I do all the asking

About this Video:

I’ve been thinking about a question I don’t have a good answer for yet: how do you know whether being alone is peace or just a habit you’ve gotten very good at?

I’m seventy-three. I like my books, my music, writing, reading, and thinking. I’m not sitting in my basement miserable. But I can go most of a week without having a real conversation, and when I looked at the different networks in my life, I realized something: my social network is really thin.

That got me thinking about how I learned to need less.

My father was verbally abusive, and when I was a kid, I learned that telling the truth or needing something could make things worse. I developed what I call “Hard Joshy” — the part of me that learned to shut things down, move on, and not go back for what hurt.

That strategy worked. The problem is, nobody told Hard Joshy when the war was over.

I’ve spent fifty years being the person who asks the questions. As a business owner, I was usually the one people came to, and I got very good at getting people to tell me when something was wrong. But I rarely built a room where somebody could ask me the same questions.

Now I’m wondering whether the independence I value is completely a choice — or whether some of it is an old defense that I’ve gotten so good at calling a preference that I can’t tell the difference anymore.

And maybe that’s the question worth asking:

If you’re the person everybody leans on, when was the last time somebody asked you a real question?

And if you’re happy alone, how do you know the difference between peace and a habit?

I don’t have that figured out yet. I’m still working on it.


Transcript:

I said something on a podcast a while back that I haven’t been able to shake. You know, I said I’m very, very happy in my basement doing this work, writing, reading, thinking, and then almost in the same breath, I heard myself say I wasn’t sure that was true. It’s not the first sentence that bothers me. It’s the gap between the two.

Here’s my situation. I’m seventy-three. I have two cancers, and they’re both behaving right now. I can go most of a week without a real conversation. Not a transaction, not a doctor’s visit, a conversation. Now, here’s what makes it strange. I’m not miserable about that. I like my books. I like my music. I dislike this. So what exactly is the problem?

So let me tell you what started this. I had Glenna Crooks on the podcast, and she studies something most of us never think about. She calls them our networks, the actual web of people running through a life: family, health, career, spiritual, social, and community. And her first finding stopped me cold. Most people don’t even know who’s in these networks. I didn’t. I never once sat down and looked. So I looked. Health, strong. Career, strong for forty years. Family, better than it was. Social, thin. Really thin. That’s not a feeling. That’s a map. Somebody handed me a map of my own life, and there’s a big hole in it

Here’s what I notice now. If I want to see somebody, I’m the one who reaches out. If I want a conversation, I start it, nearly every time. And a few weeks ago, somebody told me something I haven’t been able to put down. They said, “You’re not very likable. You may want to look into that.”

Now, I’ve got my defenses ready. My face isn’t a friendly face, never has been, and I’m blunt. I’ll take you on, and I don’t always pick the right moment. Funny thing is, I like it when people do that to me. The rest of the world doesn’t work that way, though. I know that, and I keep doing it anyway.

But here’s what I keep circling back to, and it goes back fifty years. In all my years running companies, almost nobody ever walked into my office and told me they made a mistake. It was way too scary, and I mean almost nobody. I had to pry it out almost every single time. And you know, I got really good at it. I was proud of that. I thought it was leadership, and you know, it might be. But look at the shape of it. I ask, you answer. Fifty years of being the one who asked the questions, and I don’t remember many people- asking me one.

Why would they? I build a room where I’m the one who asks. I got very good at asking. I never got very good, at answering

Now I have to go back further. This is the part I’d rather skip. My father was a very verbally abusive man. I wanna be precise about that because it matters. He never hit me. What he did was with his voice, and he was really good at it and really intimidating. Two things set him off, embarrassment and not getting his own way. I could produce both on demand, and boy, was I good at that. Because here’s what I’ve only recently been willing to say out loud. I went at him regularly. I challenged him, and he was a man who could not stand being challenged.

Now, my sister rarely caught it. I caught it constantly and hard. The difference wasn’t luck. I just wouldn’t leave it alone. We’ve all got a few people running around inside us. I’ve got one. I call him Hard Joshy, and his job was protecting the rest of the Joshes from whatever was coming. He worked out that strategy when I was really young.

Taking care of myself meant shutting down or moving on and not going back for it, because when I did go back, when I told the truth about it, I got slammed almost every single time. Now people will tell you they learned that needing less made them better. That’s not what I learned. I learned that needing less made the pain stop. That’s a different sentence. It isn’t a virtue. It’s a nine-year-old doing math, and the math was correct. Hard Joshy wasn’t wrong. Telling the truth in the house generally did make it worse. He solved the problem in front of him. He just never got the memo that the problem ended

I always assumed a father like that was just how it was back then. So my story may have it backwards. It wasn’t that everybody had a father like mine. It’s that nobody had a word for what mine was doing. And I’m still sitting with that. I’m not the only one up at two in the morning with this.

There was a woman in the cancer forum who wrote that she’s sure everyone’s fed up with hearing about it. Then she added, that’s never once been said to me, but it’s what I think. Nobody ever said this sentence. She installed it in herself, knowing that machinery. Mine’s been running since I was a kid.

Now let me argue against everything I’ve just said because there’s a good case. There’s research on solitude across three age groups. 2,000 people. Guess who does it best? Older people. Not even close. They report the most peace when they’re alone. And they almost never describe feeling alienated. One man in that study, 77, said, I had nobody to answer to but myself. And I read that and thought, that might be me.

Because I’m not in distress down here. And I need to keep saying that or this whole thing is a lie. Somebody asked me once why I do all this writing. The answer I landed on was, I’m doing it for me. If you want to come along, I’m glad to have you. But this is how I figured out what matters. That’s not a man in trouble. That’s a man who’s found a good use for his afternoons.

So here’s where I actually am. I can’t tell whether my content me is a choice or a very old defense that I’m not very good at calling itself a preference. Those two look identical from the outside. I’m starting to think they look identical from the inside too. Hard Joshi solved a real problem in a real house a long time ago.

And he was right. But nobody told him the war ended. So he’s still at his post, still making sure I don’t need anything from anybody. Asking me intellectually whether a social life matters and I’ll say yes, of course. Ask me emotionally and I get nothing back. Not a no, just nothing. A quiet room where the answer should be.

And one more thing I can’t tie off. The directness that got me slammed at nine is the same directness somebody flagged me a few weeks ago. Sixty-four years apart, same trait, same result. I don’t know whether that’s a wound or just who I am. I’ve stopped being sure there’s a difference.

So let me put it to you, ‘cause I don’t have this worked out. If you’re the only one everybody leans on, when’s the last time somebody asked you a real question? And did you answer honestly, or did the old reflex answer first?

And if you’re happy alone, I wanna hear that too. Tell me how you know the difference between peace and a habit, because I can’t. Not yet. So drop it in the comments. You know I read every one. Hey, this is Josh. You’re on The Long Strange Trip. I’m glad you’re here, and I hope to see you back here next week.