Self-overcoming, especially in the Nietzschean sense, doesn’t necessarily lead to empowerment, at least not in the way we often hope. It can also hollow out spaces where we once found comfort, where we once understood others. There’s a loneliness in it—a deliberate isolation, as if to shed the old self means severing ties with everything that once made you feel like you belonged.

Nietzsche’s concept of the "Übermensch" isn't a celebration of some transcendent, self-assured figure. It's the person who goes beyond, sure—but who does so alone, estranged even from the ordinary aspirations that tie most people together. The “beyond” he reaches isn’t filled with glory, but with uncertainty, with an absence of shared meaning, and with the crushing weight of realizing how alone one can be in the pursuit of something other than what is given.

That loneliness isn’t just personal, though—it’s also relational. It bleeds into our interactions. When we outgrow old frameworks, or when we shed illusions that most people still cling to, we lose the ability to communicate those shifts. The mutual misunderstandings you mentioned arise here. It’s like trying to translate a language no one else speaks. The more you peel away from the conventional, the harder it becomes to find those who can meet you on the other side.

And yet, it’s also that loneliness that forms the crucible of something new, isn’t it? Not necessarily a “better” self, but a self that has faced its own irreducible separation from the world it once assumed it could inhabit easily. And that—well, maybe that’s the heart of the difficulty in self-overcoming: the depth of the isolation it can bring, and how even our attempts to explain it fall short.

The world is out of sync, like a clock whose gears keep grinding against each other. There's a dissonance between how we imagine ourselves moving through it and how the world actually presents itself to us—constantly misaligned, as if every attempt to make sense of it, every effort to fit within the frames we’ve been handed, just falls short.

Self-overcoming, then, becomes not just an inner rupture but an existential one. It’s a confrontation with this alignment problem: where the self, having outgrown the narratives that once seemed to hold everything together, finds itself at odds with a world that hasn’t adjusted, or maybe doesn’t even see the need to. The frameworks we use to make sense of things don’t fit anymore—there’s a jarring gap between our inner shifts and the external realities that keep pushing back, unyielding.

This kind of misalignment can breed a profound sense of alienation. It’s not just personal dissonance; it’s the realization that the collective systems we live within are also misaligned, pulling in conflicting directions, often with no intention of reconciliation. That’s why mutual misunderstanding becomes such a central theme in this kind of struggle—the world at large is still speaking a language that doesn’t account for the depths of these transformations. So, no matter how much we try to articulate what’s been uncovered, we end up talking past each other.