I have always noticed how some people make the other uncomfortable – without saying a word.
Vegans are a perfect example. They do not need to be preachers or even vocation on their choices. They can simply arise, order their meal based on plants and suddenly, the table changes. People become nervous. The jokes appear. Someone evokes bacon. Another admits that they “tried oat milk once” as if they were amends.
It is rarely about vegan. These are the people around them.
I have always admired vegans for this reason – not just because of their ethics or clarity, which I recently wrote – but because of the strange and involuntary effect they have on others. They involuntarily trigger people. Their choice to live outside a dominant standard removes invisible wires.
And that’s really what it is about.
Why some lifestyle choices – bicycle, sobriety, minimalism, do not want children, do not have a smartphone – make people uncomfortable? Not just confused, but defensive? Even hostile?
It is not because these choices are extreme. It is because they quietly interrupt the social script.
Most people live by a kind of tacit agreement. A consensual reality. We agree not to contest certain hypotheses in public, in particular those that we have not examined. And when someone lives in contradiction open with these hypotheses, it looks like a breach of contract.
Take alcohol. A sober person at a party has nothing to say. Their refusal to drink can be enough to make other uncomfortable uncomfortable. People are starting to justify their own consumption, offering explanations that no one has asked. The sober person has not accused anyone of anything, but his choice destabilizes the collective agreement: This is what we do. Who we are. It’s normal.
Veganism does the same. The same goes for not buying a house. Or move away from a six -digit career. Or decide not to have children.
These are not only personal choices. In the eyes of others, these are symbolic refusals – rejuctions of what many people believe defines a “good life”. And it may seem threatening.
Because if you do not do these things by rarity or trauma – if you are really happy, even prosperous – then your existence raises a tacit question:
What if the life I built is not based on freedom, but on compliance?
And this is not a question that most people want to ask for lunch.
We are social creatures. We build our identity not in isolation, but by reflection – through the stories we have surrounded. And when someone stops participating in a shared story, we don’t only consider them “different”. We start to feel judgeEven when no judgment is offered.
This is the projection.
We assume that they must think that we hurt it – because at a certain level, we are afraid that they are right.
Of course, this fear is almost never expressed. He disguises himself as mockery. Incredulity. Passive aggression. The jokes “come on, live a little”. Exaggerated concern. Forced neutrality. Sometimes even moral indignation.
Because the human psyche does not like dissonance. When someone lives in a way that does not correspond to our map of the operation of the world, we must either revise the card or discredit it. And it is always easier to discredit the person.
We therefore call them extreme. Or unrealistic. Or naive. We accuse them of being rigid or self-justice, even when they are completely silent.
Because if they are not mistaken, we may need to change something.
And change – in particular internal change in value – is much more difficult than laughing something.
This discomfort does not only occur in isolated moments. This happens structurally.
The company rewards certain choices. Not because they are universally good, but because they keep the system on the move. Consumption, ambition, productivity, family training – These are the levers of the economic engine. And when you come down, even quietly, you reveal how much our so-called “freedom” is shaped by invisible incentives.
This is why someone who decides not to upgrade his phone for ten years may seem suspicious. Or someone who lives alone and does not long for partnership. Or someone who works just enough to meet their needs and choose not to shake up for more. These people have not only extinguished behavior – they reject beliefs. The beliefs so deeply normalized that most of us do not realize that we have internalized them.
And this is what makes discomfort so difficult to name. It is not a question of disagreement – it is a break. A break in the collective illusion which We all want the same things.
When someone says no to what you have built your life, it may look like a rejection of You. Even when it is not the case.
I felt it myself – on both sides.
I made decisions that wiggled people. Get away from traditional work. Choose minimalism at a time when my peers acquired. Living alone in countries, people did not understand. At first, I thought the discomfort was on Me– that I did not explain myself enough well, or that I went too far.
But over time, I realized that it was not personal. It was existential.
I had stopped reflecting the world they were trying to understand.
And I also felt discomfort when others made choices, I had not been courageous enough to consider. A friend who decided to never get married. Another who sold everything to live out of network. A woman who has chosen not to have children and spoke openly. I noticed my own micro-reactions-more and more defense, disbelief, perhaps even judgment. But behind them was something else: a subtle panic that my own choices might not have been as free as I thought.
This is the real discomfort.
It is not an ethics or superiority. This is autonomy. About the fear that we have exchanged freedom for approval, and someone else’s freedom makes this business visible.
Most of us have learned that discomfort is a signal to escape. But in times like these, it is actually a signal. A sign that something hidden rubs against the surface. Not a threat, but an invitation.
And if we are ready to stay with this discomfort, so as not to crush it with cynicism or sarcasm, we could find something useful. Something liberating.
Because discomfort rarely concerns the other person. These are the places in ourselves where we have not looked closely enough.
These are the stories that we have inherited but never published.
The values we make but that we have never chosen.
The fears that we delete under our “normal” lives.
This is why some lifestyle choices feel so destabilizing: not because they challenge what is good or bad, but because they question what normal. And “normal” is the most defended concept in modern life. This is where lives belongs. Where identity is hidden. Where expectations are told so deep, we can no longer see them.
So when someone lives outside normal, we remove them – or exiles.
But here is the twist: the people who trigger us most are often those who show us something precious.
Not because they are right and we are wrong. But because their choices illuminate the parties of ourselves, we have become numb – the parts that we exchanged for safety, ease, or we adapt. Sometimes they remind us who we were. Or who we secretly want to become.
I think that is why I have always been quietly attracted by people who make other uncomfortable uncomfortable. Not noisy provocateurs – but those who live their lives with a silent challenge. People who withdraw from default scripts without demonstrating it. People who wear unusual calm, as if they are not in the same race as the rest of us.
Veganists, once again, are just an example. This is not the diet I admire. It is the courage to live with conviction in a world that makes us constantly hurry to make compromises. They show how a personal decision can stop outside. The lifespan of your values, visibly and shamelessly, becomes a kind of mirror – another may not like, but may need.
The same goes for the minimalist, the childless couple, the early retiree, the woman who chooses loneliness rather than romance, the man who moves away from the status to recover his health or his peace of mind. They all do the same: remind us that there are other ways of living. That the default values are not destinies.
And this is the gift hidden in discomfort – if we choose to receive it.
Instead of starting or making fun, we can take a break. Be curious. Ask why it bothers us so much. What belief is challenged? What part of us feels exposed?
Because discomfort is not always a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it is a sign that something wakes up.
That part of us is hungry for a more honest, more spacious, more ours.
In a way, the people who trigger us invite us – not to copy them, but to examine us. To ask ourselves if the life we have built is the one we have really chosen – or the one we inherited, downloaded, interpreted.
This question is not easy. He can dismantle things.
But this is the kind of question that leads to freedom.
And that may be why these choices make people uncomfortable. Because they threaten the illusion that there is only one way of living a good life. That if we follow the card, we will end up somewhere significant.
But some people burn the card. Do not rebel. Do not shock. Just because they realized that it was never theirs to start.