Adaptivism

Revising Individualism

Adaptivism Pillar Four: Agency Amid Uncertainty

To live deliberately is to exist in a state of tension between the desire for unrestricted autonomy and the inescapable reality of interdependence, between the comfort of ignorance and the burden yet relief of self awareness. Individualism, when examined honestly, is not a ruthless and shortsighted choice, but a difficult negotiation that demands constant questioning of its own principles. There is a difference between selfishness and self prioritization.

The Paradox of Selfishness

Your life is your responsibility, prioritizing yourself is the only rational choice. However, the self is not constant, but perpetually dynamic.

When you take full ownership of your existence, you escape the victimhood of external blame. Your happiness, your failures, and your growth all become your responsibility alone. Despite this, hyper-agency is its own trap. If you believe everything is within your control, you risk antagonizing normal human vulnerability. Misfortune, systemic barriers, and plain bad luck exist. Ignoring them doesn’t make you stronger, it makes you rigid and ignorant. Then again, even if not everything is in your control, your response always is. Individualism isn’t about denying external forces, but refusing to let them dictate your agency. It’s about acknowledging your circumstances while still deciding where to go.

The paradox lies in that while self prioritization is the only sustainable framework, it necessitates a constant reexamination of what “self” even means. The person you were last year, last month, even yesterday, no longer exists in full. If your loyalty is only to a static image of yourself, you become attached to an identity that no longer exists. True ownership demands you evolve as your context, desires, and knowledge do. It is both a burden and privilege to be a perpetual work in progress and to view every chapter of yourself as transitional. What serves you now might betray you later. What feels virtuous today may reveal itself as a coping mechanism tomorrow. The goal is not to cling to an image of yourself, but to remain honest enough to outgrow it.

The Burden of Awareness

Self awareness is the foundation of authenticity. But it requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths and moving forward despite them.

To know yourself deeply is to act with intention, not reflex. You shed societal expectations and inherited values, replacing them with choices you’ve examined and approved. However, awareness becomes isolating. The more you deconstruct your conditioning and the more you prioritize personal growth, the harder it becomes to relate to those still cooperating. Intelligence, emotional or otherwise, doesn’t guarantee fulfillment. Sometimes it makes the contradictions sharper. But the pain of awareness is preferable to the numbness of ignorance. At least in the former, you have a choice in how to proceed.

The burden compounds because awareness is recursive: the more you uncover about yourself, or anything for that matter, the more you realize remains hidden. Each insight peels back another layer of assumption, revealing new contradictions you didn’t know you carried. Certainty becomes elusive and conviction demands constant justification. You start noticing the hidden hypocrisy in even your noblest stances, the subtle self interest masquerading as altruistic principle. Yet it is precisely this friction that sharpens you. The goal isn’t to purify yourself into a flawless being, but to consciously engage with your limitations, knowing full well that some of them will persist. To be aware is to wage an endless campaign against complacency and to accept that even the most vigilant mind will occasionally lie to itself. Better to catch yourself in the act than to never be aware in the first place.

The Myth of Independence

Walking alone is the optimal path. But humans are hardwired for connection.

Solitude allows for unfiltered personal development and total freedom of choice. Without the noise of others’ expectations or preferences, you refine your values and desires with clarity, even if it takes time to do so. However, solitude only does so much: even the most self sufficient individuals are still shaped by language, culture, and the labor of others, and even the most closed off recluses still desire connection with others. Total independence is a fantasy. Even your thoughts are built on borrowed concepts. Even your biology forces you to interact with others. The goal isn’t to erase dependence, but to choose your relationships carefully, knowing full well that even the best people will still disappoint you. Interdependence is inevitable and connection is fundamental, but codependence is counterproductive.

Even the act of declaring oneself wholly independent is a reaction to a perceived social structure. You define your autonomy in contrast to something else. Your defiance, however noble, still grants power to what you resist. The solution is not to sever every bond but to become selective in your dependencies. A wise man knows which ties deserve severing, which can be loosened, and which are worth preserving. Beyond that, there’s no virtue in prideful isolation for its own sake. Meaningful connection, chosen deliberately, elevates you further than any defiance. True independence isn’t the absence of others, but the freedom to decide how, when, and why you engage with and respond to them.

The Dilemma of Desire

Your happiness is yours to define, reject all external obligations. Except, desire is convoluted and contradictory.

Rejecting guilt-based living allows you to pursue what genuinely fulfills you, not what you’ve been told should, allowing you to live a life you directly approve of. However, humans are messy bundles of conflicting impulses. You might want stability and adventure, intimacy and independence, extraordinary legacy and simple pleasures, simultaneously. Pure selfish indulgence doesn’t resolve but amplifies these tensions. Individualism isn’t about blindly following every whim or doing whatever you want whenever you want, but about interrogating what you think you want. Not every desire is worth pursuing, but every one is worth examining.

The dilemma deepens because desire itself is shaped by exposure. What you want is often a reflection of what you’ve been shown is possible. The cage isn’t always the bars, sometimes it’s the ceiling of imagination. It’s easy to mistake habit for preference and proximity for destiny. Freedom isn’t merely the absence of limitations, but the deliberate expansion of your internal landscape: seeking out new desires, unfamiliar pleasures, and untested versions of yourself. The highest freedom is not doing as you please, but discovering what pleases you on your own terms, separated from any inherited perspective. And once you know that, you must decide how much of your life you’re willing to wager in its pursuit.

The Requirement of Choice

Individualism, when stripped of opinion, is not pain-fueled delusion, but a conscious, self preservative choice. It offers only trade-offs:

There is no formula, only friction. The tension between autonomy and interdependence, self interest and shared meaning. To prioritize yourself is not to declare victory over this tension, but to engage with it honestly: to constantly weigh the costs yet belonging of connection against the toll yet purpose of isolation, and to choose in every circumstance anyway.

Individualism, done right, is neither rebellion nor retreat. It is the refusal to let either the collective or your own unchecked interests dictate your life. You will misjudge. You will recalibrate. You will sometimes crave the very comforts you’ve rejected. But this is the work: not purity, not balance, but the deliberate, imperfect act of steering, knowing no map can spare you the storm, but giving yourself the chance to navigate it.

So walk alone when you must, but don’t romanticize solitude. Choose others when it serves you, but don’t confuse proximity for meaning. And above all, stop searching for a philosophy that won’t demand something of you.