The Price We Pay to Be Ourselves

What does it cost to live undistorted?

How often we spend time calculating and sometimes complaining about the cost of living? I've recently been thinking about how impoverished that accounting is.

We calculate rent, groceries, entertainment, utilities,

while failing to measure the cost of some of the greatest expenditures of a human life:

disappointment, grief, unrealized dreams,

courage, restraint, hope,

holding on to the good times,

and the risk of trying.

What does taking no risks at all cost?

To live is to wager.

Much of my life has been organized around the pursuit of purpose,

meaning, self-actualization - which is really just another way of saying

I've been a practitioner of gambling.

Mostly betting on myself: my gut, my discernment, my vision, my faith.

I've often lost, but seldom been wrong.

Following inner guidance hardly ever yields misalignment.

Even when the outcome stinks.

To be sure, there is a toll.

In a world that celebrates conformity, privileging self-alignment

is the measurable cost we pay to be wholly ourselves.

Seven or so years ago, I made a decision to dial down my use of social media to nearly zero - give or take a birthday post, the release of music, or to honor the life of a loved one here and there. While it was not lost on me that I'd be sacrificing "relevance" in the economy of social validation, I could not have anticipated the illegibility that followed.

Here's the thing, being yourself has a bill attached to it that will come due.

Sometimes the bill is predictable:

less approval, less belonging, less access, fewer opportunities.

Sometimes the cost is incalculable.

My social-media withdrawal is a concrete example.

I understood that leaving the machinery of constant participation might cost some relevance. What I didn’t know was that prolonged absence in the contemporary attention economy could make decades of creative contribution, thought leadership, actual work strangely illegible - as though accumulated public life has to be continuously re-certified by ongoing visibility.

My work. My voice. It seemed to disappear.

My presence - well I authored that disappearance.

And with it opportunities that had historically happened like magic.

The financial hit was hard, and confusing.

Still, fading away was harder.

Have you ever asked or had to confront what happens when the mirrors disappear?

And now, today, as I reluctantly ease back in to using these tools,

I still feel the cringe that motivated my departure.

But here I am returning - not because my opinion of the architecture has changed.

The call to purpose has finally outweighed my disdain.

Today, I am here to honor a threshold, plainly name what happened and begin clearing the backlog of stories:

I withdrew from the social media metrics of modern life;

I left Brooklyn and the city I called home after 24 years;

I retired my private practice, and 27 years of holding other people's stories.

And whether or not anyone registered the thinning of my presence, I changed while being gone. It wouldn't feel right to resume speaking publicly as though the last seven years were not to me an enormous existential event.

I am here to bear witness to that. Not surprising. Seldom do I stand outside an idea and analyze it. I tend to implicate myself in it first before examining what my work always been in conversation with: self-governance, and the sacred, arduous work of self-authorship.

My social media absence wasn't a random event; it was a symptom of my decades-long dedication to authentic selfhood.

So here go I with my next wager.

Can I use a system without internalizing its objective?

Without getting burned out?

And perhaps most sharply, can I - after having paid the price of refusing conformity -

re-enter this jungle without interpreting my return as a repudiation

of what my absence meant?

These are the raw, modern-day questions I’ve been sitting in a dark room with. Not to "optimize my life" - tech has already out-optimized the human soul - but to ponder what it means to live soulfully, courageously, truthfully. To interrogate what it means to live the full spectrum of the human experience and ask:

Who are we when the external apparatus that mirrors us back to ourselves goes completely dark?

What happens when online connection and in-person encounter collapse the meaning of community, friendship, and we realize according to AARP's glaring study on loneliness that we are the most disconnected lot of humans to ever live?

Why do we hoard our old glory days like holy relics, letting the world convince us that our time to dream has expired?

How do we maintain the radical audacity to believe our best days are ahead of us, when we've already lived enough life to know the weight of its scars?

Can we find the stamina to sit quietly inside the uncomfortable rooms of grief and memory, or have we been trained to flip the switch and fight the process of just being?

How does an independent consciousness participate in a digital jungle it does not respect, without letting the machine rewrite its core DNA?

This feels like a few essays, an entire book even, a conversation or ten waiting to happen. It is the framework of everything I have carried into boardrooms, onto stages, and into my private practice for decades.

It is the text I will continue to untangle in my writing, on my blog, and out loud in my new podcast, Without Distortion.

It really isn’t a “new podcast" as much as it is a proposition about perception, self-encounter, inquiry and refusing inherited and unexamined lives.

It's the public sharing of my sacred practice of inquiry told in a three-part introductory overture. The first encounter, titled "Fearless self-encounter" is already live here on youtube.

Give a listen. Tell me what you're contemplating!

I am super geeked to connect and undress with those of you who dare to step into the wilderness of inquiry with me. Come wander!

New episodes every Sunday.

And don't forget to sign up for my mailing list to stay up to date on all that's coming.

I'll see you in the wild!