[In this series of posts, I want to introduce you to a certain idea, metaphor, and reality: The International Bohemian Highway. Millions of people who do not fit comfortably into a conventional life are fellow travelers on this highway. I hope that this series of posts paints a picture that resonates for you. If you’d like to meet some of your fellow travelers, please come join my new Eric Maisel Community.]
There is the story of a farmer who attended an auction where a painting of his farm was being sold. When the bidding was over and the painting had sold for a hefty price, the farmer exclaimed, “But he could have had the whole farm for half that price!”
But the purchaser hadn’t wanted the farm. He’d wanted a painting of the farm.
Many people on the International Bohemian Highway who crave community do not actually want the company of other human beings all that much. They want a certain feeling more than they want an actual room full of their fellow writers or painters.
In that actual room, there are just too many rivalries, too much game-playing, too much alcohol, too many resentments, too many former lovers, too much inner commotion about how John got such a big advance or why Mary seems not to like our latest work.
Isn’t it possible that we are constitutionally more lone wolves than social animals? There is a character known to every devotee of action movies, a character often played by Clint Eastwood, who not only has no friends but, as you can tell at a glance, could not and would not ever have any friends.
Oh, maybe sometimes these lone wolves band together for some reason, as seven do in The Magnificent Seven. But as soon as the reason to band together has passed—the instant they have cleaned out the town of the bad guys—they immediately go their own ways, maybe after one last shot of whiskey. Those seven were never a community, not by a longshot.
As with other aspects of original personality, we have no idea if a person can actually be born a lone wolf or a social animal or if those roles and attitudes are more learned than innate. But, darn it, they feel pretty innate. When I see a picture of a stadium full of, say, devout believers, I know in my bones that I am not them and they are not me. They are not sheep—they are meaner than sheep. But they have a herd mentality that folks who ply the International Bohemian Highway simply don’t possess. Deep in our bones, we can’t stand herds.
How can you have community if you can’t stand herds, if you don’t much trust rooms full of people, if the thought of making small talk makes you break out in hives, if your very profession is to be a social animal (think “networking event”) and you can’t stand to be around people for more than five or ten minutes, maybe fifteen minutes max?
This is a question that needs answers. An actual lone wolf may never get cold and lonely but human lone wolves do. They crave something and know that they are missing something, even as they want to maintain their distance. They need something more than and different from just reading about Paris in the Twenties or Greenwich Village in the Fifties. They need something which is a little absurd to say: they need the feeling of community without too much contact.
I think that one partial answer can be found in the profound difference between the phrase “being together” and “being alone together.” In a café, twelve writers can be writing at their twelve different tables, not saying a word to one another, not acknowledging one another, not looking up from their laptops except maybe to flirt for a moment, and experience that great feeling of “being alone together.”
Were they then for some reason to have to meet in a back room of the café to have a meeting about something, all that good feeling would likely evaporate in a wash of egos, fault lines, and fantastically different opinions. While they were alone, they were together. Now together, what a mess!
We have much more to think about with regard to all this, including a wonder if “genuine community” might yet be possible. We see the ghostly outline of that possibility here and there, at this long-running AA meeting, during the making of a film that is a “good experience,” at a heart-felt protest, at a pride event, or when three writers gather to write and not critique. We are going to get to think much more about this, in connection with the new Eric Maisel Community that is forming, because we intend to be real about “what community means” and move the needle on community, moving it in the direction of what we deeply crave and also can tolerate.
Come join me on this adventure in search of—what, exactly? Well, let’s call it postmodern community. Come as the lone wolf you are—all lone wolves welcome. Let’s make some sense of this, because we really do need to.
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Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt: A Toolkit for Thriving in a Chaotic World (Personal Growth, Self Development)
Make Your Gifted Life Meaningful
Overcome your unique challenges. The challenges smart and creative people encounter―from scientific researchers and genius award winners to bestselling novelists, Broadway actors, high-powered attorneys, and academics―often include anxiety, overthinking, mania, sadness, and despair. In Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt, psychology specialist and creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel draws on his many years of work with the best and the brightest to pinpoint these often devastating challenges and offer solutions based on the groundbreaking principles and practices of natural psychology.
Find meaningful success. Do you understand what meaning is, what it isn’t, and how to create it? Do you know how to organize your day around meaning investments and meaning opportunities? Are you still searching for meaning after all these years? Many smart people struggle with reaching for or maintaining success because, after all of the work they put into attaining it, it still seems meaningless. In Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt, Dr. Maisel teaches you how to stop searching for meaning and create it for yourself.
In Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt, you will find:
- You are not alone in your struggles with living in a world that wasn’t built for you or your intelligence
- Logic- and creativity-based strategies to cope with having a brain that goes into overdrive at the drop of a hat
- Questions that help you create your own personal roadmap to a calm and meaningful life
Readers of true, natural self-help books for gifted people struggling with life, anxiety, and depression, like Living With Intensity, Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults, or Your Rainforest Mind, will learn how to create meaning in their lives with Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt.
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