Part of this idea of “strong” means to be unafraid—unafraid to stand up for what is right, to defend oneself and others, and so on. But I am afraid of a lot of things. And so are you. Being afraid isn’t weak; at the most basic biological level, it’s being alive and wanting to stay that way. Like pain, fear is information about the world that guides you to pursue some behaviors and avoid others. Working out and anything else that’s challenging involves enduring physical discomfort, but pain is also your body warning you of its physical limits. If I don’t listen to my body, I will hurt myself, and in middle-age I don’t heal as quickly as I used to, meaning I have to gauge the “right amount” of pain during exercise. Too little, and I’m not challenging myself. Too much, and I’m going to risk injury and will not be able to work out at all, perhaps for weeks.
Similarly, the trick with fear is to make sure that fears are proportional to the actual risk posed by some hazard…

I am a very sensitive person. I am so sensitive I once punched someone in the face for calling me sensitive (more on that later). I have been bullied, harassed, ridiculed, threatened, and stigmatized—both as a child (for things I’ll get into in a moment) and as an adult (mostly for writing things like this). Being sensitive is a touchy subject if you’ll forgive the terrible pun; it might make a short list of things that people find desirable in a friend or a mate, but it might also make one an object of ridicule and even hatred today…

There is a reason I tell this story, besides getting something personal off my chest or challenging stereotypes. A lot of this comes down to time and how I used it. Since I quit social media back in November, followed more recently with deleting numerous games and apps from my smartphone, I have noticed many disturbing parallels to when I quit partying in terms of how my life has changed. I think about what my late academic advisor and friend Ben Agger wrote over a decade ago about how smartphones were changing the ways we interacted with each other, how we perceived time, and even our biological rhythms and cycles. He called it iTime, a blurring of boundaries between private and public, of work and leisure, of day and night. It has, consistent with his theories, unfolded as a constant battle for “eyeballs” or attention which has the effect of “dopamining” society, as philosopher Gerald Moore has recently discussed, in which the machinery of profit-making is turned ultimately on hijacking the reward-mechanisms of the human brain via increasingly sophisticated technological interventions (i.e. “screen culture”).

I do not believe. That is a complete sentence. I am not a nihilist. In fact, no one is a nihilist because nihilism doesn’t make sense—to attack, or defend, a viewpoint, you have to have standards of truth (what is), morality (what ought to be), or both—the very things nihilism is defined by rejecting. What I mean is that as soon as I discover a new idea inspires or fascinates me, I set to work trying to figure out how it might be incomplete or wrong.

When I’m having trouble making sense of things, I re-read William James’ (1842-1910) essay The Will to Believe. James was a U.S. psychologist and philosopher who wrote and spoke on topics from psychedelics to suicide to the scientific method. The Will to Believe is about religion, directed by James, a Christian, at an increasingly secular and agnostic Ivy League culture. To be clear, I’m not promoting or criticizing Christianity here; I’m sharing thoughts on James’ work because it offers me comfort in making tough decisions.