There’s a certain romanticism to the idea of locking yourself away to pursue your goals. We’ve all seen the montage: the entrepreneur coding through the night, the artist holed up in their studio, the student who disappears into the library for weeks on end. The grind culture tells us that sacrifice is noble, that cutting out distractions is necessary, and that social life is just another luxury we can’t afford if we want to succeed.
But here’s what nobody tells you: when you isolate yourself to grind, you don’t just miss out on parties and hangouts. You actually become weird. Not in a quirky, endearing way, but in a way that makes normal social interaction feel like speaking a foreign language you used to know but have somehow forgotten.
The first thing that happens is you lose your calibration. Social skills are like any other skill—they atrophy without practice. When you’re not regularly interacting with people, you lose the ability to read rooms, to gauge when someone is interested or bored, to know how much detail is too much detail when someone asks how you’re doing. You forget the rhythm of conversation, the subtle dance of speaking and listening, the art of knowing when to make a joke and when to be serious.
I’ve watched this happen to friends who disappeared into startup culture or graduate programs. They emerge months later and something is off. They talk at you instead of with you. They can’t quite match the energy of the conversation. They’ve lost the ability to engage in the seemingly pointless small talk that actually serves as social glue. When you ask them what’s new, they either give you a one-word answer or launch into a fifteen-minute monologue about their project without pausing to check if you’re still engaged.
The problem compounds because when you’re isolated and grinding, your internal world becomes your entire world. The projects you’re working on, the problems you’re solving, the goals you’re chasing—these things take on an outsized importance in your mind. You assume everyone else finds them as fascinating as you do. You lose perspective on what’s actually interesting to talk about and what’s just inside baseball that means nothing to anyone who isn’t living in your head.
Then there’s the emotional regulation piece. When you’re constantly around other people, you’re forced to modulate your emotions, to stay relatively balanced, to not get too high or too low because you’re existing in a shared social space. But when you’re alone, grinding away, you can spiral into whatever emotional state your work puts you in. You can get obsessive, manic, depressed, anxious, and there’s no social feedback to pull you back to baseline. You lose the ability to maintain emotional equilibrium in the presence of others.
What’s particularly insidious is that isolation creates a feedback loop. As you get weirder socially, social interaction becomes more uncomfortable and awkward. So you start avoiding it more, which makes you weirder, which makes you avoid it even more. Before you know it, you’ve developed a kind of social anxiety that you never had before, not because you’re inherently anxious, but because you’ve simply lost the muscle memory of how to be around people.
And let’s talk about references. So much of bonding and connection happens through shared cultural touchstones—the shows everyone’s watching, the memes that are circulating, the events that are happening in the world. When you’re heads-down grinding, you miss all of this. You emerge not knowing what anyone is talking about, unable to participate in the casual cultural conversations that make up so much of social life. You become that person who has to have every reference explained to them, who can’t contribute to the group chat, who seems weirdly out of touch.
The cruel irony is that the thing you’re grinding for—whether it’s a business, a degree, a creative project, or career advancement—almost certainly requires social skills to fully capitalize on. You can build the best product, write the best thesis, create the best art, but if you’ve made yourself socially weird in the process, you’ll struggle to sell it, present it, collaborate on it, or network around it. The very isolation that you thought would help you succeed might be undermining your ability to translate that success into real-world outcomes.
None of this is to say you shouldn’t work hard or pursue ambitious goals. But there’s a difference between being focused and being isolated. You can work intensely while still maintaining regular human contact. You can protect your time while still showing up for the people in your life. You can be disciplined about your craft while still participating in the world around you.
The healthiest high performers I know treat social connection not as a luxury to be sacrificed but as a necessity to be protected. They have boundaries around their work time, but they also have boundaries around their social time. They understand that staying socially calibrated isn’t just about having fun or being well-rounded—it’s actually essential to their ability to function effectively in the world.
Because here’s the truth: you’re not a brain in a jar. You’re a human being who exists in relationship to other human beings. Your work, no matter how important, is ultimately going to be received, used, shared, or appreciated by other people. If you’ve made yourself unable to relate to those people in the process of creating something for them, you’ve made a devil’s bargain.
So grind if you must, but don’t isolate. Set your boundaries, protect your time, focus on your work—but stay weird in the ways that make you interesting, not in the ways that make people uncomfortable. Keep one foot in the shared human experience even as you’re pursuing your individual ambitions. Your future self, the one who has to actually interact with the world you’ve been hiding from, will thank you.