2023 Logs

Word Count: 26,218

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December

December 31 Smell Your Tea

When you brew tea, it's too hot to drink. Without pausing and paying attention, you'll sip it too early and burn your mouth. Savor the time when your tea is too hot to drink. It's not ready to taste, but you can smell it; you can feel the heat radiating through your cup. Like brewing tea, you must steep each moment in boiling, 180° awareness, else it will be watered down and lack flavor. Before you sip, smell. While you wait, be grateful and wonder. Don't rush.

Entropy is a bitch, and it's the nature of reality. But is Mother Nature a bitch? Or is she worthy of worship? If the concept of Mother Nature — a creator — is something to revere, then how could we lament such a fundamental characteristic of Her creation? Learn to love the Mother, learn to live within nature's trend toward disorder.

The bigger your topic, the narrower your scope needs to be.

It's dangerous and destructive to make sex an ethical issue. Sex for us — just like it is for dogs and ducks — is amoral, natural, necessary. The ethical issue is consent. Christianity has been the primary cause of this cultural phenomenon, by praising virginity and abstinence and condemning unsanctioned sex. But if we loosen the cultural cuffs on sex and tighten the norms around consent, everyone would have healthier, better — and likely more — sex.

December 30 The feminine desire is to have kids without having sex. The masculine desire is to have sex without having kids. Those are the conceptual extremes, and both are impossible. The reality, within every person, is a homogenous yet unequal mix of both energies.

Religion is a source of ultimate comfort (e.g, the promise of eternal life after death). Maybe that's why it feels inauthentic and untrue to me. What new truths have you learned that made you more comfortable? The character of the universe is not simple and unified but paradoxical and entropic. Our greatest fears and pains and worries are all assuaged by the Christian doctrine. Sad that your mom died? Don't worry, she's in a better place, and you'll join her soon. Worried that you might be a bad person? Go to confession and take Communion. Unsure of why you're here or how life began? Read the Bible. Unclear of what you should spend your time doing? Are you afraid of being selfish? Do you not trust yourself to adhere to a self-ascribed morality? Follow Jesus. Religion offers simple answers to unanswerable questions. That's why it seems inauthentic and untrue.

Often, what you think is your intro should actually be your conclusion. Open with a question and save the answer for the end — so that you give your reader a reason to read, and a satisfying resolution.

It is enough to justify your philosophy with your experience — not enough for academia but enough to make an impact on other people.

Don't write about a timely topic unless you can use it to make a timeless point.

No matter how well you think you know yourself, writing will reveal what you don't.

Most philanthropy is guilt- or status-driven.

Here's my playlist of top-tier doomed-romance films: Past Lives, 500 Days of Summer, Marriage Story, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, La La Land.

The cohort is as a fundamental model of community. On a small scale, you have an elementary and high-school cohort. On a large scale, you are alive with a small portion of humanity, whose lifespans intersect with your own. As a model for community, the cohort is about chance connections and a group navigating similar circumstances and facing adversity together.

December 29 The paradox of mindfulness: being aware of the moment and being in the moment are fundamentally different things. Mindfulness is meta-experience, which means it is not presence.

If you’re struggling to write, you either don’t know what you’re trying to say or you’re trying to say too much.

The best way to express a philosophy is to render it as a character and embed it in a story: Socrates, Buddha, Zarathustra, Monsieur Meursault, Icarus, Alice, Jesus, Oedipus, Odysseus, Prometheus.

The glaciers are melting. Yes, they are. And they have before. Once we're extinct, they'll be another ice age, and the glaciers will rein again. Of course, let's try to stop the glaciers from melting, but let's not pretend that we could ever possibly kill them. That's too great a feat for mere mortals. We're not saving the planet. We're saving the planet for ourselves.

December 28 Ideas are power-laws. The more you work you do with ideas, the less work you have to do for the same results.

December 24 Inflation is an increase in price without a change in value. Appreciation is an increase in value, relative to a previous price.

December 23 I just met a guy named Harley whose parents' home is in Asheville. Harley lives in Kinnelon, NJ, and works for L3 Harris. Harley, before I knew him, was riding in the middle-seat across the aisle, in my row, on our flight from EWR to ORD. Their trio was pretty chatty, led by a spunky girl in the window-seat, whom I overheard was studying abroad in Spain. The guy talked to her enough and was awkward enough, and she was pretty enough where I could safely assume that Harley was smitten.

As we deplaned, I tried to let their whole trio exit before me, together, but the girl in the window-seat waited back for her bag and let me go ahead. I stepped into the aisle between her and my boy, Harley (before he was my boy), and felt like I'd failed to fuel the romance. It's the holiday season! I can't be stepping on dreams. All my suspicions of Harley's smitten-ness were confirmed when he glanced behind him to see where the girl was, clearly wondering whether he would talk to her again. Actually, as I was walking behind him, I was waiting for him to catch a backward glance, to confirm my suspicions of his smitten-ness and timidity. Damn, I'm perceptive! (Oooph, that's a little arrogant. But hey wait, is it arrogant if I am aware of it being so and couch my arrogant statement in a too long aside to assure a theoretical reader of my humility?) That glance permitted me to say to Harley the thing that I'd had a growing impulse to say.

I'd been there. Planes, actually, are among my most successful arenas for courtship. Junior year of high school, I asked prom date to the dance using the aircraft's intercom (but had no plan for what would happen after and weirdly walked over and had a random man in the aisle stand up to let her out from the middle seat to give me a hug before sitting back down, and forty of my classmates witnessed this, who were all there because we were headed back from a choir performance at Carnegie Hall). The summer prior, I made a last-minute, illegal seat-change to bunk with the prettiest girl on our student-travel trip to Argentina. We intermittently made out from Buenos Aires to Miami. (I had just met this girl on the trip, and I'd been in the friend-zone with my prom date for years, hence the hug.)

Anyway, I was intimately familiar with the situation my boy Harley found himself in today. His quick glance back down the aisle was, in fact, double confirmation that I had the grounds to say what I wanted to say. Before that, as we were taxiing to the gate, I also noticed him absentmindedly flipping through a seat-back mag while he was talking to the window-seat girl. (That's a tell for a lot of guys. Is he acting disinterested and distracted? He's insecure and has convinced himself you're out of his league.) Off the jet bridge, in the arrival gate, I stood by Harley, pretending to be checking the gate of my connection, until the girl came out and said goodbye. He wised her a Merry Christmas but pretended to be busy with his phone. Just after she walked away, I said my line: "Hey, did you get her number?"

Harley and I had not spoken. These were the first words I had uttered to this stranger. To his credit, he was smooth and honest with his response: "I didn't," he said with a smile of fraternal understanding.

"This is your chance. You've got this," I said.

"Nah," he said with some head-shaking and a few lousy excuses about her living in Spain and whatnot. (Recall from my eavesdropping that she is not Spanish but studying abroad in Spain. Harley was trumping up his excuse by leaving out that detail.)

"You could be friends. Let's go," I said, gesturing that he and I run after her, and I hand him off to give the ask.

It wasn't going to happen. I asked if he was interested in her and if they got along. He dodged, saying that they enjoyed talking. I understood. I'd been there (but in high school). Harley was at least my age, maybe 25. I was disappointed but didn't show it and shook his hand, finally learning the name of this stranger: Harley, who was on his way to his parents' home in in Ashville — today, without the girls number. Harley works at L3 Harris, but just like everyone else I've known to work there, he says he will leave soon and is looking at other jobs. I wonder if he negotiates pay like he courts women. Maybe his next job will require him to move to Spain.

Most times I pee at a urinal, I stare that the wall in front of me and try to focus on the smallest little thing I can see, wether it's a spec in the grout, a fleck in the tile, or a mark on the wall. It's a practice of pseudo-mediation I have. Today, it made me think about how rarely we use the full measure of our visual focus. It's only when I'm at a urinal that I pay attention to something so small.

December 22 Resist the winds that push you from your way, but heed the omens that tell of one better, a way that you have yet to consider.

[[Die at Sea]]

I happily embrace the feminine energy of an inscrutable legacy. I don't need credit for the great things I do. I don't care whether I'm remembered. The only thing I care about is becoming the best possible version of myself, while doing right by everyone I interact with along the way.

I have no kinship with the men who seek a stone-etched legacy. Strip me of money, fame, and notoriety; leave me with a sense clarity, strong relationships, and meaning. I would die happy.

[[Not all "great people" lead great lives.]]

As an editor, if you can't see the forest for the trees, you're failing. As an editor, you have to see the forest, the trees, and the leaves — and move between those scopes nimbly.

[[Park-Ranger Revision]]

How can I reach DFW's level of English-mastery without getting an MFA?

To assume a stance of objectivity is to remain ignorant of your subjectivity.

Here's a coined term for the misconception that other people are doing more with their time than you (or for the myth successful people get good overnight, or the related myth that people like news anchors also have time to write their own memoirs): The Santa Claus Effect. We inflate the idea of what other people are accomplishing and how productive they are — just as we do with Santa. We imagine him traversing the globe in a night and hand-delivering presents to eight billion people — all while we're asleep.

Doesn't "traveling" feel like it should have two Ls? Look at its past-participle cousins with double consonants: "betting," "getting," "sitting," "ridding," "bidding," "kidding." But I guess the 'L' is just an exception: "quarreling," "barreling," "appealing," "reeling," "feeling," "dealing."

Original Sin is a man-made justification for his own insecurities and low self-esteem.

(Then, religious devotion — according to what Kant would call "an ecclesiastical faith" — is a clear path to remedying those insecurities and, to a believer, also the only available path to do so.)

Warren Buffet said that the best portfolio is the entire market, and the best time horizon is forever. It's a clever way to say that the market trends upward in the long term. But that advice is only an ideal, a heuristic. You can't hold the entire market, and you can't hold it forever. If you translate the same advice to practical terms, it's this: the best portfolio follows the long-term trend of the market, and the best time horizon is indefinite.

An indefinite time horizon is better than an infinite one. If you're close to retirement or death, you don't want to keep holding everything until the last possible moment. If your time horizon is indefinite, rather than infinite, you have the ability to sell. And if your time horizon is indefinite, rather than immediate, you have the freedom to buy and hold through market dips.

The more market-independent you can be, and the more you can align yourself with the long-term trend of the market, the better off you'll be as a retail investor.

December 21 Live In The Third (Interval)

To create harmony, all you need are two frequencies separated by an interval less than an octave. The simplest and most pleasing two-note harmony (interval) is the third. Sing aloud to yourself: "Do, Ra, Mi." A third is the interval from "Do" to "Mi." (If you have a friend — or a willing stranger — nearby, ask them to sing the "Mi" to your "Do," so that you can hear and feel the harmony.)

For contrast, take the major second interval: "Do, Ra." It's just as simple — two notes — but not nearly as satisfying to the ear. They sound in competition, whereas "Do" and "Mi" collaborate in the interval of the third. You know the minor second from the Jaws theme, and the major second is similarly disconcerting.

In life, we two often see the world as if it consists of dichotomies: masculine or feminine, success or failure, confidence or insecurity, conservative or liberal. We too often see the world as only comprised of two notes, only one step apart. They play at each other, as a call and response like the Jaws theme: "Duh...Duh, Duh...Duh, Duh Duh, Duh Duh, Duhduhduhduhduh." "Aaagh!" And we feel like we have to choose one side.

Instead of choosing one of any two extremes, choose to live in The Third. Stretch the extremes so that they are two steps apart, and leave room for yourself to exist in the middle, along the spectrum of the duality (not a dichotomy). Harmony does not mean balancing two things and taking them both at half-portion. It means having both in full at once. It's almost paradoxical, but I assure you it's possible. Play "Do" and "Mi" together. Find harmony among the dualities of life: masculine and feminine, success and failure, confidence and insecurity, conservative and liberal. Live in The Third.

[[Live in the Third]]

December 20 The thing to focus on when you dream journal is not the dream-content but the structure of the content and how you respond to it. Map the structure of the dream-content to your waking life, usually through an emotion — pride, guilt, excitement, fear — and examine your subconscious response to now whether you can trust your instincts or whether you need to overcome some blockers/insecurities around that thing.

Response in the Substack comments section: "I’ve always regarded the Fall as the story of man receiving the gift of divine knowledge — the knowledge of good and evil, self-awareness, sin. I like what you say about finding gratitude in the fact that life is a gift, regardless of whether it is finite or eternal. However, I’d argue that Adam and Eve wouldn’t have had the awareness to see life as a gift. In Eden, before the Fall, they lacked self-awareness and the divine knowledge and probably did not feel gratitude, because they were just living and were unaware that living is a gift."

Today, everything is treatable, so everyone is treating everything. We live longer than our ancestors did, but we have a higher rate of chronic illness. Everything is treatable, so why put in the work to prevent a thing?

A Shiny Dime is the most compressed version of a specific and surprising idea.

December 19 Send a week trying to minimize the number of ads I see, and log all the ads that I do — the ones that are unavoidable, that trespass on my optical real estate.

A third of the people on the 8:00 am 156 bus to Port Authority have their eyes closed. And they're not meditating. Maybe it's the end-of-year angst and exhaustion (today's December 19), or maybe they have to nap on their commutes because their lifestyles don't sustain them and their work doesn't excite them.

December 18 I want to consume long-form narratives visually, because that medium adds so much depth and economy to the storytelling. (Think of an actor's subtle facial expressions and the immersive expanse of an establishing shot in films vs. pages of exposition and descriptive language in novels). This means I would rather watch a film or play a video game than read a novel (mostly because I really enjoy films and video games — not just for the sake of being efficient). In most cases, I am willing to give up having my version of a story exist in my head, so that I can spend my reading time on the types of writing I want to write: narrative essays, nonfiction books, popular philosophy, and short stories. This would let me learn more about writing from what I read. You can't render a nonfiction book in a visual medium, and short stories are richer in your head than they would be as four-minute films. Both nonfiction and short fiction (idea- or theme-focused content) benefit from the economy of prose, whereas long-form narratives (character-, setting-, and plot-driven content) benefit from the economy of motion-picture.

Read to become a better nonfiction and short-fiction writer. Watch films and play video games to learn how to deliver a captivating, long-form narrative.

[[Manifesting My Ideal Information Diet]]

"The young man who became the wanderer... wonders: Who learns the most? The one who has seen every corner of the world, or the one who made it to the top of the great mountain at its center?" – Like Stories of Old on The Eight Mountains

December 16 I used to look at a Lamborghini and want one. Now, I look at a Lamborghini and wonder what the owner had to give up to get one.

I subscribe to a local, practical ethics. I strive for the following ideal, and achieving this is my definition of living a moral life: do right by yourself and everyone you interact with. This is an ideal because it is approachable but unattainable; you will inevitably say something you shouldn't or wrong someone. But this local, practical version of ethics is all that you need to focus on to live a good life. You don't have to torture yourself about how you should sacrifice your own happiness to reduce the suffering of others. Instead, you can treat everyone with dignity and respect and help everyone you meet live a more enjoyable, meaningful life. Keep it local. That's all we're evolved to handle.

December 14 Usually what's scarce is expensive; it's simple supply and demand. Silence is scarce in New York City, but it's free to go to the New York Public Library. That's a paradox in a capitalistic society but a welcome one to me.

A piece of practical wisdom: other people don't share your insecurities. The worst way to interact with the world is to assume that everyone is worried about what you're worried about. The best way to be in the world is to acknowledge the reality that everyone is consumed by their own thoughts, their own insecurities. No one but you has the thoughts that go through your head.

December 13 I've always been interested in quantifying qualitative things — applying an analytical mind to what is subjective and unpredictable. Now, I'm obsessed with it, but in a different way. Now, I lean more on my intuition. I'm not concerned as much with quantifying as I am about sensing quality or intuiting what can't be directly measured or observed. I find this skill so valuable and so rare. It's the foundation of good taste. Applied on the largest scale possible, having good taste is how you decide what to spend your time doing before you die; it's how you live a good life.

Genesis as a Myth

Present a new way to read the Bible: it's the most successful story ever written by humans. Of course, that would diminish its significance in the eyes of a believer, since I'm saying it's not the word of God. But to a non-believer, that would elevate the book's significance. Think of how much we value stories and live by them and for them already. We tell stories to explain the world around us and how we are within it. The Bible, better than anything before it, captures the latter. It tells a convincing story more about human nature than Nature, unlike the pagan and polytheistic traditions before. It was the first transcendental story to appeal more to our minds (e.g., the concepts of Original Sin and The Trinity) than to our senses and survival needs (e.g., praying to the god of the harvest for rain).

Here are some examples from Genesis of how to read the Bible as a piece of literature:

• Labor and childbirth are painful for women, so man invented a story with a crime that would be worthy of such a "punishment": Original Sin.
• Men are violent and kill their kin, hence the story of Cain and Abel to justify this characteristic as part of our fallen nature.
• Women are a mystery to men, and men want to act as if they have the power — when, in fact, they live their lives according to the women they want to attract. To explain the male-female dynamic, men wrote about women as having been created from a part of man (a rib) and made Adam's Original Sin deferring to Eve, when she offered him the apple. Eve's sin was disobeying The Father, and Adam's sin was following a woman.

Eden Is Hell Too

Hell is eternal suffering for the body. Heaven is eternal suffering for the mind. Eden and Heaven are stagnant, unchanging — completely counter to the nature of our universe and of ourselves. We are entropic and ever-changing. We are unfit to exist in a place of perfect, eternal order. What would there be for us to do or strive for or hope for or love? There would be everything always as it was. We would have no agency. The world wouldn't need us in it. It would be the exact same without us. That's not true on Earth, our world. We can act in the world and dictate change and impact people. None of that was true in Eden, and it wouldn't be true in Heaven. As for Hell, no human is deserving of eternal torture, especially for disobeying overly-particular, amoral rules about what it means to be obedient to one idea of what God could be. Neither Hell or Eden is an existence fit for man.

Travel vs. Adventure

When you ask people what they would do if they didn't have to work, too many say, "I would travel the world." It makes sense why this is the answer, why it's so appealing, but we're lying to ourselves if we think meaning and fulfillment in life depend on the range of your lived experience. In fact, it all depends on depth. When you're anxious, can you reason why? When you're with a dear friend, are you fully present and undistracted?

We feel obligated to say "travel the world" because we have that privilege and because we know the value of traveling (or maybe because we've never really thought about what we desire). More important than traveling is going on adventures. Adventures have depth and a purpose and teach you a lesson or unlock a new skill. Traveling is all about range, breadth. How many destinations can I mark of my bucket list? Think of any human that lived before the airplane (or anyone today who can't afford an international flight). None of them had vague dreams of "traveling the world." That wasn't an option. If you wanted to go somewhere dramatically new, it'd be on a boat, a wagon, or a train, and you'd have to commit to going on an adventure to do it.

One more thing about the people who lived before us, without airplanes or social media or air-fryers: their lives still were meaningful and fulfilling. Actually, they were less worried about living a meaningful life, because they had fewer choices. Meaning and fulfillment came easier to them because they had no choice but to be present; the here and now was often all that was available. Depth was easy. Now we're optimized for breadth, and we're being strung out over everything, rather than connecting with one thing: here-and-now.

There's a skill to sensing someone's vibe and where they fall on the spectrum of masculine and feminine energies, and whether they have harmony among the two. For a sense-check, here are a few archetypes for each side of the spectrum, and for the harmonious middle:

Masculine: Finance Bros, Girl Bosses, High-Libido High-Achievers, The Aspiring Alpha

Feminine: The For-Yourself Talent Who Makes No Money from Their Craft and Doesn't Want To, The Devoted Mother, The Nature Girl, The Ski Bum

Harmony: The Ambitious and Authentic Artist, The Pro Athlete with a Traditional Family, The Executive Who Does Quarterly Meditation Retreats, The A-List Actor Who Doesn't Seek Validation, The Honest Self-Critic Who Finds Humor in Their Flaws

December 12 A heuristic for personal finance (during a phase of full-time work): Don't stress over having a negative-cash-flow months, but limit those to no more than two or three per year (for big purchases or expensive experiences), and make sure each quarter is cash-flow-positive; manage your spending and saving so that you guarantee quarterly and annual surpluses.

December 11 There is a rare synchronicity between your subconscious and your waking mind where a dream can seem like it was made to speak to you, rather than for you to interpret. It's like a rogue realist painting in a gallery full of abstract art. Sometimes, you know exactly what the artist (your subconscious) is saying with their work of art (your dream).

[[Dreams as an Aesthetic Experience]]

Neither the ant nor the snowflake has the privilege of appreciating their existence, because they lack our special self-awareness.

December 10 We humans are beholden to Nature. If you don't like the weather, all you can do is wait.

"Smart" is domain-specific. It must be qualified, to indicate the area of smartness: "smart about," "smart with," "book-smart," "street-smart." Wisdom is wholistic and unconditioned. To be wise is to be globally smart — smart about how to approach life.

December 9 As a writer (or any artist really), it's dangerous to take yourself too seriously. The more seriously you regard yourself and the status you ascribe to yourself for the self-perceived quality of your work, the less you focus on improving you craft. And that's what matters. Focus on the work and the words. Forget the artist. Like anyone else, you're just a person with a passion. You're not so precious.

As a writer, always know, and as an editor, always ask: "Who is your ideal reader?"

A good editor always knows how a piece could be better and always presents those suggestions alongside compliments to the writer, indicating that the editor also understands what's good about the piece already. These are not dishonest platitudes but freely flung praise, to keep the writer motivated and confident — not deflated by — the piece and the criticism at hand.

The highest conceivable ideal of who I could be is in no functional way different than the concept of God. Rather than subordinating myself to something external or someone besides myself, I can live life in service to my Ideal Self and thereby bring myself, effectively, closer to God.

It is my divine mandate in life to liken myself to Him, my Self.

December 7 It's dangerous to romanticize your occupation, vocation, or even your passion. The more you think you are meant to do something, the easier it is to find motivation to do it, yet the more blind you become to all the other parts of life you are meant to be living too. Don't let work prevent aimless wonder. Don't let objectives override relationships. Don't let your purpose draw you away from the present.

The crew member just made a special announcement thanking a passenger for his loyalty to United, celebrating that on this flight he will clear 1,000,000 miles — the equivalent of 737 flights from EWR to AUS. At least four people clapped, which was at least one too many, since I only see three crew members. The man has spent an exorbitant amount of money with one company and irretrievable time away from his friends and family. Who on this plane is enough of a United fan to root for that?

How much of our optical real estate has already been purchased by advertisers? Billboards, pop-ups, promos, sponsorships. Could you spend a day or an hour in America without seeing an ad? Will it ever get any better, or will it become ever worse, where each individual slowly loses the monopoly of his own attention to an infinite conglomerate of capitalistic competitors? Without our consent, our optical real estate has been zoned commercial.

It seems backwards, but your biceps are the hamstrings of your arms, your triceps the quads. Each pair of muscles correspond to pulling and pushing movements, respectively. It's backwards because your elbows bend forwards and your knees bend backwards.

December 6 The only thing to disrupt my peace was a pair of pissed-off Arctic Terns. If you come near the nesting sites of these birds, they'll take to the sky and start dive-bombing toward your head, as if they're going to rip it off and stick it on a pike to deter any other humans who would dare come near their young. These birds have two types of squawks. One is a normal bird-sound, just more frequent and more annoying. The other haunts me. It's a short, raspy growl, and it's the closest thing to a bird yelling "Fuck off!" But in that moment on that beach, I found a rare bliss, and the terns ceased to bother me. In fact, I included them in my thoughts as I paused to appreciate Nature's majesty.

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

A writer does best to keep in mind the questions that the reader will have at every turn. Those questions are sources of suspense, reasons to keep reading, and they help the writer find his way to answers (resolution).

December 5 The American ideal of freedom is not a freedom from but a freedom to. Rather than a freedom from all commitments, the American freedom is the freedom to commit to something that you deem meaningful, worthy of your time and attention. This type of freedom is suitable as the primary value of a nation, because it means that each citizen is endowed with the ability to live the life they want, as long as they protect that very freedom for their fellow citizens.

The scariest of the five senses, in isolation, is hearing, for when you can only hear a thing, you are left to infer the sight of it in your imagination: the only place where your greatest fears are a reality.

The third act of Oppenheimer is flawless for the same reasons that James Clear's book is titled Atomic Habits. The third act of the film, like the title of Clear's book, is a microcosm of the very theme and overall message. This is what Oppenheimer says beyond the story: we bother ourselves every day with the petty, material things of our existence, yet our attention to those things is what might cause the devastation of our species, by our own blind hands. Small things — atoms — when broken, can have disastrous results.

December 4 The requisite cost of any pursuit of untethered freedom is a loss of meaning. To chase complete freedom, trying to make life more enjoyable, is to flee from the commitments that make life meaningful.

December 3 Maybe these people didn't share my reverence for this country or this mountain, but even so, a Christian wouldn't walk into a mosque without first removing his shoes. If not reverence, you'd think these people would assume a posture of appreciation or respect rather than consumeristic entitlement and adolescent titillation.

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

I exist in service to no one other than the highest conceivable version of my self.

December 1 The best time horizon is not the longest but the most flexible: indefinite.

The patriarchy is not a society where men hold positions of power; it is a society that disproportionately rewards masculine virtues with power.

November

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

November 30 I'm in the midst of an existential crisis — but have no fear! This is part of the regularly scheduled programming. It's not so much a crisis as an existential jaunt or a tasting. It's like a race-car driver stopping for a pitstop and asking all the tough questions, even if there aren't any evident issues: "Do I have a flat?" "Any fluid leakage?". The most deadly crashes are those that come from faulty mental mechanics, so I schedule time to ask the tough questions and evaluate myself. I'm in the midst of an existential pitstop; give me a minute, and I'll be back on track.

It's too much to ask that we marvel at the fact of our mortality; the best we can do is accept it, and, along our ways through life, be sure to marvel at the majesty of Nature. Live within this harmony, where you appreciate the gift of existence and accept the fact of death.

November 29 Female artists that have the vibe:

• Florence Welch
• Caroline Polachek
• Orla Gartland
• Nanna Hilmarsdóttir
• Sorelle Amore

This vibe is that of the feminine archetype, that of a siren, a mysterious goddess, an agent of chaos, the source of life and the voice of death. These are ultimately confident women who don't hide their insecurities. They are perfectly still, have deep self-awareness and captivating personalities. They move their bodies fluidly and authentically. They dance and sing and live for themselves, not for anyone else, and it's why they have so much gravity.

Evidence: Florence in this interview and this performance, Caroline in this interview and this performance, Orla, Nanna in this performance, and Sorelle (— and one more example of the vibe)

I want to write essays with the linguistic control of David Foster Wallace, the perceptual layers of Joan Didion, and the concise insights of Emerson.

November 28 Steven Pressfield on How I Write: "Are we material beings having a spiritual experience, or are we spiritual beings in a material world?"

My entire approach to life, in a way, is in an effort to avoid emulating the almighty narrative structure of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. The resurrection part is great and essential. (Resurrect yourself whenever necessary, to rebuild — re-erect — yourself.) What I want to avoid is the Dark Night of the Soul, the point of no return, the all-is-lost moment, rock bottom. I want to live each day beneath the everlasting light of clarity and self-awareness and graduate, so that I can foresee the fall and catch myself — bring myself to rest before I topple over. The best lifestyle is not the one that brings the most success or pleasure or happiness; the best lifestyle is the one that can sustain you for an entire lifetime.

Lucky breaks happen by doing the right thing at the right time. So, you can make your own luck by doing the right thing all the time.

One of Steven Pressfield's principles of writing, with which I completely agree: "The female carries the mystery." And the female doesn't have to be a woman; it can be the sea, the desert, a storm, a crop field. In Arrival, it's the oval spaceships (my example).

In Praise of Four-Act Narratives

A two-act narrative lacks resolution (like if Return of the Jedi cut before the Death Star exploded and didn't include Anakin's burial sequence on Endor). A three-act narrative is complete and familiar (any famous story you know). A four-act narrative reopens the plot and makes you question whether the resolution was authentic, and the fourth act is brief, like an ellipses and a question mark. It doesn't say much, but in spins up all kinds of questions that you carry away from the story, unanswered (as in Eternal Sunshine, which ends with a loop of Joel and Clem running on the beach, suggesting that the story we just witnessed is inescapable and will repeat, or that it has repeated many times already). All of these structures can work, but only three-act narratives will have mass appeal, because they are the most legible, because they require the least amount of participation to comprehend.

One thing online-native writers do not understand is that grammar and mechanics do matter. Voice and style emerge from a writer using language in the same way over and over, and that way being different than everyone else. Distinctiveness is built on little decisions like when to use a semicolon, when or whether to make up a word, or when to use an em dash rather than a comma. The best writers have distinct and memorable voices because every linguistic decision they make is implicitly and ineffably consistent. You know it's DFW or Didion or Emerson. And, if you're always writing for Twitter, sandwiched between the noise of the rest of a random feed of content, you have no chance of developing such a voice and style for yourself.

Often, the answer to "How could that be?" is "It just is." The trick is to ask the question and pursue an answer and be honest and accept the fact that there may not be an answer at all.

I literally said this out loud to a friend today and had to laugh at myself: "Doing things unconditionally is my jam."

November 27 Familiarity porn: the endless drip of hearing ideas and seeing faces we know already, so that we can remain who we are and not be prompted to change

It's non-fiction writers name-dropping tech founders. It's Hollywood giving every high-budget lead role to an A-List actor (for a remake of another film, using legacy IP). It's people on your feed regurgitating your opinions, the opinions for which you chose to follow them. And the most popular and lucrative genre of familiarity porn is nostalgia.

Morgan Housel, James Clear, Mark Manson, I love your work, but I don't want to read another anecdote about Bill Gates's self-assurance, Warren Buffet's discernment, or Arnold Schwarzenegger's discipline. Give me something I don't know, or even better, something about your life that only you could write.

The antithesis of familiarity porn is David Foster Wallace writing about the adult film awards convention or about how his favorite tennis player (not the best tennis player of the time) broke his heart in Consider the Lobster. Or, it's Joan Didion writing about her experience at the California state water control center and her experience at the Hoover Dam in The White Album.

Approach universality not through familiarity but through intense specificity, the sort that you can only access when you write from your personal experience, rather than paraphrasing some tired anecdote or pandering to the people's demand for nostalgia.

November 26 I spent ~$750 total on campsites in Iceland, which, over 72 nights, averages to only $10.50 per night for an entire summer of lodging.

Iceland has 1% the landmass of the U.S. and 10% the population density. In Iceland, there are 10 people per square mile. Imagine if Yosemite National Park were only 12 square miles and had fewer than 120 visitors per day. That's how it feels to be in Iceland as an American.

My ideal information diet optimizes for a few things:

• Ad-free content
• Long-form writing
• And rigorous editorial standards.

[[Manifesting My Ideal Information Diet]]

Kundera's "kitsch" is the aesthetic impulse toward anything that is easy to like, like children playing on the playground on a sunny day or an immaculately played Michelin-Star meal. For Kundera, kitsch is the denial of shit, the attitude that nothing worth seeing stinks.

November 24 We measure all outcomes relative to our expectations. Satisfaction, or dissatisfaction, is the difference between our expectations and reality.

We are so beholden to batteries. Barely anything anymore operates using kinetic energy. Almost everything operates by drawing from a stored energy source, which means we must constantly work to fill those batteries. Think of a washing board versus a washing machine. Think of a typewriter versus a laptop keyboard. Think of a rake versus a leaf blower. The mini adventures of our lives end when we return to an outlet to tether ourselves again to the wall. How much more would we see and do if we weren't plagued by the anxiety of being disconnected?

November 22 There is almost nothing concrete to glean from dreams. Anything you see in them is actually the content of your waking consciousness superimposed onto the dream-content. The real value in dreams is not in premonitions or revelations but rather that they give you an implicit sense of the mood of your mind.

[[Dreams as an Aesthetic Experience]]

November 21 We fall into chaos, yet we must summit mountains to achieve order.

How poetic is it that we figured out nuclear fission before nuclear fusion? What better proof is there that the fundamental law of the universe is entropy — a trend toward chaos and disorder? It is simply easier in our universe to split atoms apart than to fuse atoms together. The latter requires more energy. And for what is that not the case — nations, businesses, people? We are easier to split apart than to bring together.

A simple fact that you'd never think about but that drives so much of our social and cultural dynamics: To maintain our population, every woman, on average, must give birth to more than two kids (2.1). That's because of a few even simpler facts:

• Men can't have children
• Everyone dies
• Not everyone chooses to have children
• And some people die before they are able to have children.

To make no moral statement about it but just to highlight the fact, if a woman has two or fewer kids, she is drawing down the average fertility rate (currently 2.3) and directly impacting the population growth of our species.

Reference: "Forget About Overpopulation"

Vision

• Write and self-publish a book on the practice of introspection and my personal philosophy.
• Publish short fiction in literary journals/mags and, later, my own collection.
• Become the editor of my own publication, featuring “self-investigative journalism”: introspective essays, drawing on the author’s experience and expertise, that prompt readers to reflect on their own experiences in new and revelatory ways.
• Own and operate a writing coaching business, where I train coaches and take clients for essays, short stories, and books.
• Make most of my money from editing and writing coaching so that I can always write what I’m interested in, never only for a paycheck. I’d rather always choose what I write and never make money from my writing than make money with my writing by completing assignments for others — hence the impulse for self-publishing.
• Be commissioned by magazines/publications to go on adventures in nature and write about them (e.g., backcountry skiing in Alaska).
• Book speaking gigs and slowly become an expert orator.
• Build a community where I regularly facilitate group discussions on philosophy.

If you start a story en medias res (in the midst of things), make that moment in fine rerum (at the end of things). Stephen King, in On Writing, says that en medias res is an honorable tradition but one he dislikes because it necessitates flashbacks. It's a tactic to hook the reader with action and create suspense and open questions. It's better than opening with boring backstory, but it usually serves no other purpose than being a good hook. It doesn't offer the reader something; it's more of a trick. But if you start the reader in the midst of action at the end of the story (without telling them it's the end), then the suspense lasts the whole story; there's no need for flashbacks; and you can plant seeds in the opening scene that help the reader track their progress through the story — where they come to understand the opening scene and that realization spins up new questions about how the story will end.

What does it mean to master writing? It means that no idea in your head could be better expressed by the hands of another.

The story of original sin in The Fall is man's justification for his own anxiety and self-deprecating insecurities. It is a story whose truth we must acknowledge, as a condition of being, and a justification we must discard, as a lie we tell ourselves about how we were meant to be different, and that we are insufficient as we are. That's the next evolution of Western thought: we are sinful, and it is a righteous gift to be so. Sin but no shame. Self-awareness but no salvation. Morality for the sake of it, when we stop lamenting the fact of our mortality.

November 20 My Top-Five Values

• Autonomy: Being self-reliant and self-directed
• Stillness: Maintaining the sweetness of solitude in the midst of the crowd
• Honesty: Telling the truth early and always
• Uncertainty: Reveling in mystery and detaching from outcomes
• Introspection: Reflecting on who I am and who I aim to be

Honorable Mentions

• Reciprocity: Returning favors and expecting no favors in return
• Adventure: Expanding my world by communing with Nature
• Conversation: Regularly and deeply connecting with others
• Openness: Being willing to change my ways

When you use an image or reference art, describe it enough for the reader to understand your point without the image. This makes your writing versatile. Your online article, which features the image, could be featured in a print anthology without the image. Or, someone could listen to the article and still understand it, without seeing the image.

This value of "versatility" is a counterpart to that of "timelessness." The more applicable your writing is across time and across media, the better it is, the more opportunity it has to endure and connect with people.

Life is the whole cake. Living is the icing.

November 19 The masculine impulse is to nurture ideas (and business plans and blueprints). The feminine impulse is to nurture people (and pets and plants).

Joan Didion is the best paragraph-craftsman I've ever read. Her paragraphs are, on average, longer than those in any contemporary nonfiction book or news story, but that's because Didion sees the world with such depth, through so many layers. For that, her paragraphs require a few more lines than those you're used to reading. But what you're used to reading lacks the craft and attention of Didion's prose. Despite their length, her paragraphs are more dense and concise than contemporary nonfiction and journalism. Each one is a three-act narrative, including an inciting incident; rising action, with the occasional plot twist; and a resolution.

November 17 There are at least three reasons to use repetition in your writing: emphasis, rhythm, and analogy.

Analogy is the most interesting use-case. If you repeat the structure of a sentence or paragraph yet change the content, you can relate two ideas without explicitly stating their relationship. You can communicate it implicitly through a parallel, repetitive structure.

Example:

Iceland taught me how to find harmony among the light and heavy. Iceland taught me how to feel fire and ice.

The structure is repetitive, not the content. And the repetition lets you equate two concepts: "finding harmony among the light and heavy" = "feeling fire and ice."

Maybe, in our technologically advanced Western culture, we neglect sleep and nutrition and exercise because our day-to-day occupations require less kinetic energy than those of ages past. Compare, even, typing on a typewriter to typing on a keyboard. You don't have to depress the butterfly keys on a MacBook even a quarter of an inch, but to leave any meaningful marks on the page with a mechanical typewriter, you have to strike the key with force and intent. If you haven't slept or eaten breakfast, your fingers might not have enough energy to do any good work that day. This, obviously, is even more true when you compare a day of Zoom calls and Excel to a day of coal mining or farming. When "putting food not the table" requires minimal physical effort, we tend not to care as much for our physical wellbeing. It's an evolutionary characteristic: use as little energy as possible to procure what's necessary for survival.

November 16 Title: Catchy, Mysterious, and/or a Coined Phrase

Subtitle: Context for the title, opens a big question-loop

Hook: Anecdote, pithy statement, visual, question, thought experiment

Thesis: Provocative, specific, refutable claim

Conclusion: argument recap, offering open questions, answering “So what?”

Kicker: Aphorism that repackages the thesis into something you can carry in your pocket; or restating the thesis in a new, surprising way; or a provocative question that helps the reader see the broader implications of the piece

You need clarity to set your heading, and you need courage to change it.

Dorothy has a lucid dream that teaches her to love her home and the people there, and that she has agency over her experience.

The paragraph-break is sacred. Don't abuse it. Every chunk of white space taps into the ineffable, linking two related ideas by an invisible string. The space between two paragraphs is like an electron cloud, with some subatomic — or more accurately, telepathic — elements in a superposition. For each reader, the electron cloud collapses into a measurement of the particles' positions. As he goes, the reader comes to a concrete, though implicit and subconscious, understanding of why two paragraphs are placed together, and how those two fit in the whole logical chain. Great writers don't explicitly state why two paragraphs go together; they use the paragraph-break, transitional phrases, and cross-paragraph allusions so that the link between any two paragraphs can be inferred by the reader. That white space is the single best way to convey meaning without words. It's is a miracle.

Thinking in the unit of the paragraph is the most important thing to master as an essayist. Everything within the paragraph should be opaque and clear, concise, so that the space between paragraphs can operate in the subatomic or ethereal realm where human minds connect without communicating.

November 15 The Lumineers say that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. And it's true. Love and hate are merely two moods of the same passion; the opposite of hate is indifference too. Iceland, known to its people as "The Land of Fire and Ice," is a place where love and hate harmonize in the voice of Mother Nature. She expresses love with a midnight rainbow, illuminated by June's never-setting sun, or by draping Aurora's flowing green dress across the black winter sky. She expresses hate with the summer's sideways storms and jet-stream winds or with the winter's unrelenting darkness and hazardous cold. Iceland is incapable of indifference. There is no obscurity, no indecision, no apathy — only obtuse expression. The island fills you with passion and evokes the full range of human emotion. In Iceland, you feel fire and ice.

My summer in Iceland was not a life-changing experience; it was life-affirming. It gave me permission to live the life I wanted, and it validated how I already saw the world: bursting with beauty and opportunity.

Satisfaction is Relative to Expectation

We feel satisfaction relative to our expectations. So, the only way to feel more satisfied is to lower your expectations or bring reality closer to your expectations. The former solution is simple but hard to implement. We are bound to expect to receive more than we can reach. Those ever-higher expectations keep us motivated, and they often come from comparison, envy, jealousy, and greed — habits that are hard for us humans to avoid.

The better route to satisfaction is not to lower your expectations but to partition them. Divide your expectations into two categories: what you can control and what you can't. Effort, attitude, focus you can control. Outcomes you cannot. If you want to maximize satisfaction without sacrificing ambition, reduce all expectations you have to zero, except what you expect of yourself.

Expect nothing from the world and the world of yourself. If you only set expectations for those things that are within your control, you give yourself the ability to determine your satisfaction. When you set expectations for outcomes, for what you should receive from the world, you will be perpetually dissatisfied, or at least, your satisfaction will depend on the whims of the world and not on your effort, attitude, and focus.

What does this look like in practice? Imagine a man arriving at a five-star beach resort. He's been anticipating this vacation for months, and after a long travel day, he's ready to relax. The room is immaculate — just his style with the perfect view from the balcony. He kisses his wife because of how grateful he is to be there with her.

Then the man goes to the bathroom. After a few minutes on the throne, he needs to wipe. And what do he find? "One-ply toilet paper?!" he yells. "This is unacceptable. Five stars but one ply?" He struggles to finish his business, writhing in frustration. When he finally emerges from the bathroom, he b-lines for the room's telephone, about to punch 0 and request luxury TP.

Before the man has a chance, his wife — always the voice of wisdom in his life — grabs his arm and says, "You know, you could just make two-ply out of the one-ply. Take twice as much from the roll and fold it an extra time." The man pauses and listens. His wife continues, "If you want to be satisfied in life, expect nothing from the world and the world of yourself."

November 14 Concision vs. Brevity The more concisely you can write, the better a writer you are. But concision is not the same as brevity. It is not about the length of your writing but about your writing's economy, the density of ideas. If you're editing for concision, you're not just cutting away; you're rewording and restructuring to make each sentence and each paragraph have more depth and meaning. An error people make in revision is trying to cut away information or ideas for the sake of brevity. The best writers simply repackage that information and fold the ideas into tighter and tighter strings of prose, for the sake of concision.

Trim the fat from your writing, but only after you've put enough meat on the bone.

— — Morgan Housel: "Brevity doesn't mean short. It just means there's no rambling."

Paul Graham: "Succinct doesn't mean short; it means a high ratio of ideas to words."

[[Concision ≠ Brevity]]

Nothing that is true sits on one side of a dichotomy. Everything that is true is some gradient within a duality.

Iceland taught me how to find harmony among the light and heavy. I learned to live within the duality, rather than betraying truth and deluding myself into choosing one side of a false dichotomy.

The Hierarchy in Your Head

An ideal is a conceptual aim that is approachable but in attainable — like batting 1.000, never lying, or living like Jesus. A goal is an concrete aim that is attainable — like doing ten pull-ups, publishing a book, or landing a job. An idea is a thought that helps you achieve your goals or approach your ideals.

This is the hierarchy in your head: ideals, goals, and ideas. Clarity comes from linking all these things together, when you're ideas help you achieve your goals and your goals will help you approach your ideals.

November 13 It's not just that the journey is the only thing that matters. The journey is the only thing that exists. Every destination is fleeting and illusory, like hallucinating a small island at sea. Destinations are merely moments in time along the journey. So, concern yourself with your heading, not with where you're headed. Clarify your direction rather than calculating your displacement from where you want to be.

My promise as a writing coach is not that you will amass a massive audience, land a book deal, or make your first dollar online. My promise is that you will write your favorite piece of writing — the one you are most proud of — and that you will learn how to make each essay better than the last by becoming better at revision.

November 12 There's nothing more humbling then realizing you don't know how to shit. In Iceland, I had the unsettling realization that I had no plan for going if I were ever out of range of some porcelain or a drop-toilet. Am I a fully functioning adult capable of navigating the wilderness with a backpack? Or am I merely a toddler who needs to be told where to place his doo-doo?

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

The most practical use of recalling my dreams is that they reveal open loops and unresolved relationships in my life. Whether it's a good friend I haven't checked in on or an old boss that deserves a thank-you note, when they show up in a dream, I know I need to reach out to close the loop and shed the guilt of my neglect.

Success is a feeling, and it's a feeling that many traditionally successful people do not have.

Examples:

• David Foster Wallace
• Steve Jobs
• Robin Williams

What's more important than money? Meaning. What's more important than salary? Satisfaction. What's more important than ROI? Relationships. What's more important than accolades? Adventure. What's more important than fortune? Fulfillment.

There are two life-changing aspects of lucidity (applying the lucid-dream state as an analog to waking life):

1. You realize that what you perceive is merely your filtered view of the world and not reality itself.
2. You start to believe that you can influence what you perceive and how you feel as you move through life, just as you can in a lucid dream.

You realize that the world you perceive is a world you create, and that you can re-create it.

November 11 There are first-graders playing soccer across the harbor from "The Troll's Throne," a seat-shaped, concave part of one side of the fjord. It's 9:00 PM in June. They'll play here for another two hours before biking home for dinner, spurred on by the energy that oozes out of the never-setting sun. In six months at this time of day, the first-graders may be at a friend's house beside a fireplace slurping down fish oil as their daily vitamin-D supplement. In six months, the soccer field, when it is not covered in snow, will see sunlight only four hours per day, even less when the east side of the fjord or a dense set of clouds get in the way. Six months from now, the soccer field will be silent and still and barren, but it will be no less beautiful.

(Six months from today, those first-graders might ride their bikes through the snow-plowed streets to watch backcountry skiers turn down The Troll's Throne.)

November 10 There's a fat left tail on the satisfaction vs. salary curve, meaning low-income people are much more likely to love their jobs.

It's because:

• They haven't built their lives around work and use work as a means to live the life they want, within their means;
• They have made their passion into their work and have oriented their whole life around the very thing that they long to do every day, and they've found a way to get paid to do it;
• Or, they have a heart of service and derive more utility from seeing the direct impact of their labor on people's lives than from adding to the balance of their bank account.

High-income people, disproportionately:

• Prioritize their income over their interests, their paycheck over their passions;
• Sacrifice time with their families and communities to do business with strangers;
• Or live in a place or work in an industry that's misaligned with their nature, because it offers the best economic opportunities.

Success is a feeling. We measure success relative to our expectations. So, the more you expect to feel happy all the time, the less you will feel successful, because you will constantly, cyclically, be falling short of or away from that unrealistic expectation.

College is not the time to prepare for your career. College is the time to figure out the life you want to lead. You have enough responsibilities for each decision to have real stakes, and the consequences of failure are mild enough for there to be every reason to give anything that interests you a try.

Let your fleeting thoughts go. The more you identify with them, the sooner you will delude yourself into thinking that your thoughts are different than they are. If you identify with your thoughts, you won't let yourself look at them without tinted glasses or a fun-house mirror. Look at the shadow and see it for what it is: a part of you.

Adventure sports, like skiing and scuba diving, sit at the pinnacle human experience. You are using technology to do something that no human would otherwise be able to do, while using your mind and body to operate the technology, to take you to a place on Earth that few if any humans have ever seen. It's the tech-aided exploration of Earth, and every experience sets you further apart from every other human that's ever lived.

November 9 No piece of writing is ever truly finished, because it could always be better. So, you have to decide when to stop revising. I say, revise a draft until it has taught you at least one way you can improve your craft.

For each draft, ask:

• What is the one thing that improved this draft the most?
• What is the one thing this draft has taught me about how I could improve my craft?

(I don't yet do this, but) keep a running document of all the one things you've learned from revising your writing. That document will be your touchstone for becoming a better self-editor, which is the best way to become a better writer.

What is the one thing? As an editor, for every piece of writing you touch, identify one thing the writer can do to most improve their draft and one thing that would most improve their craft. Be specific with feedback on the current essay, and use the current essay as an example of a concept that could be applied to all future writings.

November 8 They say that the opposite of love is indifference, and it's true. Love and hate are merely two moods of the same passion. The opposite of hate is indifference too. (Either you want so dreadfully for the other to be different, to be more like you; or you long so dearly to be different yourself, to be more like the object of your love.) Iceland is incapable of indifference. It's summers shine with the midnight sun, and its dark winter nights are adorned with green wisps of Aurora. In Iceland, there is no apathy, no indecision — only obtuse expression. What is it like to be in a place incapable of indifference? The place fills you with passion and evokes the full range of human emotion. In Iceland, you feel fire and ice.

(In Iceland, you love and hate, as She does — the Land of Fire and Ice.)

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

November 7 Iceland was not life-changing; it was life-affirming. It gave more depth, breadth, and clarity to the life I was already living, the life that I want to live until I die.

November 6 We are wholly insignificant on the scale of the Universe yet holy and significant on the scale of ourselves.

— — We are insignificant on the scale of the universe and ultimately significant on the scale of ourselves.

We each have an illimitable essence; the primary characteristic of man is his ineffability.

November 4 I paused on the roadside for 20–25 minutes and observed a crowd of horses behind a fence. One was visibly horny and behaved identically to how any man my age would in a bar. The male was chasing after the female, and another female was biting at the dude's haunches, fending him off from her friend. She wasn't in the mood, and after a while, he wasn't either. The moment had passed. I took a beat to reflect on how much I saw of myself in the horny horse. It was a humbling reminder that we are merely animals. Then I picked up my pack and continued my hike.

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

Every writer needs an editor, but editors are hard to come by. What writers really need is a writing coach who can help them become better self-editors, so that their writing improves enough to attract editors and readers.

New Rules:

• No video games in a day until after I've exercised
• No social-media scrolling (save Substack) until after I have meditated (for 15+ mins) or written (for 45+ mins)

Why? After I exercise, workout, or write, I will no longer want to play video games or scroll on my phone. Dangle a carrot in front of the pig until the pig loses its appetite for carrots.

[[Manifesting My Ideal Information Diet]]

In matters of physics or statistics, your feelings don't matter in determining what is true. But when it comes to deciding what you believe, how you feel is a valid criterion for deciding what is most true to you.

Pascal's Wager works as an argument for living a moral life but not for enjoying life.

The argument goes like this: if you live a good life, according to the morals of the Church, then if the Christian God exists, you'll go to Heaven and have an eternal afterlife; if He does not exist, you will have still lived a good life on Earth.

But if you live as if God exists, you'll regularly forget the very likely reality that your time on Earth is the only time you have to exist. If you live life as if the Christian God exists, you will fall into living as if the Christian afterlife exists. Like an elder with dementia, you will operate as if there's an eternal, blissful life beyond the one you already have, and only certain moments in life will remind you that life is finite and fleeting (empirically, maybe not absolutely).

There's a way to live a moral life for the sake of this life alone, and not as penance in hopes of Heaven. There's a way to live where, in every moment, I am aware of the finitude of life — an awareness that imbues each moment with meaning and gratitude. Without a belief in God, there is a way to live an ethical, enjoyable life until the day you die.

November 3 A litmus test for whether you're learning from a piece of media: "Would I ever want to read this information as a transcript?" If the answer is "No, never," then you're being entertained, not educated.

'If You Don't Like the Weather, Wait Five Minutes'

In Iceland, there’s this saying: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.” It’s a joke about the severe and volatile climate of the island-nation, and it’s a philosophy that propels its people. Even in the deep dark of winter, where ice covers everything and you see the sun for twelve hour per week, wait five minutes and you might see the Aurora Borealis. In the summer, when you trek into the countryside to camp or resolve to climb that mountain on your bucket list, you’d better do it before the weather changes, before a storm banks the corner five minutes from now.

There should be a second part of the saying that goes, “If you like the weather, pray for it to stay.” In Iceland, every square foot of blue sky is a gift. And when you’re living outside, like I was, the weather can have a pretty big impact on your days. I can tell you from experience that the saying is not always true. Sometimes, the bad weather sticks around for more than five minutes. Sometimes, you hike all day in the rain, and pitch your tent in it, and wake up to the sound of it.

But regardless of whether this saying is an accurate whether forecast, it’s still a useful mindset. It’s a form of faith. Even when the weather is bad and not getting better, you can find comfort in the idea that it might be better in just five minutes, and it’s not a lie. The could always change in the next five minutes. And believing that is enough to get you through the bad stuff before it’s better.

When you stop worrying about the future and embrace the idea of “this too shall pass,” you can sink into the present moment and fully absorb your surroundings (elevate your experience). The majesty of Nature and the chaos of her weatherly whims makes you feel 1) small and 2) grateful.

That feeling is my favorite feeling in life; you feel small on the scale of the Universe and ultimately significant on the scale of your self.

November 1 Aimlessness is one of the unique privileges of human consciousness. We may look at animals and envy their simple, anxiety-free lives; we may want to inhabit a head that isn't flooded with worries about the future and insecurities of the present. But animals lack the ability to be aimless. Every subtle movement is spurred on by some bodily function for survival.

As humans, we understand what's required for survival and can grant ourselves time and space where we don't have to worry about it. We have the privilege of spending time being aimless, yet we fail to indulge in that pleasure — one of the most blissful and creatively generative practices one can have.

[[Ideas Come from Aimlessness]]

One of the greatest highs of life comes from being on the edge of understanding with a eager partner in an organic conversation. Those moments are beautiful and exciting for both their rarity and their impact.

Rather than as pure speculation, read this essay as fiction, as if it were written by a young man reflecting on death in a world where the afterlife is confirmed to be one long dream...

Films and plays are perfect dreams from the collective conscience. Video games induce lucid dreams for one's waking conscience.

I hate the Screen-Time limits on iOS. They're so performative; they're barely hiding the fact they want you to stay on your phone, to keep scrolling. That's not directly Apple's incentive, but it's how they appeal to developers. To appeal to customers, Apple acts like this is a lifestyle feature to help you manage your time. But with no more effort than it takes to dismiss a pop-up ad that interrupts your algorithm-fed, short-form video, you can extend your screen time for 15 minutes or ignore your self-imposed limits for the whole day with a single (color-incentivized!) click.

I could be the John Muir of Iceland.

"The Bare Necessities" is not only an all-time pun but a rich philosophical discussion of what we can learn from how animals are in Nature. The bear lives like a bear — eats and sleeps and floats on the river according to the whims of his body and Nature. And every moment, he is only focused on the present, as all animals are. He has no anxieties about the past or future. The bear has all the carelessness of an animal yet the human faculty of gratitude, enough to marvel at the abundance of life and educate man on how to adopt his perspective.

By the grace of some deity (or elf), that French family pulled up in their van in a storm only minutes after the Polish women had dropped me off in the cold, wet, foggy, rocky overpass. I was 15 miles from anywhere, or — as it turned out — a warm, 10-minute van ride that dropped me off an hour early for the last ferry of the day.

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

October

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

October 31 The return key on a keyboard is a 1:1 map from the mechanics of a typewriter, but it doesn't quite work for how we write today. Why do I have to hit "return" twice every time I start a new paragraph, just as I have to hit the lever twice on a mechanical typewriter? You only use line breaks for lists and poems; the rest of the time, you want a paragraph break, not a line break. So, why isn't that the default function of the "return" key?

(There's the exception of printed and indented prose. But that could just be a toggle setting in any word processor: Are you writing a novel or an email? For most people, paragraphs breaks will do.)

October 30 There's something about this longing for rest that we have in busy times, or after a work day. But with enough leisure time available, you long to do more than just relax. You long to learn and grow.

Just think of anyone in the pandemic who started off relieved for being granted a clean break from their busy lives, only to be sent into a spiral of boredom that they had to climb out of. Most people took to new hobbies and filled their time with learning and conversing and contributing to their communities.

The same happened to me in Iceland. When I first got there — more than anything — I was relieved to have no obligations. I took pleasure in exploring aimlessly, reading and writing and bathing in the city's pools. When I left Reykjavik and started hiking, I would talk or sing to myself and even play with a fidget toy to pass the time. But after a certain amount of complete leisurely freedom, I started walking in silence and only uttering words to the strangers I met and the friends and family I called. I rarely watched any videos and never scrolled social media. My leisure time was spent journaling about my experiences or reading to learn new ideas and to study great writing.

When life is busy, I can play video games every day and justify it as relaxation. But if my calendar is empty, I can only play video games for so many days before I can no longer justify it, before I start using my free time to do things that are more meaningful to me.

October 28 The best reason to play sports as a kid: You learn to be coachable, to invite and implement feedback.

The Origin of Idioms

Most idioms are just more memorable, rhythmic ways of saying common things.

Examples:

• "Fought tooth and nail" x "Bit and scratched"

Once the phrase becomes remembered, it takes on a figurative layer, beyond the literal meaning of the word in the phrase.

The most impactful lesson that I've learned in life (and one of the easiest to forget): Success is a feeling.

We tend to measure success in life by the size of your house, the prestige of your job or university, the tics off your bucket list, or the number of plates you can bench. But when we measure success by material metrics, we always want more. There is no limit to how much money you could have, how much weight you could bench, or how big your house could be. When we measure success by material metrics, we forget that success is a feeling. More than any of those quantifiable things, success is measured by the calm of your mind in the morning, your sense of purpose at work, and how well you sleep at night.

October 27 Why do adults have to become parents before they give themselves permission to play at the playground?

Great editorial feedback improves the writer's craft, not just their draft.

October 26 A heterosexual man is so deluded that, based on the number of samples he gets from the good-looking dermatologist Dr. woman, he will convince himself thereafter in his memory that their conversation had a hint of sexual tension — rather than the reality that she had been friendly and attentive to him because he was her patient, not because of how he looked with his shirt off.

That good-looking woman cared for me, he thinks, forgetting/ignoring that the good-looking woman was a doctor.

She gave me a bag overflowing with samples of moisturizers, and it wasn't because of the severity of my rash or her office's abundance of lotions; it was because she was into me.

There's nothing ugly about being human, so don't hide what's shared among us: sex, dreams, sex-dreams, etc.

It's no secret that modern media incentivizes sensational clips and soundbites.

October 23On Hannah Arendt's active vs. contemplative life:

The contemplative and active phases of life feed each other, like inhaling and exhaling. Both are necessary, in a recurring sequence, and the alternative is pain.

October 22 Highly neurotic people operate as if the worst possible outcome is the most likely.

October 20 Social media is a game show. Every user competes for attention and the fame and fortune that follows, strung out on an endless drip of likes, perpetually dissatisfied for their ever-increasing appetites.

Every work of fiction is a fantasy. That's why it's worth reading.

October 19 Use a colon to attach one or more fragments. Use a semicolon to connect one or more sentences.

October 18 The faith required for morality: I am capable of discerning right from wrong, and I have a duty to uphold what I deem to be just.

Take pride in being illegible.

How to handle desire: Avoid all distractions, but not all pleasures. Align your desires with your values.

Give your vision integrity, give your word value by manifesting them in action.

Recalling a dream is like fishing into your subconscious. There's no way to know what's down there, but as you recall and your dream, you reveal an entire organism that was obscured by the depths.

The more you practice dream-recall, the longer your line gets, and the better your lure. You'll catch bigger fish and see them in greater detail.

[[Dreams as an Aesthetic Experience]]

October 14

Local and Timeless Knowledge

You can think of knowledge along a 2-D matrix, with the axes being Time and Space. There is local or global knowledge, timely and timeless knowledge. Depending on what you care about, how you live, and what you do for work, only one of the four quadrants of knowledge will be most relevant to you.

I want to live in a way where I prioritize local and timeless knowledge, where that is the type of knowledge most relevant to my life. I don't want to care about the world's problems, only my problems and those of my friends, family, and commute -- local knowledge. I don't want tog follow stock-market news and watch sports, only universal accounts of history and timeless works of fiction and philosophy — timeless knowledge.

The problem: modern media trends toward timely, global knowledge.

October 10 A maxim is a heuristic for action, an aphorism a tool for thought.

Aphorisms help you discover what is true. Maxims help you decide what to do.

— —

A maxim is a heuristic for action, an aphorism a vehicle for thought.

October 9 Some of my favorite moments are when I'm misunderstood. They prove that I can't be put in a box, that my essence exceeds definition.

October 8 Touch grass, kick ass (in that order).

Can I remain detached from worldly outcomes while still achieving in the world?

If you don't resolve your insecurities, they will rule your life.

There are two ways people avoid insecurities:

• Guilt — internalized, fragile, non-confrontational
• Blame — aggressive, dismissive, disagreeable

The antidote to both guilt and blame is radical self-honesty, -responsibility, -reliance. Know yourself and your insecurities and work to correct them.

October 7 The best thing you can do for the world is to become the best version of yourself.

Everything else follows from a concerted effort in that pursuit.

Subjects at Rest

Cultivate a practice of stillness, where you — the subject — sit on the banks and observe the endless Stream of Subjectivity: the happenings of your experience (thoughts, emotions, ideas).

October 5 In logical writing, truth is explicit. In lyrical writing, truth is felt. Meta writing is about how to best communicate truth through language.

Change is the only certainty. To be certain of anything else is to be in denial of change.

— — Change is the only certainty. Being certain of anything else is merely a failure to accept change.

— — The only certainty in life is change. Certainty of anything else is merely a failure to accept change.

Pass no judgement, give only feedback.

— — Level no judgement, give only feedback.

Give unsolicited praise and criticism upon request.

Fun reading is memorable writing.

Success comes from repeated failure, direction from many missteps, and great ideas from strings of duds. If you want fertile soil, mix in manure.

October 4 My little-league baseball coach repeated this maxim every practice and printed it on t-shirts:

Feedback is a gift.

It might be the greatest lesson I learned from playing sports. The more receptive you are to feedback, the more you'll learn and the better you'll perform.

Tweet

— — The greatest lesson I learned from sports was how to be coachable. The more receptive you are to feedback, the more you learn and the better you perform.

My Little League ball coach printed this maxim on a shirt and repeated it every practice:

Feedback is a gift.

— — On my Little League baseball team, we had three rules:

• Respect the game.
• No excuses.
• Feedback is a gift.

The third one really stuck with me. It taught me how to be coachable, which is one of the greatest lessons I learned from sports. The more coachable you are, the better you'll perform.

An aphorism is like a folded map you can put in your pocket.

— — Aphorisms are like acorns, if acorns could immediately unfold into great oaks. (An acorn in your hand, an oak in your head)

Don't read into things. Read behind things.

Instead of dreaming up ideas and implications that don't exist, take in the context of what someone is saying.

[[Conversation Culture]]

October 3 Only drafts can haunt you. Publish an idea to bury it. You can always resurrect it.

October 2 "Bad luck" is often caused by a lack of focus. When you have inertia directed away from yourself or out of the present moment, you miss things, lose balance, or misspeak.

Imagine your keys are loose in your pocket while you're working out. You lay down to do glute bridges or an ab exercise, and your keys fall out. But you don't notice because your headphones are in. That's the last set of your workout, and you leave the gym without noticing your keys are missing.

The distraction didn't cause a dire error. When you get to the car and notice your keys are missing, you go back into the gym to find them. Distraction isn't ruinous, but it's inconvenient and breeds anxiety.

September

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

September 29 Online writing has killed the art of the paragraph. Popular writers of old thought in the unit of the paragraph. Popular writers of today think in the unit of phrases, fragments: headlines, hooks, memes.

Instead of using paragraph breaks to separate ideas, we've started using them for emphasis, like bold or italic font. When we don't want the modern, short-attention-span reader to miss something, we put that thing in its own paragraph.

What you lose with this is the integrity and structure of a good paragraph. It's analogous to a three-act narrative:

1. What you want them to know
2. Why you know it
3. How you've proven it / why it matters.

Within any good paragraph is an inciting incident, some conflict, and a resolution. There are expectations, stakes, and a pay-off. The pay-off doesn't land if it's separated from the narrative by a paragraph break. No play has an intermission between acts two and three.

September 28 I live in a place where you need to be a multi-millionaire to own a house with a garage.

September 27 Setting your thermostat is like placing a limit order.

• The current temperature is the current price.
• Buying is setting the AC to "Cool" and setting the target temperature below the current temperature.
• Selling is turning the furnace on and setting the target temperature above the current temperature.

September 22 Why I should care more about birthdays: For every person, each birthday is like beating death in the Super Bowl. Another year you and I live is another victory for the human race over the cold indifference and disruptive entropy of the Universe.

September 20 Sacrifice is a vice.

Einstein and Oppenheimer made similar accomplishments and contributions to the world. But since the Theory of Relativity hasn't killed anybody, we see Einstein more favorably.

If those moments cease to be, it won't be a tragedy if all the moments that have been were as good as they could be.

September 19

Attune Your Taste

In this new paradigm of independent publishing, there are no more gatekeepers.

Everyone is free to share whatever they want with the whole world. But what we’ve lost with the gatekeepers are editorial standards.

Now, you and me — the consumers —must be the arbiters of quality.

You need to believe in God to think that life is worth living? Have you looked outside? (You must've never gone for a hike at sunrise.)

September 17 If you want to be radically different, radical things must first become normal to you.

Start with:

• Sitting in boredom
• Lingering in awkward silence without breaking eye contact
• Sharing how you actually feel and what you actually think.

Yes, these things are radical.

September 16 Dogma is the antidote to (the pain of) truth/reality, (and it comes at the cost of intellectual honesty).

Be an intellectual nomad; don't dwell in dogma.

— — Reality, by nature, is in flux. And for that very fact, any immutable belief is further from the truth than one that is malleable.

[[Intellectual Nomad]]

September 15 You have too many tabs open if you go to click one and accidentally click the 'X' to close it. This happens to me every weekday.

In a media landscape without gatekeepers, you must be the arbiter of quality.

— — In a world without gatekeepers, you must be the arbiter of quality.

— — (Curate the content you consume –– as if you were the editor of a major publication.)

(Edit your own work, and only consume information with high editorial standards.)

September 14 Too often, progress comes at the price of stillness and gratitude.

In pursuit of progress, we pick up our pace, and we start moving so fast that we don't enjoy the process and lose sight of how far we've come.

Ideally, we would always make progress but at a sustainable pace — slow enough that we never lose sight of where we are right now.

[[Defining Success and Managing Expectations]]

September 12 To become a better writer, spend more time editing. Your editing will make you a better writer, and you can spend less time editing (for an equivalent quality).

An unwritten thought has no weight in the world, but a written thought can tilt the world.

September 10 Just as a task will fill the time allotted for it, leisure time balloons to fill the time between tasks. If you want it done, schedule time to do it.

Editing is an entirely separate skill from writing. And the best way to become a better writer is to develop the skill of self-editing.

We humans have these infinite concepts of what could be, yet we are stuck in the finite concrete of reality.

Example of reciprocity: When you're done playing pool, re-rack the balls for the next players.

(Also: Refilling the Brita water jug)

September 9 On of these days, I will die. Until then, I will live.

September 8 In the course of my life, I will spend hours contemplating suicide, so that I don't consider it for a second.

— — In the course of my life, I will spend hours contemplating suicide, but I won't consider it for a second.

— — In the course of my life, I will spend hours contemplating suicide, so that I won't consider it for a second.

— — In my life, contemplate suicide for hours but never consider it for a second.

"Evergreen" isn't even an evergreen term. It's a product of the age of content and the attention economy. I no longer want to write evergreen essays. I want to write timeless essays.

September 7 When giving feedback, be provocative, not prescriptive.

As an editor, don't impose your vision for the piece. Instead, ask questions that provoke and reveal the writer's vision. Only make statements about:

• How you understood the piece and your main take-away
• How it made you feel
• What you would like to see expanded, added, or omitted.

These are provocative statements. If you are tempted to make a prescriptive statement, phrase it as a question instead.

September 6 If ever you have the chance to compliment or support someone with actions rather than words, do it.

• Don't send your condolences; show up at the funeral.
• Tell her she's pretty in the midst of prolonged eye contact.
• Invite an old friend over for a meal.

Before you ask someone a question, ask yourself how you could make that question unique. Do you want a conversation to be predictable or revelatory? That all depends on what questions you ask.

September 1 If you take the goal of democracy to be perfectly fair representation for all people and equal opportunity without exception, then we are failing. But if you reframe the aim of democracy as avoiding authoritarianism, we are wildly successful.

August

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

August 29 Don't give it any credit. It isn't doing shit. All it's doing is reading and rewording what humans have written.

AI is not thinking; it's strategically regurgitating.

Conservatives think that progress comes from the movements of the free market. Liberals think that progress comes from policy.

They're both right. Social progress comes primarily from policy, then implicitly from economic freedom and access to quality education. Material progress comes primarily from the free market and can be accelerated by stimulus policy.

[[The liberal asks what's possible. The conservative asks what's practical. Without the one, we'd stick to the status quo, and without the other, we'd have no idea where to go.]]

August 27 A man so domesticated that the dog trains him

August 25 Your first draft generates a bunch of potentially related ideas — like a pile of building blocks on the floor.

During revision, you sift through those ideas and make them click together like Lego bricks.

August 22

Morality Requires Faith

There is a faith required to live a moral life, but not a faith in God. To have a sound morality, you must have the following faith: "I have the necessary faculties to discern right from wrong, and I have the duty to uphold in the world what I deem to be just."

August 21 Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Do the things at which you are great, not those you were never made for.”

My revision: "Do the things at which you are great, not those for which you were never made."

• Parallel structure
• Not ending with prepositions
• Emphasizing the right elements/phrases at the beginning and end of the sentence.

Match the rigor of your writing to your reader's stamina. At the start of an essay or book chapter, don't lead with an easy, fluffy anecdote. While your reader is fresh, lead with a challenging concept, an intriguing question, or your thesis.

(It's like doing your hardest lift at the start of your workout.)

Then, make a four-course meal out of that initial idea. And don't forget to serve dessert.

August 17 The dark side of gratitude is complacency. The dark side of ambition is dissatisfaction.

By hoping, you are subordinating the present to the future. Why hope for something better? What could be better than this?!

The only life-affirming manifestation of hope is faith in the unbounded potential of the present moment. Hope that what you are doing will lead to good things, but don't hope for good things to come.

August 16 You were made to be misunderstood. (We contain multitudes.)

[[Emerson's Understanding]]

Your first draft maps out the road. Revision paves the road (for others).

— — Your first draft is a dirt road. Through Revision, you pave the road and make it accessible to others.

— — Your first draft is a gravel road. Revision paves the road and makes your ideas accessible to others.

August 15 Writers, think of yourself like a park ranger who’s building a hiking trail. You don’t hold the hiker’s hand as they go, but you do give them a clear path to follow on their own — so that they don’t get lost.

Claims and Evidence

When writing essays, you can generally think of there being two types of ideas: claims and evidence.

If you want your argument to be cohesive and clear, your reader must know — for each idea — whether it is a new claim or evidence for a claim.

If you want your argument to be convincing, your reader must agree that each of your claims have sufficient evidence.

Tweet

— — When writing essays, you can generally think of you having two types of ideas: claims and evidence for your claims. If you want your argument to be cohesive and clear, your reader must know, for each idea, whether it is a claim or evidence.

It's unnatural to be unchanging.

There are two valid reasons to compare yourself to others:

1. To find gratitude in your situation by comparing your hardships to others'
2. And to reassure yourself of your character and morality by comparing your worst deeds others'.

Of course, in the latter case, you risk justifying your wrong doings. And in the former case, you risk gaslighting yourself. But what you risk in these exercises you gain even more for the gratitude and self-esteem they bring.

Keep your comparisons tame, but don't dismiss them as wholly unproductive or unhealthy.

August 14 There is a certain feeling I get when I have copied something but haven't pasted it – may be a block of text or a webpage URL.

That is an open loop. The feeling you get when that loop is open, when you have copied but not yet pasted, is what you want to avoid. The more time you spend in that headspace of open loops, the less time you spend in the headspace of thinking about the always-open circle.

Open loops are unsolved problems. The open circle represents the open and unanswerable questions of life. There are solutions to every problem in the world, but there are not answers for every question in your head.

[[Closed Loops and an Open Circle]]

Group Discussion Framework

When you chime into a group discussion, you're either building on or branching from what has been said. If you are doing neither, that's called a monologue.

August 12 Inbox zero? Why? That means that anyone with your email can add a task to your to-do list.

August 10

A Logical Argument for a Dream-Like Afterlife

• There is no perceptual difference between the waking state and the dreaming state (in non-lucid dreams).
• In a dream, you identify only with yourself, even though the world you're experiencing is a world you're simultaneously creating.
• You can have dreams within a dream.
• You recognize that you are dreaming when you come out of a dream, not when you drift into it.
• There is no way for you to prove that the entire physical, waking world does not exist purely in your imagination, like a dream.
• When you die in a dream (or right before you die), you wake up.

Therefore: Death could be the event that shakes us awake from our parent dream and reveals that we are not a single snowflake in a blizzard but the entire storm, the sea, and the stars.

August 9 Relationships are meant to supplement your individuality, not supplant it.

Perfectionism is pathological. It’s the compulsion to chase an illusion: perfect.

I dream because I am human. I am human because I dream.

August 8 Sometimes characters in film aren't people. Sometimes, the main character is a concept or setting.

Christopher Nolan does this with entropy, time, and dreams in :

• Tenet
• Interstellar and Memento
• Inception

James Cameron does this with Pandora in Avatar.

Even when these movies have too much exposition, a weak plot, or shallow character development, they still work because they're depicting things that can only be represented in the cinema.

A movie isn't just a script. It's a movie.

— — The direct contrast to this is Quinten Tarantino. His movies are scripts firsts, then films.

August 4Oppenheimer Intro

I cried within the first 30 seconds of Oppenheimer.

The opening scene is a close-up of the fiery blaze of a detonated atomic bomb. Before the scene cuts to Killian Murphy's Oppenheimer, two lines of text show up on screen.

They're written in black, and you can only see them for their contrast agains the red and orange flames erupting in the background:

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. / For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.

[[Oppenheimer convinced me that we will kill ourselves.]]

August 3 The spring and fall are pivotal moments in the past:

• "Spring has sprung."
• "The leaves have fallen."

The summer energizes the present:

• "Summer is here!"
• "School is out for summer!"
• "Have a great summer!"

The winter looms large in the future:

• "Winter is coming."
• "I can't wait for snow!"
• "The groundhog saw his shadow; it will be a long winter."

When you treat life as a series of seasons, success becomes synonymous with progress, and your main goal becomes the following: gracefully transition between this phase and the next.

[[Defining Success and Managing Expectations]]

August 2 "Season" is from the Latin root serere meaning "to sow."

A season is not a stagnant phase of time or a style of nature. "Season" is a verb. It means to plant new seeds so that they may grow — to sow.

Invite the change of the seasons in your life because transitioning to new seasons is the only way to avoid stagnation.

(Don't wait for the solstice.) Like Mother Nature, invite new seasons when you need them, and sow [now] what you want to grow.

[[Make like Nature and grow. Invite change and uncertainty so that you're open to serendipity.]]

Make like Nature and grow. Invite change and uncertainty so that you're open to serendipity.

Am I the only one who is completely uninterested in learning how to talk to a computer? Why would I read about how to prompt chat GPT when I can read a book by a human that is a 300-page distillation of their best thinking and their area of expertise?

Why would I spend time learning how to communicate with a computer when there's still so much I have to learn how to communicate better with humans?

August 1 If you want your message to be remembered, edit it for meter as much as for meaning.

— — If you want your message to be memorable, edit for meter as much as for meaning.

— — If you want your message to be memorable, edit its meter as much as its meaning.

— — If you want your language to be memorable, edit for meter, not just for meaning.

Liberalism is not the party of tolerance; conservatism is not the party of bigotry. Conservatism is not the party of reason; liberalism is not the party of impulse. Liberalism is not the party of progress; conservatism is not the party of tradition.

Most people are tolerant, reasonable, and want to progress with respect to our long-held traditions. Liberalism and conservatism are parties of very similar people who too often forget their common ground.

Liberalism is the party of possibility. Conservatism is the party of practicality. Without the one, we'd stick to the status quo, and without the other, we'd have no idea where to go.

[[The liberal asks what's possible. The conservative asks what's practical. Without the one, we'd stick to the status quo, and without the other, we'd have no idea where to go.]]

Every time I go through customs in a foreign country, I get tripped up. They ask, "Where are you coming from?" Recently, the right answer has been New Jersey. But, my natural, instinctual response is, "Kansas City." No matter my destination, my point of origin is always the same — because I'm a Kansas-City native.

Weddings evangelize the religion of marriage.

July

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

July 31 Stereotypes are not truths. But they are tools.

July 30 When you're consoling/supporting someone, share your experiences, not your opinions — and never accusations.

[[My three rules for effective facilitation:]]

Extending the Icelandic saying:

"If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes." If you like the weather, pray.

[[Feeling Fire and Ice]]

I write to clarify my thinking, to discover what I believe.

There is a Goldilocks zone of clarity required for me to write about an idea. If I'm too clear on it, I have no motivation to write about it — because I've always learned what I need. If the idea isn't clear enough, I need to think about it more before I write.

The trick is to write while I'm still in the Goldilocks zone, so that other people can benefit from my learning process.

July 29 Capitalism only works when money is merely a metric of value and a means to many ends.

Capitalism fails when money becomes the object of value — when it becomes an end.

[[Stop measuring success. Start feeling success.]]

The best writing — whether fiction or nonfiction — is like a Russian nesting doll. There is a clear, coherent image at every level of granularity. (And each smaller layer unpacks and composes the largest idea.)

I have faith but no religion, self-awareness but so salvation.

July 28 Think of "revision" etymologically — as a prefix and a root: re•vision.

Look again.

Revision means revisiting what you've written and looking at in full, to see if the full thing should be different in some way. Revision is structural. It's an arial view — the forest, not the trees or the leaves.

— — There are three levels of editing, each one with a narrower scope than the rest:

1. Revision = "Structural Edits"
2. Edit = "Line Edit"
3. Proof = "Proofread"

Closed Loops and an Open Circle

There is a solution to every problem in the world. Yet, for the most important questions in your head, there are no answers.

Strangers aren't strange. Deep-sea creatures, hairless cats, mycelia, and Mars are strange. Strangers are human.

[[Experiment: Micro-Dose Discomfort]]

— — The creatures at the bottom of the ocean are strange.

July 26 There is no best way to go, but there is a worst way: to follow.

The shortest path to greener grass is to tend to your lawn.

[[The quickest path to greener grass is to tend to your lawn.]]

The ultimate sense of security it so feel at home within yourself — even when you are abroad, in uncomfortable, unfamiliar territory. Self-assurance and autonomy are that feeling: I am always at home.

July 25 Stop measuring success. Start feeling success.

[[Defining Success and Managing Expectations]]

More than creatures of habit, we are creatures of expectation.

[[Defining Success and Managing Expectations]]

Success is never absolute; it is always measured relative to our expectations.

Ex:

• Public companies guide down their earnings so that their stock doesn't jump down off of their latest quarterly report.

[[Defining Success and Managing Expectations]]

July 19 Before BitCoin, we already had a cryptocurrency. It was social media accounts, where "followers" and "likes" made up the metadata and the social graph was the blockchain.

If you could trade Twitter accounts on the NYSE, it'd be equivalent to trading crypto: for both, there is no underlying asset to determine value. For BitCoin and for Twitter accounts, their value rests solely on the public's perception of their value.

July 17 Once you have a big enough archive, you need to start curating yourself. If what you're writing is evergreen, then send people to it year-round, year after year.

You can't expect someone to stumble into and scroll through your archives. Craft a compelling reason for why it's worth reading now, and send that out. May your archives be read, not just this week's newsletter.

July 16 The heart holds your darlings. The head hunts them.

When I delude myself, I elude my Self.

Not all "great people" lead great lives.

That's what we lose when we get lost in the weeds of perceived gender inequalities. Behind nearly every great man is a great mother. We get caught up on the wrong metrics — money, fame, notoriety. Maybe all the mothers want is to be great mothers. Maybe they don't want to compete with the "great men" who spend their lives chasing accolades and missing birthdays.

I happily embrace the feminine energy of an inscrutable legacy. I don't need credit for the great things I do. I don't care whether I'm remembered. The only thing I care about is becoming the best possible version of myself, while doing right by everyone I interact with along the way.

Make me the moon, so that I can cuddle with the ocean and make waves that kiss the shore. Don't let me become the Sun, which sits so distant and apathetic. I want to offer more to the world than the energy from my fusion run-off.

I have no kinship with the men who seek a stone-etched legacy. Strip me of money, fame, and notoriety; leave me with a sense clarity, sound relationships, and meaning. I would die happy.

Three (overly simplified) rules for effective facilitation:

1. Be the first to share.
2. Ask thoughtful questions that are provocative but not prescriptive or accusatory.
3. Otherwise, shut up and listen.

— — My three rules for effective facilitation:

• Be the first to share (to share something real).
• Ask thoughtful follow-ups that keep the conversation on course.
• Otherwise, shut up.

July 14 Mortality is the source of meaning and morality in life.

What we do only matters because we are aware that we will die, and we only have an interest in doing what is right because 1) we don't want to endure the consequences of immoral actions, with our finite time; and 2) we don't want to harm others, who also have finite time.

If we were immortal, nothing would matter, and nothing would be immoral, because every moment would be a baptism, beginning an entirely new, infinite lifetime.

July 13 A rock balance is so grounding and brings you so close to nature. You're using the raw components that've emerged from years of natural processes to create something that only humans could possibly create. It's human order against the canvas of nature's order, or her chaos.

A rock balance by a river is like if Michelangelo's David stood in a marble quarry.

July 12 The moon is so much closer to us than the sun — literally and figuratively. When you watch and listen to the tide come in, that's the moon hugging the ocean, kissing the shore.

[[The Moon Is a Woman]]

July 11Essence and Ornaments

The essence (of a sentence or paragraph) is the core meaning/information/message.

Ornaments improve the reader experience and help them feel and relate to what you're saying. But with too many ornaments, you risk muddying the meaning.

July 9 You wonder why Canada is economically subordinate to the U.S. Then, you stand beneath skyscrapers that say in big letters "TD Ameritrade," "CBIC," and "[American Bank]" and jaywalk while 50 Toronto natives wait at the crosswalk for another two minutes watching two total cars go by.

If you're not willing to jaywalk on across an empty street, you may not have what it takes to be an economic world power.

Recalling a dream is no different than recalling a waking experience from memory. They feel like the same mental operation — the details just as clear, the feelings just as pronounced.

That means failing to remember your dream is like failing to recall an experience in waking life. You can multiply your memory, the breadth of your experience by recalling your dreams. While their events have no impact on the world, the contents of dream-memories can prompt insights as well as any waking memory.

July 8 We rise and fall to the level of our expectations.

(We rise and fall to meet expectations.)

July 6 All the worst parts of capitalism are due not to it but to consumerism. If we didn't value shit at a premium and saw shit for what it is, then our lives wouldn't be so governed by whats on store shelves, billboards, and Super Bowl ads.

I'm a free-market democracy, the consumer has complete power, the final say. If you don't like what you see, don't buy it.

July 4 Line edit by sifting the essence from the ornaments.

A pice of art does not have a theme in it. The piece of art is of the theme. Like crop circles, the art's commentary on the theme is revealed only as a whole, from an arial view.

(Explore the difference between symbols (the concrete, the crops), motifs (repeated patterns in the crop circle), and theme (a statement of the whole piece of art about a known concept).

Don't use a full stops after fragments, or at least use them sparingly. Please.

Would you rather stick your reader in bumper-to-bumper traffic ahead of the Holland tunnel, forcing them to stop and read your ad-copy fragment billboards that line the turnpike? Fast wifi. Best cheese. Breast reductions covered by insurance. Or, would you rather set your reader loose on the freeway, coming off cruise control to change lanes and only ever stopping to turn off at scenic viewpoints?

Snaefellsnes Beach

There is this 2-mile stretch of black sand beach on the northern coast of the Snaefellsnes peninsula, which jets out from the western side of Iceland. It's more of a place in time than in space — a place in memory. If I couldn't remember the feeling of my feet going numb, I would mistake it in my mind for a dream.

• Perched in the clear horizon: the portal to the center of the Earth

July 3 Nothing you write will be right the first time. Every first draft is disposable.

Yet every one is essential.

To deal with the depths, live with clarity.

To achieve breadth, live with congruence.

To deal with the darkness, live with detachment (acceptance).

June

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

June 29 Do you want your name in big, bold letters on the desk in a corporate corner office? Or would you rather have the world as your office?

Ref: "Chasing Prestige" (David Perell)

When giving feedback, don't pick apart the whole essay; pick a part, and help the writer improve the essay in one meaningful, memorable way.

June 28 Addiction puts blinders on you, like a horse. When the object of our desire is attainable, everything else fades to black, and we start sprinting, ever-faster, on the same circular track. Yet, there is no finish line. The only way it ends is if you are debilitated, depleted by the thing you're after: more and more of the same.

June 26 I study philosophy because it applies to all other areas of study and to every part of life (politics, business, leadership, psychology, relationships, and fitness to name a few).

PhD means "Doctorate of Philosophy." The highest level of study in any field is to understand and contribute to the philosophy of the field itself, to expand the field to new territory and develop a comprehensive map of it in your head. A PhD in philosophy, then is a meta-study. You are expanding the field of knowledge about what we can know and how we know it.

If philosophy were a three-legged stool, it would stand on these unanswerable questions:

1. What is just? (Ethics)
2. What is true? (Epistemology)
3. What is real? (Metaphysics)

— — OR

1. What is it that I ought to do? (Ethics)
2. What can I know to be true? (Epistemology)
3. What is the nature of (my)reality? (Metaphysics)

June 25 Mindfulness is a prerequisite for freedom, stillness a prerequisite for creativity.

Both mindfulness and stillness are modes of awareness. Unaware in action, you are coerced by causes and effects, not free. Unaware in thought, you are blind to your own insights, not creative.

June 24 Forget about developing IP. Focus on developing the 'I.' Your IP can be bought and sold, but your 'I' is an intangible, immeasurable asset.

(The 'I' is yourself, your intellect, your identify — verbally, introspection.)

Any book on writing will warn you about adverbs. They're low on the part-of-speech hierarchy because they rarely add meaning.

But that doesn't mean you can't use them well. Here's @BennyCarts with an admirable use of an adverb:

"Step back from the role you play and take in the fact that you’re a mobile meat sack provisionally containing infinity." (Benny Carts, The Art of Not Writing a Goddamn Thing)

June 23 What is this slippery, modern world robbing from you? Is there a grippy, analog tool that could change the outcome?

June 22 Stop worrying about packaging and presentation. Focus on quality for an infinite time horizon, and approach perfection. People will notice, and those who don't notice will hear about you from the people who do.

You can grow not from virality but from renowned quality and word-of-mouth credibility.

The quickest path to greener grass is to tend to your lawn.

Do you have a favorite pun?

My undisputed champion is "The Bare Necessities."

June 21 I saw a sign in Hiawatha, Kansas. It said "freedom hospice." Freedom for whom? I ask. Is it that the family will be free from caring for their elderly? Is it that the dying will soon be free from this world and ascend to His Kingdom? Or did that just not give the name much thought?

June 20 To quote another American transcendentalist, "we contain multitudes." That means, we are great insomuch as our scale and scope is incomprehensible, inexhaustible. We have, within each of us, such a breath and death that make us ineffable.

[[Emerson's Understanding]]

June 18 There are two types of individualism: the selfish and the responsible.

Selfish individualism: "I can do everything myself."

Responsible individualism: "I should take care is myself."

(East Coast vs. Midwest)

Don’t write to please. Don’t write to meet a perceived demand. Just focus on creating something you’re proud of and on writing well. Audiences form around quality and authenticity — and the only way to guarantee those is to write for yourself, to write something you would like to read.

(From a Daily Email that I wrote with Sherry)

June 14 Recalling a dream is like reading a printed page from the back side, holding it up to the light of day and reversing the backwards words.

June 13 The writer is not just an artist. He is also an editor, which is antithetical to art; editing is analytical. Yet, editing is necessary to make great art and to make a living as a writer.

June 12 Maintain the mystery. Without it, life ceases to be.

Mindset shift: It's not an unpublished idea; it's a pre-published idea. (Or, it's a dud that will help me dig up my next one.)

June 10 Every shit is a story. They all have a three-act structure — whether it's diarrhea or a no-wipe wonder.

1. Sprint/stroll/skip to the throne
2. Enjoy or endure
3. Flush, relieved and resolved

Everyone says that the book is better than the movie, but most of that is because your experience with the book is uniquely yours — more so than the movie.

(You create the world in your head or you watch it unfold on screen. Both can be well-told stories, but only the book will be a story you helped create.)

June 8 Line editing (sometimes copyediting) is an in-depth review and can require multiple rounds of revision and feedback, and can cover everything from paragraph order to punctuation. A proofread is the final polish of a piece before it goes out the door, which doesn't require any revisions from the author — just minor corrections.

(There's also developmental editing.)

June 7 If before I go to sleep tonight, I can let go of today, then maybe I'll be able to let go of life when I go to die.

June 6 You're not dancing if your hands are below your waist.

June 5 It is not immoral to park illegally. It is illegal. The immoral thing would be to shirk the responsibility of the consequences from parking illegally.

June 2 What is the chance of us being able to witness a full eclipse? Doesn't that mean that the moon has to be the same multiple closer to us than the Sun is larger than the moon?

Online creators amass a following in one of two main ways:

1. They grind through a prolific period, where they publish as much as possible, that propels them in front of the eyes of the world. (David Perell's YouTube and Podcast, Casey Neistat's vlogs, Stavros Halkias's crowd-work sets)
2. They create enough and well enough that someone (or many people) with a considerable audience recommends them, and then they retain that audience by following a publishing schedule (Van Neistat).

Analog Energy

Electronics rely on intangible energy, like the chemical potential energy stored in batteries. But analog devices rely on kinetic energy. They have mechanisms that must be activated, and you have the ability, the force to activate them.

Take a typewriter. Every key is a lever, and every time you hit a key, a metal bar swings up and stamps a single letter through an ink ribbon onto a sheet of paper. As long as the mechanisms are intact, you bring the energy. You can convert the food you eat, the water you drink, and the sleep you get, into words, paragraphs typed with a 90-year-old machine. In 90 years, where will your iPhone be? Who will be using to create art, to express themselves, to deepen their connection with themselves.

Imagine a life where we weren't feathered to our devices and outlets by the chords of our chargers and Ethernet cables. Imagine a life where you could use the energy within your body to perpetually use any device you needed.

May

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

May 31 Modern media is a carousel. You either ride it up and down, round and round, like a child. Or you sit across the way and watch it spin, but only when you look up from a page of a well-written book.

May 29 The best restaurants specialize in one meal of the day. The most successful restaurants are open all-day long. The most sustainable restaurants offer two meals: either lunch and dinner or breakfast and lunch.

Decide whether you want to be a super successful specialist or not as successful but with more talents, interests, and time. But you do, don't serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The Moon Is a Woman

The moon is undoubtedly feminine, the Sun masculine.

The Sun gets all the credit and sits at the very center of our solar system, but the moon... she is the one who cares for us, comforts us. She is tidally locked, always facing us, always aware of how we are and what we need. She orbits us, while the Sun sits — distant, idle, and apathetic — and gives us his fusion run-off.

It is around the Sun that we physically revolve, but it is by lunar cycles that we emotionally flow. The moon is Earth's companion.

— — Notes

• Waves crashing on the shore
• Guiding explorers across the land at night
• Denoting the passage of time, beyond the time of day
• Mother Earth and the moon are like a mother and a grandmother, respectfully
• The moon is mysterious: we only ever see one side of her. The Sun concealed himself by putting off a blinding light, but within a year, he is on display from every angle.

May 28 Look deeply into a human eye and tell me that we don't have worlds within us. What is a pupil if not a black hole? What is an iris if not an event horizon?

And what gravity eyes have! We are drawn to them, drawn into them because of what's behind them: entire worlds.

May 27

Riff on Cliches

Riff on cliches. They're a hack to crisp, economic language. You can use all the associations of the cliche and then subvert the actual meaning with your own version or twist.

Don't just play the tired four-chord pop progression. Make your own jazzy remix of the familiar tune, and benefit from all the associations to convey a fresh idea, dense with meaning.

(Reference Scary Pockets)

May 23

Write Like a Coffee Shop

Write like a coffee shop. Become part of someone's routine. Make your ideas so infections that they are a source of energy for someone's day, or someone's week.

I am possibly a decade from having 1,000 paid newsletter subscribers (figure $60k/yr at $5/mo). But how many people spend an average of $3 on coffee per day?!

What's the coffee shops' secret? They become part of your routine — reliable, simple. And they create a place you want to be, a place you like visiting — comfortable, familiar, communal.

If you can write reliably, and if people know what to expect when they visit your shop, they may just make you part of their routine and stop in to join your community.

May 17 At my favorite coffee shop, I have to wait at least 10 minutes before I can drink my tea. And that time is a gift. Every few minutes, I'll smell it and experience it in that way, detecting whether it's ready for my tongue.

I always want to live in a way where I'm not in a rush to drink my tea. I want to always live a life where I smell my tea first and savor every morsel of flavored vapor.

Riff on cliches. They're a hack to crisp, economic language. You can use all the associations of the cliche and then subvert the actual meaning with your own version or twist.

Today is heavy because it's all you're guaranteed. Today is light because you have the freedom to determine tomorrow.

May 14 I hate the term "progressive" because it suggest that they're the only people in favor of progress. We all want progress. We just have different ideas about how to get there.

May 10 Imagine how our perceptions of the world and the constructs of our society would be different if, when we looked to the sky, we saw two stars orbiting each other in harmony, at the center of our solar system.

Maybe we'd be less selfish, more compatible, and more romantic. Maybe our lives would be more sustainable and we'd be less interested in consumption and fleeting pleasures. Binary stars exist with each other but not for each other. They collaborate to create something bigger than them both: their relationship.

May 9 I take pride in being misunderstood. It's evidence of a level of uncertainty, mystery, and adventure in my life that prevents who I am from being simplified to a tagline.

— —

I take pride in being misunderstood. It's not evidence of a lack of eloquence but of a level of complexity and uncertainty in my life that prevents who I am or what I do from becoming a slogan (tagline).

May 8 The liberal asks what's possible. The conservative asks what's practical. Without the one, we'd stick to the status quo, and without the other, we'd have no idea where to go.

May 7 Is there a belief or idea that helps you accept the hard truth of your mortality? What helps you feel more comfortable with the reality of death?

Dreams offer me some comfort.

Every night, when my body stops moving and when I lose consciousness, I have dreams, which are rich, vivid experiences that are concealed from my waking mind.

I'm not saying that I believe that death is like a dream. But the fact that I dream leaves the question open; I will never know what happens after I die, just as I don't know what will happen when I go to sleep at night.

My Summer Solstice

Summer doesn't start until I catch a firefly.

May 6 Concision ≠ Brevity

Concision means dense, economic, bang-for-your-buck prose.

Brevity means sacrificing accuracy and clarity to lower the barrier to entry.

May 4

Parts of Speech Ranked by Meaning-Density

1. Verbs
2. Nouns
3. Adjectives
4. Prepositions
5. Adverbs
6. Conjunctions
7. Pronouns

• Verbs are the only words that can be complete sentences. (An imperative, with the implied subject of "you.")
• Adverbs often signal that you need a more descriptive, or a stronger, verb. They don't do much else.

The creatures of the air and sea map to the masculine and feminine energies, respectively.

May 2 No one has to fire Chekhov's gun. Your reader just has to wonder whether someone will fire it.

"In dramatic literature, this technique inherits the name Chekhov’s Gun. In a letter he penned in 1889, Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wrote: “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”" (Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer)

April

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

April 30 On Christ's Passion and Resurrection:

The story reveals the archetypes and structure underlying the narratives of Western culture; it's a passionate, transformative struggle that brings man closer to God — a journey from the ordinary world, to Hell, and back. You'll find that same structure equally in the The Odyssey and in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Christ's Passion is the model for the monomyth.

April 29 Now, every time it rains I think of Iceland. Something that used to be dreary and draining now brings me feelings of nostalgia and bliss. And I'm reminded of the Icelandic saying, "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes."

April 28

Ungodly Sounds

There are harsh sights, unpleasant smells, prickly surfaces, and repugnant tastes in nature. But there are few, if any, ear-piercing, ungodly sounds.

That's why, when I hear the screech of a subway or feel the decibel-boasting bass from concert speakers, I'm reminded of humanity's negative byproducts on nature.

April 24

Subject-Object Pronouns

Few people have the lexicon or categories to delineate these two types of pronouns. It's easy once you know the difference.

Subject: We humans are made in the image of God. Object: God made us humans in the image of God.

April 22 Seeing something as black or white is like seeing life as either birth or death. What about the glorious gradient between? What about living?

[[Live in the Third]]

April 21 The interrogative mood is underrepresented in online writing.

Thoughtful questions help the reader discover their own insights. Isn't that the value of writing anyway — what it inspires in you, not what it says to you? The interrogative mood admits uncertainty and invites the reader's thoughts to interrupt the author's indicatives and imperatives.

Ask questions. Be provocative, not prescriptive.

Substack Note

April 19

Don't Train on Me

• You've seen the AI Impressionist paintings. You've heard the automated musical Frankensteins. You've read the LLM adaptations of your favorite authors. AI's impersonations will only get better, which means that art will only get worse.
• Encrypt the Internet to soil the training pool and give the LLMs gibberish to draw from. Castrate them at the source: human language.
• Maybe a short Story where a crypto bro pumps and dumps a coin that infects the Internet and prevents AI from training on natural language

April 16 Potential book (or short eBook idea): Research, analyze, and synthesize creation myths from across eras and cultures, searching for overlapping evidence of the elementary characteristics of the human experience.

Shave on Sundays

You can always decide where rock bottom is — you must. Because there is no bottom, only more of a cavernous pit. That is, if you keep falling down.

If you decide, you can right the world's axis in a day. You can turn it around and set yourself on an entirely new path. You must first recognize their falling, then have the strength to pivot.

To get reps of this skill — pivoting — I think I'll adopt a new practice. I'll shave on Sunday — no matter how many times I shaved during the week or how recently I last shaved. I'll make Sunday a weekly rep of pivoting. Sunday will prompt me to check myself and see where I've fallen and what wagons I want to mount for the weeks ahead.

The chorus of "Kilby Girl" is a great example of economic storytelling.

Expected value is one of those advanced mathematical concepts that everyone would benefit from knowing. It helps me make prudent decisions without being risk averse-averse. You weigh the options based on probabilities of their future value.

April 13 Morality is human, partial. The universe is amoral, indifferent. A star's sneeze could scorch our planet and make our species extinct.

(It wouldn't be some divine punishment. It'd just be a cosmic coincidence.)

— — It's the difference between foul play and natural causes. A murderer owes an immeasurable debt to their victim. But Nature owes nothing to us when a hurricane sweeps hundreds into the sea.

April 12 In all writing, there is the essence and ornaments.

When you revise, clearly identify and communicate the essence, then prudently adorn it with entertaining ornaments.

April 11 Good feedback is different than positive feedback. Measure the quality of feedback by how much it improves the product.

April 8 The Promethean Struggle:

Go under so that what you've created may go beyond you, may transcend you.

Give without expectation to what you value.

April 5 The only way to write for everyone is to write exclusively for yourself. Write something you'd want to reread, revisit, and revise 'till the end of time. If that's how you feel about it, maybe someone else will read it once and find some value in it.

Misery creeps when you share something you have no interest in reading and that played no part in your personal growth to create.

April 4 Misery comes from dreading the next moment. When you don't wish for time to move in a different direction, you dwell pleasurably in the present moment.

April 3 To all those who claim to have no religious beliefs, or no personal matters of faith, consider this:

Every morning, when we wake up, we operate under the unverifiable belief that this is reality and that a dream.

Dreams and Ideals

An ideal is a dream that gets you out of bed. Like a dream, it is a hallucination of something you can clearly conceive yet never grasp. Any experience of the ideal is one you wake up from, realizing that you have not yet arrived.

And if you ever reach the ideal, you wake up and realize that there's still more to do, further to go.

A Faith in Dreams

Dreams are the only natural mystery — the only grand mystery that I can confirm isn't fiction, which is why dreams are the centerpiece of my personal faith.

Every night, we hallucinate an entire reality. I call it a "reality" because (unless lucid) we cannot distinguish a dream from our waking experience.

March

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

March 31 Use the hyphen within words, the en dash between words, and the em dash between clauses.

— — Use the hyphen to create words, the en dash to attach phrases, and the em dash to connect clauses.

March 26 When their parent falls from super-human to simply human, the adolescent matures. Adulthood comes when you see the infants in your elders.

Nihilism Is Untenable

To exist is to create values (to evaluate), which is why nihilism is an untenable position; if life is meaningless, we have decided that it is so.

Create a working title before anything. Finalize the title after everything. The best titles are those discovered from seeing the work in its polished form.

Don't worry about the packaging before you've bought the gift.

Some titles that were clearly the bow on top:

• My Head Is an Animal — It's a line from the chorus of the first track on the album, which means Of Monsters and Men likely chose the album's title likely after completing "Dirty Paws"and after deciding the track list.
• Consider the Lobster — DFW's collection of essays couldn't have got its name until he knew which he'd include in the anthology.

March 25 Morocco has reminded me of the importance of prayer. It's grounding and elevating. It's humbling and transcendental. When you paused reflect on the gift of existence, you are reminded of what matters — and what doesn't.

March 24

Moroccan Modesty

Beauty, wealth, and status are not flaunted here. They're kept private and protected.

• Riads conceal the garden
• Unassuming exteriors, even to the most intricate, elaborate, grand buildings
• It's the opposite of the American attitude.

March 22 Sometimes, open shut doors.

Don't ignore the syllabic symmetry between "ah-choo" and "bless you." Exploit it. Next time someone sneezes, imitate their sneeze with your "bless you." It's fun.

March 21 If you move west fast enough, you can live forever. If you move east instead, you'll get ahead. Move North or South to scale the seasonality of life.

Which of the world's problems are caused by people who are self-aware, mindful, and confident? Few, if any. The best thing for the world is for me to learn about and love myself.

March 20

Cut Cliches

If it's early in the morning, and you're inviting a new day, I don't want to hear the birds chirping or the sun peeking through the window. I want to hear the next-door neighbor's boxer, Rocky, barking through a brick wall.

(The birds and the sun are already embedded within my understanding of the morning. They're cliche. They add nothing, unless you use those details to move the plot or develop character. Be economical, and avoid cliches. Even if they're apt, they weaken your story or argument.)

Find meaning in every moment as you approach (unattainable) fulfillment.

March 17 When you make a mistake, skip the Christian response of making formal penance and requesting punishment. Mistakes come with their own consequences. Don't exacerbate them.

Make a mistake, accept the consequences, then learn from the mistake and don't do it again.

Forget being a penitent; don't dwell in what you've done. Just start doing differently.

March 16 There is no pursuit more beneficial to the world than that of self-understanding. From it follows sound ethics, a sense of meaning and purpose, and love for others on the grounds that they are also human.

March 15

Dreams Are Aesthetic Experiences

Dreams are a purely aesthetic experience. There is no singular meaning in them, just as it is for any painting or sculpture.

They are meaningful because we assign a meaning to them, but that doesn't make dreams less important.

— — 03/5/23: Dreams are amoral, and, while they raise questions about how we know what is true, they do not reveal truth; they do not express meaning. We assign meaning to them.

March 14 Relationships are powerful mediums for growth. But in their very power is what sows their finitude. People in relationships grow through each other. It's no surprise that they also grow apart.

Life doesn't have to be epic; it doesn't have to be grand; it doesn't have to be sacred. Because it already is, as it is already.

March 10 A litmus test for high neuroticism: Do you look both ways before crossing a one-way street?

Meme-ing punctuation:

• The colon indicates.
• The semicolon coordinates.
• The dash elaborates.

March 9 The three levels of consumption (reading):

• Comprehension
• Inspiration/Interaction
• Implementation/integration

(Why I'd never make it as a critic)

Feminine Strength

Women have a strength that you submit to. It's different than a man's. We fight strong men, no matter how outmatched we may be. A strong woman decides the outcome without a fight.

A man may burn the world. A woman can erase it.

March 7 The fire of conversation is collaborative. You must take turns tossing in kindling. If your counterpart withholds their fuel, let the fire fizzle. (Don't steal their turn.) The alternative is for conversation to devolve into monologue, where there is only the illusion of bonfire-camaraderie.

[Conversation Culture]

March 3 To be honest is to remain uncertain.

Intellectual honesty requires uncertainty.

How to have a healthy relationship with money: Major in quantitative finance and minor in philosophy.

The finance knowledge cures any anxiety around money, and the philosophy knowledge cures greed.

March 2 Happiness is too low of a bar; it's an unworthy ideal. You can be happy and comfortable, static, unchanging. You can be fearful, anxious, or desperate and be growing, improving, evolving.

Rather than happiness, which comes and goes, aim for fulfillment, which you can always approach and never attain — which requires doubt, discomfort, and self-discovery.

Iteration vs. Compilation

It doesn't have to be the first take (and it probably shouldn't be). But try to do it one take.

(On the difference between iteration and compilation)

• My Substack voiceovers
• Live vocal performances
• Practical-effects films

February

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

February 27 How I knew I was an editor: reading books about writing and deciding to create my own style guide.

When you meet people on the road, their first question is never "What do you do for work?". In a nomadic setting, everyone is aware of how little time you we have with one another, so they ask questions to learn who you are, not to learn what you do.

When we recognize how fleeting our moments are, we focus more on what matters. We prioritize connection and understanding over finding commonalities.

February 21

Conversation Culture

An analysis of how we try and fail to communicate — and why conversation is a craft as worthy of mastery, as any fine art

February 20 Religion presents the world as a dichotomy — black and white. Philosophy explores the world's dualities — all the grey.

It's the difference between dogma and speculation/skepticism.

February 19 Stoicism is often misunderstood — conflated with the adjective "stoic," which is used colloquially as "unfeeling." Stoic philosophy is not about avoiding feelings but about accepting that which is out of your control. Stoicism is about feeling and then either acting (if you can influence the situation) or accepting (if you have done all you can and are faced with certain external events).

Life is a series of seasons, and staying in any one season is stagnation.

The stagnant are sunburned or frostbitten and endure more misery for fearing the fall and spring.

Steer toward the solstice. Train yourself in transition.

In any given moment, you can only either focus on how you're being perceived or on perceiving people.

• Being in your head vs. in your body
• Awareness vs. insecurity

February 16 It’s funny how far “certainty” catapults us from the truth.

When I delude myself, I elude my Self.

You can either see life as a series of mistakes or as one long learning process.

We all have a shared responsibility for the agreements we have with each other.

[Social Accountability]

February 15 The adventurer lives with vitality. The traveler constantly seeks novelty.

February 14 It's impossible to make eye contact with someone when on a video call. It's the greatest loss of remote work.

February 13 "Travel" means making an itinerary. It's about leaving here and arriving somewhere.

"Adventure" means inviting uncertainty. It's about being here and being ready to go anywhere.

It's best to be both. Happy at home and adventurous abroad.

February 10 The prettiness of your prose means nothing if the contents of your ideas aren’t worth unwrapping.

(From a WOP Daily Email)

Make your writing more than pretty paper and a bow. Give design and purpose to your writing. Fill your prose with content that makes people learn something new or question something they know.

Next time you revise your writing, make sure to look past its packaging. Examine the contents. Check how well the design works, and then make it better before sharing it with the world.

If you were in the midst of a plane crash and the person next to you was sound asleep, would you wake him?

Do you have an obligation to alert the man of his impending death? Or is it immoral to break his blissful ignorance?

February 9

On Humanity's Dual Nature

We are never one thing or the other but always two things at once. The primary characteristic of humanity is our dual nature, our inherent duality. It's at the core of what we all share.

We are the yin and the yang, God's creation and the fallen man, free to act and subject to the rules of society. We are not bathed in light or cast in darkness, but exist as dawns and dusks. We don't inhabit Heaven or Hell, but Earth. We are not either free or fated, but both — always.

February 8

Autonomy Is

• My #1 value
• Freedom + Responsibility
• Must be both independent and automatic
• Harmony among the Light and Heavy

February 5

The Utility of Narrative

Create stories for the purpose of exploring or communicating an idea. I have no interest in stories made for pure entertainment.

• That's why I'm drawn to short stories and novellas over novels. It's a beautiful, wonderful thing to build a world and to visit that in your imagination. But I'd rather explore my own dreams.
• Short stories have a theme. They are economical; everything builds to an idea.
• That's why I love psychological thrillers. They critique a part of us, draw it out and make it the center of a drama. (Get Out, Silence of the Lambs, Parasite, The Menu)

At the same time, I have no interest in reading about an idea that I can't feel, that I have no hope of embodying. Rational arguments should be grounded in feeling, in narrative. And narratives should serve their concepts, transcended by their implications (not confined to their fantasies).

February 3 All innovation requires that something first be invented.

Step 1: Make it.

Step 2: Make it better.

Step 3: Ship it, and start something new.

February 2 It is not a privilege to have what you earned but to have been supported in the process of earning it.

January

Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

January 29 The Earth spins about itself, and we act as if the sun abandons us at night. The sun doesn't rise and set; it is persistent. We are the turbulent ones, as in stillness you see.

Maybe at the heart of life, too, is light.

January 27 My top 10 tweet-length quotes from Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance."

January 21 There is no best way to go. There is only the worst way, which is to follow.

The horizon is all we have, and it's something we'll never reach. What matters is whether we move towards it.

We can sail toward the horizon or stop on a comfortable island and never see what lies beyond that beach. Those with The greatest self-understanding are those who sail forever and die at sea.

January 19

An Ode to Unconditional Art

• Screw story structure, forget convention.
• As long as you make something cohesive with form, it doesn't have to have an expressed purpose, a desired take-way, or a CTA.
• Art is aesthetic. It is meant to be experienced, not consumed. Individuals have experiences, mobs consume. The value of a piece should vary by the individual who experiences it — and not just who they are but at what point in their life they encounter the art.
• I would never make it as a critic because as long as art inspires me, provokes some interesting thought within me, I value it. It doesn't matter the Goodreads or Rotten Tomatoes score.
• Just like any experience, art is as valuable and as impactful as you make it.

[[Prometheus and Unconditional Living]]

January 18 Editing requires that we question what we know so that what we have created can be made better.

Writing Tip

Amount vs. Number

"Amount" refers to singular nouns, "number" to plural.

Examples:

• You have the greatest number of pets in our building.
• The number of friends you have doesn't matter, only the amount that they care about you.
• That's a large amount of money. That's a large number of bills.

Writers need:

Quantity for Reach + Response

Quality for Resonance + Retention

I need to inhale editing and exhale writing.

January 16 We are the most free in free-fall. When we take a decisive leap into the abyss, we manifest our freedom in action.

Dive into the unknown. Dive inwards.

Simple Sleep Tips

• Find the most comfortable/natural position, and use it every night‬
• Eliminate screen time before bed
• Make your bed every morning and don't use it during the day

January 15

Writing Tip

It's not more or less. It's more, less, or fewer.

Use "less" for singular nouns, "fewer" for plural nouns and "more" for either.

— — Examples:

• Would you like more or less money?
• Please give me fewer grapes next time.
• I wish I had more skis, but maybe I should have fewer.
• Could there be more people here? There should be fewer people here.
• He has less free time than me because I have fewer meetings.

January 14

Text-Generating AI Won't Get Better Than This

I am not naïve. I know that the technology will improve, that AI will sound more alike humans. But text-generating AI is better right now than it will ever be in one important way.

Today's AI are trained on words written on humans. Everything on the Internet before now, stretching back to the entire history of humanity before the Internet, was created by humans. But today, in the midst of content-generating AI, the training set will be saturated by words from the metal-minded.

AI spits out quantity, at a quality that will improve overtime. But as the AI-to-human ratio increases, AI will start to train on AI-generated content. It will imitate itself rather than learning to imitate us. And then we will enter a hell for readers and consumers, where real, breathing beings will be buried. Language will have been hijacked by non-beings that have never spoken.

January 11 What does it mean to live like the sun won't rise, like today is your last?

It doesn't mean spending all your money, jumping off a cliff, or gorging on a feast. It means living unconditionally.

It means, today, doing only those things that you would do even if you didn't make it to tomorrow.

January 10

Narrative vs. Nostalgia

When did we stop sharing the stories of our dreams and only those in our memories?

Remakes, sequels, reboots — that's all there is. But are there fewer creative people? Are we artistically uneducated? Have we been made lame by some universal lobotomy?

When did we become servants of the stories instead of their creators, instead of using characters and a narrative to explore our inner worlds rather than to squeeze dry the sponge of nostalgia?

January 9

Comprehending vs. Understanding

You can understand an idea with a thought, but to apply/integrate it, you have to feel it.

The ineffable is accessible because we can feel it; we just can't speak it.

You can know what someone said without knowing what it means (or why they said it).

January 8 There are greater pleasures than those I have sought. They come when the seeking subsides — from simply being.

What you do only matters as much as it makes you who you are.

Everything is impermanent — every pain and pleasure, each agony and ecstasy, all grief and glory.

This too shall pass, so enjoy it while it lasts.

Nothing is guaranteed but the present. Live now as if you don't have tomorrow. Do something you find meaningful, and close loops when you have the opportunity.

That means:

• Say what you know is unsaid. Have the uncomfortable conversations.
• Say goodbye when you part from people, even a partner, coworker, or barista that you plan to see tomorrow.
• Find stillness, exercise your freedom.

January 7 Chaos pendulums illustrate the question of free will.

Chaos pendulums are the perfect illustration of this idea: Stillness is a prerequisite for freedom.

We have freedom, but not every act is one of free will. Most of the time, we are riding along some cause-and-effect chain. Yet, there are these moments of freedom that initiate an entirely new series of phenomena.

Our freedom is the ability to pause the seining chaos pendulum. We can hold it in our hands by finding stillness. And by pausing it in motion, we initiate a new series of movements that would have never existed otherwise.

The bad things that happened to you you don't deserve. They don't happen because of who you are but because you believe that's why they happen.

Change your self-image, change your experience.

January 6 Loose writing loses readers. Technique matters.

You could: • Slather glue between your sentences and hope they stick. OR • Use proper grammar and mechanics to make your sentences click like Lego bricks.

Sticking isn't enough. Make your writing click.

January 4

Curiosity as Curriculum

What if education weren't some simple, pragmatic program to land a lucrative job? What if it, instead, encouraged the personal pursuit of knowledge?

You can become an expert in anything. And any expert can make a living. So, why not study what you love?

Instead of sticking to some strict syllabus, create a curriculum from your curiosity.

January 3

Please, Fewer Pleasantries

Pleasantries reverberate, but they don't resonate. They're comforting words that placate rather than provoke or inspire.