A Good Premise That Doesn’t Know When to Stop
Bali, Yoga, and an Overthinker’s Nervous System
Existing in Bali feels like a riff on Christina Aguilera’s 1999 hit: my body’s saying yes but my mind is saying no.
On the first day, I was asked to take my shoes off in a cafe. I declined and sheepishly kept wearing them in the single room where it was allowed. But I nonetheless became a regular. And now shoes-on cafes feel alien. Who wears shoes in a cafe?
One night, I heard strange music coming from the main room. I can’t really tell you what it was, so I’ll just call it hippie music. A guitar and some rhythmic chanting was involved. And I felt absolutely compelled, pulled, summoned to dance to it.
Me, dancing alone, with strangers, to unknown music? That’s an analytical nightmare under normal circumstances: am I doing it right? Are people watching me? What is the point of this, anyway? In Bali, none of these thoughts occurred to me, or if they did, I paid no attention.
Not everything here is purely spontaneous. Daily yoga has been a staple. It’s almost undeniably good for you — body and mind — when done consistently. Yet I recoil when I hear dubious concepts like “energy” and “detox” spouted as truths, and unlike worries about shoes, I doubt this concern will fade.
Everything in Bali is like this to a degree: a good premise that doesn’t know when to stop. When I joined a two hour “authentic relating” workshop, I thought the teacher would be our guru leader, slowly indoctrinating us into his cult. Instead, we were led by the most normal and down-to-earth person imaginable. It was we the participants who went too far, veering into trauma dumping, vulnerability olympics, uncalibrated oversharing, and speaking without also listening.
It’s these moments of excess that define this place:
Eating healthy becomes macaroni and cheese with no macaroni or cheese.
Spontaneity becomes a feeling of offense when asked what you’re doing next month.
Lived experience becomes global truth.
Warmth becomes sunburn.
Rain becomes flood.
Two weeks in Bali becomes planning the rest of your life in Bali.
While Bali gives you the disease of excess, the philosophy of yoga also gives you the cure. The body must be nourished but so must the mind. Plans may give way to novelty, but sometimes they must hold steady against chaos.
The fact that I wrote any of the preceding nonsense is evidence I’ve been spending entirely too much time at yoga. Or perhaps it’s evidence that despite my analytical reservations, I have actually learned something here — something difficult to quantify, something not easily published or peer-reviewed. Perhaps spiritual excess is the means through which such truths are found. You travel to the outer limits of experience, and then retreat back to your personal Overton Window, which itself has now shifted.
Contact with the outside world has become mildly strained. I suggested to a friend in venture capital that they evaluate deal flow more based on “vibes,” and I’m not entirely sure I was joking. They seemed tangled in an analytical web. Ordinarily I would jump into the web and enjoy the process of weaving it. Now the web seemed like a trap that was consuming them, not a juicy intellectual problem I was being invited to solve.
The world of analysis awaits me when I leave next month. There are spreadsheets to update, capital allocation decisions to make, houses to sell, and taxes to pay. But the importance of making the numbers go up now seems muted.
My yoga teacher says the last breath we take before we die should be a happy one. That the river of you, with the ego that thinks he’s the biggest river, will finally meet the ocean and realize how small he is. And maybe the lesson here is to realize your size early in life, and find a sense of peace and unity in that.
Or maybe it’s to make an absolute boatload of money. I can’t be sure.