I spent three hours doing stream-of-consciousness writing on a Saturday morning. Three rounds, an hour each, fueled by oats water and the desperate need to dump what was in my head before my primal brain won the battle and dragged me back to scrolling and snacking.
What came out wasn’t clean. But it was honest. And somewhere in the mess, three threads kept surfacing — like they’d been waiting for me to sit still long enough to notice them.
I am my own best friend
Here’s the thing about solitude that people get wrong: they think it means you’re avoiding connection. That you’re lonely. That something is missing.
Nothing is missing.
I don’t need people the way I used to think I needed people. Not because I’m cold — because I finally trust myself enough. I know what I bring to a room. I know what I’m worth in a conversation. And once you have that, the desperation to be liked just… evaporates.
Montaigne wrote about les perturbations intérieures — the inner disturbances of the solitary person. The idea that if you’re alone with yourself, your mind will eat you alive. He’s not wrong. When you remove the noise of other people, what’s left is you and every thought you’ve been avoiding. The cravings. The insecurities. The part of your brain that would really prefer you just order takeout and watch something.
But here’s what Montaigne was getting at, and what I’ve started to feel: if you can survive that inner battle — if you can sit with the disturbance and not run — what’s on the other side is a kind of self-knowledge that no amount of socializing gives you.
I used to make friends based on proximity. Same lab, same team, same building. Now I’m pickier. I want the same vibe. The same perceptiveness. I’d rather have three people who really see me than thirty who know my name.
That sounds like arrogance. Maybe it is, a little. But it’s also just — clarity. The kind you get from sitting alone with a notebook for three hours on a Saturday when everyone else is at brunch.
The pill metaphor
I’ve been procrastinating on the same categories of things for years. And after writing about it raw, I think I finally see the topology.
There are two types.
Type one: The task is unfamiliar and unrewarding at the basics level. Financial management is my poster child here. I know I should understand my HSA, my 401k, my investment options. I know it’s important. But the learning curve offers zero dopamine — no visible progress, no aesthetic reward, no intellectual spark. Just forms and jargon and the vague sense that I’m behind my peers.
The fix, I think, is mechanism design. Break it down until it’s small enough to not be daunting. Then stack motivations — make it serve multiple values at once. If managing money can also be a system-building project, an optimization problem, something I can make elegant — then maybe I’ll actually do it.
Type two: The task is emotionally charged. This one is sneakier. I record my meetings. I never play them back. I know exactly why — I’m afraid of hearing my own stumbling English, the filler words, the moments where my brain was three sentences ahead of my mouth and my mouth gave up trying to catch up. It’s not that I can’t handle the information. It’s that I can’t handle the feeling.
The fix here is desensitization. Not motivation hacking. Just exposure, repeated until the sting fades.
I had this vitamin metaphor in my notes that I keep coming back to. If the pill is huge and tastes terrible, you’ll skip it. But turn it into a gummy that tastes like candy, and suddenly you look forward to taking it. Same nutrients. Different delivery mechanism.
Push, pull, willpower, mechanism design — these aren’t just productivity hacks. They play a key role in deciding who we are and what we achieve. How you trick yourself into swallowing the pill is, in a real sense, the story of your character.
Colors as self-expression
Something shifted this year. I started caring about how things look — not in a vain way, but in a way that felt like discovering a language I didn’t know I spoke.
It started with clothes. When your body changes, your options change. Suddenly things fit differently. Silhouettes that used to be off-limits open up. And what I found wasn’t just “oh, I can wear this now” — it was “oh, I want this. I have opinions about this.”
I like colors. Bright ones. Orange, blue — things that feel alive. My home was all white and wood for a while, that safe minimalist look that requires no commitment. But I started craving vibrancy. The tension between wanting everything clean and simple and wanting everything vivid and expressive — that tension is interesting. I don’t think it resolves. I think it is the aesthetic.
Outfit iteration became a kind of creative practice. Buy, try, evaluate, return what doesn’t work. Not impulsive shopping — more like prototyping. Each cycle teaches you something about what you actually like versus what you think you should like.
Home improvement is the same loop but slower, higher stakes. You can return a sweater in a week. You can’t return a couch. So I’m holding back on the big decisions — waiting until my taste is confident enough to handle something bolder than cream-colored neutrals.
What I didn’t expect is how much this connects to the solitude piece. Aesthetic pursuit is deeply personal. You can’t outsource your taste. Nobody can tell you what colors make you feel alive. It’s one of those things you can only figure out by sitting with yourself long enough to hear the answer.
The battle
After 55 minutes of writing, I started craving food. Specifically the oats water I’d promised myself as a reward for finishing a round. And I caught it — the exact moment where the intellectual urge to express myself lost ground to the primal urge to consume.
Montaigne would nod. This is his perturbation intérieure in real time. The higher desire — writing, thinking, building something from the chaos in your head — is always fighting the lower one. Eating. Scrolling. Being comfortable. The lower one wins more often than we’d like to admit. Not because it’s stronger in any absolute sense, but because it doesn’t require willpower. It’s the default.
The trick isn’t to win the battle every time. It’s to design your environment so the battle happens less. Cut off the possibility. Don’t keep the snacks where you write. Don’t open the app. Montaigne’s real advice wasn’t “be stronger.” It was “be smarter about where you put yourself.”
I’m turning thirty soon. And the version of myself I want to be by then isn’t someone who’s conquered all her primal urges — that person doesn’t exist. She’s someone who knows herself well enough to know which battles to fight, which pills to turn into gummies, and which Saturday mornings to spend alone with a notebook.
That’s the whole thing, really. Self-knowledge as strategy. Solitude as infrastructure. And the colors you choose when nobody’s watching — those are the ones that are actually yours.