I want to try to prove to you that embracing vulnerability is true strength.
Joe Hudson's got this great definition of vulnerability.
He says, vulnerability is speaking your truth even when it's scary.
So a question to ask who is truly the braver person, the one who lets themselves feel or the one who flees?
The second an emotion gets too close, the one strong enough to carry the full weight of their experience emotionally, or the ones so fragile that they have to suppress it?
Brene Brown has got this line, without vulnerability, there is no courage.
If there's no uncertainty, no risk, no exposure, you're not being that brave. because there's nothing on the line, we are so quick to praise suppression as strength.
We call it control.
We call it discipline.
We pretend emotional detachment is a sign of maturity.
But fully living your life means actually feeling what fucking happens, not just performing composure while something inside of you quietly breaks.
The enemy here, as far as I can see, is toxic stoicism.
Not the grounded, reflective Ryan Holiday kind.
Instead the hollowed out kind, the kind that rewards shutdown, that teaches you to be proud of how little you feel, as though restraint were the same thing as resilience.
As far as I can see, Fearing vulnerability turns your inner world into a minefield.
It teaches you to treat emotions like threats.
So you tiptoe carefully through your life, trying to not set anything off.
Proud of your control but slowly growing more disconnected from life around you.
This isn't strength.
It's avoidance rebranded.
Resilience is not what most people think it is.
It's not about not feeling the pain or being impervious to challenges or setbacks.
It isn't about people who suppress or ignore their feelings.
It's also not about people who are delusional and think they don't have feelings.
Resilience is about people who feel their feelings deeply but are able to act despite them in their best interests.
It's a slamming insight from Mark Manson.
This common mistake, especially among high functioning, high achieving people, is believing that vulnerability is weakness.
But vulnerability is being scared of speaking your truth and doing it anyway.
It's choosing presence before protection.
It's the willingness to be seen even when what's visible isn't tidy or filtered or finished.
Imagine, picture in your mind two people receiving bad news.
One's hands shake as tears come, the other's face goes blank, jaw locked, and later that night they're three drinks deep scrolling their phone, feeling nothing.
Which one is really stronger?
The one who can show their emotions or the one who has to run from them?
As far as I can see, weakness is pretending you don't feel.
Strength is feeling deeply. and staying open anyway.
We call it coping, but often it's just abstaining from reality.
The executive who prides herself on being unflappable while quietly burning out.
She calls it professionalism. but it's really a fear of having her true self rejected.
The partner who insists, I don't do drama, when what they mean is I can't tolerate intimacy.
Every deep discussion becomes an emotional threat, so they fake calm at the cost of closeness.
The person who posts about the value of vulnerability online while being emotionally unavailable offline.
They are fluent in the language of openness, but allergic to the practice of it.
The society obsessed with authenticity but terrified of sincerity, rewarding shallow confessions that trend, while punishing the real ones that linger.
The children who learn that silence equals safety, growing into adults who apologize for their needs before they've even voiced them.
The influencer culture that sells performative rawness as a brand, monetizing emotion while sterilizing its reality.
Different symptoms from the same disease.
People who are so afraid of being broken by their feelings that they never let themselves be shaped by them.
The real fear isn't just the emotion itself.
It's also what the emotion might not receive.
We're not afraid of sadness.
We're afraid of being sad in front of someone who shrugs.
We're not afraid of grief.
We're afraid of grieving and being judged for doing so.
That's the abandonment we're trying to avoid.
Even if we know that feeling our feelings is braver than denying them, the people around us still might think less of us for opening up.
So we keep things hidden.
Not because we want to, but because we don't want to feel alone in the sharing.
Men, as far as I can see, have this harder still, as almost all definitions of masculinity have some version of emotional control as a core tenet, which makes feeling pride in showing emotions as a man even tougher.
But you cannot connect with the world or anyone in it if you never truly show yourself.
Intimacy only exists to the degree that you reveal yourself your sadness anger joy desires boundaries, everything.
When you hide your flaws or your feelings out of fear of shame, you block intimacy and authenticity.
The more that you expose, the closer you are.
The less you show, the more distant you become.
Which do you want to choose?
Vulnerability isn't weakness.
It's rebellion.
It's not how little you feel that makes you strong.
It's how much you can face and stay open.
It is saying, I'll go first.
I'll be honest, even when it's scary.
Not because I'm fragile, but because I'm brave enough to be fully seen.
I think this is so fucking cool.
I think this is like, so on the money around, what openness really means and the fact that what is it that so many people look for in parasocial relationships with their favorite content creator or writer or thinker or TV personality or whatever?
They want authenticity, but society is obsessed with authenticity and terrified of sincerity.
The fact that that is so fucking true then creates a world of performative authenticity.
Like the stripped back behind the scenes.
I don't need no makeup or no script.
But then you find out that what this person's actually doing is some fucking five-dimensional jujitsu chess, where they've managed to flip you into believing that what they were actually doing was naturalistic, when really it was super, super contrived.
I think we like the idea of authenticity and sincerity, but when it comes into land, when the rubber meets the road, it feels really uncomfortable because there is nowhere to hide from someone who is truly, truly showing their emotions.
Someone who really opens up, who says, like this is a flag that I'm planting in the ground and this is something I really fucking care about, and I'm going to shout and scream in excitement or I'm going to cry and whimper in pain at what this thing has caused me to feel.
Like that is big, it's a very big situation to be in.
We like, think about the Overton window, the Overton window of acceptable speech, right?
These are all of the words that you can say, and within that is a bracket of words that you're allowed to say.
It's kind of the same with emotional depth, that there is a whole breadth of emotions that people can feel.
And despite the fact that we say what we want is authenticity sincerity openness truth, when somebody steps outside of this sort of emotional Overton window, most people, most people, especially people online, are triggered in one way or another.
It's very triggering.
And maybe it's triggering because it reminds them of the emotions that they're hiding from.
Maybe it's that their inability to regulate themselves causes them to feel dysregulated by seeing someone else who's suffering.
Maybe it reminds them of all of the things that they're numbing themselves from.
Maybe there's a degree of jealousy that this person is brave enough to put it out there.
Maybe there's a strange kind of pity that's tinged with being seen.
I don't want to be reflected in this.
And yeah, it is.
It is so fucking fascinating to watch people talk about the need for openness transparency vulnerability truth connection, relationally in terms of communication online.
And then when the fucking chips get laid out onto the table, everybody shits themselves.
Everybody's so scared.
And I really get the sense.
There is no such thing as being brave if there's nothing on the line.
Like being brave without feeling scared is not bravery.
If you're the sort of person, let's say, in a alternate universe, I plucked you out and I made you a soldier, but you had one change to your mental makeup that you didn't feel fear and you were the best super soldier ever.
Delta SEAL Team Six kicking down doors, shooting bad guys.
Would you say that you're brave in that world?
Well, kind of.
I suppose like you're acting bravery.
Bravery is being performed.
It's also you would know that there's a difference in that kind of bravery versus someone who is terrified and does the same thing.
There is no bravery without being scared.
And I think that that means that if there's no uncertainty and no risk and no exposure and there's nothing on the line, you can't really be being that brave.
And this is just a like transactional, detached philosophical argument about it.
This doesn't get into the fact that all of your emotions, all of your experience of life is dependent on you actually fucking feeling something.
People are going through life like a pea zombie, a philosophical zombie, this idea that uh, someone who acts like an automaton, like does all of the things, has you, stab them and they say, ow.
You hug them and they cry.
You, you know, give them something nice and they smile, but they don't actually feel anything on the inside.
And it's crazy that that is the kind of avatar that a lot of people are moving towards.
That's sort of their dream.
Everyone's got this fear that the world's going to be taken over by AI and robots.
And yet at the same moment is trying to make themselves as automated and robotic as possible.
I don't want to be at the mercy of my feelings.
I don't want to be distracted by these pesky emotions.
But what I'm feared of is being replaced by a robot.
What you fear will happen has already happened.
You are if you don't connect with yourself fully, if you're not prepared to speak your truth, even when it's scary, especially when it's scary, what are you here for?
And maybe you don't feel fear all that much, and that's great.
Maybe you don't feel vulnerability.
Maybe you don't have stuff that you need to open up about.
But just because you don't feel stuff, I don't think that that is a reason to point the finger, in sort of laughing mockery, at the people who do.
After all, they're the ones that are braver for having spoken up about it.
So yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot and I'm going to keep hammering on about it, and the internet fucking hates it, especially coming from a guy who looks presents like me, like some budget Andrew Tate meets fucking Mark Zuckerberg.
I don't care.
I don't care because I know that I'm right about this.
I'm right, but I'm early on the vulnerability is true strength thing.
And it will land, for the advice hyper-responders, it will land differentially.
There will be people for whom they will feel really seen by this.
And there'll be people that will go, what the fuck are you on about, mate?
What do you mean?
You want me to cry?
Fucking gay, isn't it?
Cry no no, what?
Oh yeah, talk about my feeling.
What to her?
Nah, nah.
To them at the pub?
Nah nah, dad didn't all right cool, like that's this is.
This is for the people that it's for, and they'll know.
But my uh proposal to you is to see these as offerings and to see where they land when you hear me talk about them, as opposed to having a knee-jerk reaction.
And we will be able to see, based on the sharpness and the stupidity or smartness in the comments below.
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