Your normal is not everyone's normal

about solitude, being comfortable on your own and accepting differences

I’ve been traveling a lot in my 20s, mostly for one specific reason: to collect friends from every corner of the map. It’s been great for my social life and even better for my ego, because nothing humbles you faster than realizing the thing you thought was universal is actually just a regional preference.

Take dinner time. For a Spanish friend, 9:30pm is a perfectly reasonable hour to sit down and eat. Spanish people, I see you, and I respect the commitment. For a Danish friend, dinner happens while the sun is still very much up, because apparently efficiency doesn’t stop at the office door. And when I was sitting down with my Italian friends at what felt like the tail end of the night, I got genuinely irritated. Why is this so late? I won’t be able to sleep. Bla bla bla, main character energy, party of one.

Because that’s really what it is, isn’t it? My normal should be everyone’s normal. It seems so reasonable from the inside. My truth is clearly the correct one, and everyone else is just running on a slightly buggy version of common sense. We do this constantly — we spend an enormous amount of energy trying to convince other people that our way is the way, when in reality it’s just the way we happen to know.

I do the exact same thing in a completely different corner of my life, just with less charm and more judgment.

I used to envy people who were comfortable being on their own. When I was younger, I quietly judged anyone eating alone at a restaurant, or nursing a drink solo at the bar, like they were missing a plus-one they’d forgotten to invite. Fast forward to now: I’m writing this from a poolside chair, completely alone, because nobody in my circle could make the trip. On the way here I was low-key anxious about it — scared I’d be the one person in the whole place with no one next to them, like that was a visible flaw people could clock from across the pool.

Turns out it was bullshit, pardon my french. It’s not bad at all. I get to write. I get to work. I get to actually decompress instead of performing relaxation for an audience. Working from home has its perks, sure, but it also has a very specific downside: you can slowly turn into a hermit without ever noticing the door closing. So I decided I’m changing that, even if changing it starts with a table for one.

Here’s the part that connects both of these: dinner schedules and solo pool chairs aren’t really about dinner or pools. They’re about how quickly we mistake “what I’m used to” for “what is correct.” We inherit a normal from our culture, our family, our own comfort zones and then quietly spend years defending it like it’s a fact instead of a habit.

Why your normal isn’t the objective normal?

Your schedule is cultural, not universal. Dinner at 6 or dinner at 10 isn’t right or wrong, it’s just what your corner of the world decided decades before you were born.

Discomfort with someone else’s normal is usually about you, not them. The Italian dinner didn’t ruin my sleep, my rigid idea of correct bedtime did.

Judging people for being alone says more about your own fear of it. I wasn’t disgusted by strangers eating solo, I was scared of becoming one, which is a very different thing dressed up as opinion.

Comfort with solitude is a skill, not a personality trait. Nobody is just naturally fine being alone, they practiced it, often uncomfortably, exactly like I’m doing right now.

The people who seem the most “different” from you are just operating on their own normal. Which means the gap you feel isn’t a red flag, it’s just two default settings meeting for the first time.

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