You’re Fragile, Insecure, Dependent, And Reactive - Here is how to fix it:
The Lion’s Lens
Sirens wail, screens flicker, and the room shrinks. In a world where extremes dominate and society is fraught with polarization, there remains hope for finding tranquility and strength within ourselves. This letter will guide you toward physical and mental strength, confidence, and independence, even amid the chaos around you. By the end of this exploration, you will have the tools to transform your stress into serenity, reclaim your inner strength, and cultivate a profound sense of freedom in your daily life.
Today’s world is polarized to extremes. News cycles overflow with disasters, crises, and aggressive debates. Riots and demonstrations dominate headlines. Society seems split into binaries: haters or lovers, good or bad, left-extremists or right-extremists.
Social media amplifies this. Platforms deliberately engineer addiction using emotional content and extreme posts like slot machines because every additional minute of user engagement translates directly into ad revenue. These platforms are intentionally designed to provoke and maintain user interaction.
Think back to the last time a social media algorithm kept you scrolling through an autoplay reel or suggested endless videos. How many minutes slipped away?
This reflective moment can highlight how seamlessly these systems infiltrate our daily life, taking time you might have spent elsewhere.
The incentive structure is perverse: your attention is the product for advertisers.
And did I say ads? Yes, they are everywhere:
Online, they are on news pages, social media, and search engines. Even offline: In and on trains, on the streets, in the shopping centers adjacent to the bus station, everywhere.
The result of all of these points above is information overload:
Too many crises.
Too much extreme content.
Too much black-and-white thinking.
Your brain cannot process it all resulting in one thing: Stress.
To cope with this stress, we tend to use cheap dopamine hits that we think will help us relax:
“Just a short video on social media.”
“Just an episode of the TV show.”
“Just a bit of fast food.”
The problem with these dopamine hits is that you always need more of them to really get your next high, similar to other addictive drugs. And the tools we use to get this high usually bombard us with even more information and ads—a vicious cycle. As a result, we become more and more addicted to these hedonistic behaviors, and they consume more and more time in our daily lives. This ever-increasing demand for time creates even more stress, since we have less time left to do the things in life we want to do. Unconsciously, we tend to feel guilty for wasting so much time, which in turn leads to even more stress again.
This stress and overwhelming bombardment of information diminishes our critical faculties. It erodes our willingness to question the narratives presented to us, leading us to gravitate toward ideas that reinforce our existing beliefs and to neglect scrutiny of their arguments. Instead of rigorously evaluating the perspectives of those we follow, we become dull and dependent on the thinking and opinions of others. We become easily manipulable individuals.
To test this, try a simple exercise: scroll through the last 10 things you’ve liked on social media and note the viewpoints they represent. Are they reinforcing what you already believe, or do they challenge your perspectives?
All of that stress and shallow thinking in the end will lead to a loss of critical cognitive functions. We can’t listen deeply. We have less energy and time left to handle personal challenges that would help us to personally grow; instead, we flee into hedonistic behavior to numb the pain.
This growth avoidance leads nowhere good. It leads to misery:
Dependency on social media
lack of freedom to
Do what YOU want to do,
Read what YOU want to read,
Watch what YOU want to watch,
Believe what YOU want to learn,
Instead, you do, read, watch, and believe what your feed tells you to.
Lack of the ability to think deeply and to focus and get things done
Shallow thinking that makes you boring to others.
Lack of authenticity
Lack of courage
Lack of time to care for yourself
Lack of physical activity
Health problems
Insecureness
Isolation and loneliness
Demotivation, inaction, passiveness, nihilism
Depression
In short: Hell!
How, then, can one break free from this cycle of stress and stagnation? How do we get out of the rut?
You only have this one life. You probably want to use it well.
I found the antidote in the animal kingdom. Specifically: The Lion.
The Lion
Imagine you are traveling through the South African steppe. It is dry, hot, and rough. You drive around a corner, and behind a few sparse bushes, you see a lion king lying in the shadow under a tree.
What are your first thoughts?
Mine would probably be: “What a strong and confident animal lying there. It exudes confidence and is fully aware of its surroundings, but also absolutely calm and relaxed.” and I would probably imagine living his life for a moment:
The king of the animal kingdom. The whole steppe belongs to you. You are the king of your own life. You are strong, confident, relaxed, and free. No noise, no information overload, no stress, no depression, just freedom, calmness, positivity, and confidence.
The lion embodies many of the qualities and skills we humans wish for most nowadays, but find increasingly challenging to adopt.
Let’s go through each of these characteristics of the lion one by one and understand what we can learn from the lion and how we can adopt these healthy, valuable characteristics ourselves.
Physical Strength
The lion is considered one of the world’s strongest animals. Even though there are officially stronger animals in the world in terms of brute strength, the Lion has an impressive bite force of around 650 psi, which is 5 times that of a human. They routinely drag prey of 400 kg or more over a distance. Their incredible leg strength allows them to run up to 80 km/h and jump up to 11m.
All these abilities help the lion survive and stay healthy and efficient.
In the end, this is the same for us humans. We need a reasonable amount of physical strength to ensure a fulfilling life. Yes, we rarely need to drag our prey, but at least our groceries need to get home somehow. We also need physical fitness to achieve our daily lifestyle and stay as free as possible. It starts with the basic things:
We need the ability to stand up in the morning to walk to the bathroom, kitchen, the train or bus station, our car, or meetings. For all of this, we need at least a certain amount of strength and cardiovascular fitness. The more we have, the more we can endure and achieve. The fitter we are, the longer we can sit and stand if necessary, the longer we can walk or hike. Some people can reach the most remote places on earth, while others can’t because of a lack of strength and physical fitness, limiting their freedom to move and do as they please.
Additionally, a substantial body helps us to live longer, stay healthy, and be full of energy. You can focus better when you are fit and fresh rather than in pain and soreness. You can defend yourself and your loved ones more effectively when you are fast and strong, reducing the likelihood of being attacked or injured.
All in all, physical strength, health, and fitness are the foundation for an enjoyable and free life, and it is worth working on them.
I am neither a fitness coach nor a doctor, so please take all of my advice with a grain of salt and take responsibility for your own body, but here is what I have learned about becoming more fit and healthy:
First, it’s crucial to understand the connection between physical activity and mental well-being. Engaging in regular exercise is not just about muscle gain or physical endurance; it directly shapes neural pathways, enhancing your mental capacity and promoting mental hygiene. Movement can stimulate brain regions responsible for mood regulation, creativity, and critical thinking, providing a sense of calm and power. We will come back to this later, when we discuss mental strength.
So if you have a physical health problem, visit a doctor. Work on your health because it has direct impact on your mood and your brain. If a doctor can’t help, I recommend a good physiotherapist or learning and researching the topic yourself. Never give up. As an example, I have recurring neck pain and headaches for years now. I gave up multiple times, but it just made things worse. If you stop working out or trying new treatments, you have already lost, and there is no hope. If you continue researching and exploring solutions, you may find the solution. And from my own experience, I can tell you that everything in your body is connected. Sometimes the root of a problem lies in a completely different part of your body that nobody has considered.
Therefore, if you are unfit, change your behaviour. Visit the gym. Start working out. Start with walking or cardio to get yourself going, then book a trainer and start training your muscles slowly but steadily. Visit a physiotherapist, work with them on your nervous system and posture, and improve the positioning of your joints. This is absolutely important for your body: it keeps the blood flowing, keeps muscular tension at a minimum, and increases your body’s functions.
Additionally, a good way to get things going and dive into health is the use of a fitness tracker. For beginners, you can start with a smartwatch to track the most critical health and fitness data. For advanced people, I recommend Whoop, which provides even more insights into your data. These two will provide you with meaningful insight into your body. Of course, they are not perfect. Never trust these devices alone. But they can help you a lot to become motivated and learn what is good for you and what to avoid. As you can imagine, these topics alone would fill several letters, so we can’t go into the details here. But one last quick win I want to share with you:
Ensure you get enough and regular sleep. Make sure you get 7-8 hours of sleep each night and go to bed and get up at the same time each day, regardless of whether it’s a weekend or a workday. These two factors alone will significantly influence how much energy you have for the day and how confident you will feel in yourself, which brings us to the next characteristic of the Lion: Confidence.
Confidence
The lion is one of the most confident animals in the world. Its behavior displays its dominance, fearlessness, and authority. But where does this come from? Lions are apex predators, meaning they are at the top of the food chain with no natural predators (the only real danger is from us humans). This alone implies that a lion knows there aren’t many dangers to fear, and if they do appear, they can probably handle them. This confidence also leads to a dominant behavior of patrolling its territory and chasing off intruders to protect its family. One of its most important tools for that is its dominant roar, which can be heard up to 8 km away.
Fortunately, the same applies to us humans. We are also apex predators, which means we don’t have to fear many dangers. The only real danger is other humans. To feel confident like a lion that knows it can handle nearly everything, we need to make sure we can handle every danger and protect ourselves and our “territory”. Fortunately, we rarely need to fight for physical territory nowadays, but we often need to preserve our mental territory, and rarely even our bodily integrity.
Let’s start with bodily integrity. Your bodily integrity depends heavily on your physical strength. The stronger we are, the better our posture, the better we can defend ourselves, and therefore, this significantly influences how confident we feel. Yes, fortunately, it is not necessary for us to defend our lives daily nowadays, but these old patterns of fighting back are still wired into our brains. If you stand up straight with your shoulders back, your nervous system will send signals to your brain that make you feel less stressed, more relaxed, and confident. The more fit and strong you are, the easier it is to hold this confident posture, and the more confident you will be.
Because of our ancient wiring in our brain, your physical appearance will also help you exude this confidence to others. People will see and feel your confidence and treat you differently, consciously or subconsciously. This is your roar, your signal to other humans: “I am here, and if necessary, I will defend myself. It will hurt if you attack me.” This is also one of the main tools in each self-defense class for protecting against physical attacks: Don’t be an easy prey! Let the potential attacker know that you will fight to the death, and even if they win, it will hurt and cost them a lot. This alone is often enough to avoid a physical fight.
Since this posture and mentality are hard to maintain in dangerous situations, I wholeheartedly recommend you take a self-defense class. After visiting several self-defense classes, I can tell you that training and drilling your body to maintain an upright posture and calmness in extreme or dangerous situations not only increases your likelihood of staying alive or unharmed, but also boosts your confidence. Even if you are short or light, you can use these properties to your advantage if you know how, and this is what you will learn in such a self-defense class.
This confidence in your own body and strength will also help you defend your values, your way of life, and your liberty, because you know that when you speak up, and in consequence, the other side leaves the factual discussion and turns to a physical fight, you are prepared. If someone harms your values or tries to take advantage of you, then your values, your independence, your way of life, and your freedom are in danger. Agreeable people tend not to say when they are hurt because this could lead to conflict and offend others. But conflict is not always destructive as long as it stays factual. Sometimes you need to go through a conflict to reach an agreement that benefits both sides. If you don’t say what offends you, people don’t know your boundaries and tend to take advantage of you, be it consciously or unconsciously. So if your primary values are hurt, you need to draw a line in the sand. This is important not only for you but also for the people around you. They might share your values, feel the same way you do, and be just waiting for someone to find the courage to speak up. It is not your values alone that you defend. It is also your family, your friends, colleagues, or neighbors that you should take responsibility for.
So next time, gather your courage, speak up, and draw a line in the sand, because this will also protect your liberty and the independence of those around you. Which is our next characteristic of the lion: Independence.
Independence
Lions are independent animals. We already discussed above that they have no natural predators and that they protect their territory, which helps them avoid physical harm and protect their families. Of course, this also helps with independence. If you are less likely to be attacked, you can act more independently, walk and eat without constant fear, and not depend on others to stay safe.
Therefore, lions adopted the behavior of making active, independent decisions about where to move and what to hunt, independent of what happens around them. They can also live for a period without water, so they are even less dependent on water and weather. Why is that important? You can’t control others or your environment, but if you are reasonably self-disciplined, you can control yourself. Being independent of your environment means you can put your life into your own hands and, therefore, create freedom.
So what can we learn from the lion here? We already discussed protecting our bodily integrity and defending our values, and setting clear boundaries in our relationships. All this reduces our dependency on others, because others can’t influence us too much when the guidelines are clear.
What we have not yet discussed is how we can protect our time, attention, and energy from external influences, so we can decide for ourselves how we want to use them and become less dependent on external factors that try to distract us.
Let’s start with how you can achieve this in your professional area of life:
If you have a job, I recommend ensuring your position has a clear role description. Clarify which responsibilities and accountabilities you have to clarify your focus.
If you are self-employed, create a vision for yourself and your business. What do you want to achieve? What is necessary for that, and what is just a distraction?
That helps you focus on what matters and allows you to block all other requests. From my own experience, this can help you a lot with getting rid of unnecessary or inefficient meetings (a topic I already discussed in more detail here).
In addition, this also provides you with a good reason to focus your attention. In today’s fast-paced world, it’s crucial to prioritize time for focused and deep work on matters that truly matter to you, regardless of whether you’re employed in a traditional 9-to-5 job or are self-employed. Without this time, you have no way of making progress in your life. It needs thinking, it needs attention, it requires focus to move the needle, to think things through to draw your own conclusions, to get things done. Protecting your focused time from social media, advertisers, games, TV shows, and colleagues is essential to live the life you want. Because if you don’t protect this time, advertisers and influencers start to tell you what to buy and what to eat, people on social media will tell you what to do and how to behave, and streaming companies will tell you what to watch. Yes, their name “influencer” already implies that their job is to influence you, making you more dependent on them and their advertisers. You start to live a life others want for you. Instead, protect your focus time and develop the skills, knowledge, and abilities necessary to make independent decisions and draw your own conclusions. I have summarized in detail how to set aside and protect focus time in a previous letter.
Along with that, you also need to protect your off time. Let no colleague or customer bother you after your work hours; you need this time to fill your battery. Let no one bother you during your well-earned vacation. Recharge to become like a lion that can endure a longer period without water. Store enough energy so that you become independent of what the next workday will throw at you. You know, if necessary, you can work during work time without much need for a break because you recharged the night before. Eat well, sleep enough, and stay independent of colleagues or customers during this time. It will also help them if you can be there for them, fully recharged, the next morning.
As the lion can hunt for itself, it is also essential for you that you can earn your money as independently as possible. You could lose that job, or the work environment could change. Your income is most independent of others when you have generated passive income by investing enough money in a diversified global investment portfolio. Of course, this is not possible for all of us right away. But you can start by first becoming less dependent on your job. Pile up an emergency fund in your bank account, so that a loss of a job does not put you in a bad position right away. Start a side-project to generate a second income. Reduce your expenses to put more money in worldwide diversified investments. Step by step, you become more self-sustained. The larger and more diversified your income streams are, and the less money you need for your lifestyle, the less dependent you become on that one job, that one customer, that one business idea, that one investment.
The same holds for the skills you need for your life. The more you need a skill in your life, the more you should own these skills yourself. Because the more of these skills you have, the less dependent you are on the help and skills of others. Of course, I don’t say, never ask for help. It is faster to learn a skill from an expert than to make all the mistakes and reinvent the wheel on your own. The same goes for skills you rarely need; you can externalize them to stay efficient. There are also situations where you need a second view, a second opinion; don’t refrain from these just to be independent. But the main skills for your life need to be in your own hands. So always block time for learning, for becoming more competent, for sharpening the axe: Book a coaching, buy and do that course, or read that book. Learn to use AI since this tool can help you learn much faster. I recommend Dan Koe’s letter, “How to Use AI Better than 99% of People.” Additionally, learn to write and bring your own thoughts to paper. There is a lot of significant evidence that this will help you understand the things you wrote about even better—one of the main reasons I started this newsletter.
And the last factor that gives you more independence and freedom is being hard to break. The less others can deteriorate you and the more stoic you are, the more you can live your own life. Therefore, another factor arises: Mental Strength.
Mental Strength
The lion is used as a symbol of courage and mental strength in various cultures and throughout history. This is because lions act despite their fear. They fight for territory and to protect their family, even with the risk of getting hurt. But Lions also fight only when necessary. If necessary, they will fight courageously. But if there is no need to fight, they won’t waste their energy. Then you often see them lying around in the shade, resting, relaxed, calm, yet fully present and awake.
They also learned to stay positive and never give up if a hunt was not successful; they never stop trying again when the next prey is in sight.
They also learned to become diligent. Diligently, they sneak near their prey to increase the likelihood of getting it on the first try, which is much more energy-efficient than needing a 2nd or 3rd try.
These are also essential skills for us humans:
Speaking up to protect our boundaries, as discussed above, requires courage. The same goes for starting that new job or business or traveling to a new place. This all requires courage—to act beyond fear: fear of rejection, fear of discussion, fear of aggression. Fear is an important mechanism that signals to us that there may be risks or bad outcomes ahead. This was much more helpful in the Stone Age, when security was less and danger was more life-threatening than today. Today, we often overestimate the risks. In most cases, the negative outcome is less likely or less severe than we expect. Knowing this, it becomes much easier for us to act beyond fear and with courage. If you are more interested in this topic, I highly recommend the book Courage is Calling by Ryan Holiday, which explains fear and how to act beyond fear in detail. My main learning was: Courage is important for us to push our boundaries outward, to make our lives richer, and expand our mental territory. Without courage, your life becomes narrower, less free, and less worth living over time.
As the Lion, we also have a great need to stay calm, relaxed, and fully present. Only in a balanced and calm mental state do we have the best brain capacity. But how do we achieve this calmness, this mental clarity? There are several essential strategies here:
Firstly, reduce the number of low-value inputs for your brain to process:
Less social media
fewer TV shows
less news
less distractions
less meetings
less slander
Instead, give your brain time to process thoughts: Start journaling. Write down your thoughts. Ignore grammar and spelling; it’s just for you. What went well today? What are you thankful for? What other things are on your mind? All of these questions help your brain process the information that came in over the day and conclude it. This helps close many thought loops in your unconscious mind, leading to a much calmer brain with more capacity for attention and focus.
Additionally, I recommend trying out meditation, breathing exercises, or vagus nerve stimulation. Your brain needs time to calm down to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, so that your body can reduce cortisol levels and relax. If you have too much cortisol in your system, the parasympathetic nervous system can’t activate, and you can’t relax, even if you want to. So give your body time. These things don’t work overnight; you need to train them diligently, like your muscles.
Another tool to stay calm, relaxed, and attentive is to avoid letting your surroundings press your buttons too much. So, we need to avoid getting triggered, react less, and act more. Try to slow down your response to your environment. When something happens,... wait,... breathe deeply,... give your brain time to think,... to work things out,... to make a conscious decision.
This is the difference Daniel Kahneman described as “fast vs. slow thinking” in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Fast thinking is the system that reacts; it comes to decisions automatically, quickly, and intuitively by using associations and heuristics. This thinking mode is very efficient, but it has one big problem: It is prone to biases and overconfidence, especially with complex choices. This thinking system is therefore only suitable for situations with less time: immediate danger and emergencies. Or low stakes: routine decisions like “which clothes do I put on today?”
Unfortunately, the more stressed we are, the more our bodies are in “Emergency Mode” due to elevated cortisol levels, so we tend to overuse this thinking system despite its clear disadvantages.
Instead, we should use the slow-thinking system more often. This system makes deliberate, analytical, and controlled decisions. It is also more intentional, but, of course, it costs us more energy because we need to actively override the fast-thinking system to make a conscious decision. But it is worth the effort. In the slow-thinking system, we can overcome impulses and make more rational decisions. It is less reaction and more a deliberate action given the current circumstances. Using this slow-thinking system makes you more present and attentive, increasing the likelihood of making the best decision. It also slows down your life, and you feel more in control, which makes you calmer and more relaxed.
The last important characteristic of the lion of never giving up is equally essential for us humans. As Mike Tyson formulated it famously, “You never lose until you actually give up.” So it is pretty simple, if you never want to lose again, never give up.
But there is a critical caveat to this. If you keep trying without reflecting on what worked and what didn’t, you’ll keep making the same mistake over and over. That is actually the definition of insanity: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” and will lead to burnout.
Instead, take breaks, reflect, and learn from your mistakes, then try it again. Because if you don’t, you have no chance of winning. If you instead adapt and try again, there is at least a chance of winning at some point.
Of course, trying again and again also requires a lot of diligence and trust in ourselves, our skills, and our ability to get there to find the working solution. Here, the other factors from above, the physical strength, confidence, and independence, are constructive. The more self-discipline you gain, the more skills you learned, the more you train, the higher your trust in yourself, the more diligence you will have, and the higher your chances of success.
The Lion’s Lens
Physical Strength, Confidence, Independence, and Mental Strength—these characteristics can help us to overcome the challenges of modern humanity. But how do we remind ourselves about these characteristics? How do we internalize them? I personally remind myself of these characteristics daily by reminding myself of the Lion, who represents all of these characteristics for me. I switch the perspective; I imagine being a lion and viewing the world through the lion’s lens. This helps me internalize and adopt these characteristics step by step, improving my life a little bit each day.
And now you know why I called this newsletter “The Lion’s Lens”.
Thank you for reading. If you found value in this letter, consider sharing it with someone who might benefit. To continue exploring the journey of living like a lion, subscribe for future insights or browse previous editions I linked below.
I wish you a powerful and free day – Andreas