When I was younger I used to party a lot. There was one particular club in Clerkenwell, East London that I was fond of. Every week they would put on a hard techno party. I was there every week.
So obsessed was I with this particular venue that even when I moved two hundred miles away to Manchester I would travel down by train each weekend to attend.
That went on for a couple of years.
But the obsessive behaviour didn’t stop there. When I was in this club, on the dancefloor, I was absolutely fixated on being where the ‘action’ was. I would dance with one group of people for a while, but then I’d look over somewhere else, see another group, judge them ‘cooler’ and go to hang near them instead.
I had to find the centre of the action. I had to find that sweet spot where only the ‘best’ people gathered.
Later in life, this desire to find the centre extended to cities, and countries. For a long time I was obsessed with NYC. Also Ibiza and Berlin. And throughout, my addiction to London has continued unabated.
But actually, when I take a step back, I see this for the nonsense that it is. People are just people. There is no cool centre. It never existed, except in my imagination.
Today, thanks to the internet, I could be sitting in a tiny village at the end of the earth writing this and it wouldn’t make any difference. No one would even know. Functionally location matters less than it ever did.
More importantly, though, is to understand that the search for a ‘centre’—as though if I found it I would be made whole somehow—is fallacious. It is really the search for identity by another name.
You can’t forge an identity through the people you surround yourself with. You have to forge it yourself. You have to arrange your life so that you are the centre. And once you do that, then people will be drawn to you, not the other way around.
If you want to learn more about my thoughts on being your own person, being assertive and not taking crap from others then pick up a copy of my book How To Be An Assh*le on Amazon. It’s one of my best, I think.
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