Cut the puppet strings controlling your life
Why its hard to think for yourself
The first time I ever did drugs was two lines of cocaine.
(I can't help but smile and shake my head thinking back to this moment over ten years later).
The backstory was I’d never done any drugs in high school, and arrived to college having only ever drank alcohol, which I didn’t enjoy much.
But when I began the initiation process for the fraternity of lunatics I chose, my exposure to party life increased one hundred fold.
Alcohol was the least of it.
Still, of the many hours spent pouring Skol vodka, and listening to the latest Big Booty mix, I abstained from the heavier stuff.
No one even encouraged me to give it a go.
It was there, but the choice was mine.
As the first semester became the second, and I was now officially a brother, my curiosity grew.
Until one night where I decided that in honor of a close friend’s birthday (someone who partook in a consistent amount of powder), I would join him.
We sat down around one of the coffee tables in the rooms of the house, poured the white powder out of the little bag, organized it into thin lines, and handed over the rolled up dollar bill.
The actual feeling itself wasn’t so spectacular.
Jumpy, talkative, energizedish… that’s about it.
But the reason I decided to do cocaine was never about the effects.
It was one hundred percent for status.
For recognition.
I had a difficult time ingratiating myself into the fraternity all throughout my initiation process, and even as a brother.
I was different than the other guys, namely in my near total lack of desire to party. This being amongst a group of insane partiers, at a party school.
I wanted to feel accepted as one of the group.
The best way to get what I wanted, was to do what the group did.
This way of living gets a lot of people in trouble.
2
“You’re angry, Robert,” said Hatty. “Well, I guess you have every cause to be.”
Indeed, Robert had very good reason to be angry.
You would be too, if the woman you married disappeared an hour after the ceremony, only to return days later arm in arm with another man - whom she called her husband.
Robert, or Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral, thought he was to be happily ever after.
But Hatty Doran, the daughter of a California mining millionaire, had a secret.
She had already married, without telling anyone.
Hatty had married the true love of her life, Frank Moulton, years before. But when Frank was reported dead in mine attack by Apache Indians, Hatty acquiesced.
A 19th century heiress of a millionaire gold miner wasn’t able to demand she marry on the basis of love, and maintain her inheritance.
So her father set her up with Robert.
“a marriage was arranged, and Pa’ was very pleased…”
But not the bride.
I’ve been waiting to illustrate a point using my favorite work of fiction, The Sherlock Holmes Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
But I didn’t need to reference peak 19th century literature to do so.
People doing things they don’t want to do, for the sake of others.
To let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life - the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual. - Hunter S. Thompson
Consider how many elements of your life have the potential to be affected by the desires of other people:
Work
Health
Wealth
Happiness
Geography
Relationships
There are millions of people compromising each of those items for others.
As with anything, there’s a balance. I don’t mean to suggest you forsake those closest to you in the spirit of doing whatever you want all the time.
That would leave you alone.
What I’m referring to goes deeper.
Consider this:
You’re stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, not much going on. The person in the car next to you reminds you of someone you met traveling years ago. Instead of glancing at them, you take your time to observe their features. They notice you doing so, to which you automatically avert your gaze.
Why would you automatically adjust your behavior when you weren’t doing anything wrong?
A great cultural example of this is easy to spot in Britain.
The British apologize for things that warrant no apology.
You can’t go a day in London without hearing someone say “Sorry” to you.
Even if you’re the one in the wrong!
I joke with my British friends that they’ve been wired to apologize for their existence.
It’s part cultural, and part geography.
Britain is a small island.
Space is scarce.
Scarcity breeds competition, competition drives up emotions.
Better to mitigate that with conciliation than their age old tradition.
War.
Whether it’s looking at someone in the car next to you, or apologizing to the person behind you in line at Pret a Manger in Kensington - it’s the same thing.
These behaviors are connected to the reason people work jobs they don’t enjoy, live in places they loathe, and are married to people they don’t like.
More, it’s a big part of why you think the way you do.
This came up the other day during a run I was on with a friend.
We were talking about a mutual childhood friend of ours, discussing how his politics had shifted over the years.
“He was always a Democrat as a kid,” my buddy said.
I paused and then replied, “he wasn’t a Democrat - he was fourteen. His parents were Democrats, and he parroted whatever his dad said.”
We agreed that was the case.
The way he thought wasn’t of his own making.
It was a copy.
It’s wired into us to constantly be thinking about… us.
3
Alone for nearly your entire life, wandering the dark and scary woods.
For a person, it sounds like a terrible fate.
But for a tiger, it’s bliss.
I remember having this reflection when I was exploring the forests of Madhya Pradesh in central India.
Pench Tiger Reserve and Bandhavgarh National Park are two of the best places to see tigers in the world.
I saw two, at distance, for a few seconds. Since the monsoons season had just ended, it was the worst time of year for sightings.
But all that time bouncing around in the 4x4 searching brought me to think.
The tiger is designed for the life it leads.
Other than a mating pair, or a mother with cubs, tigers live alone.
They have a capacity for love and affection, but they are wired to be content by themself.
People have wiring too.
Except ours are more akin to elephants and chimpanzees.
Highly social creatures.
Only one species has to contend with the fact that their primordial coding often leads them to unhappy outcomes in the world they exist within.
When I visited Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya, I learned about a prime example of how important connection is for elephants.
When orphaned babies are rescued and brought to the center, they each have a barn stall where they sleep at night.
And in each stall, every night, one of the elephant guides sleeps with them.
If they don’t, the babies die.
Elephant calfs can die from loneliness.
For humans, a recent study found social relationships have as much influence on mortality as other well-established risk factors, such as smoking and obesity.
Much as the tiger is designed to thrive alone, we are designed to thrive together.
Despite our wiring, we’re faced with a double edged sword.
On the one hand, 99% of human history was characterized by tight knit communities facing the harshness of life together.
On the other, we’re still wired the same way, but our civilizations are a far cry from what we adapted to succeed in.
Commuting, concrete hellscapes, plastic proliferation, incessant noise, a nature void, fiat currency, and people who play their TikTok videos on speaker in public.
That’s bad enough.
But worse, we’re not even producing enough people to have a chance at turning things around:
Fertility Rates (1975 vs. 2026)
US → 2 vs. 1.6
UK → 1.8 vs. 1.4
Italy → 2.3 vs. 1.2
Brazil → 4.2 vs. 1.6
Japan → 2.1 vs. 1.1
A fertility rate of less than 2 means a country is not at replacement level - in the long haul, population will collapse.
Good for the tigers and elephants, bad for people.
But while there’s still a world to live in, it’s important you understand the way to navigate it.
How can you live the life you want without the pressures of your 10,000 B.C. instincts, and/or mother, getting in the way?
4
The pre-takeoff message from the flight crew we all ignore carries an invaluable lesson.
In the event of an emergency, place your oxygen mask on before helping others with theirs.
That is how you are supposed to live your life.
You can’t be there for others with your best foot forward, if you haven’t already taken care of yourself.
But even with a good grasp of the forces playing at your subconscious, you will find it overwhelming to make the decisions that rightly direct the course of your life. Decisiveness is a skill. Without practice, it withers.
It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped. - Tony Robbins
I’ve grown up my entire life in Miami, Florida.
While most of the world dreams of coming here to vacation or even live, I actually have the real experience of nearly thirty years here. My initial feelings about where I want to live are not one hundred percent in either direction.
This is a good example of how to make a big life decision that will invariably involve other people in your life.
On the nature of making a difficult decision at all, I lean on the framework of understanding whether my choice will leave me happy with the same. The real question is whether I am willing to change.
In my case, I would not be content to live in Miami the rest of my life, and I am willing to change. Change is scary and uncomfortable, but it’s the only portal that takes you towards new opportunities.
But what about the actual decision itself?
“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” - Thomas Sowell
Genuinely one of the most powerful ways to live your life.
Moving from Miami:
Pros → new environment, better culture, better weather, new people
Cons → leave a handful of close friends and family, stress of an unfamiliar environment
When you break your life down like that, things start to happen:
Are you happy with the way things are?
Are you willing to make a change?
What are the pros and cons of either option?
Which is better for you overall?
You can probably guess I’ll be moving out of Miami ASAP.
Six months on a digital nomad visa with my dog Winston in Rio de Janeiro feels right.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to one idea.
This is your life.
You may have to make some compromises by the very nature of all our lives being different from one another. But in the grand scheme of things, you only get one outcome when you let other people (real or imaginary) determine the course of your life:
Misery.
Sit down with a pen and paper, and write out what your life would look like if it were on your terms.
Cut the puppet strings.
Think for yourself.
I realize that’s easier said than done.
Most people have had their dreams beaten out of them for years.
But the beauty is they never go away.
It just takes a practiced hand to figure them out and get the wheels moving.
When I’m not writing articles, that’s what I help people do.
If you’re interested in talking about it, book a couple minutes with me here.