Social Psychology

About a month ago, I started listening to The Joe Rogan Experience.

I had somehow gone its entire existence without really listening to it. I started with a few recent episodes, liked them well enough, and then decided to do something slightly unreasonable: go back to the beginning.

So lately I have been listening to episodes recorded around late 2009 and early 2010.

I was a freshman in high school then.

The strange thing is how little distance I sometimes feel between that world and this one.

Someone will mention a movie, a musician, a television show, a celebrity, some weird thing that happened in the news, and immediately I remember it. Not merely the thing itself, either. I remember talking about it.

I remember conversations in hallways, at lunch, after school, online. I remember what my friends thought. I remember jokes that came from things everyone had seen. I remember arguments over music, movies and whatever happened to be going on that week.

I hadn’t realized how much of my memory of that period was made of conversations about things.

And listening to those old episodes has made me realize something else:

I hardly have those conversations anymore.

That is not because pop culture disappeared.

There may be more culture available now than at any other point in human history. There are more movies, more television shows, more musicians, more podcasts, more writers, more videos and more things to pay attention to than anyone could consume in a lifetime.

A few days ago, after work, I ran home, got sweaty, got tired, got peaceful, and then took my dog for a walk through Wellons Village.

This was not an expedition.

I was not seeking danger, revelation, personal growth, or anything else that could later be packaged into a lesson. I had Solveig on the leash and nowhere in particular to be. She was in charge of navigation, which meant we were following the ancient canine transportation system of turning toward whatever smelled most promising.

This often takes us into Wellons Village.

Wellons Village has a reputation. People get shot there. Things happen there. I know this.

It is also ten minutes from my house, and Solveig knows, with the absolute certainty of a field biologist, that people in the area drop food on the ground.

So we go there.

That afternoon I was feeling remarkably good. The run home had burned off whatever static had accumulated during the workday. I was tired in the clean way. The world seemed basically acceptable.

Then Solveig found a chicken bone.

We were standing at an intersection waiting for the light to change. At the base of the crossing pole, amid the usual urban archaeology of wrappers, grit, and things a dog should probably not eat, there it was.

A chicken bone.

I was dealing with this important development when a man I had passed a minute earlier came back toward me.

I had barely registered him the first time. He had been talking to himself, or perhaps to somebody who wasn't there, or perhaps to the universe at large. In that part of town, this did not qualify as breaking news.

There are periods in life when walls are exactly what we need.

After instability, heartbreak, family conflict, financial dependence, burnout, or simply too many years spent arranging ourselves around other people, independence can feel almost intoxicating. You begin making decisions without negotiation. Your evenings belong to you. Your money, routines, ambitions, hobbies, and private thoughts stop being subject to somebody else's weather.

For the first time, perhaps, life feels genuinely yours.

There is nothing inherently unhealthy about this. Sometimes withdrawal is not avoidance but recovery. A period of intense self-reliance can give a person room to discover preferences that had been buried beneath obligation. It can restore confidence. It can teach the surprisingly important lesson that solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

A wall can protect a garden while the roots are still taking hold.

But there is a difficult question hidden inside successful independence:

How do you know when the wall has finished doing its job?

When self-sufficiency becomes extremely rewarding

The trouble with independence is that, when it works, it works very well.

You learn that you can solve your own problems. You stop worrying so much about whether somebody will stay. You develop routines you enjoy and ambitions that require no one's permission. The emotional volatility of depending heavily on another person may begin to seem less romantic than it once did.

There is a familiar trajectory built into the way we talk about serious relationships. Two people meet, spend more time together, begin sharing routines, and gradually accumulate more of the infrastructure of life in common. Their friends overlap. Their holidays merge. They may move into the same home, combine finances, marry, raise children, and begin making major decisions as a unit. None of this is necessarily undesirable. For many couples, increasing integration is one of the great pleasures of love.

But there is an assumption hidden inside this progression that is rarely examined: Why should increasing love require increasing coupling?

I came to this question not from decades of navigating a successful marriage, but from watching its opposite. Growing up, I observed how tight coupling—when two lives become so structurally intertwined that separation means total logistical, social, and identity collapse—can quietly turn commitment into captivity. I watched how easily "building a life together" could turn into a trap where two people stayed not purely out of desire, but because the cost of decoupling was simply too high. That observation shaped my own caution. For a long time, I hesitated to step into deep relationships, largely because the default model seemed to require surrendering the very autonomy that makes a person whole.

In engineering and software design, two systems are said to be tightly coupled when each depends heavily on the internal workings of the other. A change to one component can require changes elsewhere, and the behavior of the whole system becomes harder to separate into independent parts. Tight coupling is not always bad. Sometimes it is efficient, elegant, or unavoidable. But engineers generally notice it because it creates dependencies, and dependencies affect how resilient a system is when something changes.