On Shared Struggle

2023.7.23

While I find it very easy to spend a lot of time alone, reading, reflecting, or working, the last couple of days have reminded me how valuable spending time with others can be, especially when it’s an unconventional and engaging experience.

Myself and a few of the guys I am staying with in Austin completed a 39 hour fast culminating in an intense workout & a massive brunch that we cooked together. I already had respect for Bobby, Aidan, and Adi, but, now, there’s a deeper kind of bond.

Fasting

39 hours is a long time to go without consuming any calories; not surprisingly, it’s quite a challenge. Commonly known as a “monk fast,” there are a lot of purported physical benefits, including heart improvement, increase human growth hormone, reduce inflammation, and reduce insulin levels.

I’m not a doctor, though, and this is NOT medical advice. I also started out by doing 16 and 24 hour fasts, so I was a bit more used to it and knew what to expect when I started doing monk fasts.

The real point for me, though, health benefits asides, has been for focus and as a sheer test of will. It’s hard to stop doing something that I’ve made a habit of doing every single day — eating. For that reason, I find it an incredible way to break myself from the typical day to day pattern. It completely shuts off the option to consume food — if I don’t even have to think about the option to eat, I find it a bit easier to hone in on something intensely. And, it’s hard. Doing hard things can be good.

Now, however, I’m seeing another benefit to the prolonged fast: community building.

The Lindy Effect

During our massive, post-fast brunch, we had a conversation on religion. And, one concept that, thanks to Nassim Taleb, I’ve began to associate with tradition and religion, is the Lindy Effect.

The Lindy Effect is a heuristic about the life expectancy of inorganic things: to estimate the life expectancy of something that does not have a biological clock, you take the current duration of its existence and multiply by 2.

As an example, I have been writing this newsletter for 4 weeks. Therefore, you can bet on me writing it for four more weeks. However, next week, if you receive my 5th newsletter, you can bet on receiving 5 more newsletters. It’s not always true, but it’s a useful rule: The longer something has been around, the longer you can expect it to stay around.

Religions & Fasting

Many religions have been around for a very long time… while I’m not particularly religious myself, I think there is a lot of wisdom found in religion, especially when that wisdom recurs across multiple cultures. Topically, one commonality among religions particularly interesting to me is, you guessed it, fasting — it occurs in all Abrahamic religions, in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and many more. Pick a religion, and there is probably a higher probability of including fasting than not including fasting. That’s pretty compelling for me.

We can’t underestimate the wisdom of the ancients… while it is not always the case, leveraging the Lindy Effect, you can start to see that traditions often times do have truth encoded in them… I personally do not think it is a coincidence that modern experiments are discovering benefits of fasting. Time is a wonderful filter, and traditions are things that have made it through that filter.

That’s not to say that traditions should be followed blindly; some, of course, must be discarded. But, that being said, traditions shouldn’t simply be ignored, either — they should be probed and examined, put up to a high standard… and, a lot of the time, you may find more truth than you were expecting that way.

In regards to fasting, a dimension that I completely missed was the community nature of it. Some fasts in religion are isolated, but many are a community activity… everyone does it at the same time. Everyone shares in the struggle.

Bonding

The amount of respect I have for Bobby, Aidan, and Adithya has gone up substantially after our fast. It’s a microcosm of being “in the trenches” with someone: you know, first hand, the pain that the others are in, because you’re in it, too. You know that, just as you’re overcoming the struggle, they are, too.

Having a genuine level of empathy and concern for someone else’s well being, feeling their suffering, is a good way to be, well, human. When you are experiencing the same suffering as someone else (even if self imposed), it is hard not to feel a high level of empathy towards them.

Fasting is already a good reset button; I now know that doing it with others isv a good community builder, too. It shocks the system and reminds you that the people around you are, more or less, just like you.

A monk fast sounds inherently isolating, and, when I’ve done it in the past, to some extent, it has been. It’s suffering alone. But, when I did it with Bobby, Aidan, and Adithya, I gained an immediate feeling of camaraderie, one that I predict will be hard to get rid of.

It’s a shared, extreme experience.

Of course, the training session that we did at the end added an additional layer of challenge, and it increased that feeling, not just of joint suffering, but of joint overcoming.

Finally, our feast at the end was the perfect way to cap off the trial. We faced a challenged and we reveled in the victory.

So, maybe, in this sense, when we fast with others, it’s less of a “monk fast” and more of a Monastery Fast: the whole group is doing it.

Extrapolation to Business

Convincing an entire business team to stop eating for a day and a half is not an easy thing to do (trust me, I tried), nor is it necessarily the optimal way to increase the connection between team members. I’m wondering, what might be other shared experiences that can deepen connections? And, are there any pre conditions to those experiences being constructive?

If you have any thoughts, please let me know.

Cheers,

Noah Jacobs