“My name’s Shadman Uddin and I’m a Community Builder.”
Flanked by a great group of people that I had helped bring together, I spoke those words confidently as we went around the circle doing introductions. But as soon as they came out, I felt instant regret.
Was this my community? Prior to that moment, I had been tending to my other communities: being with my mom in Atlanta as she recovered from surgery and then flitting around social events in Brooklyn as I sought to form a new friend group in the city I had recently moved to. Wherever I went, I found myself asking that same question. No matter what I did, no community felt fully like home.
For what seems like my entire life, I’ve found it easy to make friends. As the son of a big-time community organizer - my dad - who frequently had people over at our house, I grew up putting myself out there and winning people over. I carried this trait as I went through grade school, college, and young adulthood. Through it all, wherever I went, I made friend after friend. To the point where I sometimes would boast, “I can make friends with anyone!”
The pandemic years suddenly threw things off, making me reconsider my approach to friendship, and by extension, community. I’m unsure whether it was because people had to now painstakingly select their “COVID bubbles”, the seemingly scarce time that resulted from an increasing amount of responsibilities in adulthood, or simply because my friends were now scattered all over the world. Regardless, the way I had been flitting around always making new friends no longer felt cool or sensible. Instead, my peers and I began talking about *focusing* on our *most important* relationships and *investing* in them, which brought to my overhanging Is this my community? question.
As I tried to unpack this question, I realized that this financialized, cost-benefit approach to friendship not only was a drastic shift from my modus operandi, but also revealed certain insecurities that had been driving my social behavior.
For me, making friends was usually motivated by a love of people, their journeys, and all their little quirks, but underneath that drive lurked some fear. My identity had become attached to being known as someone with lots of friends. With everyone now investing in their close relationships, what would that mean for me whose relationships were so distributed? How could I choose? But if I didn’t choose, would that leave me community-less? Who would I be if I didn’t have a large and vibrant community around me? The isolation and loneliness induced by the pandemic put me squarely in front of these questions.
After my winter retreat in Asheville, I sought to find my answer, but first, I needed to tackle these nagging fears around my identity in order to not be ruled by them. So, I tried a new approach to my social life - I embraced solitude.
Solitude & Leadership
It is important to have a clear conception of your why and what solved looks like when embarking on any new major change or undertaking. Leaving your comfort zone is difficult and having those two components crystal clear in your mind increases the probability that your self-dialogue stays strong as you go through the ups and downs of your journey. My initial inspiration came from the essay Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz, a Yale Professor of English whose words gave me the rationale and imagery to kickstart my new behavior change.
Deresiewicz initially gave this essay as a speech to the plebe class at West Point in October 2009. In it, he makes the case that the quality of leadership in America at the top has been diminishing. He argues that due to the relative abundance of the past few decades, the nation’s cream of the crop - its best students, for instance - are increasingly trained to become world-class hoop jumpers, i.e. people who know how to make it to the top.
And to Deresiewicz, the evolution of this phenomenon makes sense. Hoop jumpers are exceptionally skilled at reproducing the status quo, valuable for a United States at the top of the world order. But, as soon as things get murky and there are not enough “true leaders”, or as Deresiewicz describes, people who can think for themselves and have the courage to stand up for their beliefs, then a system will self-destruct.
Granted, it’s impossible to accurately determine Deresiewicz’s claim that American leadership is on the decline. It is one of those claims that people can subjectively experience, but cannot measure. However, the rationale behind his argument is salient: How can you lead others if you do not have the trust to lead and believe in yourself? Therefore, a leader should be self-confident in their beliefs and choices.
Before we continue with Deresiewicz’s argument, I want to first define self-confidence. To me, confidence is not simply believing that your thoughts and actions are “right,” rather it is the state of being that is produced by considering numerous vantage points, leading with a humility that you could very well be wrong, and trusting that you will be capable to handle the consequences of your actions and beliefs. So, under this definition, extolling a false bravado only to get defensive when criticized does not indicate a leader’s self-confidence.
How, then, does a leader cultivate a self-confidence that prepares them for the modern world? That’s where solitude comes in. Deresiewicz argues that solitude is essential to have the confidence to stand by what you say, think, and do because it helps you practice sitting with a thought, finding its holes, and mending it until that thought is truly yours.
Deresiewicz worries, however, that our society has progressively gotten more uncomfortable with solitude, likely because we experience so little of it. For instance, social media and the plethora of content platforms provide such an abundance of simulated social interaction that one can both be alone but still feel within the reality of another. We can see this clearly through the rise of parasocial activities, like watching your favorite influencer play video games, listen to music, or even just eat.
The easy accessibility and overabundance of this simulated social experience content is the inverse of solitude because “[w]hen you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”1
Deresiewicz's connection between solitude and leadership cemented my conviction to emulate the practice within my own life. Learning to be comfortable with solitude was not only important for lessening my fears around loneliness, but also for helping me become the leader I wanted to be. Deresiewicz’s conception gave me a positive mental model of how I wanted to grow.
When I decided to be more intentional about my solitude, I first began practicing by just sitting with my thoughts and seeing what was there whenever I had a moment of having “nothing to do”. Initially, the compulsion to flip open some content platform felt unstoppable. To diminish this urge, I set a daily limit of 30 minutes on Instagram, then 15, until finally, I just deleted the app, only downloading it when I wanted to post something. For YouTube, I created strict timeboxes, using the app only at certain times of the day and strictly for specific content (usually basketball videos or spiritual talks). When it came to texting, I developed a new mindset: stopping myself before texting someone to ask, Am I texting this person because I genuinely have something to share specifically with them, or is it because I am trying to distract myself from being solitary? Finally, borrowing from Atomic Habits, I replaced those habits with new ones, like journaling, taking walks, and pausing to watch any nearby animals or insects, so that any time I felt the impulse to avoid solitude, I had an activity to help me ease into it.
My initial foray into embracing solitude was not an easy process. There were definitely growing pains and slip-ups, but after a while, I noticed some changes. First off, I became increasingly more comfortable being alone. I sought less and less validation for my decisions and beliefs. And, ultimately, I felt more steady within myself. My new activities and changed habits certainly played a key difference, however - ironically - the greatest contributor to my newfound comfort with solitude actually came from deepening my friendships.
In Solitude, Together!
Late 2021 launched a broader reorientation around my friendships when my oldest friend and I sat down to talk to Esther Perel about our lifelong friendship on her podcast.
The time with Esther reverberated for many months afterward and my takeaways from the conversation evolved gradually over time. Writing this nearly ten months removed from the experience, my biggest learning was one that was actually not really discussed in the podcast, which was that I would sometimes adopt an insecure stance with my close relationships and believe that I needed to continuously perform and achieve so that they would continue loving me.
Obviously, I can try to unpack why I held this disposition (likely some combination of my familial upbringing, vestiges of adolescence, and the loose social ties of our society), but more importantly, I recognized that, ironically, this insecurity actually harmed the very relationships I cherished. Thankfully, as I leaned more into Deresiewicz’s writing about solitude, I found a conception of friendship that gave me a new perspective on how I wanted to relate to the close ones in my life.
“Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.”
The way my greater comfort with solitude first manifested in my relationships was through my newfound appreciation of long, windy conversations with friends. I more presently noticed when I would try to fill a silence just for the sake of it. I paid more attention to my friends when they shared an incomplete thought or exhibited some indecision, recognizing that they too are uncertain, ever-growing individuals navigating the journeys that lay before them. I asked more reflective questions, walking with them as they pieced together their own answers. And, when it came to sharing my own experiences, I tried avoiding relaying a story just to steer the conversation towards myself, instead revealing things as they made sense in the flow of a conversation or if they were part of a relationship’s shared context. As I leaned into these new habits, I would frequently think of a quote I had seen on Twitter that went something like, “[T]here is a difference between having friends and experiencing friendship”.
After a while, I soon became aware that I did not in fact need that much from my close relationships. The relationships being built had such a greater level of acceptance, mutual understanding, and love that our shared experiences and clear loyalty left me feeling quite full, standing in sharp contrast to the validation and time I had sought in the past. Best of all, needing less from my relationships actually helped me enjoy and appreciate them more.
How Independence Strengthens “Us”
My greater sense of relational security led me to adopt a new mindset inspired by my favorite yogi Sadhguru: Share, don’t extract joy from others.
With this mindset, I developed a “sharing framework” mental model towards relationships built upon the core values of comfort in solitude, honesty, openness, and acceptance. Below are the components of the “sharing framework” that I have been doing my best to steer how I approach my social life.
To be able to share joy, I must have joy within myself. You cannot share from an empty cup. If I don’t feel joy within myself then I need to pause, check-in, and turn my attention to the aspects of life that fill me with joy.
When I have joy within myself, I don’t actually need that many things from people. If I do want something from someone, I am more free to openly ask for that something because my baseline is joyful. This lessens the possibility of acting passive-aggressively, i.e. hoping someone does or gives me the thing I want so that I don’t have to ask for it and experience the possibility of rejection. Rejection does not matter if my baseline is joyful.
When I’m in sharing mode, other people will also feel more open and loving towards me, too, increasing the likelihood that they’ll share their own beauty and joy with me. The best part of this serendipitous exchange is that sometimes people will share parts of their lives with me that I never could have imagined, making it all that much easier to just stay open and ride that wave.
Of course, this whole framework is contingent upon having joy within myself. And though my greater comfort with solitude has helped me train the muscles of pausing and refilling my cup, I have noticed that it is much harder to do so when I am caught up in the hustle and bustle of modern, urban, young professional life. That is OK. The beauty of this whole process is that it helps make relationships more resilient, as close ones will have greater empathy and tolerance for when you do act selfishly. Ultimately, that is what love is, which brings me back to my principal question that launched this journey: who is my community?
As I understand it now, worrying about that question is a function of fear, not just one that I held, but one that many people have. It is both the fear that if we don’t do enough for our circles, we will lose them; the fear that new people will not enter our lives as we get older; and finally the fear of being alone. All of these fears are very fair, losing people and being alone are difficult emotional experiences, but they will inevitably happen in all of our lives.
But, we will always have ourselves. We will always have some elements in our lives that make us joyful. We will always have the ability to share our joys with others. And we can always cultivate compassionate and loving friendships. We enjoy those who are in our lives while they are there and understand that the relationships that form our communities will arrive, evolve, and go, leaving room for others to eventually take their place.
Life is beautiful man, I wish I could share just a montage of all the moments I have gotten to share with all these people in my life just even over the past year, but that would just be a ridiculous amount of photos haha. Even scrolling through my photo roll teared me up. If you’re reading this, that means we have gotten to witness and share the miracle that is being alive together. I want you to know how much I appreciate the time we have shared together, and I’m so thankful that God brought you into my life. I love you <3.
Deresiewicz, William. “Solitude and Leadership” The American Scholar. March 1, 2010 https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/