How I'm Holding Up on My 2015 Resolution

This morning my friend Patrick Rhone published a short piece called Right Speech.

In Buddhism, Right Speech is one of the precepts in The Noble Eightfold Path. In short, it is to abstain from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter. It is to consider carefully and mindfully what you say before saying it — weighing how it furthers the recipient of the message. If what we say does not further understanding, come from a place of compassion, or has no true purpose, it should not be said.

I have been bad at this lately.

The post is an apology for his own negativity, but whether he knew it or not, it was something I also needed to hear.

As some readers will remember, I vowed at the beginning of 2015 that I would “Eliminate as much cynicism and negativity from my life as possible.” I did a good job of it for a while, but lately I've fallen back into some old habits, both on Twitter and in my personal life (particularly the latter). I knew from the start I would be prone to falling off the wagon now and then, but I've found that each time I react negatively to something it gets harder and harder to get back on. I take this resolution quite seriously, so it's time to give myself a little kick in the ass with some public accountability.

This post is two things:

1. My own apology—to myself, to my friends and family, and most of all to my son, who my behavior influences most.

2. It's also another request for any of you to call me out if you see me behaving against my resolution. I mean it. I once sent Marco Arment a gentle reminder when he was being negative about something, and I hope someone would do the same for me if the roles were reversed.

Half a year left to go for my resolution, and hopefully a lifetime of optimism beyond that. Let's do this.

What Happens When You Unfollow Everyone on the Internet

Helena Price:

“What if we made more active decisions about how we spent our Internet time? If we weren’t bogged down maintaining our inboxes and social networks, who would we set out to meet or get to know better? If we weren’t so busy clicking links or browsing photos in our feeds, what would we choose to study or learn more about? If we spent these hours differently, what would happen?

I was curious to find out for myself.

So, one night while I was sitting in bed, I un-followed everyone on the Internet.”

The results of her experiment are fascinating, particularly that the action of checking her various feeds was so ingrained into muscle memory that she continued doing it for a while even though nothing was there to check anymore.

I feel that same muscle memory myself all the time. One thing that has helped some is cutting down on my Twitter and RSS feeds quite a bit in recent months. I don't know if I'm willing to unfollow everything just yet, but I do believe there is something to be said for carefully cultivating (and judiciously pruning) one's online experience.

Working for the Man Should Be a Last Resort

David Cain:

“According to my critics, even if you find your standard weekday boring, painful or unfulfilling, you ought to embrace it, simply because a third-world coal miner would kill for your benefits package. When so many have so little, attempting to escape a situation in which you can reliably feed yourself and fund a retirement could only be an act of the utmost ingratitude.

A minority of us believe the opposite is true — that escaping from an unfulfilling mainstream lifestyle isn’t a moral failing, but rather a moral imperative. It’s precisely because we have all the necessary freedoms at our fingertips (and because others don’t) that spending our lives in the stable isn’t just foolish, but wrong. To remain, voluntarily, in a life where your talents are wasted and your weekdays are obstacles is to be humble in all the wrong ways.”

I discovered this article and its author thanks to my friend Álvaro Serrano, and it resonated with me in so many ways.

When I was fired from my awful corporate stooge job, the temptation at the time to rush out and apply for other full-time desk jobs was enormous. There was a mortgage to think about and a family to support, not to mention our dreams of traveling the world together.

Thankfully I had enough support from friends and my wife, who all encouraged me to try making this writing gig work out. And here I am now, more than a year later, still putting words on the internet.

Does it make me a ton of money, you ask? Hahaha...no. That's cute. You're cute.

But! That's a tradeoff I'm perfectly willing to make, given the benefits:

• I get to do work I actually care about, and collaborate with a group of people I respect and admire.

• I get to spend every single day with my wife and son. Whenever I'm not writing and she's not teaching dance class we're free, as a family, to do things that used to be reserved for evenings and weekends—visiting the library, zoo, or science museum; playing at the park; going for walks or bike rides; grabbing lunch and/or coffee together; I could go on.

  I often think about how much of my son's childhood I would have missed thus far, how many experiences we wouldn't have shared as a family, had I continued doing the "normal" 9-5 job thing. It's a constant reminder that I never want to go back to that life, even if it meant making more money.

• Despite our relatively low income, we still manage to travel two or three times a year (and more than that, if you count my wife's dance school's trips to competitions in other states). We usually even manage to squeeze in a Disney trip once a year, whether it's to one of the parks or a cruise ship. It takes a lot of careful budgeting and planning to pull off, but it's so worth it.

• I can wear pajamas all day if I want. I might be wearing some as I type this. You'll never know.
• Last but not least, I no longer have to wake up early every morning to commute to a job I hate.

So yeah, I agree with Mr. Cain up there: escaping the unfulfilling mainstream lifestyle (even if it wasn't of my own accord) was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Ryan Holiday: “Wanting to be a "writer" was your first mistake”

“The problem is identifying as a writer. As though assembling words together is somehow its own activity. It isn’t. It’s a means to an end. And that end is always to say something, to speak some truth or reach someone outside yourself.

[...]

No one ever reads something and says, “Well, I got absolutely nothing out of this and have no idea what any of this means but it sure is technically beautiful!” But they say the opposite all the time, they say “Goddamn, that’s good” to things with typos, poor grammar and simple diction.”

Holiday is one of those guys who has achieved quite a lot at a young age, and can dole out advice like "go do interesting things" as a 26-year-old without a hint of pretension.

This particular post really speaks to me for two reasons:

1. I do self-identify as a writer. It's my standard response whenever asked what I do for a living.
2. I don't lead a particularly adventurous life. A happy one, sure, but it's hard to write interesting things when most of your time is spent at home.

If nothing else, Ryan has given me some food for thought. Perhaps a little more adventure in my life is in order, hm?

* * *

If you want to read more from Ryan Holiday, I recommend his book, The Obstacle is the Way. It's all about applying the tenets of stoicism to view life's obstacles in a totally different light. He also has an excellent book recommendation newsletter I've been subscribed to for years.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I just stumbled on this Tumblr and already love everything about it. As the author describes, it's “a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.”

His definition for sonder—which he also produced a video for—is the sort of thing I think about all the time:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

This site speaks to me in so many ways. Such a wonderful concept, beautifully written.