Open letter from a loner to a team

Disclaimer: To my present and future employers and colleagues, please do not assume that the text below is autobiographical. For all you know, the author might be the extraverted center-of-it-all joy bringing party animal of the flock. True, what’s written below comes from decades of personal experiences of being part of, studying and observing social groups. These are things I do for a living as a consultant/organizational designer and social scientist.

?The ‘me’-character in the letter below is a fictitious character, that represents all loners out there struggling to find a comfortable stake, or simply a stake, in social groups. ‘You’ is a team, any team that is unsure how to make loners tag along with the group. Anyhow, reading this open letter should not discourage you from working with me, now or in the future. 

Meanwhile a team has come up with a response as well, if you're interested. I advise you to read this one first though. There's another link to the response at the bottom.

Dear team,

I rarely ever enjoyed your company, and yet, please believe me when I say I deeply care for you.

Ever since my early childhood, I was described as a loner. I’m not sure I was born that way. Maybe it were my earliest social experiences that made me become one. A loner is, I suppose, the product of a self-reinforcing mix of accidental social circumstances and inner processes of identity building. 

It doesn’t matter anyway how things came to be the way they are. Nature-nurture debates tend to be superficial and irritatingly inconclusive. Now that I turn 43, I decided I need to accept some things in life simply the way they are. I truly am a loner. I’ve been that way for a long time, and will remain that way for a long time to come. 

I’ve consistently lived somewhere in the outskirts of all social groups I ever was, sort of, part of. I did not belong to any of the many cliques in school. Youth movement summer camps do not rank high on my list of joyful carefree childhood memories. More than anything, I felt miscast in such environments. 

This memory of summer camps was brought back to me a few weeks ago, when an acquaintance from back in the days texted me for financial advice. Thanks for trusting me on how to invest your precious money, but please don’t. It might ruin you, and then we’ll both feel bad about it.

It took me a few minutes to understand why you addressed me, of all people, for that kind of advice. Then I remembered. I accidently built that reputation on a summer camp some 33 years ago. In the first few days of that camp I spent hours reading comic books, and once I knew all available comics I could get my hands on by heart, I moved on to frantic reading of newspapers. Reading is me-time, and to get as much of that as I could I conducted thorough investigations of each page, including the financial pages. Apparently, that got me a lifelong reputation of a financial wizard to a bystander like you.

I couldn’t and still can’t care less about the world of finance. But you were all like ‘Look at that 10-year old rather spending time analysing stock markets than playing a game with us. He must be really into that!’ No I wasn’t. Honestly, I wasn’t. I was only looking to carve out some time for myself instead of partaking in the busy collective schedule that was laid out by the camp leaders.

This misguided financial advice-seeker made me realize common misunderstandings that circulate about loners. Life will be much easier if we’d only understand each other a bit better. With that hope in mind, I think there are a few things you should know about me.

First of all, I could be your best neighbour. Even if I may never genuinenly feel a true member of your house, I do live in your street. And I do strive to be a valuable citizen in your community. I might share your values, I might aspire the same things you do, and I will voluntarily and eagerly contribute to your goals, whenever I feel those goals are worthwhile, as I often do. In that case, I can and will self-sacrifice for your sake. I’m ready, as they say, to take one for the team. Sure, I am a little more to myself than you are accustomed to. But when I’m sunken in thoughts, I am often thinking about how to contribute to your endeavours. Privately developing one’s own ideas about how to help is a far cry from egoism. 

Secondly, it helps a lot if you allow one of your members to be my friend, without you being disturbed by it. A loner is not a hermit. I’m not socially incompetent. I am a social animal every bit as much as the next human being. When my mind starts wandering off from whatever the group is into in the moment, whether it be cheerful team buildings, or heated polarizing debates, I feel isolated. All it takes in such moments to set my mind at ease is one friendly team member to look me in the eye for half a second, in a glimpse of reassuring recognition that says ‘no worries, we’re just temporarily off again in our group frenzy here’. Please don’t take one-on-one’s with such a friend as talking behind your back, let alone betrayal of group norms. One good friend among your constituent members makes your ways a lot less impervious to me. 

Thirdly, it will be difficult for us to become friends, but do we need to be anyway? Being your friend requires me to take part in your collective habits, parties, team buildings and other uniforms. Loners feel overwhelmed by solitude when they’re forced into ceremonial rituals of social cohesion. Groups dislike individuals who retreat from such celebrations of group identity, as loners tend do do. Everyone's uneasy that way. Yet, all it takes is a little mutual tolerance for us to become caring and powerful allies to one another. Please stop saying things like “there’s no ‘I’ in team”. Statements like that blatantly deny my very existence and make me feel miserable. There’s no double u in me either. In the afterlife after the pathbreaking ‘goodbyes’ and ‘so longs’, whenever I left a group, I miss people, I rarely ever miss group life. 

Loners are not inimical to groups. They may be concerned, appreciative and supportive to a group’s goals and integrity. It’s just that their preferred behavioral strategy in social groups is to find something they can do on their own for some time, and benefit the group later with whatever helpful stuff they can come up with.

There. I got it off my chest, I feel relieved. As I read the first sentence of this letter again, about me not enjoying your company, that might have been a slight exaggeration. I meant it when I wrote it though, so I leave it as it is.

I admit that I actually did at times enjoy to be somewhat part of you. I’ve made my dearest friends in your company. In fact, I owe all of my friends to you. Thank you for that. As I think of it, I owe practically all of my accomplishments to a great extent to you as well. Thank you for that too. Clearly, I need you much more than you need me.

So I hope you keep reaching out to me. I promise I will keep on reaching out to you too, and will do my utmost to behave a little less like, well, a loner.

I also hope you realize there are many of us loners covertly among your ranks, and that the most successful teams are probably the one’s who bring out the best, not the worst, in us. Perhaps we are all loners at times, perhaps many of us ought to be a little bit more of a loner every now and then, afford ourselves some more me-time to reflect. Well thought through initiatives by individuals propel teams forward.

Let’s all try just a little bit harder to make this work, okay?

 Take care,

 A loner. 

Curious to find out how a team might respond to this message by a loner? Go here