

Ted: So I get back in my car and I’m driving to work, and all of a sudden it hits me. All them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them were curious. They thought they had everything all figured out. So they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realised that they were underestimating me... who I was had nothing to do with it. ‘Cause if they were curious, they would’ve asked questions. You know? Questions like, “Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?”

Ted: To which I would’ve answered, “Yes, sir. Every Sunday afternoon at a sports bar with my father, from age ten till I was 16, when he passed away.” Barbecue sauce.

With ‘barbecue sauce’, Ted hits the bullseye and wins the game.

I’ve been very tempted to add a tattoo to my collection - ‘be curious, not judgmental’, because I’ve firmly adopted that as a core philosophy.

Too many of us are judgmental by default. When confronted with a situation, we judge what’s in front of us without context or research. We don’t consider the possibilities, which often leads us to avoid opportunities, especially when we think it might go poorly. We sidestep the potential for embarrassment, the risk of looking foolish, or the sting of social rejection.

Quite likely the cost of each judgment is small, but when seen in cummulation, it manifests as a life shaped more by what we have protected ourselves from than what we have actually experienced.

I was struck by a story told by mathematician Hannah Fry during an interview on the podcast Table Manners. She spoke about her decision to try stand-up comedy. It was not a career pivot or a quest for a new identity. She did it because she was curious.

She captured the sentiment perfectly: “It might be awful. But I want to know.“

There is a profound freedom in that perspective. Most of our hesitation stems from a rigid sense of identity. We tell ourselves, “I am not the kind of person who fails” or “I am someone who is always prepared.” When we attach our self-worth to the outcome, the stakes become too high to move. We require certainty before we take a step, and because certainty is rare, we stay exactly where we are. Our snap judgments are the wall blocking us from trying something new.

If we dig down, the judgment we make is rarely about the opportunity itself; often, it’s the fear of losing control, of being out of our depth.

For the curious, if you try and failure occurs, you have gained data. You have a memory, a story, and a clearer understanding of your boundaries. Failure is a temporary state, and it will pass.

However, if you do not try, you are left with the silence of not knowing - another small judgmental decision compounded onto an ever-growing mountain of assumptions and regrets.

I choose to be curious, it’s not bravado - far from it! It’s not about being fearless. I’m as fearful as anyone. It is about deciding that the answer to the question “What would happen?” is more valuable than the comfort of remaining unchanged.

None of this is about grand gestures; it’s the small things. Speaking up when maybe you might have been silent. Trying a new skill. Booking tickets to an event that might seem confronting (somatic dance, anyone?). It all boils down to ‘suck it and see’.

Being a Good Human is not always about getting it right the first time. Far from it. A good life is not built on a foundation of succeeding at first try, but if you don’t try, don’t show up, don’t show willingness to be curious about tackling something new, you can never expect to grow as a human.

We should not expect that we need absolute certainty to live well. We just need enough curiosity to take the step.

I turn 60 in August this year. Much to my amusement, this means I can qualify for a Seniors Card in Victoria. Benefits include free or discounted travel on public transport, cheaper entry to all manner of things from theatre shows to my local swimming pool. Oh, and free fishing licences - not of great use to me, but heck, maybe I’ll take up a new hobby.

My theatre and arts background means I can laugh about finally being able to purchase SPU (pronounced ‘spew’) - student, pensioner and unemployed - tickets. Although today, more likely just known as ‘concession’ pricing.

I also just noticed that some petrol companies offer a 4c per litre discount - now that’s valuable at the moment.

My age - 59 - means I am a ‘nine-ender’. A paper published in 2014 ‘People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age‘ found:

“Although humans measure time using a continuous scale, certain numerical ages inspire greater self-reflection than others. Six studies show that adults undertake a search for existential meaning when they approach a new decade in age (e.g., at ages 29, 39, 49, etc.) or imagine entering a new epoch, which leads them to behave in ways that suggest an ongoing or failed search for meaning (e.g., by exercising more vigorously, seeking extramarital affairs, or choosing to end their lives).”

The authors, Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield, found that people are significantly more likely to question the meaning of their lives as they approach the end of a chronological decade. The “9-enders” were disproportionately represented in behaviours that signal a search for, or crisis of, meaning: running their first marathon, seeking affairs outside their marriage, and, at the extreme end, suicide. Apparently, the final year of a decade feels like a reckoning, a time to reevaluate, recalibrate.

Of course, this all would seem like mythical luxury to people born a few hundred years ago. Modern medicine has dramatically extended our lifespan. In previous centuries, I’d probably have kicked the bucket a couple of decades ago. We have an ageing population; the number of Australians aged 85 years and over is projected to double by 2042, reaching over 1 million, according to the ABS.

Midlife has, for many, become a hinge point. Looking around my extended friendship circle, it’s difficult to find anyone who is still married to their original partner. Almost everyone I know in their late 40s / 50s is divorced or separated. Many are single and emphatic about not dedicating themselves to a new exclusive relationship, often because they carry trauma from their previous relationship, and have found they would rather be single than unhappy, or in more extreme cases, unsafe.

We are often told that staying “young” is the goal. We are encouraged to lift weights, learn languages, and perhaps invest in cosmetics or surgery to mask the passage of time. Psychologist Frank Tallis, in his book Wise, argues that we have become far better at extending the length of our lives than preparing for the psychological challenges within them.

Many of us look ahead to the next 20 to 30 years being filled with gardening, book club, and eventually a retirement home and death, and decide that ain’t for us. It’s way more prevalent amongst the women - many of whom spent decades being suppressed or worse, abused and coerced - financially, emotionally, sexually - and reckon, ‘fuck that for a life, it’s time for me’.

I write a great deal about being a good human. But there’s also the work of being a good older human. I’ve become much less interested in things, and today I am much more interested in people. We’re so driven in the earlier part of our life by the acquisition of things - roles, titles and possessions. However, as I move into what many call the “Third Act“, these goals have lost their lustre or simply disappeared. I am endeavouring to decouple my self-worth from my output.

As I near 60, I recognise my time is finite. I have been quietly pruning my possessions - there are two air mattresses in the boot of my car right now, parked outside the cafe where I am writing this, while I wait for the op shop to open. Just another small deduction from the pile of possessions cluttering my garage earmarked for disposal.

I’ve stopped trying to impress people. I’ve stopped trying to be all over LinkedIn and other social media to preserve fictional social networks. Instead, I prioritise depth of connection with a small number of amazing people - I often refer to this group as my constellation. I only invest in relationships with people who truly espouse the qualities of good humans.

Accepting that our bodies change and that some doors have closed is not an admission of defeat. It is the first step in a healthy process of development. When we stop fighting the reality of ageing, we free up the energy required to actually experience it.

Change can be difficult:

You never fully master change. There are no medals or parades, nor a graduation ceremony where you receive your honorary doctorate in adaptability. Each new change brings its own challenge. But you do get better at it.

The challenge of the second half of life is not to stay young, but to become wise - it’s this wisdom that will support you through change. I’m not sure just how ‘wise’ I am yet, but I’ve worked hard to devote time and energy to activities and people who truly matter to me. Gratifyingly, it’s opened doors to new places and experiences I’d never have thought existed.

We talk about living ‘well’ in mid-life. Of course, ‘well’ will mean different things to different people, but for me it’s about finding meaning in existence, not just in action. People, not possessions. Working on myself to be a kinder, more empathetic and supportive friend - indeed, making new friends who I suspect will be in my life for many years to come.

Most friendships don’t end in a screaming match, stomping of feet, and the protagonist striding away. More likely the opposite, there’s no great climax, no cinematic denouement, just a slow, silent receding of the friendship tide.

Sociologists study this as friendship dissolution. In everyday terms, it feels more like friendship drift, the slow loss of the shared structures that once held the relationship in place. The connective tissue of a shared life gradually dissolves, the text messages, drinks after work and birthday wishes dissipate.

I touched on fading relationships a year ago in my article “The Silent Drift: How can a Lonely Man Form Friendships?“

“How many of us have sat in a pub or cafe on a Saturday afternoon scrolling through our phones wishing we had something to do that evening. So often we fail the ‘pub test’ - can you call three friends right now who would meet you for a drink?”

Why does a faded friendship feel ambivalent? Maybe you sense a pang when you see their name, but it’s not a romantic breakup; there’s no ritual or period of mourning.

The digital age has made all of this much more complicated. I’ve always railed against social media’s use of the word ‘friend’ to describe a connection between myself and another person. It’s a ridiculously simplistic structural method of describing the complexity of human connections. There’s no rating of the strength or type of friendship.

I have, in theory, hundreds of friends, some through work, some romantically, some through shared activities. The work ones have faded completely since I left full-time work at my company last year. I see their names float past on the occasions I bother to look at LinkedIn, but apart from a couple of notable exceptions, I have had no contact with them for nearly eleven months. They haven’t reached out to me, and I haven’t made any effort either.

I have hundreds of friends on Facebook and Insta, some are more ‘friends of friends’, or people I follow because I am interested in what they say or do. Some are ‘following’ me because of my posts and interests, including Alone Rangers.

But how many of these ‘friends’ are actually active? I’ve been on Facebook for many years. I even had a trawl through the list a while ago and unfriended a bunch whose names I simply didn’t recognise. I have no memory of the people or of interactions that might have led us to be conjoined. How many friends on social media do you have that honestly are zombie connections - perhaps once were valid but now are lifeless? Yet you are seeing their photos from their Thailand holiday this week?

In recent years, I have, perhaps for the first time in my life, discovered connections with substance, rather than those with just a thin veneer of connection. A ‘like’ on social media is not the same as saying “I like you” to someone’s face; clicking the button is a low-effort signal. It’s even worse when it’s some celebrity or influencer, they want your connection and likes because for almost all of them it adds commercial value to whatever they are selling, whether it’s makeup, crypto schemes or streams of their latest song or movie. These are completely one-sided relationships - and we’re on the valueless side.

The reality is that many friendships are contextual. They are built on the “side-by-side” nature of shared activities or life stages. When the context changes, when you leave that job, finish school, or move to another city, there’s no structural integrity to survive the transition.

Perhaps we should view this drifting not as a failing, but as a form of necessary social pruning - just like when I trimmed my social media friends. We have a finite amount of emotional energy. To be a good human to the people currently in our inner circle, we must sometimes allow other connections to move to the outer rings and then fall away completely.

A friendship that lasted for a period of time was not a failure because it didn’t last a lifetime. It was simply a relationship with a natural shelf life. This is how I view my ‘work friends’, people I spent time with, enjoyed their company, but have now moved on from.

We need to change our perspective. We all have a history; some friendships may be transitory, but we can still feel a sense of gratitude for what they brought to our lives and the role they played, without taking on any guilt for the relationships ending.