See, Curtis Sliwa was the founder of a group called the Guardian Angels, who made it their duty to protect people on the New York City subway system during the 70’s, when NYC streets were wild. Crime had risen 4-5x above previous decades, and over 1,700 people were killed in that city in 1979 alone.

Curtis and the boys would offer protection in a time when people were scared, focusing on maintaining a strong presence, training self-defense, and helping homeless people. It’s like if everyone in the movie The Warriors was looking out for your grandma.

But they weren’t paid. They put their lives at risk and sacrificed their free time, just to protect other people. A great thing, no doubt. But uncommon.

We all know at least one person who devotes quite a bit of their time to helping the less fortunate and doing good in the world. But how many people do you know that clock out from a shift and decide to get into bare-knuckle brawls against bad guys on dirty subways, just because of their patriotic sense of duty? Sacrificing their bodies for the love of the game?

If you ask me, Curtis and the boys were probably happier getting punched as an act of service than most people might ever be when they do something good, no matter how many times they donate canned food at the grocery store or scoop soup at a local shelter.

All because of what was symbolized by the little red hats.

Symbolism and Purpose

Let me ask you this: do you have anything you would die for? Beyond another human you know personally, is there any cause in the world that you see as more important than your own existence? An issue that you would give your own life to change?

If you can’t think of anything, doesn’t that make you sad? And if you can think of something, why aren’t you doing anything about it? If it’s worth more than your life, surely it’s worth more than whatever else you do with your free time?

As a straight line of thought, this Socratic-y series of questions makes technical sense and makes you look like a bad person. You’re not. (And spoiler, I hate the Socratic method). But there is a disconnect, right? Why don’t we sacrifice more for what we claim to believe in?

Humans are really bad at abstraction, is why. In the same way that we can’t really fathom a million of anything, we generally can’t fully get our brains around massive problems. The phrase ‘End homelessness’ means almost nothing beyond the words; it’s too big and nebulous to interact with. Since we can’t really have a connection to the concept, it fails to draw emotional resonance from us. ‘Children are beaten’ is something we all know happens, but it just sits there as a fact. Things are different if you see your neighbor slap their kid around. Then it’s real.

‘Subways are dangerous’ is another big idea that people know as a fact but generally take action against. What Curtis did to make it tangible was to invoke one of the oldest tricks in the book for getting people to relate to an idea they can’t touch: Curtis created a symbol.

Symbols are static, so to first-order believers, they mean the same thing all the time. Symbols are a representation of reality, and specifically of your perception of that reality. A Boy Scout badge means something. Motorcycle jackets mean something. When people wear them, they embody what the symbol represents, and wear the traits of the symbol in their behaviors and identity.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, which group of kids started acting like authoritarians, almost immediately losing empathy for their peers? The ones wearing symbols of authority. Once they were given the regalia and titles of power (both symbols), they began to differentiate themselves from their subjects. The default view of someone decked out in tie-dye and peace symbols is not of someone who calls for war. Sometimes we have an identity and then externally showcase it with a symbol, but sometimes the symbol is given and we become worthy of it.

Put on the red hat, become a Guardian Angel. Guardian Angels put duty before self. Thus, you put duty before self.

So why are they happier?

People want purpose. They crave it with every fiber of their existential being. In the face of eternal nothingness, we want to know that we did a good job with our short time and that we were Very Good People while we had the chance to be.

But there is no handbook for living, and no one will instruct you on what you were uniquely made for, much less what you were even kinda good at. It’s mostly a free-for-all, where everyone is so focused on themselves, they fail to even acknowledge your haircut.

So how do you find your life’s work? Start with listening. Listening very intently to what you already know about yourself, to what has shown itself time and time again. The little whisper behind every magnetic pull you’ve experienced. The natural link between events that catch your attention.

By your mid-twenties, you likely have a sense of what calls to you, beyond the eyes of your peers. The things you are drawn toward in your own head, the directions that are yours alone and that seem to repeatedly find small versions of themselves in your other work. In the grand world of opportunity that you’ve been exposed to, what continues to tug at your soul?

What makes you irrationally upset to learn about when it happens? What creates joy that you don’t seem to find anywhere else? What sort of system is mirrored across everything you fully participate in?

Notice yourself from above and start to connect the dots towards the thing that puts fire in your spirit. Many people get an inkling of their truest passion and then….stop. They end up ‘wanting to help people’ and feeling real cozy about all the things they could have been and would have been. In another life, they would have been a psychologist, or written the Great American Novel, or taught blind kids to swing dance. But they never do it.

Don’t let this be you. Define your purpose as a firm belief held loosely, then hold yourself to that identity. By that, I mean take the thought of ‘I will be someone who helps others’ and make it your identity (your firm belief) and then move in that direction, while being open to how it adapts (held loosely). Do something valuable, something real. Don’t stop moving towards a goal, step by step, marching forward towards something with purpose. It becomes a firm belief, but held loosely enough so that it can grow, adapt, and change over time through action.

But humans are not machines. We waver, we weaken, we get busy, and we lose steam. That’s the beauty of a symbol, because though the flesh tires, the concept stays true. As a symbol, Jesus Christ is a guiding star for Christians. The Nike swoosh is a symbol of athleticism, even if a sponsored athlete loses. Guy Fieri is a symbol for being a super rad dude. All of these are untouched by reality, a firm embodiment of specific characteristics. Symbols stay strong when you are weak and bond the believers in a shared connection of appreciation for that symbol.

Over my life, the one thing I keep coming back to is animal welfare. It’s the only thing that makes me care over, and over, and over again. Hearing about human wars does not viscerally affect me in the same way that deforestation does, as I picture thousands of animals being forced from their home, likely to die from things they cannot even begin to understand. If I’m going to do one thing before I die, it’s improve the lives of animals on Earth.

Great, so I start at the ‘I want to help animals’ baseline, but how do I make sure I don’t stop there? If I don’t do something about it, does my intention ever even matter, or is it just a story I tell myself about what I would have done in another lifetime? A way to defend the idea that I have a warm, nougaty center of goodness?

So right now, I have a loose set of results that I want to see happen, a direction for my purpose, but no action. There’s no symbol for me to get behind, no defined set of values, intentions, and behaviors that I can use to mold myself towards the biggest end result I can muster.

And frankly, if this is the thing that calls to me, the thing that would give me peace on my deathbed, why wouldn’t I shoot to make it as big as possible? Why wouldn’t I seek to gain as many experiences and skills and resources in that direction, which result in my being as close as possible to the version of me that pulls the whole thing off? If I’m going to do the damn thing, I might as well aim big and see how far I can get along the way.

That’s great and all, but I don’t know where to start, at least not quite yet. So I will start by just getting started.

What I do know is that saving animals is not profitable. Capitalism has not really rewarded the act of making kitty cats comfortable, and animal shelters are full of critters that need kindness. People have limited time to help, rescues are understaffed, and no matter how many days in a row you feed an animal, it will be hungry again the next one.

But, I also know that when a capitalistic society fails to provide a direct financial reward, the thing that keeps people coming back to the buffet line is purpose. Big ol’ suitcases full of feeling like what you did today actually mattered.

So as a capitalist who wants to do good in the world, I’m going to quantify the reward and adapt the same system. If Purpose is the transactional reward that people are receiving for their time and effort, how do we ruthlessly maximize that Profit of Purpose? If the shareholders are abused and abandoned animals, how do we make sure we’re giving them dividends, stock options, and whiskeys on their lunch breaks?

By creating a product so good people keep buying it. That product is defined and inarguable purpose that this work is worth sacrificing for.

I don’t quite know what all this means yet, but since it’s the biggest project I’ll take on before I die, so I’m willing to put in decades of time and effort here.

Powerful symbols are not designed, they are found. Humans take actions, embody values, then place those values into the symbol. I will start with the actions, not the intent.

As of this moment, it would be foolish to try to project what I think an animal service worker’s life is like. It would be a lie to pretend to understand the emotions, motivations, struggles, and rewards that an animal rescuer goes through, and how can one create a symbol to embody what they don’t understand?

They can’t.

So I will be leaving this right here, with a plan. I am moving to San Francisco full-time in April. Once there, I will be looking for an animal rescue. Then I will give my time, in several different capacities, for as long as it takes to learn what it means to be someone doing the work.

Over time, I will need to understand the resources, the limitations, the criteria that people have that makes this low-paying, high-purpose work worth it. I need to feel it deep within myself. Then re-assess.

But for now, the first steps of a long journey have been decided and I can honestly say that giving my life a direction based in service for something beyond myself has genuinely made my happiness increase.

With love from me to you,

Deacon Santiago

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

But you are not interesting.

You are playing a role of someone who is interesting, so that you can be given the same cookie a mouse gets when he goes through the research maze. If you want to pull that value back in and cease to be a shell of yourself and a mirror to the desires of others you have to curate an inner self. To ever be a complete human, deeply immersed in your life, you have to stop letting the world have a say in your behaviors and pursuits.

You have to be interesting to yourself, first.

The -ing ending of interesting makes it a verb, something that someone is doing. Like an explorer is exploring, an interester is interesting, and while a cook cooks, an interesting person interests. Thus, you have to be pursuing interests to be interesting.

The opposite of pursuing and exploring interests, which extend from you out into the world, is consuming. Being fed the world’s unending perspectives fills your brain up with stuff, but does nothing personal with the information.

It’s not yours, really. It’s everyone else’s, all stacked up on top of each other. You never develop your own lens to view the world when you exist only through the perspectives of others.

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Endless consumption is letting waves whisk you away by chance, instead of consciously swimming to where you want to be. You failed to learn how to read the currents, feel the temperature, and remember the way home, so now you are lost and drifting along someone else’s route. Consumption of information only becomes an interest when you layer your own existence on top of it. Before that, it’s just a box full of other people’s stuff.

1000 TikToks and 400 YouTube channels will overpower any intrinsic you-ness with a flood of external information, and if it doesn’t lead to any action, you’ve done nothing but lost the plot of yourself with an unending swarm of other people’s opinions. The most you can hope for is to parrot some lump summary of everyone else’s thoughts and pretend they are yours until eventually, they will be. Give other people enough time to mold your clay and the sculpture ends up looking nothing like you.

Do you really like gardening? Or do you kind of like the way gardening was presented to you, curated to drive algorithmic addiction, but can’t really say why? Have you ever done more than the basics of buying a pre-potted plant, naming it, and trying to remember to water it?

Have you explored what that plant is compared to others, it’s structure and native region, maybe even trying to understand what it’s home soil might have consisted of? Have you reflected on why that plant calls to you above all of the other options? Have you found yourself in a plant and the act of taking care of it?

If you’ve done the former, but never even gotten to the edges of the latter, I would be confident in saying that your gardening experience is not interesting. It is everyone else’s experience, lumped up together and projected onto your own life, and you barely even know why you did it in the first place. You can’t even name what calls you to action in your life, so how well can you be certain that you know yourself at all? Why are you letting others define your interests, or even suggest them? How can anyone ever hope to know you if you don’t even know yourself?

Too many people begin to explore hobbies and think ‘I should take up what my friends do, or what I see on IG, that looks cool enough’. This is a betrayal to the self.

Being a pickleball/watch/cars/birdwatching or whatever other permutation of current trend interest means emulating someone else’s projection to try to capture their sense of being interesting, completely bypassing your own. Don’t scan a list of Top 100 Hobbies and pick whatever is easiest to fit into your life, start by asking yourself what you have routinely enjoyed throughout your life and what all of those threads have in common.

Walking through your life, what do you notice about the activities you enjoyed and what they shared? Were there many complex factors involved? Did they happen outdoors? Were they slow and methodical or fast and reactionary? Were other people involved? Did you have to decide between various tools using a systematic approach? Did you construct your own tool to use? Was it best done competitively? Was it used as a status signal to other people outside of the activity? Did you feel differently about yourself during the activity? Is it reliant on any external parties or organizations or global factors? What was the reward system like and is enough to sustain you? Were you happier during it or just closer to what you’re projecting happiness to be?

Start to ask a billion questions about yourself and begin to know yourself.

For me, I like systems. I like starting with bare-bones nothingness or untamed chaos and getting deep into the framework of the parts that I can affect, learning how to asserts my will into the environment. I also need it to be tangible, as so much of my life is online and I ached for non-digital pursuits. I enjoy global games of rarity, where some things are better than others, but that I could decide the reasons for. I learned that because I liked how I could personally decide which types of art were better than other peoples, but I didn’t want it dependent on another human, I wanted it to be in a vacuum. I also wanted it to be completely open, so that I could move in any direction that I wanted to, as I wanted to build without constraints.

Factoring in these criteria and many others, I landed on gemstones and small metalworking as my interest. Through that choice, I learned quite a bit about myself, and now each new learning is tied to my deepest personal qualia.

Do not be a Pickleball Guy just to be a Pickleball Guy.

Be a Pickleball Guy because it is the culmination of an introspective process that calls deeply to your humanity after careful reflection and measurement. Or be whatever other kind of person fits you best, but play the goddamn active role in the decision-making process.

To have interests is to pursue understanding, to interact with the world in juxtaposition with your own humanity. Everything you do for fun, you do as a means of exploring yourself. We seek out novelty, differences, and parallels in universal systems, so that we can encompass them and draw lines back to our human existence. You find yourself through play, and hobbies and interests are just adult play. When you find yourself, you can connect that self to other people, genuinely.

Geologists may not often wonder what it is like to be a rock, but they do wonder about geometry, geography, crystallization patterns, rarity, indicators, history, and more. Those geologists seem to have little in common with those who do digital marketing, until they touch on the geometry of a page layout, the geography of global trends, the crystallization patterns of a concept, the rarity of a product, the indicators of engagement, or the history of advertising.

“Your thing is like my thing” they say to each other.

This is the greatest part of being interesting: you become a prism that others may shine through. By exploring genuine interests and learning about themselves in the process, people can genuinely connect.

By knowing your interest well enough to categorize and draw boxes around concepts, you give others conceptual ropes to swing from. Through your knowledge, they connect observations in their own field to your observations in yours. They absorb a piece of your world and your perspective of your world, making their lives richer in the process. You owe it to the world to be interesting. To produce more than you consume.

If you want connection, you must become someone worth connecting with. No one else will do that for you, and no one owes you their time without it. Endless consumption is passing time, but it is not living and you are not developing. Take in only the information that you can make use of, then do something with it.

Take the time, make the effort, look inward, and become interesting.

With love, from me to you,

Deacon

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

If you don’t, you should.

A catchphrase is a large concept that you firmly believe in, which you think has repeated applicability in your life, condensed down into its purest wisdom. It is an essence of your value system, and can outlive you through being absorbed by others. A catchphrase is part of your legacy. A signet ring mark that stamps your presence.

The same catchphrase can be attributed to people in different ways. “A penny saved is a penny earned” elicits different feelings coming from Ebenezer Scrooge than from Warren Buffet. Your words will bring up memories of how you brought them to life, so reflect on which values you want to be symbols of your wisdom.

If you don’t have a catchphrase, or can’t think of one that isn’t a joke, you likely have not crystallized your unshakable beliefs and values. Do you have principles beyond an amorphous blob? Can you state anything that you believe to be true in all instances? Can you take a stand for anything?

You have one life and it deserves to be sculpted with respect. Don’t fail yourself by letting ‘Zoinks’ be the noise that most regularly came from your mouth, leaving no foundational direction for your kids beyond a chuckle.

In a recent episode of the podcast Dialectic, Jackson Dahl interviewed Ryo Lu, the Head of Design at Cursor. If you’re into AI, it’s a great listen, but the value is way beyond that. Throughout the episode, Jackson brought up multiple catchphrases of Ryo’s, which he has curated across several high-level, influential positions.

Things like “It’s all the same thing”, a simple phrase with an underlying depth that comes from deep, careful work across massive platforms. Ryo said these words often enough, to enough people, educating them on how data is the base layer of a system and everything else is just a game of dress up, that it became an aura. A lens through which he understood and affected the digital interactions of tens of millions of users. One that others came to see through as well. This phrase was a foundational understanding of his world construct and a representation of his impact, and will continue to spread through his mentees.

That was only one of several of Ryo Lu’s catchphrases, and not even the best one.

It is said that the master knows all the rules, so they know when to break them. Simplicity works the same way. Only a wealth of knowledge and immersion in a topic can boil it down to a reduction that makes sense, and usually sounds so simple that it could come from a novice. Just like the midwit meme, the beginner knows only the basics, the moderate mistakes complexity for knowledge, but the master recreates simplicity with the genius of when and how to apply it. A catchphrase is an earned belief, carefully measured, observed, and tested across various situations, and found to consistently represent the world as you see it.

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Up to this point in my life, I have continually found two things to be true and my family is sick of me saying them. Yet every single time I ask my young niece-

“What’s rule number 1?”,

she responds with “Always be grateful”.

Then she follows up with the answer of “Solve your own problems” when I request rule number two.

Two rules, two responses, said over and over again. I firmly believe that those two rules will do more towards granting contentment in life than any other two phrases in the English language, and I stand by it in every situation. I could give a full presentation on each rule, but all I need to say are the seven words that compose them and every individual can extrapolate out from there. I will ask my niece those same questions for as long as this universe allows me to be present, and trust that she tests them in her own life. Maybe she finds them to be junk, but they will be a representation of me and I will consciously choose to live by them so that the words have strength coming from her mouth. Living my own life without gratitude or never solving my own problems will only result in them falling limply from her tongue, and leaving a slimy residue behind.

If you haven’t yet, take the time to consider your fundamental beliefs. Make them complex, then find the through-line back to simplicity. Test them over and over, pushing to find when they crack. Build them back up again in new ways that make sense. Find what resonates with you and then bring those words to life through your actions. Do not waver. Your catchphrases are your verbal legacy and they deserve to be great.

With love, from me to you,

Alec (for now)

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

Being ‘bad’ at conversations with strangers is not mandatory, it is a choice, and admitting a desire to develop more skills is the first step to improving. AA had it right. Admit you have a problem before you can change. Once you desire to improve, find the right tools to enable growth, and practice. You reading this, right now, is finding a tool. By the end of it, you’ve gotten your first mental rep towards releasing the fear of public engagement.

I acknowledge that random conversations with strangers can be intimidating. You have to piece together: Do I want to talk to this person? Do they want to talk to me? What do we talk about? How do they feel about that subject, positively or negatively? Am I talking too much? Am I talking too little? What do I do with my hands? How do I know when to walk away? How do I gracefully say “I’m going to walk away now”? What if they follow me? Have I learned enough karate to incapacitate them?

So many factors.

This challenge is worth breaking through, as choosing to let yourself be limited by fear is choosing a smaller, unfulfilled life. Immersive and honest connection with new humans really is lovely when you remove any traces of fear and shame.

So here’s some thoughts on how to chat up randos, acquaintances and friends alike!

Split between:

Mindsets that are important for enjoying conversation

&

Specific actions to take to improve

Important Mindsets to Improve Conversation

1. Curiosity will improve your life. I am stating that as a fact, because it is one. The desire to bring more adventure and knowledge into your world feeds your human desires for novelty, spectacle, and understanding. Conversation is grounded in curiosity. If you do not care to explore the borders of the complex entity across from you, there will never be honest flow to your words. If you don’t want to learn about the information and opinions that come from the other person’s mouth, preferring only to inform them of your own instead, that is not conversation, and you should be talking to a guy I know.

   

2. Everything is interesting once you start to learn about it. Flower life cycles, steel manufacturing, clouds, international ketchup varieties, literally everything has depth to it, doused in abundant context, that can’t help but be interesting once you start to dig around in it. Humans are the same. Once you pass the shallowest depths of a human, I have yet to find anyone truly boring, because even boring people make me want to understand WHY they are so agonizingly dull and then bam, I’m interested again. Interest blooms from curiosity.

3. Conversation is a dance. If you do the hokey pokey in a mosh pit, you’re going to get punched in the face. Same goes for conversation. Every person, situation, and subject is its own dance, requiring grace and knowledge to match your verbal movement to the rhythm. There is no single set of rules to connection. You must adapt, often on the fly, but you can move in many directions. This is not as scary as it seems, but it must be acknowledged.

   

4. You are a musical instrument. A kazoo, a timpani drum, and a harpsichord all have their own dynamic ranges and sounds but you would never mistake one for the other. A gong will never sound like a flute, but that doesn’t make the gong any less badass. It knows it’s delivery, the emotions and vibrations that it conveys, and owns that power. You should also learn your own ‘musical’ capabilities (ignore all my mixed metaphors, you get the gist). Comedians doing funny impressions of people exists because humans have specific cadences, deliveries, ranges, and idiosyncrasies in their dialogue. Learn yours and learn how to wield them.

5. Faces and bodies whisper while you talk. Your body language sends signals as clear of signals as the wet vibrations coming from your throat. Tension cloisters in your mouth, eyebrows, eyelids, jaw position, shoulders, hands, basically every section of your meat sack. Your body can reinforce or betray your words, and it is important to monitor and understand your body’s tension/relaxation patterns.

6. Communication is a skill. If chatting with strangers was a natural, organic thing to do, no one would have social anxiety. Yet it is common to be nervous and awkward about social engagement, so stop thinking that strategizing makes you a failure or less natural. Everyone should practice these skills. Pretending it should be a magical, natural thing from the start is cope for not wanting to make yourself uncomfortable, and many who are skilled have been subconsciously practicing their whole lives. Decide to build that skill.

Once you accept all of these to be true (they are), you can take action on these first principle concepts with a solid foundation.

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Specific Actions to Improve Conversation

1. Slow things down if you need to. If you start to feel your breathing become shallow, like you’re running out of air, or your chest is moving too much, slooooow down. You can probably talk 30-50% slower and be just fine. I love to play a little game in my head that I call ‘Land The Plane’. I start meandering through conversations with no idea of where I’m going to take the sentences, and see if I can stick the landing. If I end up with a coherent thought that relates to the other person’s thoughts while also giving them a jump off point for continuation, I have Landed The Plane. If there’s a lot of turbulence mid-thought and I’m not sure if I’ll land it, my go-to strategy is to talk slower. Stretching out a sentence is a good way to add more emotional resonance, punctuate specific words, or add more body language. Let the plane coast a bit and it might just kiss the tarmac in one piece.

2. Trust yourself. Much of social anxiety stems from a fear of the unknown. You have no clue what that person is going to say and whether or not you deliver an adequate response within an acceptable time frame. Once their sentence ends, you have seconds to dish something back, and your brain has a funny way of freezing up whenever you expect anything out of it. It is understandable that this pressure freaks people out. Yet, once you grow to trust yourself, that all fades away. However, you do not have to trust yourself to respond quickly and cleverly. You have to trust yourself to figure things out in general. By this I mean, even if that you blunder and stumble through the conversations at the networking event, you will figure it out. If they kick you out of the group, you will find a new group. If they fire you, you will get a new job. If they chase you out of town with pitchforks, you always wanted to travel anyways. Trust yourself to deal with consequences, not conversation. If you learn not to fear the consequences, you are untouchable.

3. Focus on the Other Person’s Benefit. There is a wonderful feedback loop when you decide to do good in the world. First, you feel good doing it. Second, other people benefit from it. Third, you never have to feel shame from entering a conversation with the explicit and genuine determination to make someone else’s life a little better. Even if you’re not good at improving lives right away, intention matters more than output at the beginning, and output will improve with time. Benefitting others comes in many, many forms in conversation:

   • Laughing at the right time

   • Sharing a burden

   • Noticing something small and complimenting it

   • Helping someone feel seen and validated

   • Listening with intent

   • Giving a great recommendation

   • Many other small but incredibly valuable ways

     Focusing on benefitting the other person rather than their perception of you releases you from the burden of needing to perform. They’ll remember how they felt more than your words anyways, and this ensures you leave them better than they started.

4. Manage an Exit with Grace. It does not have to be awkward when you want/need a conversation to end. To leave with grace, do two things: state a direction with clear intention & give direction the other person can follow. Firmness is what matters here. Taking charge is what makes the exit smooth. If you hesitate, you signal awkwardness, and if you signal awkwardness, it leaves a wishy-washy sense in the other person’s mind. Don’t say “Well, I should probably get going”. It’s too drawn out and uncertain, there’s no resolution, and it then requires the other person’s participation and alignment to end. Instead say something final, even if it’s vague. “I’m off to go toodle around” has come out of my mouth many times, no further explanation required. Then after declaring the end, give direction. Assure the value of the conversation with intention (either to continue connecting or not). If you’re never going to see them again, say “I am glad that our paths have crossed” and walk away. If you want to see them again, tell them how that might happen. “I will find you on LinkedIn and connect”, or “I will be at the next event here and will be looking for you”, or just “here’s my number, if you’d like to continue the conversation”. That signaling of finality or continuation is the easiest way to resolve tension. Take the burden of action on yourself, because then everyone knows the ball is in your court. Be confident here, both of you will benefit. Small caveat, if you are a man ending a conversation with a woman that you have interest in, leave the ball in her court. Give her your number, ask her to connect with you online, say you’ll be free on Wednesday if she wants to continue chatting, then leave. She now knows that the door is open, but is not incredibly pressured to walk through if she does not want to. Trust me, this is a good move, regardless of outcome.

5. Use Your Own Stories Wisely. It is natural for humans to connect their own lives to someone’s story. That’s how we relate and show understanding through lived experience. Yet, if it becomes a tug-of-war between whose life is at the center of the conversation, you’ve made an enemy of your friend. Relational stories should be two steps: show the other person you empathize, then support their story continuation. Be direct about supporting their story with a concrete statement. Ask a question after your story that lets the other person continue theirs. Do not let your story be a diversion or an ending for them. “That reminds me of this time my dog was silly. What did you do next?” is much better than leaving them dry to focus only on your dog. Keep the rule in mind that people want to be heard and seen. If you take a moment to wander in the woods, make sure you go back to the path.

6. Zoom out. Not every conversation is going to be winner, and you should not expect it to be. You’re developing a skill, be cognizant of that. Can you name any other skill you learned without stumbling? I highly doubt it, and this should be no exception. If one night or one meeting goes bad, zoom out. Wait until you get to a hundred, then count. Track in seasons, not days. See your life in phases, not as static. Cut yourself some slack. You’ll win in time.

Communication is the center of human connection, do not let it be a weak muscle when strengthening it is such a clear upgrade for your life. Conversation is a dance, but a dance that you can be wonderful at. Your fear of the unknown can be transformed into the joy of connection. These tips are not going to fix everything, but it is a damn good start.

Go out there and make your dreams come true, little rockstar.

With love, from me to you,

Alec

That’s because most parents love their children and Gormy is a terrible name, unless your children are either insects or very oily.

The presence of bad names suggests the presence of good names, meaning there is a spectrum of quality for the noises people make when they want to get your attention. That spectrum has more axes than just good and bad, there is also ‘masculine vs feminine names’, ‘fancy vs plain names’, and ‘baby or dog names’.

Names can also reflect time periods, such as Minnie (#6 female name in 1880) and Mildred (#9 female name in 1920). Unless you were in India, where the respective eras were more likely to have an Aditi or a Pavarti. There are also broad cultural connotations, such as how no American family with the surname Epstein is considering naming their baby Jeff right now.

My point is, names carry weight, and can impact people’s first impression of you when they hear, read, or say it. A name is as much of an introduction to you as a face, and I’m surprised more people take it so lightly. Your parents, without even knowing you, gave you the label that you’ll probably keep til you die.

Unless you don’t, which gets us to my premise: you should probably change your name. If you want to completely own your life, begin with the words that describe it, the header of the whole category, the label under which all else falls. Choose your own name.

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You know yourself better than anyone, meaning you know the kind of costume you want to present to the world. You understand how you want everyone to see you, deep down. If the world is a stage and you are naught but an actor, wouldn’t you want to have a hand in the script? To have the reviewers of your life talk about the grace of Rosalia, instead of the grace of Gormy? To have the crowd chant for an encore from Midas over the return of Wamble?

Jack Butcher, the founder of Visualize Value, famously named his child ‘Baby’ for a year, as UK laws allow you to easily and legally change a child’s name up to a year after birth. Why? Jack wanted to get to know his daughter as much as possible and learn about her personality and mannerisms before giving her a name that might not fit.

Whereas your parents, lazy bums that they are, probably just gave you the name they liked the best, or even just pawned off the name of a grandparent born 85 years ago. What if your parents have terrible taste? What if grandpa is kind of a dick? Is it your destiny to suffer the slings and arrows of a name not meant for you, simply for the lack of initiative and creativity from others?

No. Choose a name that embodies the person you want to be, then choose to live up to it. Give yourself a title, then earn it. Make a choice and stand by it. Name yourself.

Personally, my own name has always sounded very lame to me. As an obese child, I abhorred it, the way it started so wide and ended with a weird click in the back of the mouth. Alec is a great name for a brand of cottage cheese, soft and lumpy, but not for me. I asked Claude to break the name down phonetically in the context of being an American male, and this is some of what it said:

‘Low front unrounded vowel’

‘Not a prestige vowel’

‘Abrupt termination with no voicing or release resonance’

‘Moves backward’

Who wants a name that gets described like that?

Phonetically, it seems to have low qualia, which helps explain why it never felt good coming out of my mouth or entering my ears. It’s a bunk name for a boy who wanted to be perceived as going forward, not backward. It annoyed me to be associated with that name, when so many much more fitting names were available, and I was annoyed at my mom for choosing it just because she thought Alec Baldwin was pretty cool. I read a lot of Redwall in 3rd/4th grade, and when my nerd friends and I would create fantasy battle scenes, I would proclaim myself to be Lance Shrew, and proudly wrote that name over my own in my elementary yearbook.

Decades later, as I work to have ownership in my life from every aspect, to guide the pen as it inscribes my narrative into the history books, it’s time to christen myself and I would suggest you do the same. Come 2026, I will be changing my name (after I move to San Francisco to settle in for good.)

As I discuss in the essay Why Everyone in Their 30s is Sad, there is a Second Death of Innocence that occurs once you transition from being peer-defined to being individually-defined. The world stops having a defined track to follow and you are left to chart your own way forward, defining success and failure on your own terms.

This is disorienting for many, as the paradigm shift leaves them adrift in an ocean of possibility. You may choose wrong and be unable to go back, so you are left paralyzed with fear and overwhelming opportunity, slowly decaying in your inactivity. Those who instead decide to forge their own life feel a sense of control. A weight behind their own choices, and an ownership contained in that weight. Every downstream consequence and win, joy and pain, tiny moment and grand experience, becomes a reality they have directly created.

In an American culture that lacks a Rite of Passage into adulthood, I challenge you to create your own. Cross the channel from a name chosen for you (bleh) into a name you have chosen for yourself (wow!). Become adult by seizing the reins of your own life and directing its energy. New name → new you, and the new you is ready to stride with swagger into a new phase of growth.

So which will you be? Will you dare to redraw the map of your own kingdom? Will you look into the endless list of letters to string together and make a choice of which string will be yours? Will you ever escape fuckarounditis and live up to your potential? (Thanks ).

Start to look for inspiration in the world to see what vibes with you. Find names of literary characters you admire. Compile a list and ask Claude for the phonetic linkages between them, to parse out the sounds of what the highest version of yourself should be addressed by.

Own your life, beginning with your name.

With love, from me to you.

-Alec (for now)

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

P.S.- A funny anecdote about my life. Back in September, 2021, I was pondering the name change, and put a list into my iPhone Notes app to think over them and ask my friends their thoughts on what would suit me.

There were about 12 names on the list. One of which was Dorne.

Now, I had spent about 29 years of my life without knowing my father. My mom said it could have been one of three guys, but she wasn’t sure which one. Very Momma Mia.

In 2022, through Ancestry.com, I ended up meeting my father. Wonderful man with kind, impressive kids. He’s since opened up his heart and home to me, and all is well between us. We met at the right time and I’m glad it didn’t happen earlier.

His last name? Dorn.

Not saying there’s anything cosmically linked to names, or that label predates destiny, but my being drawn to the name that I would come to know later as my own paternal lineage is pretty cool.

It also helped me scratch that one off the list. Seems weirdly Oedipal to steal my father’s last name, and I do not want to anger the Old Gods.

These are really fun to make. If you have any thoughts, feedback, or pointers, I would love to hear them!

I recently saw a very frustrated couple at my gate complaining openly and loudly that our plane was going to be delayed by an hour. I watched them mewl to each other about how these airlines need to get it together and deliver what they promised because they paid good money! Wide-eyed, heavy sighing, hands to the ceiling levels of exasperation.

About five minutes later, we all get another update that the flight was now going to be departing on time and to continue to the terminal. Both shockingly and unshockingly, the same couple was equally as frustrated at this new circumstance. Now, in the face of getting exactly what they wanted from the beginning, they were upset with the emotional whiplash of having unexpectedly felt frustration. Instead of being grateful, they wanted vengeance for having had to experience fleeting discomfort.

The problem with comfort is that it gets normalized so quickly. Getting everything you want poisons your ability to have gratitude, because it gets to be routine pretty fast. Why would you be thankful for what you consider normal? By only ever demanding pleasure, you’d be surprised at how terribly you’re directing your life to be. It’s just our reality to have been given brains that crave novelty, and we have to work with that system by throwing a little pain into our pleasure soup.

In the digital age, most basic problems have been solved. The majority of people on Earth (and like 99% of people who cruise Substack) have enough food and water to survive. The problem is that our brains want to find problems and solve them. It is both the curse and blessing of being human. Sunbathing forever is not what you want, it gets boring. You need challenges and goals more than limitless daquiris.

What do I mean our brains want problems?

Our brains, in bodies that are constantly trying not to die, are designed to focus on the things that could kill us. By focusing the hardest on avoiding potential dangers, we stand the highest likelihood of not dying. The tradeoff of maximizing survival in a previously harsh world is that biologically, we’re not primarily built to enjoy life. We’re primarily just built to not die so that we can continue to pass our genes. The sections of the animal kingdom (which you are a part of) who survived the best, passed along their chemical composition, regardless of whether they were an apex predator or lived underground. Even the baddies of the animal kingdom still had to not die. Cheetahs developed spots as camouflage, polar bear livers are poisonous to us but keep them from starving, and sharks have flexible skeletons to help absorb blunt force trauma. Defense is just as important as attack.

When it comes to our big, beautiful human brains, the bummer is that more nice things does not equal more happiness in your brain, at least not for more than like five minutes. The hardware just doesn’t work that way. Unless you get nicer and nicer things forever, but then you end up in a ‘his yacht is bigger than mine’ scenario. Fortunately, this physiology is fairly easy to work with because we can accept that our brains are going to focus on the negative state, then use that negative state to our advantage. If you’re not going to be happy, at least be sad in a cool direction. Pick a struggle that makes you a cooler person, that’s the gist of being happy.

Since I like fancy names and making my life sound more dramatic than it is, I call it a Noble Arc: choosing to bring a challenge into my life, oriented towards developing into a person that I am prouder of. It’s the muscle burn in getting jacked, the denying myself a little sweet treat to save up for gemstones, the pain of a calf stretch to get the relief that comes after. Suffering as a debt towards my future self having a better position.

Your brain is going to want to whine anyways, it is an endless void of desire. If all you do is keep pushing stuff into the hole, eventually it’s all so boring that it’s impossible to be excited anymore. Oh, another new Netflix special, same as the past 100. We all have made comfort and pleasure so routine that it’s boring and now we’re upset because we’re so happy that we don’t even know we’re happy. It just feels normal.

The Age of Abundance has quickly become an Age of Yearning, a purposeless ho-hum of instant gratification. Life feels grey and we want so desperately to feel something again! Yet we maintain our pleasure barometer at 100% day after day, and are surprised when our little coke addict selves need bigger and bigger hits to feel the same thing. Odysseus is not written as a description of his retirement, but as a tale of his perils. Biographies don’t focus on the cool cars they bought after getting rich, but the Noble Arc they took to achieve success. Your own life is bland in real-time because there is no heroic struggle, only comfortable pretend struggles. To find fulfillment, you have to go out, find some dragons, and battle them. You have to be less comfortable.

Only then will you have something to be grateful for. Only then will you have a ‘sad’ so that when you look at ‘happy’, it has something to be comparatively different from, and thus appreciated in contrast.

I have a specific way of creating my Noble Arcs, involving extending my time horizons, charting my growth, and being hyper-intentional. If that interests you at all, subscribe, because I’m sure I’ll write about it eventually.

In the meantime, if you feel like your life is a sea of grey sameness, go pick something really hard and somewhat painful, and do that more. If you don’t know what to do, just ask yourself if you’ll end up cooler if you do it for a year. If yes, then do that.

If you’re just getting into being cooler and don’t know how, here are some good ones:

• Lift weights, with a real program that you’re following.

• Go volunteer at an animal shelter and try to increase community involvement.

• Start a small online business and learn how to advertise.

• Buy an old lawnmower and fix the engine.

• Go to a language meet up every week and bring everyone homemade snacks.

It doesn’t matter what you specifically do, it just needs to challenge you. Please, force yourself to be less soft. I promise you, you’ll be so much happier.

With love from me to you,

Alec

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This one really sparked some anger in young people, especially young men who feel like the world punishes them for daring to speak to women in public.

Bill is giving dating advice that feels old, like walking into a bank handing them your resume to get a job. Grandpa advice. Yes, he’s off, but not by much, and I’ll tell you exactly what you can get from his advice to improve your cold opens.

But first, lets talk about the anger. Many stories shared in response to Bill’s tweet look like this:

The tweet says that someone innocently said Bill’s 4 magic words and were uproariously laughed at by multiple women at once, leaving them to crawl back to the shadows. Probably exaggerated, but that’s not important.

The sentiment here is that young men, in anonymous online spaces, abundantly agree with each other and visualize the world this way, feeling dejected, devalued, and hopeless about the situation. Their first principle is that the world will reject them for trying. That every attempt is met with pointing and laughing, and that you were a fool for believing you had value.

They’re hurt, and that’s understandable. The pendulum of life swings in both directions before finding a middle, and the dating world has not been kind to young men for the past 10 years. But today is today, and if you are a young man who would rather cling to your pain and bitterness than succeed, then I can see how you would be so frustrated with Bill’s sentiment. The pendulum is swinging back and people want to find connection.

If you’re ready to let it go and move into the next phase, I’ll tell you why he’s right and how you should adopt this lesson to increase your dating success.

Let’s get it out of the way that Bill is a 6’3”, famous billionaire. He’s going to succeed more than you at being attractive in a random room. But you can still improve your own experience with his mindset.

The actual words he uses are “May I meet you?”.

If we break down the Shakespearen vibe, this phrase is doing four specific things:

1. Getting a green light from someone that they want to engage with you

2. Establishing that you want to know more about that specific individual

3. Giving them a graceful out

4. Opening up the conversation to go in any direction you lead it

If you can deliver these concepts confidently with a single phrase, you just bought yourself a few minutes of genuine, intentional, engagement with another human. It’s like getting past the AI human resources and going to the first interview. The door is opened.

Since this is late 2025, you should probably not use those specific words (unless you’re at the Renaissance Festival) so I would personally tweak them to:

”Hey, you look fun/interesting/friendly. Can I have your next 5 minutes?”

They will then look at you and decide whether or not to say yes, based on your appearance, because that’s likely all they have to work with.

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Why are these four things important?

1. Attractive women are pressured into engagement constantly, and the last thing you want is a pity conversation. It wastes everyone’s time. Getting a green light right away is a clear indicator that this connection has potential from square one.

   “Can I continue”

2. You have to focus your interest and signal it with intent. Confidence is not born from asking a whole group some random question as a bar opener, and hoping to filter down to one person. People want to be chosen. Confident people choose. Dating is also inherently a filtering process, and the only way to filter is through knowledge of your options. Now that you have chosen them, you should be seeking to learn about them while helping them to learn more about you. Curiosity is at the core of this interaction.
   ”I want to learn more specifically about you”

3. A chance to get out decreases the pressure of the interaction. Put this upfront, because safety and conscious choice let humans feel more expressive. 5 minutes time brackets the ask to be very low-risk, very easy to say yes to, because the cost is low and a safer gamble to make than an unknown promise of time and energy.

   “You are not trapped”

4. All someone has to say is yes and then the ball is back in your court. This is where you can drive the conversation to your strengths or to the other person’s interests. You can go further than lame, level 1 questions (“Come here often?”) and you aren’t boxed in by a gimmick (“Can you settle a bet between a friend and I?”). Take this opportunity and be interesting while also being interested.

   “Let’s talk about this”

These four concepts stem from advertising principles, and advertising principles stem from psychology. Psychology is the study of the human mind and its functions, especially regarding behavior. To interact with the human mind, use its behavior patterns.

To increase your success even further, do the obvious. Get in shape. Stand tall. Dress well. Look them in the eye. Smile. That’s how you build the product. Are these things mandatory? No, but they certainly help, and there’s very little reason not to do them. Then you present the product to people who may be interested and they let them choose.

Bill may be old and incredibly blessed, but don’t discount his lesson. “May I meet you” is still way less cringe than something like negging, and plenty of you were willing to try that. If you want to do better at dating, put the work in and understand the psychology of the scenario.

Then get out there and fail gracefully until you succeed.

With love from me to you,

Alec

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

If you feel like life is overwhelming, like no one showed you how to solve problems or be independent, this essay will give you a system with explicit instructions for improving your life. Ones you can follow today. If you feel like things are beyond your control, this system will give you the power of control again. Plus it’s like 5 paragraphs, you weenie, just read and implement it.

Here is the system in a nutshell:

-Get over your fear of failure and embrace change with one mindset shift

-List the things that make your life worse ( your problems). Recognize that those problems are too vague and you need to make them much more specific.

-Drill down on those problems, creating subproblems until you find something 100% in your control.

-Set a quantifiable, binary action that addresses that problem.

-Do those actions and keep yourself accountable as you progress.

That’s it!

This little system can be applied to literally everything in your life that brings you discomfort, again and again, because it brings action into your control, which applies to everything. So many of our problems stick around because we feel like things aren’t up to us, or we don’t even know how to start. So let’s change that. If you want to learn agency and independence, this is how. If you want to never again have your play out according to the decisions of someone else, this is how. If you want to own your shit and decide your own reality, this is how.

As we go, I’m going to walk through examples of when I sat down and went through this system with a family member. These actual answers should be a guide on how to do the same in your own life. It’s a good system and anyone can do it. My family member and I were literally raised by a drug addict, so no examples were ever set, and we did it. You can too.

Your first problem is probably that you don’t have a system at all. There is a reason that textbooks have structure, because you’re going to have a hell of a time ‘Learning Math’ without knowing where to start and how things connect. Instead, you build a foundation and stack higher upon it. It’s too easy to spin in circles if you don’t have direction and don’t see clear boundaries. So here, take mine, I’m calling it GYST (Get Your Sh*t Together), and I also have another one attuned to emotional awareness that I wrote a whole book about, you can find that here.

Onwards to Step One!

First-Prep the Clay

Change is a bastard that promises improvement at the expense of admitting being a failure. To pivot your behavior takes admitting that you were wrong the whole time, up until that point. It can feel really bad, causing you to dig in your heels instead of feeling foolish, refusing to change and hurting yourself rather than just saying you were not making good decisions or well informed. First thing is to soften yourself to the idea of change by distancing it from your ego. Detach failure from yourself.

To do so, we’re going to think of everything you have done up until that point as being ‘You- Version 1.’ That first version of you had limited information, limited skillsets, and was moving in the wrong direction. Every change you make is now a new version and you are no longer the old version. You can forgive the old version for not doing better; it just wasn’t equipped well.

This will also not be your last upgrade. Every improvement you make leads to a new version, and every version does their best until it’s time to upgrade again. When you slip backwards, remind yourself that this new version is better equipped, doesn’t have the same behavior patterns, and has more strength and knowledge to navigate the world. You are no longer Version 1, even though it keeps trying to pop out. You.V2 is the start of something wonderful.

Two- List the Negatives

On to the meat. Get a pencil and paper and list out the major things that negatively impact your life. These are the first major items that come to mind when I ask “What sort of things cause the most negative impact on your life?”. Write those things down and shoot for 4-5 of the biggest ones, the ones that really make your life suck. By starting with the things that have the largest negative impact, you bring the most positive result by changing them.

Examples of big negative things from my own family:

The house is never clean.

My 9 year old won’t listen to me.

Three- Bring it Back to Your Control, and Only Your Control

To have real, full control in your life, you cannot give anyone else power to affect the results. Here, we are going to keep drilling into the core of each large problem, deeper and deeper, until we end up with reasons that contribute more specifically to the main problem but that are explicitly in our own control, where our actions are the only dependencies that decide what occurs. Chances are, these first problems are technically correct, but they are so vague that there’s nothing to point at and nowhere specifically to start. “Oh, your house is dirty? You should clean it.” Vague gotcha’s help nobody and have no real action, so the cleaning never gets resolved. You have to get to the real problem, and one that you can control.

Thus, we are going to create these subproblems, but in ways that relate to ourselves, because subproblems that relate to us are the ones we can change. To do that, keep asking the question “What contributes to this problem and how are the actions of Version 1 related to it?” over and over until you’re at the root of it. If you struggle to come up with reasons, put different imaginary profiles of people you respect in front of you (a doctor, your grandma, your favorite content creator) and imagine what they would say. How would they say that your actions are contributing to the problem? Being honest with yourself will get you to it much faster. After all, it’s Version 1 that is causing the problem. Version 2 has to be able to see Version 1’s mistakes in order to fix them. You are Version 2 and you will not be making the same mistakes.

Example:

The house is never clean.

“What subproblems are contributing to the main problem of the house never being clean?”

1. I don’t have the energy.

2. My toddler makes it very difficult.

3. Cleaning a whole house is overwhelming.

“Go deeper. What subproblems related to Version 1’s actions contribute, which are within your control?”

1. I don’t have the energy because I have not been taking care of my body by eating well, sleeping enough, and my job is very stressful.

2. My toddler is very difficult because I struggle to keep him entertained and he is very dependent on me for attention.

3. Cleaning is overwhelming because I don’t know where to begin, I don’t have enough time, and I have a lot of self-doubt.

My 9 near old won’t listen to me.

“What subproblem is contributing to the main problem of the house never being clean?”

1. I can’t seem to control my annoyance and frustration with her.

2. She doesn’t seem to care.

3. We have a communication barrier.

“Go deeper. What subproblems related to Version 1’s actions contribute, which are within your control?”

1. I can’t control my frustration because my emotions overwhelm everything else.

2. She doesn’t seem to care because I am trying to get her to care about what I care about and she is 9 and does not care about those adult things.

3. We have a communication barrier because I don’t understand how to communicate things in a way that a 9-year-old truly understands, only what an adult understands.

If there is no I in the problem, then you have no control over it. If you have no control over it, then you are leaving the results up to chance. You have to have ownership of the situation, or you will not have the capacity to ensure positive results.

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Four- Create Measurable Behavior Changes

Here, you want to take accountability to the full extent and find a way to measure, very clearly, whether Version 2 is doing what Version 1 could not. Look at the subproblems in your list and create new behaviors that fill the gaps. If you don’t have any idea how to create behaviors, just go to ChatGPT and put the whole thing in there, ask it very straightforwardly for help, and keep going until you get good results. By addressing the subproblems in our control, we work towards the main problems with very specfic steps. You have to have an action that says you either Did It or Did Not Do It, no grey areas. Otherwise, it becomes very easy to rationalize behavior and end up where we started. Create a set of changes that you can make that will end up as solutions to your problems.

Example:

The House is Never Clean

1. I don’t have the energy because I have not been taking care of my body by eating well, sleeping enough, or exercising, and my job is very stressful.

a. I am going to throw away all the junk food in the house right now and limit my intake of junk food to only one day a week, which I will buy that day and throw away at the end of the day. I am going to put my phone in another room an hour before bed. I am going to send 10 applications a week for a new job.

2. My toddler is very difficult because I struggle to keep him entertained and he is very dependent on me for attention.

a. I am going to practice letting my toddler entertain himself by waiting 10 minutes before responding his requests for attention at least three times a day.

b. I am going to get a baby gate to keep him in the living room with toys while I work in plain view in the kitchen, so he can see me but not demand my attention, using earplugs if he screams.

c. I am going to battle guilt by saying out loud “I am not a bad parent by giving my child opportunities to learn to be independent. He also needs an example to learn a new thing, like everyone else.”

3. I get overwhelmed because I don’t know where to begin, I don’t have enough time, and I have a lot of self-doubt.

a. I am going to only give myself 5 main categories of things that demand my attention. My life will be smaller, but I will have time to focus on those five things. All things not on that list will not be a part of my time and attention.

b. I will look across books, videos, and articles for a specific strategy to clean a house and follow those instructions to the letter.

c. I will begin each cleaning by saying to myself “I am feeling overwhelmed, but my actions will override my thoughts. Fear is trying to keep me away from failure, but I have a system, and I will not fail, so the fear is not a reliable signal”.

My 9-year Old Won’t Listen to Me

4. I can’t control my frustration because my emotions overwhelm everything else.

a. I will acknowledge that as the parent, I have to be in control of my emotions and be steady against her large, childish emotions. To do that, I will use ChatGPT to find resources for how to manage anger and complete 1 course/book/podcast series within the next 45 days.

b. I will start to pay attention to what I feel in my body when I start to get angry, and use those physical feelings as an indicator of anger building. When I feel them, I will take 5 deep breaths and relax my shoulders and face.

5. She doesn’t seem to care because I am trying to get her to care about what I care about and she is 9 and does not care about my adult things.

a. When I see that she has not done what I asked, I will first write down why I think she should care about doing something like cleaning her room in my Notes app. Then I will ask her what she thinks about her room and if she cares about the things in my list. I will then ask her what might make her want to do things my way and try to put myself in her shoes to understand her motivation and put each answer in my Notes app.

6. We have a communication barrier because I don’t understand how to communicate things in a way that a 9 year old truly understands.

a. I will begin every conflict with questions, trying to understand her perspective, then only operate from her understanding. I will ask questions like “What do you think happens if you continue that behavior” and “Why do you think I would want you to act differently”. From her responses, I will try to remember what it is like to be 9 and better understand her perspective by writing her answers down in my Notes app.

Five- Follow Your Plan

What you have now is a very clear set of instructions of how to change your behavior in meaningful ways that will positively impact your life. Your list is dependent on no one but you, and is drawn from a place of honesty. You have given yourself the system to build on and now just need to execute. If you fail, go to the next Version and try again. You have the answers to the problems now, and you can find new answers to new problems by applying the exact same system when you need it.

You are now in control of your life. Use every resource you can. In the era of YouTube, ChatGPT, and social media, there is no more excuse for not knowing things.

Go out and make Version 1 proud by doing what they could never do.

With love from me to you,

Alec

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

Frozen wind steals your comfort, the chill slows your blood, and the crops are withered away by frost. The natural state of the cosmos is mostly a heatless, dark, emptiness. Cold, and the veiled threat of death that it signals, is a practice round for waits for us in the grave.

I hate the cold.

I detest the death of every year, the annual reset blanketed in snow and greyness, yet I will not go gently into that good night. I cannot control the weather, but I refuse to let Old Man Winter steal away what I am owed. Life is my birthright. Vitality is my weapon. I will not give up what is mine without a fight.

Geographically, the cold is an inevitability for me. Living in Boulder, Colorado, next to a mountain and 30 minutes from a ski resort, mounds of snow will find their way to my doorstep. There will be no avoiding what I so vehemently dislike, and every day draws me nearer. This gives me a very clear decision:

Live with resentment and bitterness brought on by the situation that I consciously put myself in, or adapt.

I cannot shift the weather around me to adapt the environment, so I am left only with adaptation of myself. Adaptation beyond warmer clothes and higher heating bills, which only serve to create a bubble of comfort, a hopeful boundary of heat that can to easily be crossed. No, that is not enough. I will adapt myself completely.

I will learn to love the cold.

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It’s common to feel that the universe has chosen us to suffer, as if our current state was nothing but a jail sentence to pay for the sins of a past life. Which may be true, that I don’t know. But I do know that the guy who comes after me in the reincarnation cycle is going to have real hell to pay, because I refuse to take what the universe offers without trying to bite its fingers.

You are both the author and the actor of your story, and to be anything less is a premature death. To not take action is to let the game continue on autopilot while you idly sit there and watch. To manifest a rich, full existence, you must be in control.

I have chosen every step on the path that has led me to Boulder, and every result is mine to own. Thus, my next step could easily be one of frustration and impatience as I try to rush the sands of time through my existential hourglass, ticking down days until things are ‘good’ again in the spring. Or I can have good right now, this very second, and every day of winter.

As I bike to work in 25-degree weather, I will relish in the pain throbbing in my hands as the wind cuts over my tight grip on the handlebars, forming cracks in my knuckles. I choose to see it as myself shedding blood for my choices, with deep gratitude for the freedom and autonomy to have made them. Choice is life. Those tingling needles in my frozen fists are a physical offering to the altar of a moment in time. Of a time when I am 33 years old, building a company, physically active enough to bike over hills, and in a space where I enjoy both myself and my life. That offering is made with a smile.

I will choose to love the cold, because choice is life and life is intention. I have set my intention of building here in Boulder and will now adjust to the spiderweb of consequences that grow from them, with grace and action.

If I can’t swim in a lake, I will ski down a mountain. I will not allow myself to wish for spring, at the expense of valuable time, even if it is spent in the winter. Life goes on, and no sand will be rushed through my existential hourglass.

So too does this symbology carry over to death. The third decade of life is the culmination of Endless Youthful Summer, mirroring the transition of the year. Young enough to have hot blood, but old enough to remember when it was boiling. A long way yet to go to the grave, but crystal-clear memories of what has passed, and grief of what will never be returned to. We must not dread the future because it does not shine like what has passed. Hindsight is always rosier than the present. Relish every stage.

We will rage. We will stand and choose to fight against the gasping, sputtering, dying of the light. We will grab it by the neck and force it to remain above the horizon for as long as our grip has strength, and start a fire in the dark after it has sunk beyond our reach.

If you are struggling, suffering, drowning, you must re-imagine yourself. You are staring down a fork of existence, and you must choose whether to succumb or seize the reins.

Choose to live, even when Lady Fortuna has chosen you to die. As long as you pull breath into your lungs, you have one more second of immeasurable depth to assign meaning to.

Tragedy will happen. You will die, I will die, everyone we love will die. I will not spend a second of it begging for the universe to hear my pleas for fairness, to wish for what has not come to pass.

Instead, I will rage. I will wield my birthright of vitality to bring choice to every impasse. Short or long, tragic or bountiful, I alone will direct the flow of the water as it carves the canyons of my existence.

Choose to be good, to do good, and to inspire good, on your own terms. We are just a vector of energy that came from the stars and will return to the ground, which can consciously create positive impact in that short space between phases.

If the universe wants the light to die, it had better come with the intention to kill. Shoulder your burden and strengthen your resolve against tragedy. Seize responsibility with gratitude, as every result or consequence is a chorus singing hymnals to our autonomy. Manifest the reality you desire and when the universe raises its fist, be prepared to fight.

Rage against the shared tragedy of temporary existence. Rage against the unforeseeable pivots of fortune. Rage against the dying of the light by becoming the light.

With love from me to you,

Alec (for now)

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

The world tends to segment itself broadly into groups that are pretty clearly visually identified, like an 80s movie with lunch tables that separate the jocks, the art kids, and the computer nerds. Similarly, attractive people are often seen with those who are also good-looking. Anyone who looks for group patterns long enough can start to notice some things and one very clear one is that the hotties have much more fun.

Now, maybe they have more fun because the world is good to them. But maybe the world is good to them because they have more fun. Both can be true, but I have a strong suspicion that the second one, (which you can control), is a way to immediately improve your existence, no matter what your face looks like. You too could reap the rewards of the beautiful, by exuding effortless joy.

I’m surely not the first person to tell you that the world treats you better the higher that you rate on the attractiveness scale. Questions get answered with more depth when your face is more symmetrical. Extra care is taken to assure your comfort when your clothes are fitted to your composition. Here’s where it gets interesting, though: I don’t necessarily think that visual attractiveness is always at the core of it.

Whatever the “fun gene” is, the extroverted social genetics that makes some people the life of the party, is also a character trait that tends to be more broadly attractive. Thus, just being fun leads people to out-do their base physical capabilities, have higher-caliber partners, and over time produce offspring that happens to be both fun and hot. It’s why funny guys can date models and have really lovely family Christmas cards.

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That fun gene shows itself as a raw playfulness, an enthusiasm for engagement. By taking things less seriously, as if time wasn’t such a constraint, and worries are placed second to experience, the world de facto becomes easier.

You may think ‘No, they’re just more confident’, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Confidence is the internal feeling, but what is the external behavior of confidence? Relaxation. Assuredness. Social engagement. Fun.

Confidence is freedom from consequence, operating without fear of judgement or condemnation. There’s no worry about what might happen, because you feel in control of it, or at least able to control your reaction to it. And what does that result in? Being more playful and having more fun with your actions. The end result is the same.

All of us, from our Main Character perspective, have to maximize the outcomes of every situation so that we can continue to move up in the world. At the bottom of the ladder and with limited time in life to climb it, even a single misstep could ruin everything. Those with the advantage of being born on the top floor are not so worried. Being free from worry is essentially what we all really want. Even when we lottery-fantasize, many of us dream about paying bills for ourselves and for others, giving the gift of removing their worry. Transitively, being around those who are free from worry lets us double-check our presumptions that we need to worry at all, by allowing us to relax and to play with life in a way that we can’t do when we’re gripping it so tightly.

Put linearly, it goes like this:

• The world treats you well

• You expect good from the world

• You stress less about things going badly

• Life feels more playful and fun

• Good attracts good

• Existence improves

Because of this, being around attractive people makes us feel looser, more relaxed, and at ease than we are in our own heads. There is a feeling of safety, that someone brought a bright enough flashlight to wash away the fear of wolf attacking you from the dark. If they’re not worried, you don’t have to worry, and things will be ok. It’s an infectious attitude, everyone benefits from it, and it’s not tied to being attractive.

You can jump to step two without needing step one.

Anyone can live a life with effortless ease. Anyone can allow others the sanctity of relaxation in their existence. All it takes is someone to go first to loosen the grip and enjoy the feeling of the ball within their palm, of the game at hand, without the worry of needing to win. The person who reminds everyone else that the score is just a number but the game is an experience, is the person that breathes enjoyment back into the team.

A man with an inheritance does not have to worry about stockpiling to retire at 65, and avoiding that scurrying race to hoard resources gives him emotional security. You could have emotional security, too. You just have to choose it.

You have to find a way to be happy with your present moment, otherwise you will strive forever for the future and waste 80 percent of your time on earth in service of the 20 percent when you’re too old to care. Easier said than done, right? Maybe, but probably not.

If you are in the midst of suffering, find peace in being on the path to recovery. If you see no way out, look positively towards the opportunity that the world might provide in the future. If you are facing an insurmountable loss, find security in the previous existence and the eventual end. There is no harming the person who is self-secure, and the person who is self-secure gifts that security to everyone in the environment. You alone are the penultimate decider of your success because you are the one who chooses the measuring stick.

The ability to proclaim to others that the resources will not be scarce, that the world will provide for you, and conveying that through a sense of ease and comfort in interacting with your daily experience is what is attractive. Tension is the most unattractive quality. Imagine two (sober) men in a fight. One looks tense, eyes wide and obviously stressed, while the other looks casual and relaxed. Even in the face of danger, who would you feel safer with? Comfort in the face of fear, relaxation in the face of the unknown, and security in the sense that everything will work out is the most attractive quality because others internalize that signal and feel relaxed themselves. The experience of peace is the most attractive thing that you can have, and if you want to be more attractive, then work to find your peace.

If you want to read future articles on how this directly and specifically translates into dating, subscribe.

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For explicit ways to find peace, read more here:

With love from me to you,

-A

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

Getting too big for your own britches makes us sad. Take the crown off, king. Spend a day amongst the peasants.

In every single moment of our lives, being the narrator of every action, every intention, every goal, and every hurdle makes us oh so important in our own heads and much larger than everything else. It’s not our fault, it’s how we survive. If you didn’t prioritize yourself to some extent, you’d eventually starve or dehydrate or just be so stinky you die, idk.

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Unfortunately, it becomes a strain to carry the weight of our past and current selves, plus the consequence of every single decision we make. Every primary choice cascades into endless secondary choices, all while every should-have, would-have, and could-still, piles up to an overwhelming landscape of potential realities to select from. It’s paralyzing enough to understand that there are 35 options for peanut butter in a grocery store, and that every choice is somehow unique in its tradeoffs. If you compound that decision hundreds of times a day, hundreds of days a year, over the decades of our life, you are left aghast against the enormity of it all.

We’re zoomed so far into our own existence that we forget that we’re only one ant, hustling and bustling around one anthill, amidst the thousands of anthills spread across a single square mile. Our mental lens only has enough space for like fifty ants max, and that’s just not enough to understand how infinitely small we are. In zooming, we grasp more detail but lose sight of context.

Most of the time, it’s great to prioritize yourself and your life arc, but occasionally, I beg of you to just chill out and bask in your tiny-ness. You do not have to take yourself so seriously. You can allow yourself to simply be, without having to race forward towards success or achievement.

If your inner voice loves to whisper “Don’t fuck this up” like every day is the finale of some universal performance, you’ll never be free of the burden of importance. A constant pressure to never miss a step lest you fall from the ledge keeps anxiety high and breath short. But what if you did? What if you did let it go and let the orb drop from your palm? Would the ant hill as a whole be any worse off? Would the square mile of thousands of anthills even notice? In the grand scheme of things, would your mistake even shift the dirt beneath your own feet?

In a mad rush to prove that the existence we lead is worthy of having been brought forth from the primordial soup, we seek new ways to quantify the value of our days. The problem is that we can measure them against anything, an endless number of ways to win or lose a game that you’re pretty much just making up. It looks to me like most of us are choosing somehow to make ourselves losers, too.

In our grand attempts to reach a high score, we forget that we don’t even know the system of cosmic tally, and that we’re letting our squishy and limited human brains decide how the universe keeps count. When we stand next to a mountain, it forces us to notice that we might just not be so goddamn important. That maybe it’s okay just to appreciate being alive.

Mother Mountain reminds us that even she erodes, that once what seems so mighty in comparison to our own existence will also be broken down into its composite units. Something very small comes together to create something very large, and so too should we remember that we fundamentally are brought into a bigger unit through our connectivity. To only measure the value of your life in reference to what it does for yourself is the same as the rock judging its existence without ever remembering it was part of the mountain. Define fulfillment through your service to other humans. Derive your value in things larger than yourself. Take a step back and ask what you’ve done that was better for the community as a whole. Let yourself be a part of the bigger picture, not floating above it.

With love, from me to you

Note; No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

Our social media is a constant influx of worrisome news, aggrandizing the Fox News effect of using emotional power to keep people engaged. The speed and range of bad news is a torrent that is incredibly easy to drown in, showing you ways to be scared that you didn’t even previously know existed. That kicks in a defense mechanism to protect yourself at all costs, shrinking your life down to that of a rabbit, who scans the environment for threats any time they’re above ground, with a racing heartbeat and muscle reflex to match.

You can choose to live otherwise, to live a life of magical realism and wonder, instead of fear and worry. Dramatic darkness has strengthened your fear muscle, making it so strong that your brain is imbalanced. If you only ever work your upper body muscles, your legs wither away, but it is within your power to bring things back into proportion.

It will take constant, diligent, conscious action to do so. Action that only you can perform, and that no one else will do for you.

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When you go through the world, you have to remind yourself to focus on the beautiful, and once you begin, there will be no shortage of ways to do so. You have to work the ‘seeing beauty’ muscle until it is strong again. Those who are happy exist constantly in that state. Single thoughts, when piled up in abundance, become your entire mindset. You have to bring it upon yourself to be a positive person. It is no one’s job but your own.

Here is one very simple rule to get started: Look harder at things.

When you’re out on the street, look at a sign. Notice how a font makes you feel and realize that someone creatively designed it. How colors have connotations to specific businesses and customer categories. How we are all largely connected by simple shapes and strokes.

Look at a flower arrangement in a highway median and appreciate how someone used pattern, size, and color matching to bring small wonder into a concrete square. Look at the concrete itself and be amazed that humans have taken the earth underneath our feet and formed it in ways that bring flow into our environment and our movement.

As you walk, feel the muscles flex in your feet, pushing and counterbalancing our momentum in sync, to propel us forward. Look at your own clothes and allow yourself to be impressed at the generations of human ingenuity that have led to materials with different properties, being machined into specific patterns through a loom, that warm and protect our bodies while allowing us the freedom of expression through them.

When you receive junk mail, be grateful for the behemoth of logistics that lets us draw marks onto wood fibers and have it transported directly into the hands of another, anywhere in the world, for a remarkably cheap cost to us. When your potted plants wilt, be inspired by the plant structures that move water from the soil into the tips of the leaves.

The world has limitless points for gratitude, appreciation, and beauty. It is your job to acknowledge them. It is your job to flex that muscle so constantly and efficiently that it becomes the default. You cannot expect industries that rely on emotional capture (a powerful drug for manipulating dependence out of fear) to have your best interests in mind. It’s not good business, and capitalism does not reward it. Chirp about how things should be all you want, but you’d be better off chirping at yourself for allowing a business to dictate your reality.

Danger is real and should be acknowledged, but not at the expense of wonder. Controlling your own narrative of the world will bring much more inner peace than whatever the scrolling newsfeeds dictate to you.

If you want to change the world in ways where these feeds don’t exist, then starve them of attention. The greatest form of rebellion against fear-driven industries is to live a life of attentive gratitude. By seeing the world as a place of beauty, you give others permission to do the same, and exponentially increase the effect.

Negative media acts from the same cognitive base that a child does, operating out of emotional reactions and polarization. You must choose to be the adult in the situation, to seize back control and define your own reality. Happiness is your burden to create.

In effect, you must choose to be happy, even when the world does not want you to be. Take all of the energy that you previously placed into worry and anxiety, and instead channel it into putting in the work to seek out and dig for positivity. Victor Frankl found solace and purpose from deep within Nazi internment camps, and constructed the framework of his mind to let that flourish. In turn, you must also find your own meaning.

Global tragedies will punch you in the face, determined to knock you down and keep you there. Standing back up is an act of defiance. Choose to do so, over and over again. Bring control back into your existence and make that choice.

With love from me to you,

Alec

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

They don’t need to know their neighbors. They don’t need to interact with their proximal environment. It turns out that the wealthier you are, the more you get to have chosen relationships instead of default community. Decades ago, you had to know your neighbors, because these were the people that you went to school and work with or the people that you would eventually date and marry. Unless, of course, you went to private school or you went to boarding school, where your community is more of an intentional connection; a more exclusive binding tie than just being able to see their house from your mailbox.

We all hear that being rich is lonely, and isolationism is probably why. People are more like squirrels than we care to believe, and resource guarding leads to pushing other people away to protect your precious pile of riches. There’s a reason people who build secret bunkers are killed to keep the location secret and dragons guarding gold live in desolate caves. Once you have something worth protecting, you shrink away from the world to keep it safe. As you grow in your prosperity, it is vitally important to keep your world open to human connection, even at the expense of fully defending your shiny objects, so that you don’t wither away into a creature like Gollum. This is a sacrifice and a risk, but crucial to being alive. You cannot forget your roots.

Being independent is a great and worthy goal, but when taken to the extreme, it just means that you’re alone. Cohesive society demands personal sacrifice, in the same way that a nuclear family does. Part of the backfiring from wokeness that led to current American politics was the individualization of every single person that resulted in the breakdown of larger solidarity. People were not willing to bend for the greater good.

I’ve lived in quite a few very poor neighborhoods, and there is a default geographic tribalism that exists for safety because spreading resources and ensuring the security of the neighborhood block fell on everybody’s shoulders, like a Roman phalanx. At some point everybody needs somebody. Sometimes you’re the needer, and sometimes you’re the somebody. Being on good terms with your neighbor means that you can borrow a cup of sugar, that they’ll watch your house while you’re gone, they notice when your dog has escaped, and they’ll give you a call when your behavior is erratic. It turns out the more money you have, the less dependent you are on external cohesion. You have the resources to ensure that there is not a cup of sugar ever missing, that your fences are secure, and that your home in hidden. But there’s also no one around to call you out on being crazy, or to check your inner voice. When there’s only one voice swirling around in your head, it echoes. Your own voice gets louder, and reinforces itself, doubling down on forming your entire worldview. Humans don’t do well when left alone for too long.

There is a price to pay for social cohesion, but the annoyance of being in a supportive group outweighs the isolation of being alone. On your own, you never have to put up with people’s bullshit. Everything can be maintained to your exact comfort. In a group, you have to adapt and conform and sacrifice.

Hispanic families like mine love to say a million goodbyes before they leave, to circle their room, and to stay as late as everyone else is staying, often long into the night. Essentially sacrificing self for the collectivism for the group.

By doing so, you’re saying “I’m willing to participate in the cultural norms, so that I may stay in the group.” The group notices who leaves early, and are a little offended because the departing choose to prioritize their sleep (or their boredom) over paying homage to the collective group. There’s an unspoken agreement that we all sacrifice and maximize for each other because that’s how we get by, and to go against that is to rebel against group norms. Success and independence often means you stop needing the group and you prioritize your individualism, so you can cut ties. You don’t care about the judgments because they are not required for you to continue to survive.

That also comes with a feeling of betrayal from group participants. “Oh, you’re too good for us. You don’t need us.” To go one step deeper, what some of those in the group may think is, “I still need us. I have to stick around, but you can leave because you’re a little bit better than me. I depend on the collective resources, and you don’t. I am lesser and needier than you and I resent that mirror being held up to me.” Those who need to protect their own ego will push you away because of this. No, it’s not right or fair, but it exists. We’re human.

This phenomenon also happens when people have another form of wealth: high self-approval. People who need approval from external parties conform to the standards of the group because they’re dependent on it. Those who don’t need approval from the group are wealthier and are able to turn away the norms, forging their own path. A great and admirable goal in a vacuum, but do not walk that path so far that you lose sight of others. Artists seclude to be more in touch with their divine inspiration, but too much isolation severs your connection to the world and makes your life small. If all you do is choose personal preference and your own priorities, then you don’t make room for anybody else to comfortably exist. You become so thorny to interact with that it’s easier for others to just opt out.

A well-balanced life demands the toxicity of conformation. As we’ve seen in the past decade, when everyone is a special snowflake, there is no social cohesion. If you want to participate in society, you have to give even when it’s uncomfortable and even when it’s boring. To reap the rewards of connection, you have to pay the price of compromise. To stay connected and to validate other people’s existence because they deserve that too. Do not let your gold drive you so far underground that you lose sight of the light.

From me to you with love,

Alec

Note: No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article.

I’ve tried to be a good little writerboi and construct very linear articles, going from thoughts to evidence to recommendations in a nice logical manner, but I just can’t do it. It never feels as genuine as just walking around and making a recording on my phone of whatever thoughts meander in, then just writing that up. This act is more journal than article, and it’s the only style that keeps me engaged. Unfortunately, it’s kind of always going to suck. It’s always going to be perspective-driven and flowery, going the most circuitous route.

I’m also never going to know how to end it very well. Do I tie it up with a nice line that says “And that’s why you guys should X, Y, Z?” Do I draw a conclusion? Do I note the sorry state of the world and plead with you to do better? Do I give ten bullet points of what metrics to use for fulfillment? Well, maybe sometimes, but not all the time, or even often. Most of the time, I’m actually just going to trail off when I feel like the thought has naturally culminated.

Once I get to the point where I have more than 25 subscribers (which I’m very grateful for, thank you so much, having 25 people in the world who care what I say is flabbergasting and lovely), what I’m really hoping is that this open-ended style lets you jump right into continuing the conversation, gives you a point for commenting or for feedback, and allows me to hand the baton off to those who are interested in furthering the dialogue.

I write for exactly one reason: to put myself openly and genuinely into the world, hoping that people like me will see a mirror into their own souls and choose to interact. I write to find my people, and I can’t do that if I only want to be the advisor or the figurehead or the expert because then you’re only finding followers. What I really want to find are peers, friends, collaborators, homies, blood brothers, a wolfpack, ride-or-dies, and people who want to wear matching shirts in a bowling league.

I’m comfortable standing in front of a room and speaking, but I prefer sitting at the table and discussing. It’s hard to discuss something that’s already tied up with a nice bow. So I always feel uncomfortable when I get to the end of a thought that becomes an article or an essay and I don’t know how to wrap it up.

In my head, what I like to picture is myself being on the street, speaking the words of my essay to the general public, and then at the end just quietly standing there and waiting for somebody to engage. My articles end with my ears open and with a hope for intentional, genuine communication.

end

With love, from me to you
-Alec

No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article. Which may mean the article is worse, but at least it’s genuine.

I’ll start by saying that I’m pretty decent at interacting with humans. I enjoy first dates, I enjoy interviews, I enjoy mingling, networking and being dropped face-to-face with a stranger. There’s no social anxiety or fear at the core of it, but sometimes I don’t want to talk to new people. For reference, I’m 32 and I just moved to Boulder, Colorado. This is the fifth or so time in my life that I’ve lived in a brand new city, and it’s always been a pretty easy transition to find new groups of people and events and participate in the greater community because I have a pretty low activation energy to just go out and do things. And maybe it’s the age or the new phase of life, but I’m tired, boss.

I’ve always pursued connection to try to establish myself. I’m very open to new things and can sit back and let them wash over me and gauge what I like and what I don’t like, pick those out to keep, toss the rest back, and have a little bit of another life brought into my own. Maybe I’m being a dick here, but I feel like at this point, I know what I like. I’ve been incredibly intentional about narrowing down my interests into the frameworks, the architectural building blocks, of things that I enjoy. And everything else probably great in its own right but it doesn’t float to the top of the pile. These things include:

• Biology/Biochem

• Business

• Personal Development

• Playing Sports (but definitely not watching sports, unless it’s UFC)

• Writing

And beyond that, it can kick rocks.

What this really means is I’ve stopped going wider and started going deeper. You know, it’s high time that I got good at the things that I enjoy instead of just trying to find the things that I enjoy. Which has really helped to spend my time in ways that are fulfilling.

Like I’m sure that that barista class that teaches you about coffee beans and ethical sourcing and the proper equipment is incredibly interesting to the right person. But it is no longer worth my free time. Also in this category is reality TV, pro sports, cooking, stinky kitties, the Southwestern US, and most social media. Interest in fashion trends ended when I zeroed in on what my clothing style looks like aesthetically and texture-wise. I know some materials and some high quality brands, and beyond that, I just can’t give a damn. Cross it off the list.

I’m also starting to understand that it works the same way with human interaction and meeting new people. To be fair, it’s going to be really bad in the long run if all you do is stick to what you know, because it gets really insular. It feels so damn cozy to just hang out with your high school friends and never expand your perspectives, but the world will leave you behind. On the flip side, if all you’re doing is getting out there and meeting new people, you never establish depth. It’s like going to college and taking every single introductory class over the four years instead of ever really having a major. You’re collecting, not experiencing. Gotta find your balance.

I go to networking events now and realize pretty quickly when there is or isn’t overlap in interests. And oftentimes, if the only thing that’s drawing together this group of people is our professional sector, that is not a strong indicator of how we choose to spend our free time or what we find exciting. The world is broad, man. People are out there with hobbies that I don’t even know exist. Some pretty weird stuff, no doubt.

Not to say that my curiosity in people has waned or that I never want to meet strangers, but hearing about your latest tiramisu experiment is not going to bring me as much joy as discussing the two guys who got into a cage and tried to kick each other in the head. When I meet new people, I have to be careful not to prune my own leaves too much to make room for more plants, because I love my plants and I should be letting them grow, not just trying to expand the garden.

If I take this out to the extreme, it does mean that eventually I’ll only have a few friends and we’ll talk the same old bullshit. We’ll essentially be the good ol’ boys hanging around the gas station talking about when the principal got pantsed. While that may be hilarious for probably 30 years, eventually it gets old. As human beings, novelty is king. Life has to keep changing in order to be fulfilling. I don’t care how much you love your favorite food, you can’t have it for dinner every single night for the rest of your life and be satisfied. Even if you’re just adding some new spice to the spaghetti and it’s technically still spaghetti, it gives it a little kick to keep it fresh.

Balance.

With love, from me to you
-Alec

No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article. Which may mean the article is worse, but at least it’s genuine.

In normal, productive society, we generally stick to a common good to improve everyone’s lives, at both big and small scale. For example, I look at this dog and I know the most impactful thing, the thing that I would be most proud of myself for doing, is probably to help that dog find a stable, loving, caring environment. That is the action of immediate, highest good, and it haunts me that doing good is such a complicated pursuit.

To save the dog, I would need to wrestle with the ethics of technically taking the pet away from their owner and solve the logistics of getting the pet placed in a stable environment, in a city that I’m only visiting. Who knows if the dog ends up better? The end result might be a shelter, faced with being put down, or worse, left alone in a cage for years. Only understanding that before they had a person and now all they have are cement walls and floors.

Could I bring the dog back with me? Well, the lease says no, I can’t afford two homes, and I don’t know enough people in my current town who are willing to take in a strange dog from a different city.

But like, technically I could. I could nab that dog, clean it in the hostel shower, bring it back on the plane, hide it from my roommate, hope it doesn’t cry when I go to work, and have it live in my room. Until maybe dominoes fell and things got complicated.

I feel limited in my capacity to do good externally because I’m bound by the logistics of participating in the fabric society. If I veer too far from the courses of action that maintain my responsibilities, pay my bills, and fulfill my debts and obligations to my family, roommate, work, and society as a whole, things can fall apart fairly quickly and if everyone colored outside the lines too frequently, the entire structure could collapse. By participating in the societal structure that we all agreed on, in unspoken terms, I’ve shackled my own capacity for action. The same way I can’t just take off work every day or not shove my trash through my neighbors window, I can’t save every dog.

But isn’t that the highest purpose thing? Why even bother with anything else?

Completing an expense report is nowhere near as fulfilling as ensuring that that little dog is given the opportunity to be loved the way it deserves. But completing those expense reports allows me to also do other micro goods, because it gives me money. To apply one’s own safety vest before inflating the person next to me is necessary to ensure that I can do any good at all.

Or is this just a story that I’m telling myself instead of taking action?

Is it actually more noble to dedicate my entire life and routine to doing the things that I know will fulfill my soul? The things that I know would make all past, present, and future versions of myself deeply proud of the time that we spent on earth? Am I willing to trade comfort and security for defining purpose, and a life of deep value and intention? Is there any mathematical equation that will tell me whether a higher risk life of intimate meaning would tip the scale over a more normal life, stippled with small or less impactful deeds? Is the ultimate benefit maybe to build myself and my influence as quickly as possible to have it all? With no money, no resources, and no structure, I could save all of the dogs that my own two hands would allow, but with money and connections, I could exponentially increase my effort. Is this true, or is this just another self-serving narrative?

As of now, I don’t quite know what the right answer is. But I know that I’m uncomfortable in the paralysis that the situation presents. Every time I see a dog that I could be helping but choose the stability of my current life instead, I die a little inside. I’ll need a concrete answer to the question of what my life is pursuing, and whether my current pursuits in fact do outweigh the certainty of deeply spiritually fulfilling work that I know I could have had if only by saving that one single dog.

For now, this is what I tell myself. I have dedicated myself to creating medicines that prevent people from facing the existential vacuum of dementia. I wrote books and give them away for free, only asking people to donate to a dog shelter if they can. I support my family, emotionally and financially. I seek to do good in every interaction. I act genuinely. These are my dedicated actions, and to let the dominoes fall that support them means that I end up achieving nothing. Which means that as much as it breaks my soul, I can’t save every dog. Because of my choices and priorities, I stand by and let sorrow and misery continue.

This is one example, but there is a bit of a constant measuring, weighing, and balancing in my life of what to pursue given the unlimited options at hand, and the multitude of tradeoffs that come with each one. If you, my friendly reader, have any insight into how you’ve dealt with a situation like this before, please connect so that we all may benefit and find peace with the tradeoffs.

With love, from me to you,

Alec

P.S.-No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article. Which may mean the article is worse, but at least it’s genuine.

We’re at a stage where we put in the effort during our twenties and expected the payouts to come rolling in. The rewards were supposed to be bountiful. Livable house, fulfilling career, inspirational and caring friend group, the kind of life adults were supposed to have.

But for many, it hasn’t shown up.

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Houses are more expensive and wages can’t keep up, unless they’re deep in the suburbs. So they commute in and spend 60 minutes of their free time behind the wheel. They’re too far to see friends regularly, and surrounded by subdivisions. Plans need three weeks notice, and cancellations are more normal than showing up.

Life starts to get smaller, digital personas become the new norm, and none of it feels satisfying.

Maybe it’s a problem of idealization, where we imagined a finish line that was really only just another starting line. Or maybe our expectations were never realistic to begin with. Maybe the world has just changed.

I watch people ponder career paths and interstate moves, trying to find a place to rest their bones. I myself have lived in 4 states since I finished high school and want to make sure my next home will be home for at least a decade. I crave a life of substance, and want to be part of a local ecosystem. We’re all looking, looking, looking.

Reaching your 30s means the birth of babies and the toll of wedding bells, which is wonderful for the family but challenging for friendships. Maintaining contact takes effort, and with trying to fit that in between child care, a dedicated career, life tasks, and romance, it’s no wonder hanging out at the brewery falls a bit by the wayside.

People try to fill the void by picking a hobby they see on social media. Bird watching might bring a spark for life back, right? Pickleball plonking is just fun enough to make paddle costs worth it. Whatever trendy new way to pass the time will work to make life feel less robotic.

But even the people with their weekend calendars filled still talk about missing something. They’re not sure what it is, I’m not sure what it is, but we agree that something isn’t quite there.

People in loving relationships- yup.

People with important, fun careers- mhm.

People living in the big cities, the mountains, and the beach- them too.

All missing this great big, fulfilling something.

Part of me wonders if it’s not even a thing. Maybe there’s actually nothing missing and it’s just the second Death of Innocence, where the rug of what the world was supposed to be and how life was supposed to go, gets pulled out from under you again. The first one happens during childhood, when we learn that the world can be dangerous. The second one might be happening in your late 20s and early 30s.

The time when you realize that maybe all there is to life is just to exist. Just kind of go through the days, solve your little problems, play around with little hobbies, and connect with other humans whenever you can. That your personal movie might not be a blockbuster for the ages, and that not everyone is the main character.

Which sounds kind of sad at face value, but it’s only sad if you relate it to something much bigger. If we set the threshold of expectation so high that normal life seems like a drag, the problem isn’t life, it’s the expectation.

The second part of what I’ve noticed is that some people thrive when the Second Innocence dies.

“You’re saying I can just be happy?” they think. “I don’t have to constantly be chasing some grand character arc?”

The pressure to try to have it all is gone. The family, house, car, career, friends, workouts, hobbies, social group, audience, volunteering, on and on and on.

All that yearning just dries up and gets replaced with gratitude.

You can just live, and do whatever calls to you day to day. The sadness only comes at the tail end of FOMO, where we see all of the absence instead of the presence.

The world is big and time is short, and choosing the top 5-10 things you want out of your life is much more satisfying than watching sand fall through your fingers as you try to hold the beach in your hands.

If you resonated with this at all, feel free to unburden yourself now. Let some of the expectation fall away and remember that we’re all just hairless monkeys on a rock in space doing our best, and that’s ok. Not everything is for everyone, and that’s also ok.

Life may not be everything all at once, there’s a lot of tradeoffs. But have fun with it while you’re here.

From me to you, with love

Alec

No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article. Which may mean the article is worse, but at least it’s genuine.

No AI was used to write, edit, or otherwise modify this article. Which may mean the article is worse, but at least it’s genuine.

I'm sitting outside of a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado, which is one of the safest and most upscale cities that I've ever lived in. Everyone around me is smiling in the sunshine, soaking up the afternoon, when brrrrraaaaaap - a bunch of kids on motorbikes passed by.

Motorbikes are a bit of a bane in this city because they're loud, and aggressive, and kids who are squeezing the throttles to the max might not even be in puberty yet, but they certainly are zipping down the street at 30+ miles an hour.

And as I'm sitting here, I see those three or four kids pass by on their motorbikes, feel them abruptly stopping the quiet scenery of the cafe, and watch as somebody behind them yells at them to get off the road, from their car.

Then the greatest thing happened. The kid in the back turns around, looks at the guy, pops a sick wheelie and laughs, then just keeps on going. His friends see it and they laugh and continue on braaaping down the road, completely unbothered by this man's frustration. They're in their absolute own little world where the only thing they need is validation from each other, regardless of what us lames at the cafe give a hoot about.

As I'm looking at them, I see a little bit of myself . Specifically, the period where the whole intention of being in public is disruption. The whole schtick is to be seen as different, to be made an outsider by my own actions. To force other people to see me doing ‘wrong’, and know I'm seeing them seeing me do wrong. To feel their judgment, then shove it back that I flat don't care. Their opinions are water off my back, and it feels free.

I felt kind of powerful to shake off the chains of the expectations of authority figures and do whatever I wanted. In rebellion, there was quite a bit of autonomy that I didn't feel in the rest of my life, where I was being told when to go to school, how to behave there, and what to do afterwards. Whenever I got the chance to stick a middle finger up in the face of it all, that freedom of rebellion was extremely enticing.

It's pretty interesting that rebellion seems to be part of the natural order of adolescence, especially since it's usually antagonistic to normal society. By loitering menacingly, smoking in a no-smoking zone, revving your motorbike, or roaming the streets, you're breaking the social contract. If everyone did that, we would have no functional society, so it has to be reined in by responsible adults. But also, that’s what makes it so damn tasty in the first place. Beyond that, and maybe even more importantly, rebellion is a social contract with your in-group. It's a way of signaling to the people that you do want admiration from (your peers), that you are one of them, and that they can trust you because you are all the same.

It’s also interesting that most rebellious kids end up fitting into a certain category, whether that be the goths or the skater kids or the kids who do drugs behind the bleachers. Rarely is it actually a signal of a person following an individualistic path; it's usually a break free from the norm that their parents and teachers enforce, and it signals a little bit of questioning of greater authority. The kids don’t want to be individuals as much as they want to just be less like their parents and more like their friends, whatever form that takes.

Rebellion also signals that for the first time you are questioning the rules that have been imposed upon you and deciding that those rules can suck it, you’re going to seek the alternative path. The first action towards making your own place in the world. It is a bit of an irony that instead of the ‘normal’ path, you follow the path that everybody around you is taking and usually you're rebelling in the same way that everybody around you is doing, so it’s just another ‘normal’ path, but whatever. Regardless, it is a signal of identity creation.

Which I love. I love that the kids are still pushing back, still going full tilt towards freedom. It’s a joy to see the fire of angst burning bright, even if it does mean I have to deal with miniature Evel Knievel racing down residentials. I would much rather have that than apathy and non-chalance. Good to see the screens haven’t muddled their brains too hard, and love live the rebels.

With love, from me to you,

Alec