How Hyper-Individualism Is Keeping Us Apart - Undividing #25

Plus Undividing Lives Every Wednesday and Downloading Advice

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hey there all,

In an effort to spread the message of Undividing I’ve been looking this week at how to go back on Instagram and put some of this work there. Hot take: didn’t love it.

I’ve barely been on IG since the end of my book tour nearly a year ago. And like many of you, had all but abandoned it after I found Substack because this place is everything that I wanted the internet to be.

What I found interesting was that IG was like a snapshot of me from a year ago; the people I was following, the impact I was trying to make, and let’s be honest, the fame I was hoping to conjure there for How To Burn A Rainbow. Plus, the freedom I imagined that kind of success would bring; the artistic and financial freedom of making a living and career as a full-time writer.

That freedom didn’t materialise. Not yet anyway. Working on it.

But with fresh eyes, I noticed something—all the IG influencers I was following were always alone. It didn’t matter if it was literary, wellness, finance, AI… these folks were almost always solo.

It made me ask myself, “What if the freedom we’re chasing is the very thing keeping us disconnected?”

And how a reframe on that idea of individualism is something that could be a good undivider for all of us.

So together, let’s get undividing!

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The Freedom Hustle

It’s a new day on Instagram.

He wakes up at 5am, does his meditating and journaling, a simple breakfast full of optimised protein, works a whole day using an AI tool, gym session for his insanely toned body, powers down, reads, bed. All on his own, never a single other person in the frame.

There she is, on the beach. She’s journaling, meditating, and on a Bali retreat. Dancing under a full moon, lighting incense, plugging a swimsuit line in a collab. Again, without another single person in sight.

We’ve all seen those videos too of a picturesque vista somewhere serving as a backdrop; a family taking a photo, an influencer recording a travel video, a sports guy on a mountain bike go-proing his takeoff down the hill—everyone around them doesn’t exist. Unless they get in their shot.

Hyper-Individualism: the modern individual as both subject and product—optimized, independent, self-sufficient—and utterly alone. We’ve built an entire culture around becoming ourselves and yet we feel more disconnected than ever. Which isn’t surprising when you think that we’ve replaced community with self-work and emphasized self-improvement as the path to fulfillment.

We’ve gone from, “I think therefore I am,” to, “I brand therefore I matter.” And then wonder why we feel so alone.

The cult of the individual and the self-help treadmill

In a previous Undividing where we all wrote together about peace making traditions in our cultures there was a common thread that ran through it all - each person as part of a whole group. Ubuntu summed it up best, “I am, because we are.”

These days though we’ve stopped asking, “where do I fit in the whole?” and started asking, “how do I stand out from it?” A lot of the influencers who have personal branding products talk a lot about your niche, how to stand out in a crowded market… as yourself. Or at least a marketable version of yourself.

It reminds me a lot of the work that I did in my advertising days. But I was selling cars and jeans, not humans.

Even self-love, something that is a wonderfully important part of our personal happiness, has turned into an industry of $80 candles and endless self-work. Something very separate to mutual care. As though there is nothing to be personally gained by being part of a whole.

Wellness, therapy, coaching, journaling are all valuable tools, but often marketed to be used in isolation. Today’s therapy and self-help cultures centers on you—but rarely on us. Which starts to look a lot more like competition and a survival strategy in a broken system.

Who profits from us being alone?

Not us.

Capitalism’s drum beats to an idea of the solo success. I know this is a theme that I come back to often, but all roads seem to lead back here, all the time. When we’re lonely, we consume to fill the relational void.

We’re told we’re not enough, so we look for an answer from the same system that made us believe that in the first place. That makes us profitable.

One of the reasons I left IG well alone for so long was the ridiculous things that I would find myself buying at stupid o’clock in the morning—something I only ever did when I was alone, and not sleeping over at my partner’s house or vice versa.

Victoria Romulo for Unsplash+

But there are costs bigger than a tote bag with an organisational system that apparently I couldn’t live without and is still hanging unused on a door handle in my house. Three of the big ones:

• The commodification of self-help and wellness industries often diverts attention from systemic issues, the big picture stuff that we really should have all our eyes on and that are going to require collective solutions.

• The isolation epidemic that I wrote about previously which is us losing the social muscles and instincts to connect and share, which fights with our wiring to be part of a social whole.

• Collective action stalls in the face of rampant individualism. Movements struggle when everyone's optimizing instead of organizing. And also when one person is seen to embody a movement, eg a headline against Greta Thunberg destabilises the entire global climate saving effort.

Exporting Western Hyper-Individualism

In my research this week, there were a lot of articles on the changes to other more collective cultures that this idea of hyper-individualism is making. In particular in Asia. These changes are the same as some that we’re seeing in the West. But go against the collectivism that permeates Asian cultures.

From living in Asia for years and working with Chinese, Japanese, and Indians, as a foreigner I was in awe of the strength of their family structures.

A common thread in all three was the idea of being a link in a chain, not the sum total of their family lines. That said, they also complained about it; the pressures they had on them from their cultures made my family obligations seem like Disneyland. The fact that I was living away from Australia with no plans on returning any time soon was unimaginable for most of them.

But the globalisation of media and the influence of western culture and its promise of "freedom" is changing the landscape: success is now personal, healing is private, and relationships are optional. Family and community becomes a lifestyle accessory—not life. The deep social fabric that once held people through crisis, transition, and celebration is starting to vanish.

In Japan alone divorce rates have climbed, household sizes have shrunk and the hikikomori have emerged; roughly half a million Japanese have withdrawn completely from society, so called “modern-day hermits”. Sometimes for a decade.

At the same time, a booming “rent-a-family” industry lets lonely clients hire actors to pose as spouses, children or friends, literally commodifying connection.

Javier Jaèn for The New Yorker

The tension is obvious here - a collective etiquette (and natural desire to be social) still polices public life, yet private life is increasingly sectioned off.

OK, but there’s upsides to individualism too right?

Absolutely there are.

As someone who spent years looking to my relationships, my community, my job, my achievements as a way to define myself, all I found in that was an emptiness that I spent years getting to the bottom of. It wasn’t that being a part of these was a bad thing. It was that I was using it all of them as a crutch to avoid figuring out who I was.

I could tell you then that I was Australian, gay, a global creative director, award-winning… but take all of those things away and I couldn’t really have told you who Karl was.

The journey I went on to self-love was one that I could only do on my own.

Aboriginal culture in Australia has a practice called “walkabout” where a young man leaves his tribe to wander alone in the wildness, to commune and be in touch with nature, and learn valuable lessons of self-sufficiency.

But the difference is that they return to the tribe again after going through a passage of rights to combine their knowledge with the rest of the tribe. The end point is always to become a more valuable part of the whole.

And my journey wasn’t alone. I met over a hundred guides along the way who popped up with the right lesson at the right time. Even a solo journey is a collective effort. Then I returned if you like, in the form of a book and a book tour that was a way to be with my community all over the States, and also to add my contribution to the canon of stories of humans going through human experiences.

I would sum it up as this:

• Hyper-individualism is a one-person show.

• Individualism is discovering your personal voice and sparkle.

• And the next and most important part is adding that sparkle to the chorus. In a word—interdepedence.

Interdependence Day - freedom from Hyper-Individualism

So how do we be our individual selves and also part of the whole? Without either dominating?

The answer I think lies in understanding the value of the self and how that fits valuably into the whole. “Being a piece of the puzzle” literally means your shape matters because of how it fits with others. Interdependence isn’t erasure of you, it’s the celebration of you for the expansion and completion of all of us.

It’s the best of both worlds in my opinion; the quest of self to give value back to the whole. Honouring the self but never at the cost of the whole.

It could be summed up in two questions to ask ourselves. Ones that take years to answer sometimes, but that’s maybe the whole point of life.

• Who am I?

• Who then, am I for others?

I think we have to be solo and in collaboration to answer both of those questions. And for me, neither answer came with the click of my fingers. But there can be a destination to shoot for even if the path there isn’t obvious.

The road to interdependence

Ok, so if interdependence is the goal, how do we get there? To a place of knowing who you are, and how that’s of value to the people around you? It starts with the smallest of things:

• Journaling or The Emotions Diary: I have yet to find a tool as powerful as a pen and paper for figuring yourself out. Even if you do it just once a week, I’m still amazed at what writing reveals. It’s the greatest tool I know for knowing yourself.

• Shared Self-Care: Weekly walk-and-talks with a friend, group journaling prompts, or even a WhatsApp Wednesday Waffle

• Offer help before it’s asked for: If you can see a friend/co-worker/family member struggling with something, offer a hand. Even if they don’t take you up on it, they know they’re not alone.

• Join groups and classes: I just switched my gym routine from lonely weights to classes. Body workouts, step, boxing - anything really. It doesn’t matter because now I know people there in the classes and we chat before and after. I will happily Zumba for this vibe.

• Tell “we” stories, not just “me” stories: On professional and personal sites, credit everyone who helped you with milestones. How you model connection is a lot about how you narrate your life.

In a world where the hyper-individual life is ringing more and more hollow, and modern day isolation isn’t satisfying our primary needs, the most radical thing you can be today isn't a brand.

It's a friend, a neighbour, a sibling, a co-conspirator. It’s being you, as well as a part of something bigger than you.

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A quick break…

How can you support Undividing?

Like, comment and restack! It all helps the algo push Undividing into people’s feeds.

Have you learned anything in Undividing that’s helped you in your life? Given you a new perspective? Helped you feel connected to the good in all of us? If so, consider taking out a paid subscription. If we can get to a 100 paid subscribers, the algo will supercharge Undividing and get that feeling you’ve had to more people here.

You can also Buy Me A Coffee. I post you back a personal 30 sec video for any donation, any size. (Ignore the BMAC amount prompts, you can enter any amount)

You can also support by picking up a copy of my award-winning book How To Burn A Rainbow, the story of how my divorce set me off on a journey - a riches to rags rollercoaster from LA to Berlin where I had to lose it all to find myself.

Back to Undividing…

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Undividing Wednesday Lives!

One of the things that I’ve been trying to figure out is how to be in more community with all of you. I spend hours in the comments every week, responding to every one of them on my posts, and as many as I can on Notes.

But I love talking with people. So I’m going to start doing one hour live videos once a week for paid subscribers. These next two weeks I’ll be doing them for free before I head out on holidays at the end of the month. I want to try it out, figure out how it works (never done one before) and get a feel of what folks would like in them.

To those ends, I’m starting with two free AMAs:

• Wednesday 14th May - Ask Me Anything Undividing

• Wednesday 21st May - Ask Me Anything Emotions

Wednesday 8-9 pm Berlin/CET time (my home) / 7-8pm UK / 2-3pm NYC / 10-11am LA

I chose this time as it seems like the one that most of subscribers will be able to do. Of course the videos will be available for all of you to see later.

Let me know in the comments any questions you know already you want to ask!

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Warning: Substack Downloads

You would have to have had your laptop under a rock this week to have missed the story on Substack about the woman who deleted her podcast only to discover that she’d deleted her entire publication and lost all her subscribers in one go. Not her fault. The programming here let her down.

Sarah Fay PhD

put this out in a Note and I beg you to follow the advice here. I did. And I’m going to do this every month for emails and every few months for posts.

Substack has grown massively in the last year and there are clearly some tech and teething problems. Don’t lose everything you’ve worked on.

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And that brings us to the end of Undividing #25.

Till Thursday when we do the next Emotions Diary, let’s move through this world undividing, and see what this planet can do.

Karl

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