“So laid-back”
People used to say it admiringly. You’re so laid-back. Nothing bothers you, does it? I collected versions of that sentence for years — from colleagues, from friends, from near-strangers — and I took it as the compliment it was meant to be.
They had no idea.
Here’s what “laid-back” looked like up close. I went along with everything — happily, or what passed for happily. I had no strong opinions, so nothing turned into a debate. Change of plan? Fine by me. Someone else’s preference? Even better — saved me producing one. Nothing was ever a problem, and here’s the actual mechanism: nothing was ever a problem because making it a problem was the one thing I couldn’t do. The objection would start to form, small and inconvenient, and be gone before it reached my mouth. What was left looked exactly like calm. People complimented it as calm.
But agreeable isn’t the same as at peace. That’s the whole of this piece, really, and it took me most of my life to learn it.
Real peace has opinions. That’s how you tell them apart. A person who’s genuinely at peace can disagree with you and stay peaceful. They have favourites — a preferred restaurant, a way they like their weekend, things they’ll happily tell you they don’t enjoy. They can say “actually, no” without panic. Their calm survives contact with their own preferences.
Mine couldn’t have survived that contact, because it depended on never having any. Underneath, my version of easy-going was hard work: reading each moment, sensing what everyone else wanted, and agreeing before any friction could start. It looked like a man floating down a river. It was a man swimming hard to stay level with the current — and calling it floating.
The giveaway, in the end, was the tiredness. Floating shouldn’t be tiring. And “not fussy” — my other favourite label for myself — shouldn’t need maintaining. But stating a preference felt like starting trouble, and I had learned, so early I can’t remember learning it, not to start trouble. So I didn’t. For decades. And I filed the tiredness under “just how I am.”
If you’re the laid-back one — the one who’s fine with anything, the one everybody calls so easy — I’m not here to take the compliment away. Maybe you really are at peace; some people are. But ask yourself the question nobody ever asked me: is my calm allowed to want things? If the easy-goingness only holds while you have no needs — if it’s less “I’m content either way” and more “I’d rather disappear than choose” — then what you have isn’t peace. It’s a habit of vanishing. And you’d know the difference by the tiredness.
If that’s what you find, be gentle with yourself, because none of it was fake and none of it was your fault. Going along with things was, at some point, the smartest available move — you adapted to conditions that rewarded exactly that. The adaptation just outlived the conditions. They usually do.
I’m less laid-back now, by the old definition. I have opinions — some of them inconvenient. I have preferences and edges and the occasional flat no. People can no longer say “nothing bothers him,” because some things visibly do.
And I’m more at peace than “laid-back” ever was. The real thing doesn’t require you to disappear. It was waiting on the other side of showing up as an actual person.
— Adam