Reality Laughs

Just assume that everything you hear and everything you see is an attempt at manipulating you. Maybe it is benign as making you spend your money in a certain way. Maybe it is more sinister.

I don’t mean the fucking Russians and the fucking Chinese. If you see “the Russians” etc. as the bogeyman you’re intellectually weak and pathetic.

Of course these things exist. So what? Grow up. You’re still missing the point about life, who you are, what is important to you, and what is within your power.

What’s the easiest way to sense attempted manipulation? Your own emotional response. Is it intense? Does your mood change noticeably? Do you want more of it? It’s probably propaganda. Analogy: drugs. What is your reaction?

Subtler methods of manipulation are at work. Long, persistent, slow seeding of despair about The World Today, or Them.

What’s the defense? Two things come to mind:

• A skeptical-by-default perspective.
• Dunbar’s Number.

Skeptical by default

Skeptical by default is learning how to make your own brain question everything.

Good scientists, detectives, trial lawyers, and many other people learn this skill. You can, too.

But . . . the person to be most skeptical about is yourself. This is a hard and lifelong quest.

I know for myself that I am apt to accept everything I hear. I am gullible.

If I wait for a little while I will start to build nuance and questions. So I know to postpone judgments where it is important.

Dunbar’s Number

Dunbar’s Number means that you surround yourself with reliable people. People you know personally. There is an upper limit to the number of people you can know personally.

They need not have the same opinion as you. In fact, they should not. Don’t build an echo chamber of people with the same blind spots as you. Just find people as fiercely committed to the same Quest as you.

But you must know them personally at some level and have judged them to be of moral character and acceptable intellect. Your judgment will probably be wrong at times. No matter.

These are your canaries. These are your scout outposts warning of attack. These are your filters.

Strong people are harder to kill

I like the Mark Rippetoe quote and I think it applies here. Get your mind strong. Surround yourself with like-minded people. Get physically strong.

Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general.

Mark Rippetoe

I’m also thinking of the lyrics to the old Popeye song. “I eat all the worms and I spit out the germs. I’m Popeye the sailor man.”

You’re going to eat worms. Learn how to spit out germs.

Started and deleted a couple things.

They were spawned by Epictetus and the Enchiridion. I started rambling.

Stop.

My head is bolted on correctly at the moment. Plan my day. What will I do today?

• Take the car to the body shop for repair and get a rental car. Then go to work.
• Target task. Use Work Cycles.
• Remember to eat.
• More target task. (Remember that “target task” means do one thing until done).
• Go home. Light bodyweight exercise. Stretch Remember the idea of a recovery day?
• Eat.
• Airport for pick-up.
• Sleep.

Today’s title is plagiarized from Governor Cuomo’s PowerPoint online Covid presentations. First class buffoon.

These entries run long.

I have a short attention span.

Be brief.

I need to reverse my prejudice against living authors. “I only read dead authors” was my childish way of invoking the Lindy principle. If something has survived for a long time, it’s probably good.

Time to grow up a bit.

If energy is transmitted from human to human by language, I need to be open to all communication.

If I cut myself off from living people and read only dead authors’ works, I am cutting myself off from energy.

I was using “living author” as an equivalent to “shit information”. Some living authors may be generating shit, the equivalent of a middle-brow generic sitcom. Some, however, create gold.

Bob kept saying “You must have human help.” Live humans have the advantage of being alive. That means I can talk to them. I would be a damn fool to cut myself off from that.

My correct filter is not “is the source of information alive or dead?” No, the correct filter is “Is this information good or is this person full of shit?” That is not always an easy question to answer.

As usual, The Path requires judgment and nuance. I must do the work: hear what is said, and decide to accept or reject the offered ideas — and know why I decided what I decided.

As usual, every opinion has a price. The smug “I only read dead authors” opinion exacts a price: damage to my future self. I am not willing to pay that price.

I need these exhortations. I can’t hear this message enough.

Chris Williamson. YouTube. TedX. Newcastle. (Sticking this stuff in here for future text search reasons.)

Inspired by and largely lifted from Jordan Peterson.

Have a goal. This is where you want to be.

Know where you are now.

Think about what you need to do to get where you want to be.

What can you do, today, now, with what you have at hand?

Make the task really small.

Do it (or don’t).

If you don’t actually do it, then the task was too big. Break it down to a series of smaller tasks. Do the first smaller task.

Do it (or don’t).

If you didn’t do the smaller task, break it down again into even smaller tasks.

Eventually you come to a point where the task is small enough that you actually do it.

Now you have progress.

Judge yourself and reward yourself by looking back to where you were before. Look! You did a thing!

Rely on the unstoppable compounding effect of repeated incremental actions. You cannot fail.

Keep repeating the incremental actions by focusing backwards on your progress compared to yesterday you. You are relentless.

If you fall into the ditch, get out of the ditch and back on The Path.

You will fall in the ditch. That’s what humans do.

When you get out of the ditch and back on The Path, that’s you successfully harnessing the compounding, relentless, unstoppable power. A power greater than you.

Failed? No factor! Get small. Get on The Path.

Mission

Mission. BHAG. Quest. Heart’s Desire.

What do I want? Here I sit, a grown man, with decades under his belt, and I don’t know the answer to that question.

A mission is mandatory. Otherwise I will drift like a rubber ducky.

This, I don’t know what it is. Yet. I can’t articulate it except “peace” or “contentment”.

It may turn out that a goal is like the horizon: clearly visible, always moving as you move, and impossible to reach.

Rule of three

When things are really going to shit, I can barely remember to eat. I get in a doom loop.

Three things propel me toward my mission. Three is an arbitrary number, but the number reveals a truth: when the shit is flying (and it’s always flying) I can barely concentrate on one thing.

So, even in good times have three areas of responsibility and no more. In each of these areas, drill and rehearse and build habits so when the metaphorical bullets are flying, I know what to do.

The rule of three. Don’t get hung up on the number. It’s a concrete expression of “keep it simple”. Simple usually means just a few things. Three is just a few.

My three

Business. Body. Brain.

Business, because this is my chosen craft. I have some skills. Effort here leverages into money, and money is stored energy.

Level up as a laborer.

Body. This is self-evident: it’s good to be healthy. Let’s just keep the Starting Strength quote in mind here:

Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general.

Mark Rippetoe

Level up as an athlete.

Brain. This is where it happens. Get smart, get clear. Navigation skills are paramount.

Level up as a leader (of self).

I am pretty sure I read the book a long time ago. Forgettable. Or maybe I was not open to learning from it then and I might get something from it now. Who knows.

All I know now is that I’m not interested in books by living authors. Or at least they must prove themselves worthy by channeling ideas that are Lindy (sometimes inadvertently or with astonishing and perhaps unintended subtlety, e.g., Jocko Willink, who explicitly disavows the Stoics yet channels their philosophy).

Spotify just threw a track at me: The Four Agreements, mixed by Matthew Dekay and Martin Roth. Actually the YouTube edit is better than the one Spotify gave me.

Interesting idea (but low-budget interesting) from the excerpt: I am dreaming all of the time.

(It is also interesting how he morphs the meaning of words, like “dream” and “attention”. Powerful writing, persuasive unless you’re paying attention. Propaganda is built that way. But that’s not what caught my eye at first.)

Interesting idea (and this one is provocative and worthy of thought, compared to what else I heard): energy is transferred from human to human through language.

What first caught my attention, though, is the idea of how we are imprinted with beliefs in every conceivable way. Even the language we use (we are born with it) is thrust upon us and it’s construction dictates how we think.

Do not accept this idea as final.

We’re not helpless. We aren’t rubber ducks destined to drifting downstream, bouncing off rocks, stuck in the weeds, or drifting helplessly as the river flows.

Go back to the anti-victim mentality: “So what are you going to do?” Do something. Especially if you have been battered by fate.

From that seed grows Freedom.

Plant the seed.

Refusing to accept fate and planting the seed of Freedom? That’s Lindy.

I’m doing this for me. I’m not doing it for you.

If you see me as selfish, you’re missing the point.

Rise up a level in your thinking. If you don’t know what I mean by rise up a level, read Flatland.

You will see.

Because I’m in the middle of an action cycle, I see cause and effect more than usual. Yes, sometimes it’s correlation. But a few decades of experience tells me otherwise.

Today in Meditations there is a little excerpt that echoes this idea:

Humanity, divinity, and the world: all of them bearing fruit. Each fruitful in its season. Normally we limit the word to vines and other plants. Unnecessarily.

Meditations 9:10.

Then he goes on to talk about the logos.

Which of course reminds me of “by their fruits you will know them.” Matthew and Marcus Aurelius were more or less contemporary so it’s not a surprise that a meme might have circulated from Palestine to Rome. The idea is probably timeless, in any event.

Time for me to look at myself! What fruit am I producing? Fortunately for those of us infused with the logos (that’s me, and you, and probably many other humans) we have the ability to retool and start producing different fruit. Different results. Results more satisfying to me.

The ones who cannot change and produce different results are the “cannot” or “will not” people. The number of “cannot” people is probably quite small. Almost everyone who is producing a life that is unsatisfactory to himself/herself is a “will not”.

If you will not look at yourself, your ideas, your actions . . . all with an open mind and willingness to change . . . you’re doomed. You are a rubber ducky floating down the creek.

I don’t want a rubber ducky life.

The hardest thing to do is be open-minded and honest with self when looking at self. The next hardest thing is taking a contrary action.

Except it’s not hard at all. Say three words out loud: “I was wrong.” Look how absolutely insignificant that sentence was. Now you’re a free man.

What is stopping you from saying those three words?