the entrepreneur loneliness tax nobody warns you about

4 years ago, I was out for drinks with old friends in Berlin.

A few beers in, I could feel it. That sublte shift in energy. The jokes that weren't really jokes.

My intuition was telling me:

I wasn't one of them anymore. It was subtle, but it was there.

Not because I did anything to them. Because I chose a different path. Because I chose entrepreneurship and was starting to make money.

And in Berlin especially, wanting to make money makes you the greedy guy. The extractive capitalist.

That night, sitting at that table with people I'd known for years, I felt completely alone.

Here's the loneliness tax nobody warns you about:

Building something extraordinary doesn't just cost money and time. It also costs the people who can't relate to you anymore.

This is about that isolation, how it hits you, and what actually helps.

Getting out the crab bucket

When I was producing music, people got it.

Music is universal. You can show someone a song. Even if they don't like it, they understand what you're doing.

And I wasn't doing well financially. I was safe. Relatable. Someone they could root for without feeling threatened.

The moment I stopped making music and started focusing on business - crypto, AI, social media stuff - the first real division happened.

My old friends couldn't relate anymore.

I could feel people talking behind my back. Making me the villain in a story I never agreed to play a part in.

When I started my business, some people were supportive. Curious even.

But once it became visible that I was living a completely different life from them,

people turned sour.

It's like crabs in a bucket. When one tries to climb out, the others pull it back down.

The Family Paradox

My family is different than my friends. They support me. They want good things for me.

But they fundamentally don't understand what I do.

When I was making music, they kind of got it. Music made sense. But crypto? AI? Social media businesses?

They completely lost the plot.

I've tried explaining what I do every day. It doesn't work. The framework doesn't exist in their world.

I'm the only entrepreneur in my family. Probably for generations back. There's literally no knowledge or reference point for this path.

My parents always had jobs. Stable, traditional jobs. That's what they know. That's what they've been primed to think is right.

So their default reaction to any struggle is: "You could just go back to having a normal job, you know."

When something goes wrong, when I got hit by a big scam, when my accountant made a mistake with taxes - they can't relate to these problems.

They've never had them.

And when something goes right, when I grow my audience or launch something successfully - they don't have the progress meter to understand what that means.

It's not mean-spirited. They just don't understand the life of entrepreneurship because they've never lived it.

With my family, it's okay. They're supportive in their own way.

The harder part was realizing that even the people who love you most can't go where you're going with you.

The False Solution

For a long time, this just hurt.

I felt like I was losing friends by becoming who I actually am. That shouldn't be how it works, right?

I kept thinking maybe I could bridge the gap somehow. Maybe if I explained things differently. Maybe if I acted a bit more "normal."

I wasted so much energy trying to make people understand. Not to prove I was legitimate, but just to feel less alone in it.

Trying to get the validation back. Trying to fit back into their world.

That was a dead end.

The truth I didn't want to accept:

You can't make people understand a life they've never lived.

And the harder truth:

The more successful I became, the wider that gap grew.

Alone in the dark

The worst part wasn't the friends who turned sour or the family dinners where I felt like an alien.

The worst part was when things went terribly wrong and I had almost no one to talk to about it.

When I almost went bankrupt. When I got scammed. When everything felt like it was falling apart.

Besides my girlfriend and maybe one or two friends I found later who had similar backgrounds, I was alone with everything.

The wins that mattered. The failures that crushed me. The decisions that kept me up at night. The problems that don't exist in normal jobs.

This really fucked me up for a long time.

I felt like I was paying this massive price:

Losing my old life, my old friends, the comfort of being understood - and for what?

To be isolated when I needed support the most?

The Turning Point

The breakthrough came when I heard Alex Hormozi say something that completely reframed reality for me:

"If you want to be extraordinary, you cannot live a normal life. And if you don't live a normal life, by definition, most people can't relate to you."

I read that and it hit me like a freight train.

I'd been fighting the wrong battle.

I was trying to make my old life understand my new one. Trying to bridge a gap that wasn't meant to be bridged.

The isolation wasn't a problem to solve. It was the price of the ticket.

If you choose a path most people won't choose, you end up somewhere most people won't understand.

That's not a bug. That's just the deal.

Acceptance feels good bruh

Once I accepted that, things started to ease out.

I stopped trying to make people understand. Stopped defending my choices at family dinners. Stopped waiting for old friends to "get it."

I let them think what they wanted to think.

The second thing I had to accept: most people don't actually wish you anything bad.

They just have their own insecurities. Their own programming from society about what's normal, what you can do, what you can't do.

Their mindset often isn't even their own. It's inherited. Cultural. Unconscious.

So I let them be right in their own world.

And I focused my energy elsewhere.

Some tactical advice for you

Accept the trade-off

Extraordinary life = loneliness in ways normal life isn't. That's the deal. Stop fighting it.

Be forgiving

People's judgments usually come from their own insecurities, not from anything you did wrong. Let them be right in their world.

Use content creation as a magnet

If you post online and someone reaches out who seems similar to you - just meet them. This is how I've met some of my best friends now.

Build in public consistently. It filters for people who already understand your thinking before you ever meet them.

Quality over quantity

You won't immediately find a new group. Making good friends takes years.

Better to have 2 real friends who get it than 20 surface-level connections who don't.

Consider where you live

Some cities and countries celebrate entrepreneurship. Others treat it with suspicion.

If the cultural headwind is too strong where you are, maybe it's worth moving somewhere where the default isn't "business = bad."

Stop expecting people to understand

My family will never fully get what I do. My old friends won't relate to this life. And that's okay.

I've stopped trying to explain myself at family dinners or justify my choices.

The energy I was wasting trying to convince people is mine again now.

Ole's Bookmarks

My YouTube Channel is live, you can check it out here 🙂 

great framework to follow for creating content in the AI age

I've really come to terms with this now.

I'm spending way more time building relationships that are actually aligned. People who get it without needing explanation.

And honestly, anyone who turns away from you when you start building something - that's just a speed run showing you these people weren't meant to be your friends anyway.

It hurts in the moment. But it's actually doing you a favor.

If you're feeling this same isolation ,that growing distance from old friends, that family love mixed with confusion, that sense of being an alien in your own life - know this:

It's not you. It's the path.

And somewhere out there are people who speak your language. You just have to find them.

See you next week 🫡

Ole

P.S. please let me know if you enjoy reading this more personal stories