On Asking The Universe for Patience

There are times in life when shit just goes wrong. Not just a single little shitty thing, but a veritable compilation of shitty things. They have a tendency to happen all at once, causing stress, frustration, and a whole lot of emotions that, most of the time, we’d just rather not feel - certainly not all at once!

Time seems to compress or dilate, and because of the sheer volume of complications, everything tends to seem much more serious than it is—much bigger than it is.

Some of us are lucky enough to have strong support to hold onto while the storm of life comes crashing through, and there’s a part of us, a part that would settle us down if we had just a bit more patience, that knows we’re overreacting and that things are less, well, serious.

We may even ask or plead for more patience, knowing that there’s a dwindling source of it somewhere within us. This hint suggests that more could be had if only the universe or some higher being would hear our plea and grant it. But what does the universe do when we ask it for patience?

It gives us more opportunities to be patient, that’s what.

I don’t believe that anyone who knows me would call me a particularly spiritual person, but I do have an assortment of funny little hard-held beliefs that cross the threshold of contrasting and conflicting ideologies. One of them happens to be that the Universe (with a capital U, for some reason) likes to test us in humorous ways. William B Irvine, a student of stoicism and a great storyteller, likes to attribute these little tests to the Stoic Gods - despite Stoicism being a nontheistic religion - and gives himself a little grade on how he’s reacted to the situation afterwards.

Last year, I set out to focus my entire year on mobility and ended up tearing my patellar tendon, making it my least “mobile” year to date. Damn you, Stoic Gods! Not believing in a personal god, when I ask the universe for patience, I know that I’m really asking myself to be patient.

Another quirky belief I carry with me is that I am tremendously lucky, in both the “good” and “bad” ways. For every airline upgrade I receive (which happens a surprising amount of times), I also break a toe, accidentally delete an entire hard drive, or get hit by a car (I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been solidly yet gently hit by a motor vehicle in my lifetime). When something really good happens to me I often ask myself, “I wonder how I’m going to pay for this later…” and then a bird will poop in my open coffee cup.

Some philosophers would rightly argue that Luck and the Universe playing helpful little pranks on me are my way of attributing meaning to what is, more than likely, a series of random events. Don’t get me wrong; randomness can also be fun, but I like to think that when everything seems to be going wrong all at once, there’s a reason for it, even if deep down I know that the reason is that things just happen because things just happen.

So maybe the next time you find yourself asking the universe for something, think about what it might be giving you instead.

I hope this was, if not useful, then at least comical (and no, I didn’t drink the bird poop coffee)

On A Preference for Human Interaction Over AI Interaction and Why it Doesn't Matter

Disclaimer: This post mostly refers to productivity-related AI, but I do dive a tiny bit into the more artistic applications of some of these tools, and while I’m happy to talk at length about that area of the technology, it’s not my area of expertise and I would hate to inspire any fear in anyone because of my lack of knowledge. So I’ll try to keep this to the productivity and philosophical implications of the work.

Edit: It’s been rightly pointed out to me that some of the things I’m suggesting in this post will unevenly affect certain groups of people at a rate and degree greater than other groups. I agree with this argument and the way that it was presented, and while I still think that the larger societal change is both necessary and inevitable, I have now shifted my mindset slightly away from the more…. “apocalyptic” ideas that I present here toward finding more equitable solutions to these problems using this technology. In short, I’m asking myself, “Do we have to burn it down to build a better building, or can we replace each brick individually until the structure that remains is made of entirely new bricks?” I will leave the content of this post as-is, but I may write a revised copy in the future.

I’m a cautious optimist when it comes to technology of any kind, and I have a particular fascination with recent shifts like Web3 (don’t get me started) and AI. I’ve also said on several occasions, to varying reactions, that my professional goal is to make myself obsolete, and as a leader in a middle management position at a global company, I know that it’s just a matter of time before I’m “Solved” out of the professional equation.

But I’m still very excited about AI.

All around my office, I see people using tools like ChatGPT or Grammarly to help them with the tone of an e-mail they’re about to send, fix their Excel formulas, and ask basic factual questions that prevent them from having to sift through multiple sources on Google.

What I see, is people trying to be more effective at their work. There are arguments (I’ve made them) that tools like Grammarly will make people worse writers, but we’re already notoriously bad at conveying our sentiments and thoughts via text alone. I’ve heard people say that when ChatGPT can write Excel formulas it will replace accountants, but did the calculator replace mathematicians? It may have made the general population less math-literate, but it also helped to propel entire fields of mathematics.

I do understand (and have a tiny bit myself) the personal fear that a tool will take a person’s job, and history is full of fables like John Henry and the Steam Engine, and with AI we’re already seeing that in action at a pretty enormous level that is likely to spark long-overdue societal conversations about how we should be spending our precious little time in the modern age. But aside from this fear, there is a question we should ask whenever we implement a piece of technology that is intended to make work easier: What causes us to resist efforts to simplify people's jobs? Why do we seem to prefer maintaining difficult conditions?

There is a supercharged flurry of Capitalistic angst brewing around technologies like AI just like there was a momentary panicked land grab during the initial introduction of Web3 to corporations who really like their closed ecosystems and fear the thought of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), because it’s never really been the individuals who decide how this technology gets used, and history tends to teach us that better technology benefits a select few and displaces the rest. There’s also the pesky fear of change that infects us all.

To be clear, I don’t know if this will be any different, and I don’t have any arguments for why it would be. A coworker of mine recently said that people will always have a preference for interacting with a human, but that technology will get so good that this preference will become irrelevant. And I agree! My argument instead is that a massive displacement of work itself would be a good thing for everyone because it would force those societal conversations I was referring to (I’d prefer not to be first though, thanks).

I’ve heard tech billionaires the world over make lofty promises about new careers like “Prompt Engineers,” but last night I spent a few hours creating an agent for my chatbot on my site (check it out) that does a pretty great job of improving poorly constructed prompts like “I need to write an email to my boss”. It’s not perfect, but it’s also proof that if I can spend a few hours on an idea then it’s just a matter of time before someone smarter perfects it.

Previous reply was a generic letter with the subject “Resignation Letter”

Current models are great at many things, but many argue that while they’re great at creative execution, they’ll never be good at creative ideation. The concept is that they can’t imagine a thing that doesn’t exist. But what if that’s wrong? Articles and papers come out nearly every week referring to concepts like Deep Reasoning or Neuro-Symbolism, and new multi-agent approaches to interfaces encourage AI inner monologues.

So, what is “Safe?”

Over coffee today, I had the opportunity to talk with a friend who is a dancer for the Dutch National Ballet. We discussed the value of human creativity using his art form as an example. There are dozens of people who pay to see the same show, often multiple times per week, year after year, in order to see the craft of ballet. No show is the same. No dancer’s performance is ever the same. In fact, some of the allure, he says, is when something goes wrong you want to see how the dancer corrects or improvises.

And there are many things like this. There may come a day when there is an all-robot ballet, and it will undoubtedly be astounding. There may be an orchestra that is capable of recreating the original artist’s exact sound, but it’s crafts like this where we don’t pay for perfection. We value them because we see, in front of us, the effort and dedication that it’s taken in order to perform something that is physically improbable. The practice of getting good at something does have some sort of value over the result of the thing. It’s the same reason why some of our most treasured singers have great voices, but we look down on artists who use autotune as a crutch.

For me, there is hope, not only that a massive foundational disruption will be good but also that there will still be durable forms of expression where human creativity is the ideal.

I hope this was useful.

On Better Questions and the Power of a Clearness Committee

In the 2022 documentary Stutz about the relationship between Jonah Hill and his therapist Phil Stutz, Jonah says that one of life’s great tragedies in life is that we want our friends to listen and our therapists to tell us what to do, but our therapists only listen and our friends won’t stop telling us what to do.

I think about this a lot more than I should in my daily life and find myself quoting this line a disproportionately high amount. Partly because thinking of this quote acts as a small reminder for me to shut up and listen, and partly because it’s just such a damn good way to inject some levity into a tense conversation.

But I think that this is unfair to therapists, who have to play the precarious role of being a mirror for their patients by asking questions that allow people to arrive at their own conclusions. The complexities of human processing and communication styles unfortunately mean that sometimes people abandon therapy because it “didn’t work for me” when in reality it was more likely just a style mismatch.

So their role isn’t to fix me?

No. Definitely not. We’re all broken, they’re just helping us to build the tools to fix ourselves. The world breaks us all, hell even the best parents inflict damage on their children (I firmly believe that the differentiator between “bad parenting” and “good parenting” is not how little parents break their children but by how well they equip them with the tools to fix themselves). Some might say that broken is our default mode, but I, as a well-documented optimist, think that there is hope! Better questions.

I’ve written about the benefits of hosting a self Q&A, and how to formulate questions in order to walk yourself through thinking that might be stuck or stagnant, but as a friend recently commented, “That’s great, but where do I go from here:

Me: Is there something wrong?
Also Me: Yes”

Ah. I should have been more clear…

Just like with therapy, our own Q&As should be formulated in a way that avoids these conversation stoppers (except where they act as purposeful punctuation marks, which I’ll get into). An overly aggressive studio executive once told me that he only ever answers “no” to yes/no binary questions, because he believed (and there’s evidence to back this up) that we are hardwired to answer no when presented with these types of questions. Despite disliking this man, I’ve fully absorbed this principle into my life, and besides the possibility of it being hardwired into us, it also just doesn’t give us much room for thoughtful responses.

There is a massive difference between, “Do you like ice cream?” and “What’s your favorite dessert?” One is a conversation started and the other is just a question…

Back to how this applies to me…

Well, I’ll be brief here, but if you’re going through something - especially if you can’t quite figure out what that is - then asking open-ended questions that require you to think, and therefor process, are infinitely more beneficial. So avoid these questions…. unless you have reached the point where you need to punctuate your thoughts.

Let’s take a scenario where you’re trying to decide whether to move to a new country/job/etc, and you’ve gone through your self Q&A and have reached a point of unspoken clarity. Are you done? Well, sure, you could be, but you could also ask yourself one last question: “Should I do this or not?”

With this question, you’ve accomplished two things. You have tied off the conversational thread with some finality which results in a slight decrease in the psychological burden this question has put on you, and you have also written your decision out. You have made a small commitment to yourself. Congratulations!

Okay, but how do I help my friends if I can’t give them advice?

I never said you couldn’t give your friends advice, and I’m not your boss (and even if I were I’d probably never tell you to not give advice, see my principles page for more on that). I believe it is totally fine to give advice when it’s asked for, when it’s urgent, and on a handful of other occasions you’ll have to figure out for yourself.

But I would ask you what you’re looking to accomplish by giving advice. If it’s to help someone you care about, then a better way might be to - you guessed it - ask questions (and make sure they’re of the “better” variety). If you’re just looking to talk, then you do, this post is probably not for you.

In the book Effortless by Greg McKeown, he references a practice performed by Quakers known as the “Clearness Committee” wherein a group of elders would preside over an individual in crisis. Their only job in these situations is to ask honest questions and seek clarity when needed. Their role is not to give opinions or advice or solve the individual’s problem, and neither should this be your responsibility to your loved ones.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink,” and this is the psychological equivalent of that. The horse may be distrustful of water that they’re dragged to by the bridle, and I can’t blame them! But if they happen to stumble upon the water while you’re walking around with them then they might just take a sip.

On Boundaries, Self Reflection and The Importance of Personal Time

Okay, so this is a lengthy title, so let me attempt a tl;dr for those already exhausted. Boundaries are a thing, sometimes you might not know they’ve been crossed, and the most oft-crossed boundary for me seems to be personal time/space. There, how’d I do?

I have spent the past year, and most of my life, exploring and identifying my own boundaries as it relates to things like work, romantic relationships, and even friendships. But recently, just when I was beginning to feel confident about the work and romantic relationships part (thanks primarily to someone wonderful who has been patient with me as I navigate love like a teenager learning to drive), another element popped up that has me pausing and reassessing all of this progress. And it’s this question:

What about people you’ve spent your entire life with, i.e. family? Thankfully my family has been supportive of my struggles and adventures in depression, but during a recent visit where multiple family members came to visit me here for the first time, I realized that something that hasn’t been necessary with newer relationships and business relationships is fundamental in familial relationships:

Context. Your family knows the entirety of you, and so these new pieces of you, the boundaries specifically, can come off as if something is wrong (which, to be fair, something was definitely wrong, which is why I have been chronicling these adventures) or as you just being plain rude.

As an example, a relative and I were joking and she crossed a boundary that she didn’t know existed, because for the first 37 years of my life it didn’t exist, and it was miserable attempting to contextualize why this was an issue to someone who literally saw me born.

In the end, though the conversation felt a little awkward, I felt brave for having done it. But the other weird part about this, and something that I’m discovering about myself, is that context sharing needs to be timely. But timely does not mean immediately.

For me, I needed to walk away, and to think about how best to share the information in a way that was honest but not so heated that it was adversarial. Because it wasn’t. No one did anything wrong here. So, in this case, the appropriate “timeliness” of it was between 3 hours and 1 day and it worked perfectly.

The last thing I’ll touch on here, because it relates to boundaries, is that I have absolutely SUCKED at setting boundaries lately, and my poor family definitely paid the price. They left back to the US about 28 hours ago, and I spent the entirety of that 28 hours speaking to no one, except for dinner with my partner’s parents (which was amazing, and well worth breaking my no humans rule) because the last 9 weeks, literally, have been spent with either visitors staying with me, or travel for work. In that time I have had exactly 5 days without plans, and this is a critical failure of maintaining boundaries on my part.

Prior to my parents joining, another friend casually asked, “hey what are your plans this weekend? Can I come to visit?” and without a beat I said sure. Absolutely. I’ll make the bed… All the while screaming internally about when I would have a moment to myself and hoping to some unseen god that they wouldn’t ask me to play tour guide (they did).

So here is another few boundaries I’m setting:

• No visitors back to back. Minimum of 2 weeks between

• I will not play tour guide, but I will happily provide recommendations

  • I might get some grief for this, but if you’re here to see me, great, let’s hang out. If you’re here to see the city, do some fucking research and I’ll happily answer questions. but I have 2 full time jobs, and if you want your holiday to end without resentment then you’ve gotta pull your own weight around here.

• I will not spend every day with you. Or every hour of every day with you. I may not even have any days off work while you’re here. Amsterdam is one of the most popular tourist destinations on the planet which means that I get, on an average year, TWELVE people (or groups of people) visiting. I don’t want to spend all of my holiday days giving tours to y’all. I want to spend them trekking the Alps, or snorkeling, volunteering, or building a castle.

And I hope you understand. In return, when I ask to visit you or your city, I will make the same promise. If I am there to see you, let’s have a bite, sit on the couch, and chill. Don’t change your life because a rando is suddenly in it. And if I’m there to be a tourist, I’m going to be a tourist and walk around with an oversized map and get lost.

I hope this post was useful, and I hope you know (those of you who have visited) that I did love every minute of it, but I’ll not be accepting any visitors for the next month or so, thanks :)

On Immortality

Recently I had a conversation with a friend about immortality based on the recent news about Jeff Bezo’s investment in a laboratory specializing in longevity and how it’s suggested that the first person to live to 1000 may already be alive.

“I don’t think anyone should be subjected to another 950 years of Bezos,” she said, shuddering at the thought. She went on to describe her vision of a dystopian future where everyone lives forever and machines have stolen everyone’s jobs and billionaires continue to leech off society.

But I have a different vision for immortality and it’s not pessimistic, but first I’d like to discuss what I see (and I am not a biologist) as the challenges and moral implications of living hundreds of years.

As a matter of focus for this post, I will mostly exclude external causes of mortality and instead focus on aging at the cellular, molecular and mental levels, but this is by no means exhaustive and I intend this to be a philosophical perspective instead of a prescriptive roadmap.

The Cell-ing Point

At the biological level, aging can be simplified as the accumulation of damage at the cellular and molecular levels. This damage can be caused through natural cellular reproduction whereby “errors” are produced every few billion cycles, leading to degeneration in healthy functions. This can also be caused by lifestyle and environmental factors, but the result is largely the same: more and more wrinkles and achy joints.

Studies such as this one on the “Immortal Hydra” suggest that there are ways to decrease the rate at which cellular errors occur and even shine a light on how organisms can recover from seemingly catastrophic or fatal damage. Reducing the rate of cellular errors alone would lead to a decrease in aging-related symptoms, meaningfully extending the average lifespan and health span of humans. And fewer wrinkles and achy joints, hurray!

But that is just longevity, not immortality.

To supplement this error reduction, technologies like CRISPR show some promise in bolstering our immune systems with the tools to seek out and destroy damaged cells and even target some genetic illnesses, effectively leaving us with a semblance of immortality. Fewer errors + deletion of errors = forever?

(NOTE: this is vastly oversimplified, and there are entire fields of study into the various causes of aging that I could not even begin to touch.)

So we’ve reached biological immortality. What about our minds? Can we store hundreds of years of information without some catastrophic issue? Would the weight of centuries drive us insane?

I can see a few possibilities. One is that of correction. Suppose a sizable percentage of the population begins to live hundreds of years, and the weight of those centuries does begin to take a toll on our mental functions. In that case, we’d have a meaningful focus on augmenting our existing capabilities through additive technology. An overly simplistic view of the human brain is to compare its functions to that of a complex computer. It has its own storage system, its own operating system, and even its own peripheral devices (your senses). Need more storage? I can see that as being possible. Faster processor? Sure, why not. Are senses failing you? We’re already introducing new senses quite easily.

However, I am more optimistic about our brain’s ability to adapt. There is a lot of evidence that suggests we’ve had to do it several times in the past (and I’m not just referring to evolution). Recent studies into neuroplasticity show that we can make near-immediate changes to its structure. As our minds store and then later recall information, we use symbols as shortcuts for representations of more complex information (there are theories that this is what dreams are. Converting information into a coding system for storage and later retrieval).

As an example of the power of symbols, if you ask anyone who has ever seen an airplane to draw an airplane, they will almost all give you the same basic drawing, despite thousands of different models of airplanes. And we’ve done this for as long as we’ve been humans. Symbols are shortcuts, and they are great for encoding information.

When language was introduced to humans, however, we were suddenly presented with a much more efficient coding system for our memories. Words individually are symbols, but words together convey fully formed and wildly complex ideas. In short, we invented a new encoding system for our brains, and with it, the structure of our brains rapidly changed to become more efficient.

It’s my belief, then, that our lengthened sense of time would present another opportunity for change in how our brains store information. It may take multiple generations of “immortals” for a consistent coding system to emerge, but we’d have all the time in the world to test… because of the whole immortality thing…

And none of this considers additional technologies like the “neural link” that would give us ready access to a repository of information external to our brains. With these, maybe no change would even be needed, but I have my doubts that it will affect this particular challenge and might instead affect communication or working memory.

So now we’re immortal, forever wrinkle-free, and we remember everything. What does society look like?

Well the dystopian view is that billionaires continue to leech off a society of immortal workers who have no choice but to work to live off continually meager earnings.

I disagree. Not that billionaires will try to leech or that they will even try to hoard or obscure these advancements for themselves (i feel pretty confident that even immortal people can be greedy), but that in a future where people can live 500+ years and advances in technology have already begun to replace many types of labor that they will have anyone to leech off in the first place.

There are already countries trialing things like universal basic income or incentivized societal income, because they see these foundational shifts in work and know that we will need to be more creative in the future where historically “menial” tasks are automated. More radical post-capitalist subscribers view an optimistic end to money as we know it. Others submit challenges to governments to present wealth caps in what is referred to as capped-italism, calling for an end to billionaires.

“Where there is money to be made, there is greed.” And I don’t disagree, but I see the mere possibility of a future where the ultra wealthy no longer have anything the populace needs, and that wealth (as we know it) is no longer relevant.

What about the environmental impact of immortality? This is the area I’m most concerned and least optimistic about. Our very living requires resources, and we have lived out of balance with our ecosystem for as long as we’ve existed, so how can we change this?

It’s overly simplistic to suggest we completely stop the extraction of raw materials, but is what it would take. There is a line in a recent episode of Star Trek that says, “first we cataloged the totality of the elements in our landfills and found all that we needed. Next, we produced technology to fabricate whatever we needed. Everything exists in abundance if you know how to use it.”

Big words, cool idea.

Another, and much more controversial angle would be strict population control or even reversal. I see how this is controversial because we’ve seen it in practice throughout history and the outcome has always been inequality (either monetary, racial or gendered), and also because what the actual fuck?! Still, I mention it because it will, no doubt, be mentioned in this conversation in the future and it would be unfortunate to ignore that possible conversation just because of how ew-y it is.

Still, something will need to change, or no one will live forever (unless Bezos takes off in his penis ship and flies around forever laughing like a Bond villain).

And finally, let’s talk about the concept of “forever”. Why would anyone want to live forever?

I believe the goal will never be to live forever and that the reason it’s romanticized today is because we each currently have an unknown “time limit” to our personal existence that presents us with a small but constant fear that any day might be the last day. And because the media paints such a delightful picture of it with a dozen shows and films about 500 year old vampires dating teenagers.

This presents us with another issue, though. Our impermanence, and this background fear, is a primal motivator for us to experience, learn, and, well, live. If we suddenly didn’t have our mortal worries would we be motivated to do anything, at all? Would we revert into lazy hedonists with no care or concept of time? Would our mental health decline without the structures and confines of life milestones (or even daily milestones)?

I am a firm believer in the power of applying positive constraints to your life and to your work, and that our limited lifespan is one of the most potent positive constraints there available. We have a limited amount of time within which we can do as much of the things that are possible to do within that limited amount of time.

The challenge will be finding a way to make immortality more constraining so that we don’t fall victim to Parkinson’s Law on a massive scale. Imagine living forever and wasting infinitely more time than you do now? Wouldn’t that suck?

As you can see, we have a lot to overcome, and I’m viewing immortality from the skeuomorphic lens of someone who is not (currently) immortal, but in my estimation, the reality of immortality is that it presents everyone with a choice for how long they want to go. Some will want to live longer than others, sure, and there will still likely be people satisfied with more traditional lifespans, but by effectively eliminating the unknown we gain a freedom from the ever-present reality of our mortality, along with the pitfalls that come with it.

Living forever becomes an option, like eating an entire kg bag of sugar. Sure, it’s possible, but most people would want to stop after a couple spoonfuls.

On The Stepping Stones to Expertise

None of what I’m writing here is new, and even the stages of mastery described below are borrowed from other sources, yet still I write.

Six months ago today my beard trimmer broke. The next day I looked for a new beard trimmer on Amazon and couldn’t decide which one was for me. They all seemed to lack some mystery feature that I absolutely needed in order to maintain the permanent 5 O’Clock Shadow that has been my signature look for my entire adult life.

Now, I’m unsure when I became so particular about beard trimmers, considering the one I was replacing had been a purchase from a drug store a full decade earlier and threatened to start a fire every time I plugged the US plug into the EU adapter, but, as they say, indecision itself is a decision and so that was the day I decided to grow out a beard to fully embrace my viking heritage.

Phase 1 - You don’t know what you don’t know

At first, within the first month or so, no one really noticed the new growth. At this point it was, if anything, a patchy curiosity. During this phase of expertise, most people were happy to ignore my meager efforts. I deluded myself into thinking I could go a couple more weeks before I absolutely needed to buy a new beard trimmer.

Phase 2 - You know what you don’t know

Around the two month mark it hit the length where concerned friends and family members felt compelled to ask about my wellbeing, or offer questions like, “how long do you think you’ll grow it” or politely comment on it like they would to a neighbor’s primary school science project (always a volcano, always messier than anticipated). Still, I hadn’t decided on a trimmer and so I continued down the path of excellence, adopting the go-to explanation that I’d cut it when I got tired of it, while hating it every single day.

Phase 3 - You know what you know

Months 3-4 were when things really started to take off. For these 60 days I consumed more content on beard growth and maintenance than during my entire 36 previous years of life combined and as my knowledge increased through consumption, so too was I offered an equal quantity of unsolicited wisdom from other beard-bearers. It was also during this time when I incurred the most setbacks in my journey to excellence, and developed a myriad of trust issues along the way.

As it turns out, your friend’s glorious chin mane might require different care than the wiry thicket enrobing your face, and the barber who knows every cowlick or curl on the top of your head might have a wildly different “vision” for what a beard should be. This is when I finally bought a beard trimmer.

Phase 4 - You don’t know what you know

From that last unfortunate barber-induced beard trauma 2 months ago until today, something foundational has shifted. Besides my maintenance routine becoming nearly automatic, now having an entire shelf in my bathroom dedicated to beard grooming, and my own comfortability with this new identity, the attitude and questions about my beard have also shifted.

Where once my furry face was met with concerned glances I now see impressed head nods, questions about my intentions have now become meaningful compliments, and unsolicited suggestions have become requests for advice, or comments like, “I wish my beard could grow like that but it’s too patchy.”

The point behind all of this, aside from telling you how epic I feel with my beard, is that we’ve all gone through these phases on our pursuit for knowledge, skills, or anything else that is difficult. They’re predictable. There will be a time when you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, there will be a time when you think you know what you’re doing but the onslaught of well-intentioned onlookers will have you doubting, and eventually there will be a time when others seek guidance from you.

These phases take time, they can be frustrating, and they take patience, but knowing they’re predictable might just help you to grow an awesome beard like mine.

On Asking Yourself Vital Questions, and Answering Them

As I wrote in my journal today, i had a terrible sense of worthlessness that just seemed silly to my conscious self. For one, it is a Saturday, it was before noon, I was sitting at a cafe enjoying a coffee, and I had also just finished with five of my seven "goals" for the day. Again, this is a Saturday. A year ago I would be wrestling with myself to even leave the house by this time, and today I had meditated, journaled, taken a short language lesson, shared gratitude with someone I love and did a kind gesture for a stranger.

Still, I felt ashamed at not having accomplished my first assigned task of the day (going to a 9am yoga class), so the rest of the day was effectively ruined to my ruminating mind.

My usual method for exploring these feelings is to have a Q&A session with myself, where I take turns writing thoughtful questions to myself within my journal, and then spending a minimum of 1 minute examining each question before jotting down my answer. I like this exercise, and it almost always produces quick and lasting shifts in my mental state, because it combines the benefit of a conversational bounce board with the knowledge that you can't lie to the person you're conversing with. You can call yourself on your bullshit, but you also get to treat yourself like a friend.

The root of today's ennui (or one of them, at least) appears to come from having effectively broken a promise to myself. That promise was the complicated combination of elements that I would wake up at a reasonable time, I would enjoy the mental and physical benefits of yoga, and I would still have the entire day ahead of myself to wander, think, and socialize with friends. To complicate things further, I dedicated the night before to "alone time" following the mental and social exhaustion of a busier-than-usual work week, and made the ill-advised decision to eat a weed brownie from one of my more questionable friends, which left me feeling like a tranquilized bear until around 10am today.

So, as you can see, it's not so simple as "missing a yoga class". Sure, I am sad about missing the class, and it's totally acceptable, logically, to enjoy a little lay in, but if you've read my last few posts you'll know that I've just spent the better part of the last year digging myself out of a hole of depression and the most consistent benefits to my wellbeing over the past several months have been waking at a reasonable time, moving my body, and spending time with people who make me feel good things. By sleeping in and missing this class I had betrayed myself and to the part of my mind that remembers what my life was like for the past few years, this seems a sign of impending doom.

Still, the Q&A has another trick up its sleeve. It lets me practice both criticism and creativity at once. The critic asks questions like, "is it the hour that you wake up that matters, or is it the momentum?" I don't know, I've never really explored that question before... "Well, the next time yoga isn't an option, what can you try to get yourself into a forward momentum?" I could immediately go for a walk, or I could take a cold plunge, or do some pushups.

The point is that these questions inspired these answers (as well as the associated excitement at each possibility) and all of it came from my own brain and effectively got me out of my own funk in just a few minutes. I haven't seen any friends today, and I've mostly just relaxed and played video games, but I feel good about it. I feel productive about it.

Maybe you will, too.

On New Beginnings

I have a pretty wild relationship with New Year. Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated with traditions surrounding the transition from one year to the next.

In Spain, for instance, it’s a common practice to eat 12 grapes for each strike of the bell at midnight; some countries smash plates or even throw furniture out the window. They have always made me curious about the intention behind them and about the connection between them.

My family has always made it a habit to share elaborate New Years resolutions that seem, each year, an attempt to fool Fate and finally succeed at our grand plans. I am no different, and have had many failures and some successes. This year, I am sure, will be no different.

In 2017 I conspired with my father and brother to shake things up by assigning each other resolutions. The thinking was that this would allow people who love us to decide what was in our best interest, and to create a framework of accountability.

It worked, sort of. I was assigned two resolutions to complete. The first, to publish my novel. The second, to quit drinking for an entire year.

The joke was on them, for you see, I had very little intention of publishing my novel and had recently decided that writing it had been a form of therapy and had also been contemplating a break from alcohol for some time due to a heavy party season. Now, almost 5 years later, I am still sober and genuinely love the lifestyle, but I find myself still trying to replicate the meteoric success of that year’s resolution.

This is the year!… Right?

The year after I quit drinking I decided to dedicate to perfecting sleep, and I took to it like wildfire. I read every book on sleep I could find, and the advice did seem to match up:

• No screens an hour before bedtime

  • How?!

• No light while you sleep

  • Sleep masks suck, and there’s not enough tape in the world to make the tiny lights on all of the devices in my room go away

• No sound

  • Thankfully, I don’t really snore, but my dog does, and at the time of this experiment I lived on one of the busiest tram lines in Amsterdam, so I settled for a noise machine that simulates an oscilating fan

• No caffeine after 2pm

  • This appears to be specific to my chronotype, but this alone was a game changer for me.

• Delay caffeine intake to later than 90min after waking

  • This also was a huge game changer

• Avoid carbohydrates close to bedtime

• Read fiction before bed

Once I had fully implemented these changes I did see a remarkable impact on the quality and stability of my sleep, but it took maybe 3 months to nail down, and somehow it felt like I hadn’t aimed high enough.

The next year was about getting a six pack and being able to do a muscle up. I failed. Maybe they were too specific? Maybe I just didn’t care? Either way, the year after I set up 3 resolutions that would be spread throughout the year. I was going to learn FOUR languages.

Well, I did technically succeed, but my criteria seems to have been the mistake, there. I passed A2 exams in each language, but I still can’t formulate a sentence with a stranger to save my life.

So this year, what will I do? Well, first, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking this year about these past failures and they all have one thing in common, and that is that they are “Means” goals. They’re also quite static. I think I was onto something by making my resolutions last year astronomically difficult, but I lacked purpose.

I lacked a “Why” Goal.

As I mentioned in my post “The Final Why”, if you’re able to spend some time getting to the real “Why” of a thing, then the “Means” don’t matter. Why did I want to learn 4 languages? Why did I care about a 6 pack?

I think they both possibly contain very real reasons, but those reasons are hidden behind the task nature of the means goal. So what am I going to do this year?

This year I have chosen the themes of “Mobility,” and “Thoughtitude” (totally made up) and have a couple of Why goals that go along with them.

If I ask myself why I want to be physically mobile, it is to be able to extend my health span, and to feel good and able for as long as possible. If I ask why I want to have lifestyle mobility, it is to have as much flexibility as possible to account for life changes, and opportunities and to explore the planet more.

Below are some of the Means I will attempt for both Physical Mobility and Lifestyle Mobility, but remember that the Means don’t matter, only that they work for the Why:

• Physical Mobility

  • Calisthenics allows you to strengthen muscles at the extent of their natural range of motion, and promotes better proprioception (bodily awareness), and can strengthen auxiliary muscle groups that are often easy injured at older age. As it doesn’t include any additional weights, the escalation of movements is controlled entirely by your own body’s ability to handle itself.

  • Yoga emphasizes breathwork and strength at extension as well as flexibility. Yin and Yang styles are both complementary and allow you to both strengthen at extension and also relax into extension. It is also excellent for endurance and balance.

  • Bouldering (rock climbing without a top rope) promotes proprioception, balance and grip strength and activates neurons in similar ways to lateral thinking puzzles.

  • Etc.

• Lifestyle Mobility

  • Luckily my work allows me to be both location and time independent and so I have the ability to work from anywhere, however I have learned that this is best kept to yourself as it can sometimes make other people feel bad, even if there is nothing wrong with doing it and you are getting your work done

  • Invest in experiences in new places

  • Limit expenses as much as possible

As you can probably tell, this second one is the one I will likely have the most issues with, and I will come back to this often as I think of more ideas.

As for the made up word “thoughtitude”, this one is simple. I will make it a daily practice to share gratitude to someone who has affected my life and will dedicate a small amount of time toward doing something specifically thoughtful for someone else in the spirit of kindness.

Why? Besides it being the right thing to do, this also helps to make the environment of my life more habitable toward the people that I love (current and future).

I hope that these both are wildly successful, but know that even in the attempt I will have made my life, and hopefully the lives of those I care about, just a litttttle bit better.

On Finding My Why

On 12 August 2022, I took a leave of absence from work and stepped into a journey that has proven to be the most meaningful 2 months of my life (up to this point). I’d like to say that this break was a choice, or that I took it with hope and enthusiasm, but in actuality, I stepped away despite a deep sense of shame and a sinking feeling that I was lying to my boss, my team, my family, my friends when I said that I would be back and that I would get better.

In some senses, I was lying. I had little hope that 6 weeks would be enough even to put a dent in my depression, and I fully expected (and dreaded) the day when I would have to call my boss and tell him that I wasn’t coming back. As I prepared for my trip, I also assumed that “work” would take up much more of my psychic energy, and I created little systems to counteract my addiction to work, to technology.

I changed all my passwords and uploaded them to a cryptographic key escrow that would belittle me if I even attempted to ask for access to my e-mail. I created a comprehensive briefing memo with every possible decision that might need to be made while I was gone to lessen the blow to my colleagues and lessen my guilt at leaving them. I deleted hundreds of apps from my smartphone.

But I was wrong. No sooner than I logged out of my devices did I see the immensity of the void that had grown around it. Work wasn’t so much the problem as it obscured an emptiness that quietly developed over the past few years. Where did this come from?

Cue panic attack.

I was standing on the train platform in Amsterdam waiting for my increasingly delayed train to arrive and take me to Austria for a yoga retreat in the Alps when the world started to spin. every five minutes that passed added another 10 minutes to the delay, and the stillness of the world broke apart under the barrage of insecurities, judgments and unanswerable questions.

Why did you choose a yoga retreat on your FIRST DAY of medical leave?
Do you really think you can keep up with these skilled yogis?
Won’t they know that you’re a fake yogi?
What if this train is 4 hours late?
It’s going to be awful being surrounded by 20 people for a whole week with no escape
What if they can tell that I’m depressed?
What if they can’t tell that I’m depressed?
What if they can see that I’m depressed and don’t give a shit?
No one gives a shit about you.
Where are your fucking friends?
How can I have so many friends and feel so alone?

So alone.

Now, It really isn’t fair of me to ask where my friends are, when one of the most beautiful things about this experience has been the outpouring of support from loved ones, and even from delightfully unexpected places. My boss and our VP were the first to encourage me to take this time, even though it would lead to more work for them, and through this experience, I’ve learned that I’m far from alone. So many people I know have, and are, going through similar things. To this day, I have yet to mention my struggles to someone and not hear them mirrored back to me. It seems that, perhaps, I am late to the party regarding clinical depression, but I have never felt short of an ear to listen to or a shoulder to cry on, which is why I feel so guilty about feeling so alone.

And as I waited for my train, which finally arrived 3 hours delayed, and was one of my life's most brutal traveling experiences, I couldn’t help but indulge in my innermost worries and insecurities. In addition to being hilariously delayed, the train was overbooked, and I ended up sleeping crouched on the floor; all the while, these voices screamed at me to turn around. To get off at the next station. To call it quits.

I don’t know how I pushed through these voices, but I can pinpoint when they finally shut the hell up. My 12-hour train ride became 22 after they needed to change the train's engine in the middle of the German countryside, and my “early arrival” turned into me sprinting across an Austrian village with two suitcases to catch the last gondola of the day. But the moment I sat down on that gondola and soared through the clouds to the top of the mountain that would be my home for several weeks, I was struck with calm. This is right.

Venturing through the saloon-style doors and into our hut/home, I was hit with a wall of smiles that, over time, we all discovered were only surface-level. Through a week of yoga, hiking, learning, and struggling together, we all saw the cracks in those smiles, but by the end, they revealed their more real, raw, and beautiful counterparts. Every person was on their journey, yet I felt a kinship and a familiarity with their stories. I learned so much from them, and I also got to teach about my experiences. It seemed we were all there looking for that same ineffable thing. It was magic.

The last day came too soon, and I felt an urgency I hadn’t felt in an entire week. I needed to stay. It wasn’t time. Of course, another part of me wondered if perhaps that was just because it was great, or because it was the first time I’d felt joy in a long time, but either way, I left feeling unfinished.

Leading the charge was a feeling that I was beginning to identify 3 themes (I love things in triplicate). Still, they needed more time to develop before I could put them to words, and as I left the mountain and entered Vienna, I woke up to another panic attack.

Not this shit again?! I thought we were through this…

I reached out to my new-found friends and connections and was morbidly happy to hear that my anxiety was not alone. “A problem shared is a problem halved,” they say, and at this moment, with our shared misery, I did feel halved. With enough energy and enthusiasm to continue my journey, I took another night train to Lake Garda and tried my hardest to be present.

I arrived just as the sun rose, and 6 hours before I could check into my hotel, I abandoned my baggage in the lobby and decided to see the world asleep. I found a magical place where the Alpine collided with a more Mediterranean environment. It was drastic and beautiful, and I found myself looking at the mountains in the distance with a longing that I found myself unable to suppress.

Feeling foolish and looking for courage, I messaged a few friends with strategically worded questions like “would it be crazy to make another yoga retreat?” where I knew the answer would be no. Who was I fooling? I had the retreat’s booking page on my phone when I left and never closed the tab.

So, I decided to go back.

I had several justifications at the ready, including, “I’m not trying to recreate the magic; I’m trying to continue the work,” but I was looking to recreate the magic. How could I not try to recreate the only happiness I’d felt in at least half a year? I knew it then, and I know it now, but these justifications helped me rationalize the decision, and it was the right decision, to go back to the mountains for another round.

Walking through the doors this second time, the reality of my decision immediately struck me. It was different. The people were different (more subdued, quieter), I was different (more subdued, quieter), and the weather was different (more subdued, foggier), so my illusions about recreating the magic were shattered, and instead, I did the thing I lied about doing in the first place: I continued the work.

Before my Leave of Absence, my days essentially looked like this:

• Wake up 10 min before my first meeting at 10:30am or so

• Shower sometime around 11:30am (if I showered at all)

• Stop working around 6:00pm

• Move to the couch, immediately fall asleep, wake every 15 minutes, and check Slack and e-mail.

• Drag myself to bed by 11:00pm

• Fatigued always

During the retreat, my days looked like this:

• Wake up at 6:30am (no alarm) and meditate

• Watch sunrise

• Yoga at 8:00am

• Breakfast at 9:00am

• Hiking or other activity at 11:00am

• Yoga at 5:00pm

• Dinner at 7:00pm

• Sauna at 8:30pm

• Read before bed at 9:30pm

• Bed at 10:00pm

And it was never a hassle. I breathed in the fresh alpine air, moved my body in beautiful ways, reignited a love of photography, journaled, meditated, told stories, read, laughed, tried scary new things, and felt at ease the entire time. Around the 3rd day of this second retreat, I realized I had spent nearly 16 hours every day for 15 days with nearly 20 people and didn’t feel like retreating into my cave.

This thought, and the question about loneliness, led me to the first of my three themes: Connection.

I have always considered my social life to be a singular thing, but during an exercise on fulfillment, it was described as three separate but interconnected things. Relationships (the people you are connected to), Social Circle (the people you do social activities with, often called “friends”), and Community (the people who are a part of a community that you are involved with, including location, religion, activities, and causes).

This was groundbreaking because it answered how I could have many friends and still feel so very lonely. One problem is that I have a lot of people with whom I can confide, and with whom I feel a deep connection (some emotional, some familial, some spiritual/philosophical). Still, due to circumstances such as where they live or what life events are happening, we aren’t in each other’s social circle at the moment.

And that is okay! But this also highlights something I’d never considered. That I belong to no community. My interests are personal, but I have started asking if this might be because I’ve been going about them wrong. I’ve always found it easy to make friends and get deep, but I often find that when I make friends and try to get them to do things that fulfill me, they’re often unreceptive, or I can tell they’re just not that into it. And so I continue to do the things that fulfill me by myself and do the things that fulfill them together.

But in this new light, perhaps those people who have “squash buddies” have it right. So my first theme and my first “Why” goal is to flip my social life on its head by engaging in the activities that fulfill me and searching for the community there.

“What’s a why goal?” you ask… Well, it’s time to introduce you to my second theme: Sweat.

Before my adventures in depression, I’ve spent my entire adult life with what I’ve come to refer to as “Means” goals. Try this diet, try this workout routine, get this promotion, but all for what reason?

Do I need a promotion? Why?
Do I need to be on a diet? Why?
Do I need to work out? Why?

The answer may be yes, but I’ve never really spent much time diving into the first “Why.” for example, my first reason for diet and exercise might be getting a six-pack. But why do I want a six-pack?

shrugs

If you dig deep enough (in this example, I use the 5 Why’s Technique, which is of little value in information gathering, but is a good thought experiment for figuring out why I want a six-pack), you eventually get to a “Why” goal. For me, this why goal is to feel better now, extend my health span (not just my life span) later and create enough flexibility in my life to alleviate any guilt I might have toward occasionally stretching the bounds of what is considered healthy. A diet may be a means to this goal, and a workout plan may be a means, but they are not the goal itself and shouldn’t be.

So, in short, Sweat. This was revolutionary to me, because instead of having over-constructed goals around workout rituals, I ask, “how do I want to move my body today?” and then I do that thing. Amazingly it’s working, and I’m down 4kg (10lbs) and 6% body fat by simply asking and then doing the thing.

But, I suppose, that’s not the whole of it. Not without my third theme, Boundaries.

As both of my therapists (my personal, and the company-provided resource) have been known to tell me over the past few months, I am absolutely shit at setting proper boundaries. My friendships hay have changed in the past couple of years (so many babies), allowing work to fill the space they once filled, but this would have likely never happened if I had actually created proper and rigid boundaries in my life.

“Remember that work friends are not always real friends.” I’ve heard this before. I’ve gotten this feedback from leaders. I always shrugged it off, because I value those work friends. I value my ability to be a singular human without walls or different personalities.

But I get it, now. Without boundaries, it’s not just my relationships that have blended. My time is also a casualty of my inability to separate. I check my e-mail before going to bed and first thing in the morning. I hang out with work friends more than anyone else (to be honest, most of my friends are work friends), and I spend days off strategizing and thinking about work.

No. More.

The sad part about this realization is that I likely will have to scale back or be more rigid about the people I let into my life until I can fully realize which friends are friends and which are work friends. More than the others, this last one is the one I’ve yet to test. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying new activities and searching for community, but I’ve yet to spend considerable time testing my boundaries with work. This will need to be a living meditation, but I’m setting myself up to try this:

• No slack or E-mail on my phone. If I’m on my phone, it means I’m not working.

• Avoid work before a certain time (TBD, depending on how rigid I make my morning yoga routine over time)

• Stop work at a specific time (5pm most days, some days later for UCAN team meetings)

• Take breaks

• Protect blocks of work time

• Restrict checking e-mail to specific times to protect productivity (there are so many studies on this)

The tone of this post is optimistic for something written about depression, and so am I… Right now. I hope I’m well on the way to recovery, but I’m lucky. I asked my doctor(s) how I would know when I’m no longer depressed. They both said variations of, “when you start to have more good days than bad days, then you’re on the right track.” And right now, I’m having more good days than bad, but I know some days will suck, so the work continues.

Depression is messy. I always assumed it meant “real, real sad,” but for me, it was mostly this emptiness, but with bees in my chest. I’ve talked to at least a dozen well-meaning friends who have and still struggle with depression, and I know I’m lucky. My depression is different than theirs. I haven’t felt like ending my life, not in real terms at least, and I’ve generally always had at least a little hope. Every single person feels it differently, and that’s why I assume it’s so hard to diagnose.

I’ve felt alone, but every time I’ve expressed this loneliness, I’ve been met with the tragic realization that everyone around me is silently struggling with those same feelings. We all walk blindly through the world, not knowing that other people are around us. To me, this is all the more reason to write this and share what I’m learning, as I’m learning it.

This post is also for me later, when I inevitably forget about these lessons in the onslaught of life, but here it is!

post!

On Becoming European

EDIT: This post was originally written for my future self in mind and should be read as a note to self

A colleague from the US showed up at my office in Amsterdam this morning, and I greeted them with a sturdy embrace and a kiss on both cheeks.

“Whoa, that’s new,” she said. “You’ve really embraced this whole ‘Europe’ thing, huh?”

I ignored the impermanence in her tone, as if my living here were a temporary fad, and focused on the meat of what she was saying. I guess I have embraced this whole “Europe” thing. I started to think about the subtle shifts in my habits that could arguably be called “European” and found myself surprised. I now habitually spell my words with a different flair (colour, authorisation, etc), I call my cell phone a “mobile”, I use Whatsapp exclusively over SMS, and apparently I’m now a guy who kisses cheeks.

This latter is the most surprising to me, as I have the distinct, vivid memory of being petrified of this type of greeting no more than a year before moving to Europe. The rules of it seemed daunting back then, but now that it’s a habit I can’t remember ever having even learning them.

This reminds me of something I heard once. A simple question. A meditation, if you will, on the differences between cultures. “Is it wrong, or just different?” Everything here is different from what I’m used to, in varying degrees, but none of it is wrong. It’s just different. The food has a different consistency. They focus on different elements. Streets are different. But is it wrong? No

On Creating a Meaningful Morning Routine

EDIT: This post was originally written for my future self in mind and should be read as a note to self

The beginning of the year is an extremely powerful time for creating lasting habits, with the majority of the western world participating on a mass “reboot”, but so often this time is squandered with brute-force style habit adoption.

Few people can change overnight. Even so-called “Cold Turkey” bad habit cessation is the result of several years of guilt, self hatred, and building up until the time is just right.

Enter Habit Stacking.

I first read about Habit Stacking in “The Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod, and then again in this article (which coincidentally also draws its influence to “The Miracle Morning”). Both are excellent reads and include several morning routine examples. The jist is this:

Add a habit onto a habit you already have, and then slowly build from there. Take brushing your teeth for example. It’s very likely you already have a morning brushing routine (if you don’t… ew), so add a small habit just before that. Then, when that habit is cemented, add another. And another. By the time most people have stopped going to the gym, you’ll be well on your way to a lifelong exercise habit.

I’ve found that it’s more effective to have your anchor habit take place after the habit you wish to adopt, that way it’s more difficult to end early, since you know you still HAVE to brush your teeth. Soon all habits will be this way, and that’s a good thing. You’re now crafting your morning. Forging it on the anvil of your day, and you will thank yourself later.

On Challenging Needs

EDIT: This post was originally written for my future self in mind and should be read as a note to self

At any given point over the past 7 years I have deprived myself of something. I’m often asked, “Why would you ever want to go without ___?!” or told, “Well, I could never go without ___! I need it to live!”

This is exactly why I am depriving myself. Because at one point I also said to these things. “Well I could never go without alcohol!” or asked, “Why would you ever want to go without masturbation for a year?!” I had accepted these things as necessary for my survival due to chemical dependence or habitual abuse. I said the same thing about sugar (3 months of ketogenic diet), speaking out loud (12 day silent meditation retreat), and a few dozen other random things.

I lived.

As I write this I have just finished a year of sobriety (from alcohol), and have decided I don’t want to go back. For the better part of 15 years I just considered alcohol a part of my life. Now it’s not. I also learned a lot about myself.

It doesn’t mean I won’t ever have another drink again, but in challenging my preconceived notions about who I am (and what I’m capable of) i have discovered a lot about myself.

What is something you think you need? Can you imagine a life without it? If not, then perhaps it’s time to find out what it would be like.