Are you a lone wolf? Live from the HiFi Homestead, Peter McGraw is joined by his good friend—comedian, science communicator, and self-professed lone wolf—Shane Mauss, for a deep dive into solitude, survival, and the myths we tell about ourselves.
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Listen to Episode #241 here
Are You A Lone Wolf?
Introducing Fellow Lone Wolf
Welcome back. Before we begin, I have an exciting announcement. By the time this episode launches, my TEDxBoulder Talk, Stop Telling Single People to Get Married, will have appeared on the TED.com website. I’m very excited to move from helping thousands to potentially helping millions of people via TED. Check it out, share it, like it, and help get the word out. Let’s get started. I’m at my beloved Hi-Fi Homestead. I’m working on a new book, and I’m joined by a good friend, a comedian, a science communicator, a frequent contributor to both my work on humor and the Solo Project, and also a fellow lone wolf. Welcome back, Shane Mauss.
Thank you for having me.
This is overdue. I started prepping this years ago, with some help from the Solo community. I was thinking about who would be an ideal guest. You came to mind.
That’s very much how I think of myself regularly.
As a lone wolf.
As someone who got out of a relationship, it’s a thing where I’ll often be in a relationship where I’m very satisfied. At the same time, I need my space. I’m a stand-up comedian who tours and travels.
Also, lives out of a Sprinter Van.
For a very long time, it was always an issue in relationships when I would be flying out to clubs for 2 or 3 weeks or weekends out of a month. That was always a problem for whatever girlfriend. It would always be hard on the relationship. I always thought it was wonderful. I always valued my time away from that. I don’t mind hanging out with people after shows and being social. I was also very happy to not be around anyone for a very long period of time.
Your story reminds me of when I was dating a woman. This was a dozen years ago. She worked a Sunday to Thursday job. She was a television reporter. On Sundays, she had to go into the office around 2:00 PM. She had a 10:00 PM hit. She would start her day doing her research and stuff like that. She lived in South Denver. I was living in Boulder. I would often spend the weekend down at her place. I would get in the car when she was leaving. Giddy is a strong word, but I was pleased to be going back home to be alone. That always bothered her. I was in too good a mood. By the way, I had a great time all weekend with her. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy with her. We had a healthy relationship, but I also was thrilled to have alone time. Similar experience.
For example, my last girlfriend was with me in that Sprinter van for a year. We stayed in Airbnb and hotels, which made things easier. It’s a little small for you. I enjoyed that. There is nothing quite like a three-hour drive by myself. It’s the best. I do my best thinking. I am amused by my thoughts. I’m listening to an interesting audiobook.
You don’t get lonely.
I’ll give you an example. I was in Phoenix going to LA. This is an ideal lone-wolf move and situation. I start driving. I happen to have a call. I’m going to camp somewhere. That’s all I knew. I’m going to find somewhere to camp tonight. I want to have a fire. I’d ideally like to be out in the middle of nowhere.
You said something to me that I thought was funny. I laughed out loud. You’re like, “I’m happiest in a place where if I scream, no one will hear me.”
It’s a very special kind of feeling because a lot is going on there. I’m a little bit of an adventurer and adrenaline junkie. Also, I’m not doing that for a prolonged amount of time. I’m not comfortable doing that. It’s outside of my comfort zone, where it’s the exact energy that I want to be feeling. It’s a little weird, and it can be like little waves of loneliness here and there, but it’s fascinating.
I was driving, and I talked to someone doing some work for me. I’m putting together this ridiculous donkey-themed event. She’s like, “I lived in Phoenix, and there’s this weird old ghost town where some miners left, they left all their donkeys behind. Now, there are wild donkeys everywhere.” I looked at the map. It’s two hours out of the way. “You know what? That’s where I’m going. An old ghost town and there are donkeys around everywhere.” It’s related to a recent podcast. Maybe I’ll get some pictures of donkeys.
I looked up a state park, found one, and went up crazy dirt roads. I am not scared easily. I was concerned. I was making plans for if my van started rolling off the cliff, I would have to run quickly and jump out the passenger side door. I had my seat belt up, and I got to an empty campground. No one was there. I had no idea the last time someone had been there. I built a fire, and part of my brain was like, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll stay in and do some writing.” It’s a little cold out. I forced myself to go out, and I sat by the fire by myself.
I sat there thinking about all of the years that people would live out on a ranch by themselves, in the quiet, open expanse, and not see another soul for months at a time sometimes. I went on this whole thinking about that. The next day, I got up, saw some donkeys, saw this awesome ghost town, and drove to a friend’s house in LA. That’s amazing. I got to live impulsively and have a little bit of a plan. That’s the epitome of a lone wolf lifestyle.
Do you have something you can look back to in your young adult years or childhood, now with the benefit of hindsight, where it started then?
I wonder how much of it is. I didn’t like my childhood that much.
Join the club, brother.
It wasn’t bad. I wasn’t abused. If anything, my parents were loving to the point of smothering. I remember from the age of three years old, some of my earliest memories of life were being, “Santa Claus. There’s something off here.” I remember being aware by the time I was four that you can’t tell the other kids that there’s not a Santa Claus. I remember being five years old and seeing all my adult relatives going crazy for the Packers. I was looking at the TV and being like, “That seems arbitrary.”
You’re the comedian mindset early in life.
If I saw a Packer fan and a Viking fan fighting in a stadium, it’s because those were the two most similar people in the entire stadium. They would get along great if only they were wearing the same shirt. I intuitively got that from a very early age. I would prod people. I would root for the different team. It was a mixture of feeling odd or an outsider and wanting to be an outsider at the same time. It was self-imposed in part. I wanted to be a cool kid and didn’t want to be a cool kid always at the same time.
My lone wolfishness didn’t come from that. I never felt like that much. You always feel a little bit like an outsider like a team because you can’t fit in the way you want to, etc. Mine was more about solitude. I’ll tell three quick stories. One is I would escape into my room and escape into books, especially because my household wasn’t particularly loving. It was chaotic.
My mom had a major personality disorder. She could be rather mean, overbearing, and controlling, not always, but that was part of the problem. It was uncertain when it would happen. I had a small room. I had my books. I could escape within that room into my fiction, into Heinlein, Vonnegut, Stephen King, and so on. I was perfectly content in that way. It certainly was better than mixing it up downstairs. Also, my sister and I were sibling rivals. We didn’t unite until later in life.
When I was 22 and graduating from college, I treated myself to a trip from New Jersey to Colorado, which I’d always dreamed of. I loved the idea of the American West, the big sky, and the freedom. I flew for the first time. I flew when I was three, moving back to the United States, having been born in Japan, but I had never traveled very much. I was very provincial up to that point.
I went on a nine-day solo trip as a 22-year-old to Colorado. I rented a car, slept in a sleeping bag in a tent, and traveled all through the state completely alone. That didn’t even strike me as weird or strange. It was something that I felt like I could do, even though I had never done anything like that before. It was a great adventure and I never got lonely.
I was also a very social person, very extroverted, and had a big group of friends. I would do these New Year’s trips subsequently with this group of friends, and we would go to New Orleans or different places like that, Key West, etc., warmer places. There was always a night when everybody was going out. I was like, “I’m not going out tonight. I’m staying in.” I think they found that peculiar in part because I was so social and got along with everyone, but I needed some alone time. It was too much to do a seven-day trip with these people sharing beds. We were on a budget, but I needed to do it. That’s never ended.
What Is A Lone Wolf
I think that there are a lot of lone wolves in the solo community. I don’t think you need to be a lone wolf to be solo in any way, but I do think that to varying degrees, the community tends to enjoy their solitude more than the average person. To be a lone wolf, you don’t need to be a hermit. I think those things are different. I wanted to explore this with you. I want to start with the term lone wolf.
It is funny because lone wolves would mostly die.
It is a misnomer. I think it sounds super cool.
There’s certain wildlife that we’re fascinated by, and we can see that there are insights to be gained by looking at animals and the metaphors within them. We overshoot the anthropomorphizing thing. A chimp research comes out. It’s like, “See, we’re supposed to be going to war all of the time,” until someone sees bonobos. I think that’s what happened with the lone wolf thing.
That’s the lone wolf metaphor.
It’s like the archetype you see in your mind. You would probably see one scouting more often, too.
The actual idea is largely a myth. The wolves are pack animals. They’re super social. When there is a lone wolf, it’s typically temporary. They’re between groups. Sometimes, a wolf will break off from the pack in part because it’s low on the hierarchy. Maybe it’s out seeking a mate. Maybe it forms its own pack. Maybe it joins another pack, but it’s largely pretty temporary. A wolf is not going to be alone for long. It’s not in its best interest in that way because it becomes less safe, and so on. There are other animals, though, that are better representatives of lone wolfness. Do you know what some of those are? Does any come to mind?
Sloths are pretty darn solitary.
I don’t have them on my list.
They’re somewhat around-ish one another, but they never go to hang out with one another. They don’t get very far, generally.
I’m coming over. I’ll be over in a week.
They’re not particularly social. I have some pretty interesting ideas about consciousness relating to all this that we’ll get to, but I would love to hear your list.
Here are a few. Bears. Except for mating and raising cubs, most bears are solitary, especially when hunting. Black rhinos are territorial. They’re mostly solitary. They do pair up briefly. Leopards live and hunt alone. They often avoid other leopards. This is a funny one. Koalas.
Koalas and sloths are the same.
They’re asocial. They have their own tree. They interact when they breed. My favorite lone wolf is the tiger.
Cats are, generally. It’s weird that people have them. I like it when people have them, but they let them out. Have you ever seen how they put tracking devices on cats and see what they do? It’s fascinating because they’re scouting out the territory and forming borders.
In some ways, a tiger is a little more what people think of when they think of a lone wolf in some ways. In any case, maybe you could call yourself a leopard or a black rhino instead. Nonetheless, this metaphor only works so well, so to speak. One of the things that I think is important to recognize is that being a lone wolf is not maladaptive. A lot of people think there’s something wrong with those people who like a lot of solitude and so on.
In my book, I have an entire chapter dedicated to the benefits of solitude, which we’ll talk a little bit about. There are a lot of good things that happen as a result of solitude, creative pursuits, reflection, recovery, and so on. Highly social people are important to society. Having a community is very important to humans. We’re highly cooperative animals. These lone wolves are important for things like innovation and creativity.
Some tasks require large swaths of time alone. Think about the writer. Most writers write alone. They write in a solitary way. I think that there are some scientific discoveries. You need a lab. You need collaborators. There are some things, philosophically and scientifically, that you need to sit, read, think, and write without other people around. Even art. You can imagine the artist working in a studio alone, unencumbered by responsibilities, by having to be on other people’s schedules.
It’s interesting because there’s the archetype of a scientist, a physicist, or a mathematician. You picture Einstein sitting at a desk by himself. At the same time, academia is big. You’re generally talking with other professors and bouncing ideas off them, and it’s collaborative. I have an idea that we can eventually put MRI helmets on things and record the mind-eye. If I picture an apple and this thing is recording, it would draw the apple that I’m picturing in my mind.
If you had that capability, I guess that solitary animals’ mind-eye would be more in line with reality than social creatures because social creatures have been selected for social embellishment a little bit. What I’m saying is I don’t think koala bears overestimate their abilities. I think that pack wolves do this often because they can gain status and mates from doing that. There’s some interesting self-deception research of people overestimating their intelligence or ability to drive that I think is particular to social animals, or at least more so. I think that being outside of a social situation can sometimes help you see more objectively.
When it comes to novelty, insights, and creativity, there is, at times, a benefit of bouncing things off of each other, building on them, and so on. There is also a problem. For example, brainstorming usually is not a very good way to solve problems because it is so social that people will self-censor their ideas. When you’re alone, you don’t have that. You’re not worried that you can have outrageous ideas. You can pursue things that might be a waste of time. You don’t have to worry about being judged by other people. In short, there are creative advantages to solitude. It’s not always the case, but it is a good complement to collaborative efforts around creativity, whether it be art, science, and beyond.
That’s a lot of art. When you show the finished product, you’re like, “Look at the amount of time I so skillfully wasted around this.” It’s part of the appreciation like, “How long did that take? You did that all by collecting your fingernails, and then you made the Mona Lisa?”
There is a famous quip in the world of design, which is you bill someone for 25 hours of work, and the person who is paying for it says, “That only took you an hour to create.” You’re like, “No, I needed 24 hours to think about it in order to make that one hour of work.” Feeling uninhibited by others can be useful. There are other values of lone wolves in society. We have a forthcoming episode about solos in the pandemic. You get locked down. Who does better with a lockdown? The lone wolf. Some people delighted in being locked down because it allowed them to fully embrace their solitude, for example.
Getting to work remotely, finally, and not having to go into the office all the time. Other people are like, “I need to be able to make the joke around the office and have the new mug that people compliment.”
For some people, it’s awful. Some other people actually can excel in those situations. The last one is in the case of an apocalypse, a pandemic goes and wipes out a large swath of the population, a nuclear event, or an asteroid hits the earth, the people who are lone wolves are a little more likely to survive. They’re also more likely to be away from everyone else. Some scientists study this phenomenon that you are going to need these lone wolves to come back together to repopulate the planet, for example, versus the people who are living in LA or New York who all go.
Also, during devastating natural events, there does tend to be way more cooperation than you would think. It shows in the movies, the Arctic, or the LA fires. It’s not like everyone started looting. You might, at face value, suspect. In Asheville, there’s a mudslide. Very quickly, lots of people came together to do what they could to help strangers out. I would say that people who are a little more self-sufficient and think about things in that way are better suited to then help others in those situations.
Being isolated from the event gives you a chance to survive in a way that is going to help humanity rise from the ashes, so to speak. This is all theoretical. This has thankfully not happened yet.
For most of human history, you wouldn’t have bet money on humans. They would get down to numbers as low as 50, over and over again for a very long time. Things started taking off. When they did, it was pretty incredible. You would need explorers, and then you would need people who were holding down the fort a little bit.
How Technology Made Being A Lone Wolf Easier
Let’s talk about that. First of all, one of the interesting things through much of human history, it was not possible to be a lone wolf in the way that we described. We were tribal. We were in these hunter-gatherer groups that were small, kin and friends, so to speak. To go it alone, you’re going to die. Now, because of technology, we’re able to go it alone. You have your Sprinter van that keeps you warm, keeps you safe, allows you to cover distances, etc. You have packaged foods, you have supermarkets, these kinds of things. We have our apartment buildings, and so on and so forth.
The ability to even be a lone explorer is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of non-human primates. We can thank technology for that, in particular. Even now, we can travel the world alone with a passport, a mobile phone, and a credit card. You can go to most places in the world now as a solo, in a way that is shocking compared to what our hunter-gatherers could do.
For all the buzz about life hacks and stuff, life hacks always are such silly, frivolous minutiae. Whereas to me, I think the real action, life hack-wise, is thinking exactly in those terms of what opportunities are there in this modern environment that humans have never had before. You also have to be mindful. Now, you can go up, drive around in a Sprinter van out in the middle of nowhere, and be perfectly satiated, climate-controlled, and relatively safe.
Loneliness might bubble up for a check-in. A lot of times, I think that one of the keys to mindfulness and metacognition is the understanding that not every emotion needs to be taken at face value. I’m experiencing loneliness right now because it’s unnatural for a human brain to be in this situation. It’s this great opportunity in the same way that birth control is this incredible opportunity, and then there are a lot of these evolutionary desires.
There might have been what we would view as more puritanical mating preferences that matched other times. There was a potentially high cost of offspring that always came with any sex that happened. You would want a brain that would account for that a bit. In the same way, we’ve never had fridges full of food before, so we now have a paradox of abundance.
We flip from being worried about starving all the time to worrying about controlling our desires.
I think that loneliness can be the same thing, not to gaslight people’s loneliness and say, “Just don’t experience that.” When I experience emotional states, I go, “Is this in response to something or are these emotions running through the cycle of all the emotions to see if one is worthwhile right now like running a health check?” Once in a while, on your computer, there might be a scan for updates or something like that. I often think about the emotion of loneliness in that same way. I’ve experienced it, and it very rarely grabs hold of me. I find it like a delicacy almost.
Some people are deeply lonely. These are people who have goals to be connected in a platonic or romantic way or are unable to do so. That loneliness is an alarm bell for them that motivates them to get on this important time. For some people, loneliness is this leftover emotion, evolutionarily, that says, “If you go it alone, you’re going to get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. You better be careful.” It’s a different alarm bell. When you’re out in the Arizona desert, you can get a hint of loneliness. It’s not, “I want to have a girlfriend right now.” It’s not that at all. It’s your old evolutionary self saying, “Are you okay? Is everything okay? Is this safe? Are we safe?”
It’s very hard for the subconscious to understand the idea of a parachute when you’re about to jump out of an airplane.
It’s funny. I have no desire to jump out of an airplane in part because I think I’m going to find it so unpleasant. I might be surprised by that.
What about the indoors? I’m serious.
I would do the indoor thing. No problem, but I get it. I’m not able to overcome it.
No one is saying everyone needs to be skydiving and stuff.
It’s the same thing, though. I get that. We live in a world that is way safer than it used to be. We have these old emotions that are trying to keep us safe in ways.
If emotions were appropriate, I would be terrified of all of the driving that I do. It’s statistically what will do me in. I drive more than almost anyone on the planet, outside of truck drivers or Amazon delivery drivers. It never feels that way.
You need to have a near accident to recognize how dangerous it is.
I can’t even get myself to pay attention enough to not almost slam into this because my brain is not properly accounting for the statistical probabilities here.
Occupations For Lone Wolves
Historically, lone wolf occupations, you mentioned one like a frontier scout, someone who’s going off exploring, checking out other things, or even going to scout out the enemy. You’re doing this thing completely alone. You may not come back. That was a much more dangerous endeavor than it is today because you don’t have as good a technology. Hunters, trappers, these are people who go off and live off the land. I’m not a hunter, but I think some elements of hunting are best done alone. Hermits and monks are engaged in intellectual work and spiritual work, oftentimes done alone.
You mentioned a modern-day profession like the long-haul trucker. Doesn’t make economic sense to have two people in a cab. It works best with one. Eventually, we’re going to go to zero when robots do the driving. The stand-up, the road dog, the stand-up comedian, traveling alone. Maybe you have a girlfriend at times keeping you company or a boyfriend, but generally, you’re alone. You’re performing alone on stage. You’re writing alone. What are some others that come to mind?
I grew up in Wisconsin. It was very normal for people to go out hunting by themselves for hobbies to have. I go out fishing, and I sit out in the middle of a lake by myself all day Saturday. That’s how I recharge for the next week of work. It was very much intuitive. We all know that that’s a common thing that people need. There’s nothing weird about that. It wasn’t until my generation, which ended right around our ages somewhere in the ‘70s. That started changing a little bit.
There was a sub stack. Amazon bought the James Bond franchise. There’s a lot of talk about how to revitalize this longstanding franchise, this spy, this lone wolf. How do you do this? This person in Substack wrote an article about how we should marry James Bond off and how that would be a good role model for young men. As you might imagine, as a solo, I was not happy with this argument.
I love you getting upset at a Substack about James Bond getting married. This is lovely. Now, I’m going to reflect on how often I get myself worked up.
I rarely get worked up about things on social media. I got worked up about this because if you are a spy in that James Bond sense, I recognize that most spies work in an office building. They don’t live the romantic life that James Bond did. Nonetheless, if you’re an undercover detective, if you’re a spy, there is something about being unencumbered and not having to worry that you’ve got a wife and kids or a husband and kids back at home that they could be used against you. You don’t need to be back home for dinner. You can be fully dedicated to your work. One of my earliest Solo episodes was Why Are Superheroes Single? It was for the very same reason.
Agility.
It was agility, being unencumbered, that you don’t have responsibilities that may get in the way of performing your duties.
I can risk everything. I regularly go all-in on things. You can’t do that when you have kids.
Also a spouse or family responsibilities. Even as a comedian, you can speak freely and frankly without worrying that your spouse is going to catch hell at work because of the things that you said, etc. I would put it into two spheres. There’s a sphere of physical and being out in the world alone. What you said, hunters, long-haul truckers, park rangers. There’s an artistic or creative one where you want to be psychologically free, that you’re not worried that what you say at work gets your spouse or kids in trouble.
In that way, the lone wolf can be an advantage in a very limited number of occupations. In the average occupation, it doesn’t matter if you are or not. As a professor, I bounced between the two. I’m super social and extroverted when teaching and collaborating. I’m very lone wolf-like when I’m reading, writing, and thinking. Having one foot in that world and one foot in the other world is good for me. I can balance between the two. As long as neither gets two out of whack, I’m pretty happy.
I think that people would go and do more lone wolf-type activities and behaviors if their lifestyles were different. They probably don’t realize how much they can. I love couch surfing and stuff. I’m very happy to sleep in my van. I don’t need to crash in friends’ guest houses. I love staying at my friends’ houses that have kids and families and getting to be around them for a few days. I love kids for three days. I love kids and I also don’t want a kid.
I do wish I had a little more experience because, often when I’m doing that, I wish I felt a little more comfortable connecting with kids a little bit. I tell people about my experiences of going to a state park and the ideal scenario. It doesn’t happen very often, but when I hit the jackpot, no one would even hear me scream. I had no cell phone reception, and no one would hear me scream. That’s the measure of my ideal scenario. I see a look in almost everyone’s eyes at first. It sounds a little crazy, and then I hear it. It’s funny because I’ll say it to a married couple.
Prior to this trip, I was in Palo Alto visiting a very good friend. I adore his wife, too. His kids are great. They’re super charming.
I think kids are cool these days.
I enjoyed the whole experience. It was three nights, and in the end, I was ready to go. I enjoyed it. It also 100% reinforced my lifestyle.
I’m so sorry. If it’s the last thing that I want to do is to be insulting. I think that more people than ever do find themselves in a situation where it’s very difficult, “I have no choice. I’ve stuck in that. I’m a parent now. It’s a lot.”
The Hierarchy Of Humans
I think part of it was that I was raised by a single mom, and my mom was obsessed with us getting a lot of sleep. She would put us to bed early. We would do a nap. Every day, she would force us to do this, even though we as kids didn’t want to do them. It was shocking how early we went to bed because there were still kids at the playground playing when we were going to bed at times. She recognized that it was good for our health, but as a single mother with 100% custody, it was the only time that she got quiet. She didn’t have to worry about us there. The kids are sleeping. She has alone time in that way. It was never-ending. These kids are always around. It’s a lot. For the wrong person, it’s a lot. I get that. One of the very fun things that I had when I was interacting with these teens was we were talking about brain rot, this Zoomer online dialect stuff. I got to show off that I knew some brain-rot words.
Skibidi Toilet.
It’s the rizz I was talking about.
Saying the rizz isn’t going to have much rizz for much longer.
I understand that. The fact that I knew rizz and its etymology, the teen boy couldn’t believe it. One of the words that’s made its way outside of that vernacular is the term sigma. Have you heard about this? You know more about this stuff than I do. In chimps, bonobos, baboons, and a variety of other animals, there’s the alpha, beta, and omega hierarchy that exists.
When I was young, no one ever talked about alpha, beta, omega, or alpha being the top of the food chain. The omega is the lowest of the low in the hierarchy. I guess the beta sits in between. This is very much masculine, even a manosphere-type idea of being an alpha, being strong, and being dominant. I think the default thinking in my life as a man was being higher on the hierarchy is better than being lower on it. I know this. I played sports, for example. I sat at a lunch table full of boys, young men, etc.
I’m in academia, which has its own ladder and its own hierarchy, etc. What I have realized for myself that is very lone wolf-like is this notion of the sigma, which is the person who is not interested in hierarchy. It may have appealing qualities that the “alpha” has but is not interested in ruling, not interested in being at the top of the roost, so to speak.
I’ve always gravitated toward the rock climbers, the extreme sports type.
Rather than the captain of the football team, the homecoming team.
It’s off-putting to me.
I wouldn’t say I always felt that way, but I think I gravitated into it. I had Tim Kreider on the podcast. He said this thing that I thought was great, which I would define power as the ability to make other people do what they want. Freedom is the ability to do what you want. I’ve always wanted freedom more than power. I don’t want the responsibility of power. I don’t want to manage people. I don’t want to be in that place.
That’s generally the two most stressed positions on the hierarchy. You don’t want to be the guy on the bottom, for sure, but a guy on the top has some pretty high cortisol rates going on.
Because you’re under threat all the time, and you have a lot of responsibility. I found this sigma idea, this lone alpha, as what the kids might say, as being a nice alternative. We don’t have to default into this world. The military is set up like this. Sports teams are set up like this. A lot of corporate America is set up like this. That may not agree with you. That may not be where you want to sit. Having this alternative framework is interesting. It has even trickled down into the brain rot dialect.
Speaking of anthropomorphizing, it has often been the case that we’ve looked and because of some of the hierarchical thinking that is a lot more particular to modern life, when people started looking at animal behavior like these David Attenborough things. They might as well put a crown on the guys like, “This is the king.” It then takes a long time to realize. That is the top guy. That guy is the top elephant. Here’s this matriarchy, very clearly, that’s very much in charge.
There are a lot of things like that. There’s generally a lot of flock-type behavior. It’s interesting, where there are cues to any given bird might see something of value. When there’s a drastic movement in one way, every bird in the flock should consider whether that is valuable information. Do they see something as a value or a threat? It’s not like the kingbird is moving the flock around.
I’ve been reading Camille Paglia. I remember she wrote something that I thought was very interesting. This is not when we were hunter-gatherers as much as I think when more agrarian is how, for example, men were the rulers of the public space, but women were the rulers of the private space. It doesn’t break down for humans the same way it does for chimps. It’s the idea that we take.
There are no sigma chimps. They don’t go off on their own outside. They need to exist within a hierarchy to survive. Nonetheless, the only reason why I bring this up is that I like that there are two different models for humans. You can operate within this hierarchical thing or because of changes to culture, social norms, and technology, we have Shane Mausses who can step outside, create, and live life in this way.
I think what’s unique to humans is that there are a lot of ways to humans, in a way that is completely unlike any other species.
As I like to say, there is no one remarkable life. There are remarkable lives. You can’t say that about apes, about any other animal. There’s one way to excel.
Ants have the numbers. It’s odd, they have a strange relatedness. They have a queen. There’s a whole bunch of worker ants that are never going to breed in their life. They have these weird civilizations and stuff, but they’ve done well. They’re the second place to have gotten to as many regions of the world. Partially, that’s from hopping on boats with humans. Most things, if they hitch a ride on a boat to some foreign land, they’re not going to make it.
All that is to say is most things are in a particular niche. Outside of that, they’re probably not going to survive. Once in a while, there’s something that they have a niche, and that niche can exploit some new environment. That humans have been able to go to the equator and both poles, to live in cities, and to be loners out in cabins is insane. There’s nothing else doing anything like it.
Elevating Personality Values As A Lone Wolf
I want to normalize the fact that there are multiple ways to live, depending on what stage you are in life and the type of person you are. There’s not a lot of work, as far as I can tell, on personality values around lone wolves. I think that they probably have at least some introverted tendencies. I’m not a pure introvert, but I do have some introverted tendencies. Those moments when I was on those trips where I was like, “You folks go out. I need a night to myself.” I think it’s very much of an introverted tendency. This idea of being open to new experiences, I think, potentially from the Big Five.
I want to reflect back on something you said earlier because I have talked about this on the pod before, and that is that our social norms are so strong. You could argue they provide guardrails, but I might call them bumpers that keep us behaving in a particular way. The average human does not take as much advantage of their freedom as they could.
One of the challenges that I’m going to do is I’m going to pack a bag, go to the airport, and buy a flight somewhere. go somewhere, and make the decision. Buy the ticket at the airport, get on the plane, and go on an adventure in that way. I have to plan that challenge. That’s not something that I naturally think about in that way. People who are open to new experiences are better at these. I’m high on openness to experiences. You’re one of the highest people on openness to new experiences that I’ve ever met.
I scare people. People tell me that all the time. They’re scared of what I do. They’re scared for me. It’s a regular comment that I get from people. My old podcast editor was like, “I’ve listened to you talk for hours. I have never in my life met anyone with the threshold for risk.” I have to say, that comes with some downsides. I’m not trying to make myself a hero. I would say I’ve learned a few things to warn people about along the way. I’ve found some ways of being and some opportunities that to me seem so obvious that people are missing out on.
There are so many self-limiting things like people feeling silly. Just by themselves feeling silly is such a detriment to life. I know this happens. I feel it myself sometimes. You’ll be by yourself. How do you feel about dancing by yourself? How do you feel about singing? Do you feel silly about that? You probably do. I could name something where you do feel a little bit weird doing that right now. I never liked jocks very much. I’m perfectly capable of doing pushups and everything, I have so much baggage of hating a type of person that I need to work past to do the things that add so much value to one.
For the audience, I was doing pushups earlier today.
I’ll do some push-ups with you, buddy. I’m using my own experience of something that people should be mindful of. I always like trying to use a personal example first. Other people’s example would be board games, where I had this experience. My brother-in-law was like, “You want to come over and play board games?” I was like, “Board game?”
You’re like, “Bored games?”
I remember years before that a comic being, “We’re all coming to play Settlers of Catan. It’s this board game. If you want to play,” I’m like, “No, thanks. Invite me to the next thing.” Then, I played it and I was like, “This is fun. It’s nice.”
It’s like you inviting me to play pickleball all the time. I’m always like, “No, thanks.” I probably would go, and I probably would enjoy it because everybody seems to enjoy pickleball.
Racket sports add more to longevity than any sport out there, too. I’m appealing to Peter McGraw. Now, on the other side of it, I’ve gone to teach people board games. It’s often a nice way to connect with, say the staff of a comedy club or something like that afterwards. I can have a forced awkward conversation, or I’m busting out code names. People are in this new game. We all had fun together in a way that we wouldn’t have otherwise. They remember me, and we look forward to seeing each other again. What a wonderful thing to connect with family and friends in a different way, like going to a family gathering.
The point is that I now see the judgment that people will have. Right before we recorded, I read you a little piece. I was writing about self-limiting, overly complicated stories that we tell ourselves that become these mental barriers and pursuing what we’d like to be pursuing if we didn’t make too much of it.
I did this survey about doing things alone in public, and the results may be sad. First, they made me sad for partner people because partner people are about half as likely to do something alone in public as a single person. The other thing that made me sad about single people is that a lot of single people still don’t do things alone in public. Don’t go to the movies alone. Don’t go to museums alone. Won’t even go to a cafe or a restaurant alone. I think this is one of those self-limiting beliefs. “People are going to look at me. They’re going to judge me. It’s going to be awkward.” It’s going to be these things. It’s not any of those things. You can ask anyone who does stuff alone in public. There’s almost zero friction.
There’s a tiny bit here and there, but it’s well worth any friction you have to be able to go to a museum when you want to go to a museum. Walk through it at the pace that you want to walk through it. Choose the movie that you want to watch at the time that you want to watch. Show up and leave as you like. Eat an enormous bin of popcorn without feeling self-conscious about it, etc. One of the things about lone wolves is they’re not affected by any of that.
I would say one of the keys to having success as a lone wolf is to keep on venturing outside of the comfort zone. When I started my comedy career, I found out very quickly that I would be so comfortable being by myself that I would not leave my hotel room. I’m Howard Hughes-ing it because I got to buy the museum ticket or whatever to rent a car.
It does help when someone is encouraging you or you have to show up at this time because you’re meeting someone, a commitment to it. I get that.
A successful lone wolf is someone who isn’t being, “I don’t want to go to a restaurant by myself,” which is one of my favorite things in the world to do, by the way. I love people-watching.
This researcher, Roy Baumeister, and his colleague Leary have a personality inventory called Need to Belong. People vary along a dimension. We are social creatures to some extent. It’s an important human need, whether it be platonic, romantic, familial, etc. Some people need less social connection than others. This survey is a survey of your lone wolfishness in many ways. What their work finds is that just because you’re low on the need to belong doesn’t mean that you’re dysfunctional. It just means that you thrive with more autonomy. There’s no right or wrong way with regard to this.
Again, I think a lot of this stuff is like, are you living the life you want to be living? Is it a happy, healthy life? Are you able to achieve the goals that you want? It’s a lot like, do you have a drinking problem? It’s not that drinking is bad or good per se. It’s like, are you missing work? Is your health bad? Is it affecting your relationship? If the answer is yes, then drinking is a problem. If the answer is no, then it’s not, or at least less so than we might think. I think it’s the same thing.
Famous Lone Wolves (Fiction And Non-Fiction)
Your desire for solitude, your desire to be away from people. Is it causing you problems because you’re not making good health choices, because you’re lonely, or because you can’t get along with people? Then, it is a problem. If you’re making great art, you’re happy, and you’re moving through the world with a sense of adventure, curiosity, and grace, then it’s great. Look at the outcomes of these desires or perspectives that we have to judge the goodness or the badness of them. I want to finish by talking about some famous lone wolves, either real or fictional. Most of them are fictional on my list. Can you think of any famous lone wolves in literature or film?
I had the Howard Hughes reference come to mind.
I’m not sure he’s doing it well.
For a while, he was.
We mentioned one already, James Bond.
We’re thinking fictional.
If you can think of nonfictional, that’s great. I have fictional ones. Mad Max, Road Warrior.
This is one of those where I’m terrible at questioning.
When you hear them, you’ll know.
By the way, I don’t want to put out there that I’m a lone wolf, meaning that I’m unapproachable, but don’t invite me to trivia night because this is my response to every trivia question ever. It’s in there somewhere. Accessing it when put on the spot is an impossible ask.
More recently, John Wick. The one I liked showed up in the sequel to Top Gun, which was called Maverick, is Pete Mitchell. For people who watched the original Top Gun, 1985-ish thing, he’s a young fighter pilot. Forty years later is the sequel, Maverick, which came out. It’s a very good film. He’s a captain. He doesn’t play by the rules. There’s a line in there, “You should be a general or a senator by now, and you’re a captain.” He is very much a solitary character. There’s a love interest, but it doesn’t work out. Spoiler alert, Pete Maverick Mitchell is very much like the lone wolf trope, and you can see it in that film very much.
I have a hero of mine, who is my favorite musician on the planet. I’ve had other favorites through the years, but my favorite one for a long time now is Aesop Rock, who is a rapper and an extraordinary poet.
You’ve turned me on to some of his music.
He’s articulating. He’s into skateboarding. He’s a rebellious person. He spends lots of time reading and thinking. He articulates the experience of navigating the sometimes having to deal with loneliness and depression, but also the adventure of being alone, liking his alone time, isolating himself, and realizing he needs to get out a little more sometimes. Because he’s rapping his diary, over the years, you can see him making serious mental health improvements. He has an album about going through therapy. You can see some actual real changes in his thinking and everything after that.
That’s a real-life lone wolf.
That is inspirational.
One of the things that tends to happen when you talk about lone wolves is that it tends to skew males. There is a rarer trope of the female lone wolf in media. Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill goes off on her own, a lone assassin for revenge. Ellen Ripley in Alien, although I have to admit this, Ripley was written originally for a male character. Even that one’s a little bit dicey.
Kill Bill written by Quentin Tarantino is not exactly the best at tapping into the female mind as amazing as he is.
His movies are unapologetically masculine, even if they have strong female characters in that way. There’s a movie called Atomic Blonde about a spy starring Charlize Theron. She plays a very lone-wolf character.
During COVID, I had a lot of virtual meetups, and I only got to know some female listeners who are lone wolf types, tend to skew and are artsy. I think it’s interesting. The one thing that I will say about lone wolf stuff is that you need to be a little aware of where it’s coming from if it’s baggage that you’re still dealing with and you got to deal with that baggage or if it’s opportunities.
You and I are in pretty fortunate positions where I got to become a D-level celebrity, a somewhat respected-ish stand-up comedian, and a lot of friends in a comedy community. I got to travel everywhere, where I was welcomed into clubs and could plug in anywhere that I went and see so many people get so much validation. I am all set with that. Thank you very much.
I can go on seeing people diet for a long time because I’m probably going to see a lot of people again. Sometimes that’s a little bit of a different thing than someone who maybe didn’t have the high school they were hoping for and got themselves in a little bit of a rut, maybe focused on art or whatever, now does have skills, and now finds themselves in their 30s or 40s and maybe hasn’t gotten out enough to realize that no one cares about what happened in high school anymore. You can go out there.
You can do whatever you want.
You can show up at Pickleball, and anyone is going to welcome you in. Now, you have the useful skill of having made the most of having gravitated toward introversion for a while. You can try. I do think that that’s more examples under the overarching. If you’re a lone wolf, you should always be moving a little bit outside of your comfort zone. In my book, the whole point of being a lone wolf is taking advantage of the opportunities and the adventure of it.
To your point earlier, I’ve started, when I’m at home, going for a walk at night. I used to walk at night a lot and then I moved it to the morning. Now, I’m doing a morning walk in an evening walk. There’s a particular park near me, and I’ve started dancing. I put on some music I like. I have this little spot, and I dance, but I’m not alone. There are people around in a sense. At first, I felt a little self-conscious about it. What I realized was I’m the lucky one. Some people are looking at me and are like, “I could never do that.” I feel bad for you because it’s fun to dance outside in the park on a nice night and watch the sunset.
I think there are many more female lone wolves than we think that there are to your point earlier. There would be even more if the world was a little safer for women. It’s easier as a man to move through the world. You feel safer. Some systemic, cultural, and contextual issues can inhibit it beyond. It’s not necessarily the case that it’s a purely gendered thing. There’s more inhibiting, unfortunately, at this stage in life. It was worse in the past and hopefully, it’ll be better in the future. That could be something very real.
It Is Okay To Live Alone
It certainly comes up when I talk to members of the community and female friends about solo travel. They feel like the number of destinations they can go to is more limited than the number of destinations I can go to. I think that’s very real. As we wrap, is there anything reflecting on this conversation that comes to mind?
If you’ve ever fantasized about getting a camper van or something like that, you want to rent one first several times, but it’s incredible. It goes to show you that there are a lot of ways of being that are beyond convention that especially lone wolf types can take advantage of. Speaking to my past self, I would have lived a little less suicidally and a little more of, “What if I want to live to be 90 years old, what kind of money am I going to want to put away for that experience?” Again, that’s knowing where these motivations are coming from.
Mine isn’t like that. I’ve lived highly responsibly in terms of health and finances. I get what you’re going with. To me, I think the issue is that this is not a prescriptive conversation. It’s not meant to convince people to be more of a lone wolf. It’s to convince people that it’s okay to live life the way you want to live it. You can experiment with moving through the world alone, in giving up power for freedom, for example, if that agrees with you.
Experiment with it. Pay attention to how it feels that you might decide this is a better fit in a sense. By the way, this doesn’t have to be something that is the same throughout your life. People move through stages of life where they become much more enmeshed in the community, in a relationship, or a household, and that’s okay. They thrive in that situation. At some point, they may move to that world.
I have an Indian friend who talks about, in Indian culture, these different stages in life. One stage in life is very much of a lone wolf stage in life. Another one is very much a family stage in life. I think that acknowledges that the same person can have different identities, depending on their situation in life and developmentally. From one lone wolf to another, Shane, thank you for disrupting my solitude at the Hi-Fi Homestead here in Joshua Tree.
I had a great time seeing where you’re usually alone.
I look forward to you leaving.
I also look forward to it. Cheers.
Important Links
- Shane Mauss
- TEDxBoulder
- TED.com
- Why Are Superheroes Single?
- Roy Baumeister
- The Power Of No Power – past episode with Tim Kreider
About Shane Mauss
Shane Mauss is a comedian, science communicator, and psychonaut whose work bridges the worlds of humor and the human mind. After launching his stand-up career in 2004, Shane gained national attention with appearances on Conan, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Comedy Central.
He’s released acclaimed specials like Mating Season and My Big Break, the latter chronicling his experiences with injury and recovery. In recent years, Shane has become a leading voice at the intersection of science and comedy.
His Here We Are podcast features deep-dive interviews with over 500 scientists on topics ranging from psychology to evolutionary biology. He also co-hosts Mind Under Matter, a show that explores consciousness, creativity, and psychedelics.
Shane’s documentary Psychonautics captures his thoughtful, often hilarious, exploration of altered states. Whether on stage or behind the mic, Shane Mauss invites audiences to laugh while thinking deeply.