Bravery

Or is it?

Welcome to this week’s Life Intelligence - the forever-evolving project. I like the feedback I got from the full post I published to everyone last month. So, this month, this post is open to all. Enjoy!

Meanwhile, I’ve stopped doing the Sunday Scoop every Sunday. They’ll come out once or twice a month now.

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Since I've been back to the Central Coast, people tell me I'm brave for just picking up and leaving 11 months ago on an international adventure with my little doggie. I see it as a premeditated and not necessarily well-executed plan that happened to work out. I can't credit myself with bravery. Still, it got me thinking about what bravery really is.

Is it the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, detained by U.S. immigration authorities after co-authoring an op-ed criticizing the university's stance on Palestinian issues? In March 2024, Ozturk and three other students penned an article in The Tufts Daily, urging the university to "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide" and divest from companies linked to Israel. Ozturk was not otherwise closely involved in protests against Israel.

She must've known she was putting herself out there, yet she did it.

Beyond the headlines and huge heroic example, "everyday bravery" isn't dramatic—it's quiet, often invisible, and incredibly human. It's doing the right or difficult thing even when it doesn't look heroic. It's saying no when it would be easier to say yes. It's being honest when it might cost you something. It's showing up, even when you're exhausted or afraid.

It comes in several flavors. Emotional bravery lets someone see the real you. Saying, "I'm struggling." Owning your story, even the messy parts. Moral courage empowers you to stand up to injustice, even in small ways—calling out a bad joke, defending someone mistreated, or refusing to go along with the crowd. Then, there's resilience, which gets you out of bed when you're grieving. Trying again after rejection. Starting over after a loss.

Bravery is also when curiosity leads you, despite fear, to ask hard questions, explore a new place, and start something new in your 40s, 50s, or beyond.

Brené Brown would probably call it "being vulnerable on purpose." And that takes guts.

Motivation and drive trump fear. Are extreme athletes less brave than political activists or firefighters entering a burning building?

I watched Alex Honnold as he calmly made the historical 3,000-foot ascent of El Capitan rope-free in the documentary Free Solo. I've also seen teenagers flipping summersaults with their bicycles on the local bicycle track. I would be scared to do either one and will never attempt to.

In my professional life, I've seen the bravery of mistreated spouses trying to survive and mothers of estranged children who wanted to reconnect. I've admired the determination of my clients to figure things out and outgrow their habits of shooting themselves in the foot. I've seen the strength to walk away from a bad situation, fearing uncertainty.

I am not sure my frolicking around Europe rose to the level of bravery, although looking back, I had my moments of uncertainty and confusion, and I had to figure things out. Perhaps driving the narrow, crowded streets of Thessaloniki, Greece, while dodging chaotically parked cars, jaywalking pedestrians, and oversized garbage trucks counts for something if you're an American, but over there, they call it "life."

In ancient Greece, the Stoics had a lot to say about bravery—though they often called it courage, one of their four cardinal virtues (along with wisdom, justice, and temperance). To a Stoic, fear is a passion—an irrational disturbance of the soul. Courage is the rational response. Not the absence of fear, but the choice to not be ruled by it.

Seneca famously said, "Sometimes even to live is an act of courage." I'd say the more things you fear, the more bravery you need. On the flip side, ignorance bestows you the luxury of fearing fewer things. This is not to say that we should remain ignorant, but perhaps we should choose what to know. We should also consider "how" we come to know things. It can make all the difference.

Fear expands with knowledge. When you know about the fragility of love, the randomness of illness, the weight of history, the horrors of injustice, the vastness of space—it takes courage just to get out of bed sometimes.

Meanwhile, ignorance does offer a kind of unearned ease. That’s why people say, “I wish I didn’t know,” after reading a tough truth. Because knowing costs something. It makes you responsible, unsettled, awake. It strips away the comforting illusions.

When I was in Malta, I remember reading that it was the safest country in Europe. Practically no crime. No one bothers anyone. I saw no police anywhere. I walked day and night, carefree. Then one day, a suitcase washed ashore near the promenade in Gzira—two blocks from my apartment— with a chopped-up body inside. Lulu and I walked by there almost daily on our way to Manoel Island, where we could enjoy nature practically alone in the early mornings. The incident made a difference. For the few days it took the police to unravel the story, I walked the island looking over my shoulder.

Not all knowledge is equally useful or healthy. There’s a difference between:

• Knowing through experience vs. through fear-based scrolling.

• Knowing with context vs. just knowing headlines.

• Knowing something as a human vs. knowing it as a detached consumer of facts.

The how matters. The why matters. Without some form of grounding (spiritual, philosophical, emotional), knowledge can become overwhelming—too much weight, not enough muscle.

So maybe the equation is this:

The more expansive your awareness, the more essential your bravery, and the more intentional you must be with your attention.

It’s not about choosing ignorance, but about choosing what to integrate into your life. What to let touch you. What to carry. What to set down.

Every truth you discover—about the world, about people, about yourself—adds texture to your inner landscape. Sometimes, it’s beauty. Sometimes, it’s grief. Sometimes, it’s a whole dark forest you didn’t know was there.

And once you see something, you can’t unsee it - the bittersweet cost of awareness.

So, the more you know, the more conflicted, awake, and exposed your inner world becomes. When the weight of what you know gets too heavy, it becomes tempting to numb, deny, or split off from parts of yourself. It can look like:

• Pretending you don’t care.

• Telling yourself a smaller, easier story.

• Hiding a truth that shook you because you fear what it might change.

• Adopting someone else’s narrative so you don’t have to hold your own.

But every time we betray our inner world—out of fear, exhaustion, or pressure—we become a little more hollow. A little more misaligned.

Bravery, then, becomes the choice and act of staying connected. It’s saying, “I will carry what I’ve come to know—and I will not let it make me cynical, numb, or dishonest with myself.”

The existentialists, especially thinkers like Kierkegaard, Camus, and even Nietzsche—who all wrestled with fear, dread, absurdity, and meaning- had the idea that bravery is the refusal to betray your inner world.

Instead of seeing bravery as action in the face of external danger (fire! war! sharks!), existentialists often framed it as:

The courage to confront inner chaos, uncertainty, or meaninglessness—without running away.

For example:

• Kierkegaard saw true courage as facing the 'dizziness of freedom'—the terrifying awareness that you alone are responsible for your choices. Not your gods. Not your culture. Just you.

• Camus said that life is absurd—no inherent meaning, no cosmic justice—and yet, instead of despairing or escaping into illusions, the brave person says: "Yes, it's absurd—and I will live fully anyway."

• Nietzsche, ever the rebel, pushed the idea that bravery is saying yes to life in all its messiness: pain, joy, failure, contradiction. True courage is not avoiding suffering—it's embracing it as part of becoming who you are.

And here's a twist: The opposite of bravery isn't fear—it's self-abandonment. That moment when you betray your values, hide your voice, or pretend to be smaller than you are to avoid discomfort - that's the quiet tragedy.

So, maybe real bravery is just this: To be radically, stubbornly yourself in a world that constantly invites you to be something else.

But wait! There’s more! There’s also the shadow side of bravery. So much of what looks like bravery on the surface can, underneath, be driven by fear, ego, or even self-destruction. It’s like… bravery wearing a mask.

Sometimes what we praise as boldness is really a refusal to feel fear—or a denial of it. Think, people who throw themselves into danger not because they’re brave, but because they don’t care what happens to them. Or they need to prove something—like worth, masculinity, superiority—through high-risk acts.

It’s not bravery; it’s performance, a coping mechanism dressed up as heroism. Nietzsche might’ve said this is the will to power gone lopsided—acting for the thrill of control or conquest, not from strength of character.

Sometimes, people are brave in some areas so they don’t have to face fear in others.

For example:

• The war hero who can face bullets but won’t face his own emotions.

• The activist who can speak truth to power but can’t say “I love you” to someone.

• The person who risks their life to save strangers but won’t apologize to their kids.

It’s a kind of selective courage. A trade-off. “I’ll be brave there, so I don’t have to be brave here.”

Sometimes, the most courageous people are the quietest ones. The ones who keep showing up despite fear, without applause, without backup. And we never hear their names.

Bravery isn’t a fixed trait or a heroic pose—it’s context-dependent, messy, and deeply human. It lives in both grand gestures and quiet perseverance, shaped by what we have to lose and what we’re willing to risk. To understand courage fully, we have to ask not just what someone did, but what it cost them—and whether they stayed true to their inner world in the process.

So no, I don’t think I was especially brave. But I do think I listened to something inside me—and maybe, some days, that’s all the courage we get.

Thank you for reading and subscribing! Do you have a story of bravery you would like to share? Leave a comment below.

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V.