🌟 How breaking free of bias can reveal the life you want
Breaking free of settings that shape us, in order to reshape ourselves
A brief background: the comment that crawled under my skin
It was 2022 and I was barely doggy paddling my way through burnout and general existential dread, when someone described me in a way that I’ll never forget:
“Sabra — you have the capacity for social isolation of a lone surviving cockroach, in a post-apocalyptic nuclear fallout zone.”
I think there was meant to be a compliment buried in there somewhere. But at the time, something about it crawled under my skin.
Was I so unaware of my own nature? And so blind to the nature of what was around me?
I decided to do what any reasonable roach might: thoroughly self-dissect the thorax of the matter.
For starters: I had always been an introvert — of this, I was certain.
But it was also true that I had become even more withdrawn into my spheres of familiarity — intentionally choosing to spend time alone, or with a small set of close people. And the ~henceforth titled “cockroach comment” made me wonder what the invisible implications of that were.
After all, you don’t see radioactive material. Even when it’s all around you. And oftentimes, we only become aware of what we’re steeped in, once it’s already too late.
Thankfully, my organs weren’t yet melting from the inside.
But on Sunday nights, when my work-woes were most acute, it felt pretty close.
And so, the cockroach comment haunted me with questions:
Do I really like the way that I’m living?
And can I even trust my answer to that, if this is all I’ve ever known?
How our settings shape us
At the time, the way I was living could be simply characterized as: incessant, paralyzingly stressful, blisteringly intense, constant working
It’s Silicon Valley — and Tech selects for hard workers. And while I was proud to be a contributor to this domain for all of its wonderful traits tackling big problems, I also became a perpetrator for some of its worst.
It wasn’t uncommon for me to Slack co-workers on Sunday mornings — sometimes requesting their final input on a launch plan, or some data on an experiment we were running. And while I always had the decency to add a tasteful disclaimer — “no response expected on the weekend!” — I also kind of did.
I was simultaneously a victim and an instigator of the unspoken ethos that takes hold in any place with a high concentration of ambitious people — one that none of us want to encourage individually, but when packed together, inevitably do:
If you’re not over-working, you’re under-working.
And the high concentration of any practice, makes you blind to anything else.
My coping mechanisms to handle the over-stimulation from over-working spawned the aforementioned cockroach proclivities. Either retreating into dark corners of comfort alone, or selectively scurrying in a tight social sphere.
My work friends and I would commiserate and crack jokes, but the best comedic glaze couldn’t cover the question eroding us from within:
Should we really be working this hard?
We knew not.
But alas, c’est la vie.
It can feel tempting to stick close to the people and places that feel most familiar, in the precise moments that have you feeling most distraught. But it may not actually be helpful.
If familiar is what got you here, familiar, ain’t gonna get you out.
And therein was my challenge:
The reason I couldn’t see clearly what I wanted to change in my life, was because I was living in a maze of mirrors.
I knew that I craved a new way of “being.” But it’s hard to know what way of being that is when all the other beings around you, are mostly like you.
Until one night, that changed.
One night, a seemingly meaningless decision ended up having tremendous implications for my life. It busted down the walls of my workaholic rut.
At 11pm on one of my most precious Friday nights after a week of back-to-back 14 hour workdays, I drove 45 minutes across the San Francisco Bay. And if you’re at all familiar with the Bay Area, then you know the unspoken divide.
The moment you start to go inland, every metric and magnitude increases.
The temperature. The topography. And the pick-up trucks per capita.
I drove to — of all places — a country bar.
Breaking free of bias at a country bar
My town, Burlingame, just outside of San Francisco on the west side of the Bay, was a lovely little thing.
Which made it all the more of a mystery to the people in my life when I started making the pilgrimage to a distant country bar on the east side.
Every single weekend for 2 years straight.
And often, twice.
Was it to throwback a couple of cold ones? To admire “God Bless America” memorabilia? To scour every bar stool for a good Christian man? To merely practice my southern twang?
What could possibly compel one to leave the gum-less sidewalks of my town’s promenade, lined with well-pruned palm trees, chic cocktail bars and a bounty of more good looking people than a celebrity rehab center? The lone fast food eatery in town, a Panda Express, was even upgraded to meet the elegant architectural aesthetic, though the city stopped just short of the logo itself. The panda — nearly “zoned” into a Pomeranian.
The country bar was across a 10 mile bridge from Burlingame, and another 30 miles inland after that. It was just off the interstate in a large nondescript lot, which was also home to a pre-school, a post office and a Chilis.
It was, for many reasons, a curious spot.
Inside, the walls were wood-paneled, and peppered with various patriotic omages — lassos, black and white photos of men in uniform (though I couldn’t tell you of which military division) and more than one American flag. Featured prominently was a dance floor on one side of the space, and a mechanical bull on the other, which occasionally malfunctioned. Though not as often as the wardrobes of brave women that hopped on in strapless tops.
On any given Friday night, you could be sure to find 100 pairs of cowhide boots, 50 wide-brimmed cowboy hats, and dozens of sweat-stained Carhartt shirts paired with carpenter pants.
I wore Carhartt too, of course.
Mine just happened to be purchased from Urban Outfitters and had only ever been parked behind a keyboard, rather than atop a 10-ton Caterpillar Backhoe.
On my side of the bay, we don’t touch blue collar work. But we love to don the blue collar vibe.
The special thing about this country bar though, was that the same people returned every weekend. And while my line dancing was about as in sync with its patrons as my left-leaning political stance, I was readily welcomed into the group.
There was:
Sal — a police officer, who smoked too many cigarettes but belly laughed far too much for me to be bothered by it. He was always posted at the center of a circle of people, planning the next 10-person Hawaii trip.
Ana and Michael —a couple of avid fishers and outdoorsmen, who ran seasonal Alaskan wildlife expeditions. They worked 6-months out of the year, and then relaxed at their cabin in the Sierra foothills every waking moment outside of that.
Meredith — a spunky 5-foot-nothing woman, only a few years older than me, who worked as a cattle hand at a Ranch and would bull-ride in Rodeos up and down the west coast.
Daniel — who managed the bar and built hot rods for a living, but his true love was his boat. Every Sunday you could find him surrounded with many friends, and more ice cold beer. He’d give me a big bear hug, serve me up a Diet Coke, and then tuck my purse behind the bar for safe keeping.
In all cases, I had learned about these people’s professions precisely 2 minutes into my first interactions with them.
Because I did what had always been done at bars on my side of the Bay:
I promptly, and most proactively, asked.
What do you do? Where do you work? And how long have you been there?
But I readily learned that this line of inquiry — while entirely ordinary to me — was entirely out of the ordinary to them. And although they peppered me with plenty of personal questions, professional ones rarely made the cut.
And on one occasion where a woman did inquire about what I do, the conversation started, but was most abruptly stopped:
I was yapping about a work anecdote from late the night before, when the woman audibly gasped. She halted me mid-sentence; her face contorted in horror:
“You mean to tell me that people message you outside of working hours?
And more than that… you reply?”
Her tone was not so much judgmental, so much as it was genuinely alarmed.
Because not only was overwork nothing to be proud of here.
Overwork, was reason for concern.
And that’s not to say that these people didn’t work hard; they just didn’t worship hard work. Free time was very much sacred to these people, and their identity wasn’t encompassed in their LinkedIn.
For me, working hard was an odd, contradictory combination: it was both a selfish matter of self-importance to serve my ego, and yet an immensely self-sacrificial one, gutting my physical and mental health. Deep down, I think I felt that working hard in a fast-paced place made me significant, and perhaps in some way, superior.
It all made sense when I thought about how I secretly judged the few co-workers that did the minimum. Even though, definitionally: the “minimum” is actually enough.
And it was the micro-messages against that mindset that I desperately needed to hear from the people at this country bar — people that I grew to intimately know.
It kept me coming back to this weird, wonderful little place.
And it saved me from myself.
Over time, they reinforced a new narrative for my life —one that I needed beaten and bucked into me if I was going to actually open up my mind enough to even see the changes I might want to make.
So each week, I’d make the drive. Hit the dance floor. And chop it up with my friends. And then, I’d mount a leather-back mechanical bovine, squeeze my legs on queue to a vigorously rung cow bell, and proceed to throw one hand in the air like I simply, preposterously, did not care.
And in the whistles and whoops of my friends from the side, I heard their message even more loud and clear:
There are many different ways of being. And you’re free to be any way that you want to be.
The country bar broke my cycle of burnout.
And maybe, when you’re feeling most stuck, you need only befriend new people.
To show you the sheer breadth of possibilities, and the sheer breadth of new ways to be.
What I learned: breaking proximity bias to our ways of being
I never knew that stumbling on a country bar would be one of the most important reality checks of my late 20s. And although I’ll still likely vote differently than most of my newfound friends, I’ll always be grateful for the ways in which they quietly called me out.
It was a conclusion that I knew, but really needed to feel, in order to act on:
Status quo may surround you, but it’s not actually anything real.
The status quo that shaped my life was merely the set of values in my setting, that happened to be near. One that — intentionally or not — worshipped overwork.
And by opening my mind to the contrast in our ways of being, the country bar crew also showed me that there was no shame in potentially wanting something else. But getting close to them was key:
It’s hard to see past proximity bias to the type of being you’ve only ever known. And you definitely can’t see past it, if you only stand and observe alternatives from afar.
Over the course of the 2 years that I went to this country bar, I started to know these people deeply. And the more I understood these different shapes of lives — occupations, faiths, free time delights — the more I deconstructed the frameworks by which I thought I needed to live my own.
And indeed, re-built them, from the ground up. But this time, on my own terms.
Which is also what landed me here, blogging to you.
And when we all think about getting to the truth of what we want, the last thing we need is for any status quo (particularly a surprisingly local one), to exert too much influence over that.
Instead, by merely inserting ourselves into different settings — be it radically different cultures in countries on the other side of the world, or niches of our own culture in a bar no further than 45 minutes by car — we give ourselves a real shot at shaping an open mind.
In fact, I believe it’s our only hope. I believe we need that gut check on the way we’re living, to get to ground truth on what we want.
So if you’re ever feeling stuck, in a cycle of unhappiness or mere uncertainty for what you want next — the steps may be more simple than you think.
Step away from wherever you are, plant yourself somewhere new, and befriend the people there. And in doing so, you may find yourself flooded with possibilities on how to live.
Ways of being — from which, you can pick and choose. And after which, it’s a straight shot.
Go live the way you want to live.
And feel free to go be, exactly whoever and however, you most want to be.
If you found something here that speaks to you, leave a comment :)
Please comment, or restack. Your support is greatly appreciated, and indeed helps this writer feed her soul 💛
Wow this one really resonates (:lolcry:). Thank you for sharing!
Your self reflection and your search for meaning in life is inspiring. Your courage to face the mirror in front of you and try to make the change that you see you need to make is admirable.