Moving to Uppsala

And assorted emotions

Category: raw, emotion management, virtue ethics.

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Dall-e: “a young adventurer going on an adventure in a lush green area with bright sunshine, digital art”

I’m moving to Uppsala within 3 months!¹

Yesterday, I cancelled my rental contract.²³ Now I’m dealing with the ramifications of this decision, most of which are both practical and emotional. The practical parts get harder because of the emotional aspects.

For most of the last 10 years, I’ve lived with my partner or with friends. The latest time I lived alone was 3 years ago, right about the time I started getting in touch with my emotions. My partner left to herd goats in rural Spain,⁴ and I got to practice unskilled anxiety management.⁵

It sucked. And now that I’m planning to live alone once more. Or rather; now I’m planning to live with myself once more. “alone” is a word with negative connotations.⁶ It sounds like giving up. I’m gonna live with myself, and It’s gonna be awesome. I’m going to pay someone to clean,⁷ and invite guests without having to care for the people I live with.⁸

I’m careful about my phrasing because of the way words shape the world⁹¹⁰. And I need to be particularly careful in this case; after cancelling my contract, anxiousness and scarcity mindset started popping up. The anxiousness is mostly social in nature.

I’ve noticed a pattern where I overthink and try to plan for how to grow a relational network.¹¹ This is not needed. I want to be open to opportunities and go with what I want to do, acting out of abundance rather than scarcity. It’s even counter-productive; provoking fear and anxiety. That’s what happens when I start valuing things I can’t control.

I’ve started telling people in the greater Stockholm area that I’m moving. Due to sporadic anxiety, I’ve reached out to some people in an overly unassuming manner. Something like:

“Hi, I’m moving to Uppsala and it would be very nice if you maybe have the time to see me for 5 minutes of your precious time. You don’t need to if you don’t want tehe. khtxbai”

This is insecure-me indirectly asking: “Hi! Do you still like me?” while trying to not appear needy. This is about 1000x as needy as asking for straight affirmation, due to the added emotional labour - the overhead of pretending like no emotional labour is being done.

A second unskillful pattern has emerged where I very carefully act as I do normally. This isn’t good either, since it stops people from relating to me authentically, and goes against my virtue of radical honesty.

I’m not surprised that issues pop up, considering my historical lack of social skills & emotional attunement. Past experiences of reintegrating into new contexts haven’t always been that pleasant. I’ve grown into a stable dynamic while co-living with people, and now that some fundamental aspects of life are getting rearranged, obstacles pop up. And we all know what our homie Marcus Aurelius says about those:

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
- Marcus Aurelius

So now I’m reaching for a skilled grip. I have unspoken assumptions, fears and perspectives on the world, and I’m going to use radical honesty to face them head-on. Let’s start by listening to the part of myself that is struggling. If I explicitly write out the “logic” of my fragile part, it would go like this:

“I need others/social success to be happy. I struggle to connect with others, and can’t take risks. As such, I must be careful not to act rashly or appear needy. If people don’t want to hang out, that means they don’t like me.”

My first reaction when reading this is to distance myself from it and call the part out for spewing bullshit.¹² This is an unskillful reaction of the second-order.¹³ If I heard someone else saying such things about themselves, I would never attack in such a way. Furthermore, I'm careful not to judge my initial judgy reaction.¹⁴

Instead, I’ll try to reassure myself that I’ve grown a fair bit since I started practising smiling into mirrors 10 years ago. That the people I know have integrity and can set their own boundaries without me having to limit myself prematurely.

I remind myself that people enjoy it when I go against the grain and disagree or say nonconforming things. That I should go with what feels nice, and connect where there is mutual aliveness, as well as matching schedules.

Finally, I want to remind myself that I like being with myself. I don’t want to grow atomized and “handle it all”, but neither do I want to hang up my well-being on people I’m getting to know. I have a stable support network of people dear to me, and a philosphical toolkit for navigating life. Right now I want to individualize and learn how to find joy while living alone, before reintegrating with a community in a healthier way.

And throughout, I want to keep up radical honesty, going into the feeling and getting experiential data that disconfirm the assumptions of my fragile part.¹⁵ I know my extended social circle is ready for vulnerability. A lot of people struggle with atomization vs community. Let's bring these anxieties and struggles into the social sphere, share our learnings and find that we aren't alone.¹⁶

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1. I made the decision after a conversation with my dear partner. They told me that my current living place isn’t suitable for long-term community building due to sucky acoustics and traffic noise. Even if I can get along well, they told me that others most likely wouldn’t.

Also, one of my best friends and my lover live in Uppsala, and I’m excited about getting closer to them. I’ve also got friends in the capital, and I’m excited about the flourishing burner scene found around Noden, a gathering place that started as a syntheist church.

2. I realize I’ve been staying with my contract in Gothenburg because it’s a hard-to-get, attractive place to live. This is desert mindset. I now choose to go where curiosity pulls me instead, i.e. rainforest mindset:

The Rainforest and the Desert

3. Good thing I’m rich, otherwise this would have been a potentially really bad move. (pun intended).

4. This is the same partner that has now moved out to live in the forest, and who encouraged me to move from Gothenburg to Uppsala, to live closer to one of my best friends & my lover. They’re great and I value their opinion highly. On a side note, they told me that they’re annoyed at this blog because I make too many recommendations I’m not qualified to state. Very true, I’m trying to become more Socratic about my state of knowledge.

If you are reading this: “Hi! :D”

5. Feelings are a tricky business. Getting in touch is hardly reversible, and skilful emotion management requires “learning on the job”.

6. Basically a formal word for “vibes”. Defined as: “an idea or feeling which a word invokes for a person in addition to its literal or primary meaning.”.

7. Part of me feels a bit weird about this. I’ve been hanging out in egalitarian leftist circles for quite some time. But after some reasoning, I’ve realized that it’s not very different from not growing my own wheat.

8. Until I inevitably get bored and join/start another collective. But let’s experiment with solo-living first :D

9. =your subjective sense of the world. This includes many things thought of as “objective” by naive realists stuck in a worldview shaped by the mind projection fallacy.

10. An entry for a draft bin close to you!

11. A coping mechanism I picked up back in the day.

12. Technically it isn’t bullshit, since the part seems to hold a strong conviction it’s true. Bullshit requires the speaker to be unconcerned with the truth. For more info, I recommend “On Bullshit”.

13. If I don’t accept my parts, I will take longer to heal, and echo

14. No need to break the third order of unskillfulness.

15. This is a highly effective way to get over such assumptions, in ways outlined in “unlocking the emotional brain”.

16. Going solo before integrating, sharing communally about going solo, and supporting each other in a greater community that transcends individual relationship clusters. Maybe atomization vs community isn’t a clear dichotomy?