A high-achieving friend falls in love and suddenly finds himself in rough emotional seas. In this Solo Thoughts episode, Peter McGraw explores why calm, optimized lives can make us successful – but not truly alive – and why passion, uncertainty, and even heartbreak may be the price of a psychologically rich life.
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Listen to Episode #263 here
Solo Thoughts 18: Welcoming Rough Seas
Welcome back to Solo Thoughts 18, Welcoming Rough Seas. A friend came to see me recently. His story inspired me to share an idea I’ve been tussling with. He texted and asked if he could come by my apartment. Sit with that for a moment. No one does that anymore. No one just shows up like in Seinfeld. They schedule, they text, they trade voice memos. This guy, a former elite athlete, now an entrepreneur, someone who has accomplished extraordinary things through discipline and willpower, needed to sit across from another person and talk. Yeah, something important was happening.
He came over and we talked for two hours. Two hours, two men sitting in a living room talking about feelings. He’d fallen in love and the woman wasn’t quite reciprocating. She was interested, leaning in, then leaning out, warm one day, uncertain the next. My friend, who is used to setting goals and executing, who wins when he puts his mind to something, was completely off balance. He was swinging between ecstasy and anticipated heartbreak. He came to me to figure out how to handle the situation, how to succeed in love, and how to cope with heartbreak. He was honest and vulnerable. It was profound and beautiful.
I listened to him. Of course, I was going to talk coping tactics and angles. First, I said, “You’re alive right now, more alive than you’ve been in years.” He responded, “You’re right. I used to be like this, but I’ve pushed all these emotions down over the years.” For most of his adult life, like many high-achieving people, he had been trying to find calm water to sail. He planned his route, he controlled his conditions, and he was rewarded handsomely for it. Trophies, books, businesses, accolades.
Calm seas, as the saying goes, never made a skilled sailor. More importantly, and this is the part that gets overlooked, calm seas are boring. Yes, you can be successful on calm seas, but can you be alive? My friend had turned himself into a good stoic. He keeps the lows at bay, but also the highs. Along comes this woman, a squall that might be a storm.
The seas are rough, the wind is blowing, and it’s blowing hard. The boat’s rocking, it might capsize. He may need to repair his heart, or this whole thing might turn into a giant gust of wind that takes him, them, somewhere thrilling. He can’t know, I certainly don’t know, and that not knowing, that’s the thing. That’s what makes him, you, me, alive.
Aliveness: The Full Range Of What Human Life Has To Offer
Now, if you’re a regular reader, you know I’ve been circulating this idea for a while. In Solo Thoughts 13: Every Day is a Big Day, I talked about the difference between merely living and being ALIVE. I discussed the difference between lifespan and healthspan, but there’s something I’ve been calling alivespan. Corny, I know, but think about it. How much of the time that you are on this planet are you actually really here for? Not just breathing, not just executing your to-do list, but present, engaged, moved.
In the Solo book, I put forward what I call the Foundation Flourish model of well-being. The foundation is your health, sleep, nutrition, movement. Get that right and you have the hull of the boat. It keeps you upright in turbulent waters. The flourish is the sail, where you catch wind, meaning, achievement, engagement, pleasure. I’ve come to think there’s something missing from the model, or at least something that deserves its own emphasis. That’s passion, aliveness, the willingness to feel the full range of what human life has to offer. I hope you see where I’m going with this.
Here’s what I’ve noticed in myself and a lot of people I talk to. We get very good at building foundations. We optimize, we achieve, we plan, and in the process, we flatten out our emotional lives into something manageable, safe, smooth waters. Let me confess something. I spent much of my life this way. A planner, a controller. I carefully managed my environment to avoid disruptions, to avoid the storms, you might say, so that I could produce. Write papers, write books, make podcasts, produce, produce, produce. My identity as Pete the achiever depended on keeping conditions calm.
My friend Darwin said to me, “You’re the only person I know who should probably sit back and consume more.” That hit me. I took it to heart. I’ve since doubled my reading and I’m loving it. The observation went deeper than reading. What he was really saying was, “You’re so busy creating output that you’ve stopped taking in life. You’ve stopped experiencing.”
It came to a head about a year ago. I was in Budapest. It’s a beautiful city. I walked a lot, I sat in century-old mineral pools, and I thought. I reflected. I realized that my comfort and planning were helping me to achieve, yes, but they were getting in the way of passion, of improvisation, of the kind of discomfort that leads to growth. My life had become so routinized, so ritualized, that it was becoming, I’ll just say it, boring. I was living, I was not alive. I’m getting better at it, but that to-do list over there is so tempting. My morning ritual’s become a compulsion. I have a ways to go, and while I don’t envy the roller coaster my friend is on, I’ve certainly been there. He has reminded me of the fitful shift I’m undergoing.
Three Philosophical Disciplines To Feel Truly Alive
How did we all get here? I think part of the answer is philosophical. Stoicism is having a moment, and I understand why. In a chaotic world, the idea that you can train yourself to remain calm and rational is deeply appealing. Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and others, their advice is practical and often wise. Control what you can control, don’t be enslaved by your emotions, endure. Here’s what I think stoicism gets wrong, or at least incomplete. The stoics treat emotions as diseases of the soul, things to be managed, suppressed, overcome. Anger, grief, desire, even excessive joy. Pathological.
The ideal was a rational tranquility, a calm sea. Ambitious people love this. It gives philosophical cover to something we already are socialized to do. Keep your feelings at bay while you execute. Don’t let the emotions in, stay in control. There’s an alternative tradition that I think deserves more airtime, and it begins with the Epicureans. Now, most people hear Epicurean and they think indulgence, hedonism. Well, that’s a caricature. The real Epicurus was practically ascetic. Here’s what he got right that the stoics didn’t. Epicurus believed that emotions, pleasure and pain, are the fundamental guides to a good life, or as I say, a remarkable life.
Not obstacles, guides. Here’s the kicker. The ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius recorded that the Epicurean wise person will experience passions more deeply than other people, and that this depth of feeling is no hindrance to wisdom. Get it? The wise person feels more, not less. Nietzsche picked up on this thread too, 2,000 years later, with his famous distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian. Apollo, the god of order, reason, structure, calm seas. Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy, creative chaos, rough seas.
Nietzsche argued that since Socrates, Western culture has been dangerously biased towards Apollonian. Too much order, too much rationality, and it comes at the cost of vitality, of art, of life itself. Nietzsche believed, and I agree with him, you need both, the structure and the wild. Most of us, and certainly most of Western civilization, has over-indexed on control. I also find some resonance in the tantric tradition. I don’t mean what most Westerners think when they hear that word. You know what I mean.
At its philosophical core, tantra teaches that every experience, including discomfort, including desire, including uncertainty, is a doorway. Not something to transcend or suppress, but something to move through with awareness. Where the stoic says, rise above your feelings, the tantric practitioner says go deeper into them. Feel everything. The body is not an obstacle to wisdom, it’s the vehicle. These three traditions, Epicurean, Dionysian, Tantric, share a common insight that I think is radical. The full range of human emotion is not a problem to be solved, it is the experience of being alive, of being passionate.
Now, I’m not romanticizing recklessness. You still need a good boat, you still need skills. That’s your foundation. Once you have it, and many of you do, the question is, are you willing to leave the harbor? There are really only three kinds of people, those who stay on land and avoid the water entirely, safe but going nowhere, the stoic sailors who white-knuckle through every storm waiting for it to pass, and the passionate sailors, the ones who understand that rough water is not the obstacle, it’s the point of the journey. The spray on your face, the fear in your gut, and the thrill running alongside it. That’s where aliveness lives.
I think about the solo episode I taped on psychological richness with Erin Westgate. A psychologically rich life is one filled with novelty, complexity, and perspective-changing experiences. It’s not always pleasant. In fact, it’s often uncomfortable. It’s interesting. It’s the life you’d want to read about if it were a novel.
Back to my friend sitting in my apartment with his heart exposed was having a psychologically rich experience. He was not happy in that moment, he was not at peace, but he was present, more present, more there than he’d been in years. The situation with this woman had cracked open something in him that his discipline and success had kept sealed. I don’t know which way things will break for him, long-standing love or horrible heartbreak. Neither does he but he’s writing more profoundly than he has in years. He’s not merely living anymore, and I’m happy for him, and the world around him is better off for it.
I recognize this because I had my own version of it in Budapest, and in my psilocybin trips, which are well-documented on the show, and in the slow, sometimes painful transition from Pete to Peter that I’ve been narrating across this show for years. Every time I’ve grown, truly grown, it wasn’t because the conditions were calm, it’s because they were rough.
Identifying What’s Missing And How To Address It
Here’s what I want to leave you with. If you’ve built a good foundation, your health is solid, your finances are stable, your friendships are strong, and you still feel like something’s missing, I want to suggest that what might be missing is intensity, emotional range, the willingness to be moved, to feel not just contentment but also longing and excitement and nervousness and awe.
No, you don’t need to fall in love or take mushrooms or move to Budapest. You can start small. Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Start the creative project that scares you. Travel without an itinerary. Say yes to the thing that makes your stomach flip or do what my friend did, show up at someone’s door because the feeling was too big to fit inside a text message.
If you want to go bigger, try a misogi. The word comes from a Japanese Shinto purification ritual, standing under freezing water to cleanse body and spirit. Marcus Elliott, a Harvard-trained sports scientist, adapted it into something different. Once a year, take on a challenge so hard you have a genuine 50/50 chance of failing. Michael Easter popularized the idea in his book The Comfort Crisis. Not reckless, but genuinely uncertain. It should be quirky, personal, and inward-facing. You don’t post about it on social media.
For example, Marcus Elliott and NBA sharpshooter Kyle Korver carried an 85-pound boulder 5 kilometers along the ocean floor, taking turns diving down, grabbing the rock, moving it as far as they could, surfacing for air, and doing it again over and over again for five hours. In another challenge, they literally chased and chose rough seas, paddleboarding 25 miles across open water from the Channel Islands to Santa Barbara with a crosswind that could have blown them out to sea. Easter himself spent 33 days in Alaskan backcountry. No cell service, no schedule, just extreme weather, bears, and boredom.
The point isn’t the achievement, it’s the encounter with yourself when the outcome isn’t guaranteed. As Elliott puts it, you always think your edge is close, and it’s almost always further out than you believed. There’s science behind this, by the way. Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy found that the single most powerful way to build belief in yourself is what he calls mastery experiences, taking on hard things and persisting through them. Not easy wins, hard ones. He found that the optimal level of confidence is actually slightly above your actual ability, just to make you reach. Talk about living on your edge.
As you can see, there’s research on this. Too much confidence and you coast, too little and you don’t try. That sweet spot, it’s basically 50/50. Sound familiar? A 2022 study by Woolley and Fishbach published in Psychological Science found something even more interesting. People who were told to seek discomfort, not just try to learn, they persisted longer, took more risks, and made more progress. The discomfort wasn’t the cost of growth, it was the signal that growth was happening.
The Stoics taught us to endure the storm. The Epicureans, Nietzsche, and the tantra tradition teach us something harder and, I think, more important: to want the storm. Not because suffering is good, but because feeling deeply is what it means to be alive. A life without rough seas is not a peaceful life, it’s a small one. Every day is a big day, but some days, the ones when the winds pick up and the boat starts rocking, those days are bigger.
A Confession And A Request
I’ll close with a confession and a request. I don’t know what to call this thing I’m talking about. I’ve been using the word aliveness, but I’m not sure that’s right. Is it passion, psychological richness, vitality, intensity, or something else entirely? I’ve been wrestling with the language across multiple episodes now and still haven’t landed on it.
I’m asking you. If you haven’t joined, join the Solo community at PeterMcgraw.org/solo and tell me, what do you call this thing? This quality that separates a life that is merely lived from one that is truly felt? I want your help naming it because once we name it, we can chase it. Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this Solo Thoughts episode. Cheers.
Important Links
- Solo Thoughts 13: Every Day is a Big Day
- Solo
- A Rich Remarkable Life
- The Comfort Crisis
- Solo Thoughts 7: Pete, Meet Peter