Re: how are you fearless and how do you deal with anxiety?
This is an excerpt from a private exchange, where my correspondent wants to know a few things about me. It is about how I manage the emotional side of publishing my works and how I deal with people’s opinions.
1. How are you so fearless? In the sense of, how do you show your face and speak without fear? Do harmful words not affect you?
I am not fearless. I experience fear like everybody else. What helps me is to not seek validation. I do not want anybody’s approval, do not try to make friends out of my publications, and have no intention to attract followers. If I do get any of those, it is a coincidence. But it is never my goal and I do not pay attention to it. When I write something, I do it to satisfy my inner need for self-actualisation; the want to express myself. Everything else feels limiting and disempowering. When I do a video, such as a philosophy talk, it is a way for me to practice my language skills and to sharpen my technique. Same for Emacs videos: I do them in one go to become a better communicator and to understand the topics better. Same principle for why I share everything I do free of charge (and with a free license): I do not want to get involved in transactions and to placate customers. What you see is what you get and there are no VIPs. That I am also putting something out there which is potentially useful to others is a nice side-effect, though not my main concern.
Because I do not seek validation, I pursue my interests based on what I like and how I feel about it. Many times people have told me that I am not living up to my potential by not doing what the YouTube algorithm wants and by not sharing my publications on various platforms, such as Reddit. I explain that I do not care about those numbers. They change nothing in my emotional state. Public opinion is a distraction. I go where I want and do not ask for approval. More importantly, I am the judge of myself because I agree to only live by my own rules. Allowing another to have power over me via their opinion ultimately runs counter to my primary mode of living as an independent person.
My discipline is a natural consequence of wanting to be independent, hence autonomy as “self-rule” or “rules for oneself from oneself”—and I take my own rules very seriously. This is why I am consistent and stable. If I was not faithful to my word, I will have great trouble living independently: it will ultimately be harmful to me. There must always be a framework in a person’s life, otherwise they are wasted on chasing shifting sands and on doing self-harming activities. The only question is whether this framework comes from outside, as in the form of a parent figure, the family or community, religion and the state, or from within. In my case it is the latter.
So I just behave exactly how I am in person. There is no role-playing, which makes it trivially easy for me to do what I always do. There can be no fear in that, as it is my normal condition: I do not have to think about it. As such, I do not exaggerate the way many people do online and do not appeal to memes. I do not do clickbait and do not try to optimise my content for maximum exposure. For my videos, which are typically very long, I do not even write an outline with timestamps of the topics I cover. I simply do not care about any of that. I just want to be myself and express my creativity through the medium I choose.
Fundamentally, I am appeasing my competitive side. I have competitiveness vis-à-vis my own self. What I mean by this is that I do not allow myself to cheat on my rules and to take the easy way out with some cheap excuse. I demand maximum effort in what I care about (and I blithely ignore what I do not have an interest in). I do not make commitments on a whimsy, but when I do they become my non-negotiable, long-term covenant. My sole point of reference is my past performance. I want to be as good as before or even surpass that. My competitiveness is not outward though. I do not challenge others, do not tell them what to do, and do not check on their activities.
Now, why do I even publish my work if it is all about me? I do it because this is “hard mode”: competition in action. I keep the standards high and prove to myself that I can keep doing what I am interested in. I set a precedent and want to live up to it. That I do my writings/talks “alla prima”, as I have explained before, is no coincidence either: this is the most emotionally challenging way of doing them, as there are no smooth edges and every mistake is on record. I like it this way because it motivates me to try harder and to snuff out any potential residual concerns over judgement from outside.
There is coherence between my method and my outlook: I do not worry about public opinion, so I do not stress about making mistakes, and since I do not role-play there is nothing hidden there that could leak through. It is a virtuous cycle. My experience is lightweight and I am easygoing. If I was doing things for a target audience—an audience that I would be treating as a means for personal gain—I would most probably be stressed the whole time to perform the way others would expect. I consider that a shallow lifestyle.
To the question about harmful words, I do not remember receiving any of those. It may be because I am lucky. Or, more probably, because I do not attract opportunistic readers/viewers. There is a proverb in Greece: “wind gatherings, wind scatterings” (ανεμομαζώματα, ανεμοσκορπίσματα). If you attract easy fans through clickbait, memes, and gimmicks, then you also attract easy haters. I do not get the former, so do not have to deal with the latter. Life is simple this way.
2. Do you not feel anxious when you expose yourself to the public (either in real life or on the internet)? If yes, how do you make it not bother you so much? If no, how do you not care?
I used to feel stress about talking to an audience. The reason was that I was not sure I actually knew my topic. I was fundamentally not convinced that I even deserved to be in that position. Though remember that I am competitive with myself. Stress is not inherently bad in this regard. I use my fear as fuel to become more capable. Again, not to impress others, but to be honest with myself that I did not shy away from the challenge; that I did try my best in the face of difficulty.
If you want to put an archetype on this, it is the side of us that we consider heroic. The hero is the person who ultimately breaks out of their fear to do what the circumstances demand. The hero is not superhuman: they are just like you and me. Everyone has the potential in them to become a hero by transcending the confines of their comfort as they rise to the occasion. I am thus inspired by my Greek heritage to not bend the knee to any despot and to never give up without trying in earnest. One common saying in Greece is “there is no ‘I cannot’ but ‘I do not want to’”. Even though it is not true in every way, it still puts us in the mindset of heroism.
About not being bothered, I already answered that indirectly in response to your previous question. But to connect the dots: I am not seeking validation and for as long as I am happy with my efforts, I do not care what others think. It also follows from what I wrote about being myself, which is super easy to do. You will find that anyone who is faking it or telling lies the whole time, is forced to always check with themselves to make sure that their charade is not exposed through all the emerging contradictions. Dishonesty is a major source of stress. Once you accept who you are, once you stop lying to yourself by trying to the best of your abilities without finding excuses, you operate with lightness and ease.
Else you suffer. You suffer when you are failing because you do not get the validation you seek. But you also suffer when you are succeeding, because you are dependent on the vicissitudes of public opinion; an opinion which you know is fickle and manipulable. Again, “wind gatherings, wind scatterings” as we say.
3. How was it like for you growing up? Were you shy, outgoing? How was your childhood and teenage years? If you had anxiety, how did you overcome it?
To me, shy is somebody who does not express what they really want such as, for example, they say “no” to a party invitation when in reality they want to say “yes”. I am not like that. What I am is an introvert. This means that I am more inclined to experience the world through introspection. I do not try to gain feedback from others. You can now connect the dots about why I do not seek validation and why my competitiveness is inward-facing.
Perhaps it is right to describe myself as the “silent type”, but I am concerned this will give the wrong impression. I have been loud many times and will not hide if I think it is time to say what I think. Though, generally, I only speak when I have something to say and am shrewd enough to not pick meaningless fights.
A common theme throughout my life has been my exuberance. I have a lot of energy and I am innately curious. As a child, this was expressed as unruliness. I would not sit still. For example, whenever I was at my grandparents’ house, I would rearrange the furniture to make games out of my fantasy. Much of my time was spent outdoors, where I would experiment with whatever I could get my hands on.
Between the ages of 6 and 12 I was a relatively good student who was somewhat easy to manage. But as I grew older I became more assertive and less tolerant of control. Due to situations that need not be made public, I was taking care of home affairs at around the age of 13, such as paying bills and going to the market to buy groceries. I effectively became my own person in my early adolescence. This may be why I have a strong sense of duty in what I do, but I will not speculate.
People like me thrive on an open-ended challenge and, conversely, suffer when everything is confined to a perfectly safe environment. School is the latter kind: I loathed it. Whereas football was my life’s passion. I loved everything about it. The physical contacts, the fights that would break up from time-to-time, and the grit needed to train as hard as possible with no exception. What I also liked about football is its unwritten code of honour: players respect those who put in maximum effort and are not crybabies.
Fast-forward to my early twenties and you can understand why I started writing on my website: it is an open-ended challenge that I have been doing for 15 years now. And like with football, I only focus on my own work: I train with intent every day and thus have no regrets. Having no regrets means that there is nothing I am ashamed of, nothing that another person can point out to hurt me.
We are feeble, especially mentally, when (i) we are never allowed to develop our own strengths (e.g. being cuddled the whole time) and (ii) when we do not do in earnest what we are supposed to (e.g. fooling around instead of training).
To go back to the shy versus outgoing question, I have had many friends in my life from various walks of life. I like when I can do some activity with people or just be able to talk with them. But I do not enjoy parties, especially when it is impossible to say anything due to how loud the music is. Though loud music does not bother me: I have worked for years as a bartender at bars and night clubs, after all. I simply do not enjoy that kind of socialisation. I seek depth in connections.
I did not have anxiety as a child. The only time I did was as an adult. It was during a time when I was trying to fit in to a milieu that I did not belong to: that of politics and its bureaucracy. I am a country bumpkin at heart who has no respect for the kind of values that people peddle through virtue signalling. I care about honour, which is about how people are, and have no interest in superficialities and empty words. Politics is basically the opposite of honour: you say what people wish to hear and throw others under the bus to pursue your own ends. I learnt that the hard way. Trying to fit in meant that I was suppressing myself, pretending to not see what I was seeing or not believing in it, anyway. There is no friendship in politics. Your best friend will stab in the back while giving you the most passionate kiss. Trying to create make-belief that there was something to be salvaged in that world is what disempowered me and set me back. I overcame the block by accepting that I cannot become another person and will not tolerate such a race to the bottom. I have since been unapologetic about living my own life my way. If anybody wants to be with me, they should know that I do not boss anybody around and expect the same treatment. Those who think they can control me are wasting their time.