On doing things alone

9/6/2024

Last year I went on my first semi-solo trip around the world and some ideas came to me about how cool it is to experience certain things alone.

You naturally establish your own, independent Working Consensus

I came across the idea of a working consensus in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

The partial description I would like to use for the purposes of this post is as follows (definitions provided by claude):

Temporary agreement: Participants in an interaction tacitly agree to act as if they share a common understanding of the situation, even if they might privately disagree.

Role performance: Individuals agree to perform their expected roles within the interaction, supporting each other's performances to maintain the social reality they've jointly created.

Situational definition: Participants cooperate to establish and maintain a shared definition of the social situation they're in, including its norms and expectations.

The idea is: when you enter any environment or situation with someone else, you automatically create a shared definition and understanding of the situation.

The reality you construct in your head of the new situation you find yourself in becomes heavily influenced by whoever you are with.

Whatever behaviors you and the other party may have had previously with each other also get self-enforced.

so what happens if you enter a new situation (like exploring a new country) alone?

Your reality construction is more your own! Whatever impressions or feelings you get from things completely new to you, you get to experience them for yourself, not having to first pass them through a working consensus filter where you need to adopt this new stimuli into a previously constructed reality you have with someone.

It also becomes easier to follow Alan Watts’

You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.

Cool quote in general but also if you're with someone you've known for years and you start acting differently every 5 minutes - that's pretty weird. Go alone and you can do whatever you want every time you enter a new room.

This might sound like I'm suggesting playing some character or fake version of yourself, but no that's not what I mean. I mean this all in just being free to think or do as you want without outside influence - without the majorly subconscious process of fitting yourself to someone's expectation of you.

more mental RAM for your experience

Each person I'm with is an open chrome tab. Each activity or thing I'm experiencing is also its own set of chrome tabs.

Experiencing something by myself is closing all chrome tabs except for the experience I'm focusing on.

If I'm eating a meal, all I'm really thinking about is how good each bite tastes. If I have to do this while maintaining a conversation - a lot less mental RAM will be allocated to my bite-pleasure-center and more to listening and contributing to the mealtime conversation.

There's a time for everything

More often than not the thing I want to prioritize will be social interaction and the meal or activity comes secondary. But I've just noticed that whether it be for a meal, walking through a new part of a city, or experiencing anything that's new to me - having maximum mental RAM available for that thing can also be pretty cool.

one last note about traveling alone

I spent many days in my travels where I had a basic idea of what areas of a city I wanted to hit, but didn't really have much else planned out.

The ability to simply pivot activities or let myself be taken by the whims of whatever I found particularly interesting in my vicinity in that moment without having to do a 'hey, you wanna check this out?' was also very cool.

Even if I was traveling with a hypothetical yes-man or group of people that blindly accepted any of my proposals, it still wouldn't be the same. The best way I can explain the feeling is that I wouldn't even check in with myself if I wanted to check something out. By the time it registered that something had caught my eye, my feet would already be moving in that direction.