Reality Laughs

I just had a chat with a neighbor. “The world today, yadda yadda yadda.” We both are about the same age. We have the same number of kids, also about the same age.

His future is smaller than his past. He expressed satisfaction that he’s on his way out—unlike his kids and mine, who are starting on the path of adulthood. He is winding down. Reeeeetired. Going nowhere. Literally and figuratively. He will die in his house.

Imagine living in that brain! I can scarcely sleep a full night with all the stuff happening in my life. My future is bigger than my past, without a doubt.

My wife’s future is exponentially bigger than it was 6 years ago. She tapped an unsuspected yearning and talent in business, and discovered . . . I don’t know (and I think even she doesn’t fully know), but she continues to find new excitement and new horizons.

So what’s it going to be? Is your future full of new, exciting, massive achievements and discoveries? It should be and it can be. At any age. My wife and I are examples.

Or is it:

My neighbor is already dead. He just has a couple of decades of walking the dog to look forward to, but he is dead.

By the way. When talking with a pre-dead or negative person, it’s important to not mentally assent to their dead mindset. Play the good reply game. Listen and in your head say, “Well, that’s a thought. There are other thoughts.” And especially reply to every complaint (politicians, taxes, whatever) with a positive counter-proposal that involves personal action required.

It’s good for you and it’s good for them. Their evil magic has no power here.

Email inbox. Calendar. Both are not the way I want them to be.

No.

So. What do I want?

Weekends.

I used to be a “Friday means it’s two more working days until Monday” kind of guy.

I can’t do it. Maybe someday it will come back, but right now the prospect of cracking open a computer and thinking . . . puts me in a low-level funk.

I keep promising people I will do their hard shit over the weekend and I keep experiencing my body, mind and soul in total revolt. Sundays have been depressing for the last three weeks by actual recall.

This is a project management and calendar management issue. Not a personal character issue.

1. Figure out how to make one person happy about one $THING that person wants.
2. Get money from the happy person.
3. Do that again with another person.

Don’t think beyond that point right now. Focus on making a few people happy. Prove it with money.

Don’t think “will it scale?” That’s like thinking straight from “I am going to ask her out on a first date” to babysitting your grandchildren.

But after proving it works? That’s where courage is required. Because doing $THING, which you think will make money and make you happy, will necessarily displace $OTHER_THING that you do right now.

Opportunity cost. Bird/hand/bush/etc.

Right now I have that dilemma. One person said “I will buy this $THING from you please make it for me to me.” We did not talk about price.

I like the process of doing $THING. I do it now, and a few test drives have proven successful in making money, but not nearly as much today and what I make right now from $OTHER_THING.

But $THING is sustainable long-term while $OTHER_THING is less sustainable long term. $THING is less stressful. It can be done from anywhere.

Short-term certainty, long-term uncertainty.

Courage?

This is the Editor’s periodic reminder to the author of this website.

You started this as a personal journal. It’s anonymous. You are writing it for you—not for anyone else.

You chose a WordPress blog as the journaling tool for minimum friction, and it’s working.

You allowed public visibility, without promotion, because it’s not up to you to decide if something is worth sharing with others. The universe decides.

Just write what you feel, what is true. It’s working for you—your thinking is evolving. You’re getting thoughts out of your head and into the world, exposed to sunlight. That’s enough.

Also, the little time stamp fetish—get over it. 😈

I am liberally using Freedom to lock myself out of Twitter. Some day I will ignore the corrosive stuff without assistance. Now, I need assistance.

I am in the midst of the 75 Hard program again. My life works better when I do the simple, daily tasks that it requires.

Specifically, I am in Phase 2 of the year-long arc of the program, which means accomplishing 30 days in a row of the standard requirements:

• Two 45 minute workouts every day
• A progress picture every day
• Drink one gallon of water every day
• Maintain a diet every day
• No cheat meals, no alcohol, every day
• Read 10 pages of a nonfiction book every day

Failure to hit the mark on any one of these means you reset the clock to Day 1.

It’s the little things that trip me up. I find that fascinating.

At Day 16 I didn’t take a picture, because I kept telling myself I would do it when I got home from the second workout. I didn’t. I walked through the door an completely forgot. (Now, the picture is the first thing I do in the morning when I wake up).

Start at Day 1.

Today at Day 21, I picked up the book I am reading, and from the way I organize my bookmarks I could tell that I had read 8 pages the day before—not 10. Clearly I had spaced out. I probably got up in the middle of my reading to get a cup of coffee, or maybe had a conversation with my wife. Whatever happened, I did not remember to go back after the interruption to complete the reading.

Start at Day 1.

What’s really interesting is that I don’t feel a sense of failure or shame at resetting the clock. I didn’t fail. I learned something interesting about myself.

Life is not a contest. Life is not a race. Life is not a series of accomplishments where you ring the bell to announce success—in the sense that success means “finished.”

One side of the coin says “finished” and the same side of the same coin says “starting.”

There is no other side of the coin.

Anyway. What did I learn about myself here?

1. Look at how I don’t even care about the arbitrary Day 1 stuff. I know what needs to be done, I do it. Yay me.
2. I am easily distracted. So have less shit going on, because that means fewer distractions. Say “no” a lot.
3. The big, hard stuff is easy. It’s the small stuff. Sweat the small stuff. Love the small stuff.

The still, small voice has spoken. Listen to what it says.

I did not know of this man until after his untimely death. Why are people talking about him?

Thank you — to a man I never met and will never meet — for telling the truth.

This just goes to show that giants walk amongst us today. Marcus Aurelius delivered wisdom almost 2,000 years ago, and Kevin Samuels delivered this gem 3 years ago.

Of the roughly 8 billion people alive now, how many others there must be, just like Mr. Samuels. This is a wonderful world.

Speaking about myself here . . . .

I am a problem solver. If something is “wrong” I want to leap in and fix it. That’s my brain.

That’s my job, too: people walk in and say “I have a thorny problem, please fix it.” I fix it. They give me money. Pavlov would be proud: it makes me want to solve more problems.

But! Thar be dragons.

It’s not a universal good to “solve” a visible “problem.”

What might look like a problem might in fact be a surface manifestation of a deeper condition. The deeper condition might be good or bad. Altering the surface manifestation might have a feedback impact on the deeper condition.

And the “problem” you see might even be a “problem” here but, transported elsewhere, would be a “solution.” Maybe a solution to something you haven’t even thought about yet.

My problem-solving method always starts with brainstorming all the ways I can imagine to solve the problem. But what an act of arrogance that is! Do I really believe that the four ideas I have are the only options available? The universe is far more varied than that. There may be 104 or 4 million things I can do. That’s why Occam’s Razor is a useful heuristic but not an absolute truth.

So I see things that I think are isolated problems that are not isolated. They have hidden causal effects in multiple directions. Unidirectional, multi-directional causality. I see problems that are in fact themselves solutions. I see a necessarily tiny subset of actions as the only possible response to problems.

I should just give up. It’s hopeless, right?

No.

We work. We make things “better,” within our best understanding of “better.” This is what it means to be human. And then we die. In other words, the urge to fix stuff, make things better (even if temporarily) is what we do. So . . . LFG.

Just temper your arrogance. you cannot know everything.

This is where the Lindy Principle comes into play. Be especially careful when confronting ancient problems. A quick and obvious (to you) action that will magically resolve a centuries-old condition is unlikely to solve the problem you see. If you have an easy, obvious solution, odds are that it has been tried over time and failed. That’s the Lindy Principle: things that are flawed will break over a long time period because time and random probability will deliver stressors that will break it. And something that has survived a long time has had untold stressors thrown at it, without breaking.

In short, if your brilliant idea is so brilliant, it would have been discovered already. As a rule, use that to tamp down your ego. Yes, astonishing breakthroughs happen. And yes in retrospect they seem obvious and simple. But . . . why is it your idea that falls within the category of epoch-changing intellectual achievement?

I guess this rambling rant can be summarized into three bullet points:

• There are no solutions, only trade offs.
• Be humble. You’re not that fucking brilliant.
• Help your fellow man make his life a little bit better. And the way to figure that out is to ask him—don’t imagine you know better than him.

And also this exercise is why the quest to write 1,000 blog posts is useful—regardless of the quality of the output. Publish, don’t polish.

1. No drugs or alcohol.
2. Family.
3. No debt.
4. God.

These propositions make me an outcast or a rebel in my home town. Or at least I’m unusual, therefore slightly suspect.

I’m not quite debt-free. I have the cash to pay off the mortgage now. But it has a low, low interest rate and . . . well, look at what the Washington DC crowd has done to inflation. There is no need to throw a lump of cash at the mortgage. Better to invest the cash elsewhere. With normal installments the mortgage will be paid off soon enough: in 31 months. I’m not sweating this.

The real battle for a good life is hand-to-hand combat with self. Do I live with a contented, peaceful, friendly, accepting mind? It is possible to live in a self-created hell, even clean and sober, free of economic pressures, and surrounded by loving family.

The solution is God. The Kingdom of God is within. Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven. Etc.

The good life is not made with externals. My car does not make a good life. The good life is a good interior life. A spiritual life. (That is why number 1—no drugs or alcohol—is essential. First, remove the impediments to clear thinking. Then and only then can you hear the messages you need to hear).

And that, dear reader, is where I am now: seeking God daily, hourly.