The first thing we were made aware of was that a wetsuit was apparently not necessary, because they didn’t have one for us. About an hour later we had the first dive briefing, the slide directly after welcome listed a wetsuit as a requirement.

Now I know what you’re thinking, you guys booked a week-long boat trip in a notoriously rough sea, it must be nice to not suffer from sea sickness. But you’d be wrong. We were choofing down nausea tablets like a suburban mum chews Valium the entire time. But at least we didn’t get ill? Of course we did!

We had treated ourselves to some extremely suspicious street food in Cairo and resigned to the inevitable toilet time. So we became fish for a few days. When we weren’t under the water, we were asleep or on the toilet. We did also try to make time to fuel our toilet sessions, usually referred to as ‘eating’. It was like this for most of the boat trip, but the diving was great. When we were amongst our true kin.

There was one time I expressed concern to my brother because I was still hearing bubbles and feeling like I was underwater during one of our eight daily naps. We were diving with Nitrox, which if used incorrectly can cause poisoning that makes you hallucinate. Fortunately, my brother reassured me by letting me know that he was also seeing bubbles and floating.

There was nothing to be worried about, we were fish. Two Australians out in the deep sea with a bunch of strangers, we would normally be the centre of attention and extremely sociable. But we had risen above such trivial social pursuits, or perhaps better put, we had sunk beneath. Fish have no use for such nonsense.

One evening they were celebrating the birthday of a crew mate and everyone got cake. Fish don’t celebrate birthdays, we had no need for cake. Laying in our single beds, barely able to move, we listened to the soft tones of people singing—we must have looked like the aftermath of Heaven’s Gate but without the cool shoes.

After a long week of nautical symphony and being unable to participate in almost any conversation outside of you good? and suppressed murmurs, we returned to land. Sweet, sweet land. Our flights were the next morning, we all said goodbye and off we went to the very small local airport.

Arriving at the airport at 6am, I could never have predicted just how horrendous my next 24 hours would be. After being a fish for so long, I had forgotten the troubles of man. For the past week my principal issue was counting the 3 hour window between nausea tablets, now I was to discover a new type of pain that no aquatic creature could comprehend.

For completely uninteresting reasons, I wasn’t able to get on my flight. But first, the manager at the airline gaslit me for about two hours, telling me that I should just chill and relax and that everything would be fine. He then disappeared for about an hour with my passport and came back after the flight had left to tell me I wasn’t going to be on it.

The underlying issue was not my fault, but the result was the same. The man I had spent the previous few hours pandering to and trying to charm had affirmed my downward spiral.

As he handed me back my passport, I thought he might apologise or wish me good luck given the circumstances. Instead he told me that I couldn’t stay inside the airport because I no longer had a valid flight. In Egypt, you’re not allowed to be inside an airport without one, I imagine the same is true in hell.

As he escorted me out of the airport, I was welcomed into my new reality by a cool 900° breeze. With a smile on his face, he asked me where I was going to go. Once again I had presumed this was out of kindness, but his eyes lit up when I replied that I needed to go to a bigger airport a few hours away. He had a friend who could help.

I needed to go to the bathroom, but I was so angry at this man that I walked straight past the toilets inside the airport, determined to get away from him. It would have also been nice to get a bottle of water after such chronic dehydration. But acts prevented by the Geneva Convention continued to play out in my mind and I needed to bid fare-the-well to my accused turnkey.

It was a strange feeling to know I had nowhere to be but I was rushing towards it, anything was better than this.

So there I was, outside of a tiny shit airport on the coast of the Red Sea, without a flight and seemingly no way to smoothly get home or leave this country. Due to some nonsensical Visa restrictions, it appeared I had to fly anywhere else out of Egypt, then I could fly back into the EU seamlessly.

But before I could deal with any of that, I still needed to go to the bathroom. With all the time in the world and not a care, I found myself in a horrendous toilet stall in the airport carpark, still getting rid of the remnants of Cairo street food. I had needed this for hours but was holding out for when I was through security, waiting peacefully at the boarding gate.

But alas the moment had finally arrived, the first pleasant seconds of my morning. My stomach was relieved, I was more at ease. Until I noticed, almost immediately after my modicum of pleasure, there was no toilet paper. A slight chuckle slipped out as I realised just how fucking horrendous my morning had become.

I should be on a plane home, but instead I’m on a toilet in 40 degrees with no escape and no cleanly way to even attempt. I stopped for a moment to listen, only to soon after realise that I no longer cared. A man this dehydrated and lost does not concern himself with such frivolous things.

So, with my shorts proudly around my ankles, I crab walked to the sink. I was ready to begin picking up the pieces of my life and getting back on the winning side. Alas, lady luck had more pain to dish out. There were no paper towels and the sinks had no running water.

In a rush of blood I continued to crab all the way into the ladies toilets next door. There was no toilet paper in the stalls, the sinks didn’t work. I really missed being a fish. What a life I took for granted. At this point in time I think I would have happily accepted Nitrox poisoning, let me hallucinate, put me out of my misery.

But regrettably life continued, there was no other person who could substitute for my pain. I decided my best option was to use a pair of underwear in the way every mother fears. My poor lulus were turned into the world’s most expensive single-use baby wipe.

I’d already sat sweating in them for hours, what quality of life remained? Sacrifices had to be made. The toughest battles are allocated to the toughest soldiers.

It is said that dysentery has killed most people who have ever lived. I refused to become another statistic. I arose out of that bathroom a hero in my own mind, albeit one I never wished to be. It was now time for me to leave.

After some research, I determined that I couldn’t fly out of this cursed airport. I needed to find a way to get to another airport about a 3 hour drive away. A taxi driver came up to me and I said that I’d pay him whatever he wants but I need to get to xyz airport and I need to stop immediately for hand sanitiser and water.

He was very obliging to my request, I think he felt a deep sincere connection to my cause. I’m sure it wasn’t about the money and my general air of vulnerability. I floated through most of this car trip, I almost became a fish again, but I was so far from water that it was no longer helpful.

After washing my hands and returning to only chronically dehydrated, the colour returned to the world a bit. With some clarity, I found out that I could book a flight leaving in 14 hours to Manchester, then I could book another flight back to where I actually wanted to go and I’d get home eventually. All it cost me was €1000 and the worst 24 hours of my life, HAH (ahahahhahaha).

The goal was very clear, I needed to leave Egypt before I became a threat to their national security. My plan was to find a fancy spa near the airport and treat myself, but the driver either sucked or sabotaged each phone call.

I didn’t have the energy to show up in a new venue and be rejected. All I wanted to do was sit in a fucking air-conditioned room for the next 10 hours and try to remember what it was like to feel human again. Or in an ideal world forget what it was to be human and return to being a semi-lucid fish.

In Egypt you can’t enter an airport too long before your flight because they think you’re there to murder people, which to be fair, I wasn’t far away from trying. So I did the one thing that I would never recommend someone to do while travelling, I asked the taxi driver if he perhaps knew anyone in town that could help.

At this point I think I was basically begging to either die a (hopefully) peaceful death or add more humour to this already ludicrous story. Fortunately for you, it was the latter. We arrived in the airport town and I had no cash left. Naturally, the taxi driver had pseudo-robbed me for my last cent and I had not expected to somehow find more creative ways of bankrupting myself.

We went on the hunt for an ATM. I waited in line for about thirty minutes in the sun. I was an empty vessel but just coherent enough to understand that the guy in front of me had broken the last functioning machine. I thought to myself, why wouldn’t it break? A fish is not meant to be on land, I shouldn’t need paper from silly machines. My currency is gross slimy worms and that weird algae shit.

We went to another two ATMs that were broken and finally happened across one that worked. I have no idea how much money I got out of that machine but at this point it had been about 6 hours since I should have been on a plane and I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t care about anything, I had complete indifference to the world around me.

All I wanted was a bed and a shower. If a miracle occurred I might have become a believer right then and there, but when it rains, it pours. Or in my case… how should I put this poetically… when it’s extremely fucking hot and dry and everything sucks, it continues to be extremely fucking hot and dry and everything sucks.

After getting abused for parking in the wrong spot, we finally arrived at my taxi-drivers-alleged-friend’s-address-thing. It looked really grim, the building wasn’t finished and the hallway was dark. It was just an apartment building in the middle of nowhere.

We waited some time and eventually two guys came out, after handing him cash that was the equivalent of 3 nights in a nice hotel—we all went in the elevator together. But, of course, just before we got in the elevator, they decided it was appropriate to light cigarettes.

So here I am, on the road again. I am in a cramped elevator with 3 sweaty men blowing cigarette smoke in my face. I am dehydrated, sunburnt and utterly defeated. But I am close, oh boy am I close. I have my flight booked and I am seconds away from entering the promised land, the room I’ve paid an extortionate price to be in.

We enter the room and I had an out-of-body experience. I was so pot committed that I saw no alternative but to say thanks and shut the door. I just wanted to be alone. I wanted to be alone in this absolute piece of shit room.

In this room with no air-conditioning. In this room with no sheet on the bed and plastic on the mattress, in this room with no WiFi. The shower didn’t work because why would it? I was not deserving of running water. It made sense.

I bird-bathed in the sink that was placed directly next to the bed then spread all my dirty clothes out on the bed, trusting that they were cleaner than whatever plastic was on it. And it was there that I truly accepted my fate. I had been through fire and I had survived.

Entering a deep state of mental-decline-fuelled meditation I lay there and contemplated all the alternative realities that might have existed. Where I didn’t have to try and spread my cheeks as I crab walked to contain the stain. An alternate timeline where I got on that plane, where I sat in a spa for the afternoon, where my underwear wasn’t defiled and sitting in a toilet bin.

It’s funny how often the worst times of your life can turn into the best stories to tell in the future, which then creates good times. I remember telling a friend this story who was going through a breakup and he had tears of laughter in his eyes.

I usually end my writings with something philosophical and optimistic. But this one I think I should just end by saying I have no regrets about my time spent in Egypt. I’ve heard enlightenment defined as the place between two thoughts, my brother and I were basically inanimate for an entire week. We were enlightened, we were fish.

It was such a stark contrast going from such a flow state to being snapped back onto land. I never liked fishing but I now understand how it feels to be on the other end of the hook. More than anything, I think everything that transpired is funny as fuck. And there’s a lot more that I couldn’t fit in (that’s what she said).

Life is about having good stories to tell, the more extreme the better. I personally think this one is better told over a few beers, but unfortunately I can’t have a beer with all of you, so this will have to do.

It is my (uneducated) opinion that before you are about 7 years old you aren’t really a person, you’re a behemoth embryo with a crippling scream. I don’t have many memories from earlier than this age, but I played table tennis from about 8 years old. My first conscious year as a tiny human being.

The funny thing about playing at the local club was most people there were about 900 years old—especially to someone who only recently learned the horrific truth about Santa Claus (no spoilers dw). We would go every Wednesday night. I’d finish school, maybe go for a surf and then head to table tennis to stay up past bedtime.

The image you have in your head is probably incorrect. At our local club there were 8 tables in a fairly large hall. This was a small town too. The club would run competitions that would last a few months, your team for the season was chosen randomly.

So at 8 years old, I was put into a team of 4 that I would play with for the next 8-10 weeks. The other people on my team were all many multiples older than me, sometimes they’d be nice and put dad and I in the same team, but most of the time they didn’t. As I got older and better it would become a known spectacle for us to play each other in competition.

My childhood is filled with memories from social clubs like this. Whether it was Wednesdays at the table tennis club or rugby after school or cricket on weekends. It’s funny how everything feels normal when you’re a kid. The world around you just is, and you don’t really have the mental capacity to understand what isn’t.

It’s only now that I appreciate all the good this did to my brain. I learned how to socialise, how to communicate, how to make friends and how to have fun through participating in social clubs in a world just before people’s pockets started to buzz. We are social creatures and have a deep need for connection.

Congregation

The origin of society is congregation. Congregation predates our (yes our) discovery of fire and our understanding of the world. We created tribes and roamed the Earth. Once tribes were more sophisticated, we turned to religion. Sacrifices, dances, prayer, ceremony, marriage, burials.

Religion has been the single biggest driver of regular congregation since the dawn of man. It doesn’t matter which religion you look to, the defining characteristics are all there. On some particular day you join together to practice some particular ritual. What better way to incentivise socialising than to tell everyone they will burn in hell if they don’t participate?

Whatever your thoughts on religion may be, and by my last comment perhaps you have surmised mine—it brings people together, regularly. There was a time where ritual and congregation were a standard daily practice for everyone, realised through religion.

Bowling alone

Church attendance and membership peaked soon after WWII wrapped up. The drop off wasn’t steep, but a gradual decline from the 50s into the 90s until dropping sharply from 2014. The sad part is that group socialising peaked alongside it. Instead of people leaning into secular assembly to fill the gap, they just stopped.

Bowling club memberships went down, PTA participation went down. Even more informal things like ‘having people over’ declined. The one number that continuously went up was time spent at home. We had more reasons for it now, consumerism had begun and the family would congregate around the TV screen instead.

This trend started far before we had technology and it’s lazy to blame the smartphone for all of our problems, but we do see the acceleration as a result of it. In the 2010s we see a rapid decline of socialising and friendship. Screen time going up, friendship going down.

The loneliness epidemic

Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome. The incentive to congregate has been going down for decades now. Once the threat of eternal hellfire faded from memory, we lost our incentive to be together. Man is a simple creature, without incentive we rarely do anything.

It wasn’t taken seriously until the US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. We don’t often consider loneliness as damaging to our health but the numbers actually look pretty fucked up. Lacking social connection raises the risk of premature death to a level comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Sorry, but if I was going to die early I intend on dragging you all down with me by making you chain smoke my tar stick. If I was a smoker though, this is pretty great propaganda. Next time someone calls you unhealthy for ripping darts just ask how much time they spend socialising. Better to smoke with friends than to eat kale alone.

Loneliness is also associated with a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults. Dementia runs in my family and I’m already able to tell my dad the same story a few times, so that one is close to my heart. Imagine if you heard these stats about anything else? You’d probably do something about it.

Somewhere between a third and a half of US adults reported experiencing loneliness. The trend can be seen around the world and was true before COVID. Lockdowns made it more obvious but the trend has been consistent, much like technology accelerating the already laid out path of group socialising.

The kids are not that okay

Another unfortunate tale the stats show is that the youngest are the loneliest, a distinct lack of friendmaxxing. 15–24-year-olds now have 70% less in-person social interaction with friends than two decades ago. The fact this doesn’t sound surprising to any readers is, in itself, reinforcing the idea we’ve normalised loneliness.

I was lucky enough to experience the fledgling remains of group socialising growing up. Table tennis taught me how to make eye contact, I learned how to speak to adults, I understood how to fit into a group of strangers.

Those who don’t grow up with in person social circles generally feel anxious and lost at the idea of joining them. We have convinced ourselves that if we speak to a stranger we will feel worse afterwards even though research consistently tells us the opposite.

Even just smiling at a stranger can make our day. The ‘ick culture’ of normalising social anxiety as cool has accelerated an epidemic that has been forming for decades. Being an edgy teen who likes to write fan-fic and scroll tumblr is a fun phase to go through in your formative years, but it shouldn’t define a life.

Synthetic Socialising

The birth of reaction videos and streamers changed the way we feel connection. PewDiePie Let’s Play series allowed viewers to feel like they were in the room with him as he played games, seeing reactions in real time. Like watching an older sibling play video games.

We are in the 24/7 news cycle stage of streaming, the cameras are always rolling. Streamers are broadcasting their entire day with the hopes of generating some viral clips. Someone sitting inside their room can watch Clavicular go on a date and feel like they are getting social connection.

The illusion of competence can trick our brain into thinking we know how to do something if we’ve watched someone else do it multiple times. We are all trying to mend our longing for social connection with counterfeit congregation.

The death of speech

There was once a legitimate concern that emojis would lead to illiteracy and a lack of depth in communication. If only those concerned knew what was coming. We used to check in on our friends by calling their home phone or knocking on their door, then it changed to texting and now we’re lucky to get sent a TikTok in a group chat.

With each passing step social connection is eroded. We have replaced genuine conversation and presence with Instagram reels. We have once again managed to trick ourselves into thinking we have succeeded with social connection, but we have not.

Send a voice message instead

Some people hate receiving voice messages, but I love them. It’s why I’m often the person sending them. There is a world of difference between sending someone a text with no personality vs sending a voice message with your tone and voice.

I record all my Substack posts, there is a different experience for those who listen vs those who read. The best part about voice messages is that you often get distracted and say far more than is required to communicate.

In the words of Red from The Shawshank Redemption—the world’s gone and got in a big ‘ol hurry. Those complaining about rambling voice messages are trying to optimise that which shouldn’t be. In a world that is missing connection, the words of a friend are the most sacred of all. The fact that it takes more effort to listen and respond to a voice message is the point.

Sycophancy

I was going to make a joke about how we’re rapidly approaching a future of AI girlfriends and chat bot besties, but it doesn’t really feel like a joke anymore. In an eerily familiar way, we’ve once again signed up the world to something we don’t fully understand, without regulation.

We are still trying to pick up the pieces of what social media did to our real world connection and now big tech is here with another recommendation. We have normalised shallow social interactions and avoid real connection whenever possible. The conditions are perfectly set for a return to depth in relationships. Or, the complete destruction of any remaining incentive to connect with real people.

What started in games like Second Life has evolved into the ultimate weapon against a basic human need. The engagement intensity of some AI apps like Character.AI is extremely concerning. Users averaged 93 minutes per day. That doesn’t sound too bad until I compare it with another stat that Americans now spend an average of 34 minutes a day (4h/week) interacting with real friends.

We are living in a world where people are interacting with AI bots more than real people, this is not a distant future. Just as the smoker can brag to the isolated man that perhaps he is healthier, social media can now make claims of being healthier than AI. At the very least, social media means interacting with real people (for now), or some highlight reel version of them.

With AI bots, we are completely synthesising socialising. A real person has flaws and will make mistakes or call us out on our bullshit. This is how we learn to interact with the world and be accountable. If I spend all day talking to an AI bot that’s programmed to tell me how amazing I am, why would I ever bother going on a date with an extremely fallible human being?

The need to stay in our comfort zone keeps us permanently embedded into an algorithm. There is an argument that perhaps bots can alleviate some of our loneliness, but this cannot be the healthiest way forward. For thousands of years we congregated together, chatbots should not be treated as the GLP-1 for social isolation.

Cheat codes

Over the past few years we’ve become accustomed to seemingly easy solutions for provably difficult problems. Ozempic presented an easy way to solve for obesity. Sure, injecting yourself every other day is not pleasant but it appears people are much more willing to reach for a needle than go to the gym.

Once being skinny was no longer exclusive, the demand for protein started to boom. Now the exclusivity of muscles is being challenged by peptides, maybe it’s time to long the dad bod?

There are young people out there who have tweaked their entire lifestyle for longevity. People who go to bed early and don’t drink, who work out every day and stay on specific diets. These rigorous routines and the desire to be perfect can be a very isolating process, and therein lies the paradox.

Instead of over-optimising everything in order to live a longer, healthier life, perhaps you are better off grabbing a beer at the pub with a friend. If you’re staring down the barrel of death by isolation, a cheeky pint isn’t such a big deal. Trying to live longer in isolation is the opposite of having your cake and eating it too.

The return of religion

In the post-COVID world there are statistical whispers that young people are returning to church. The sample size is small and unreliable, but it appears that the steady increase of secular youth is stalling, at least in the US and the UK. The main demographic is young people, specifically young men.

Young men are identified as the greatest sufferers of loneliness and it is no coincidence that they are now seeking a fix in the last standing institutions of reliable in-person congregation.

One men's pastor said the isolation of COVID nudged young men toward recognising they "can't continue to walk through life alone" and need purpose and community. If the return of religion is a continued trend, I don’t see it as a religious revival. I see it as a symptom of the loneliness epidemic.

We are once again taking the easiest route available to the ideal state. We listen to podcasts and watch reels of people enjoying their social life, but we don’t want to take social risk and be uncomfortable.

Church becomes the peptide for social isolation. An open door to walk through with zero friction and complete acceptance, regardless of skill or personality. It’s too early to make conclusions, but perhaps we’ve finally found our last straw with loneliness. Social distancing distanced us one inch too far.

I love you, bro, for real

We are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, but there is a way forward. We need to realise that we need each other. Not just in the cliche office poster way—in the 4am drunk I love you bro kind of way. Each day we possess a gift, an absolute treasure that we can share if we are brave enough.

Each day you can make someone’s day, maybe even push them towards a happier life. You can tell someone that you miss them, or that you thought of them today and you hope they are well. You can call a friend out of the blue and say that you really appreciated what they once did for you or the role they played in your life.

If you have friends but don’t feel like you have the regular social connection, you can be the one to organise it. Everyone has the same deep need to be a part of a group, but most are too lazy to start the group. Maybe schedule a poker night with friends or invite some people over for board games, something intimate and scheduled.

I’ve recently started playing tennis again socially and I love it. My partner and I also host dinners quite regularly, it’s amazing how easy it is to get people together if you just tell them you miss them (or there’s food). The people who always say they are too busy are not the people worth making time for, but the good ones will.

Remember that it’s not just about having a good time, it’s about saving lives. If you’ve read this far you no longer have the excuse of ignorance. You know that the lack of social connection can be fatal and it’s up to you to do something about it, because it doesn’t solve itself.

Join a run club, call your friends… or hey, why not start playing table tennis?

At the time I had been holding a stock called…and yes this is not a joke… $BEAR. I had absolutely no idea what the fund did but boy was I confident that riches awaited me when the world finally collapsed. The Trump headline was my holy grail. Red panty night had arrived.

My forum and I (obviously I was on a forum) opened up the charts in shock, why didn’t the world see what we saw? The leader of the free world might die and the market didn’t care???? I didn’t understand how everyone else was so stupid. I had chalked this up to the curse of my intelligence at the time. I was 20 something and a half with absolute conviction of being correct.

I told myself that I was in this trade because I was going to make money, but it was more than that. It felt… sexy. I felt like a puppet master, a clairvoyant mastermind. It made me feel like I’m the only girl in the world (the only one that you’ll ever love). There is such an allure to being a doomer, I didn’t want to give up the feeling of control. I now understand why so many people love a good armageddon prediction. Those who dream of judgement day.

Y2K, 2012, literally every year since 1 BC for Christians. People love possessing secret or unique knowledge, we just want to feel important. The gravitational pull toward doomerism is so strong that when you’re in it you are actually fine with the world ending if it proves you correct.

In your very last breath as the universe collapses in on itself you can whisper ‘I told you so’ and all is well. I’ve been cursed with this affliction a few times in my trading career and it pretty much always ends badly, because even if you’re correct what kind of quality of life do you have waking up each day hoping all your loved ones go broke?

The issue expands far past just markets, everyone thinks things were better in the past, worse today and will be worse in the future. Study after study shows people think society used to be nicer, the world was safer, that kids were less soft or stupid. We think our grandparents had it easy because they didn’t have to worry about job security or housing costs but we forget about the war planes that were flying over their heads.

Part of every great dictator’s pitch is that the past used to be fucking tits and the present is super not cash money. It’s why America once regressed to slavery and why Putin will never shut up about Peter the Great. The easiest way to get people on your side is tell them that the world is shit now but it used to be great, this is because it appeals to the disease of doomerism.

It’s not my fault that I didn’t achieve my dreams, it’s the world. Like 14-year-old me screaming at my playstation controller, we blame the tools and the system rather than taking accountability. How can I hit my signature flick shot off the top of Rust when my joystick is greasy?

But was the past so utopian and is the present so dystopian? I think the answer to both is no and I can explain why. Like many things in psychology it is an adorable cocktail of a few well-studied biases. The first being negativity bias, a loss hurts roughly twice as bad as a win.

We’ve all been there, in a symphony of good things happening we focus on the one bad. Sometimes we even find a negative within a positive that dilutes the feeling. Like hitting a winning trade then thinking about how you could have bet more. The negative hits harder than the rest. The second bias to consider is recency bias.

When Trump got COVID I was convinced that the world was going to fall apart. I did not have in my head that the markets had recently fallen 30% in a single day or that more money was being printed than ever before. I read the headline and was convinced.

So we under appreciate the positive and focus on the negative, then the recency bias makes us feel like the world we live in has all gone to shit. I’ll admit, I also have a tendency to fall into this. Screen time and the state of the world can sometimes make me feel sad, I think about what we’ve lost. But that’s also because I don’t think about what we’ve gained.

So we can point pretty accurately to why we think the present day is doomed, but why do we look to the past through such rose tinted glasses? This one can be explained via the fading-affect bias. Here’s a random cut scene of my life to explain what that is, wow you guys are really being treated to some Jords origin lore today.

When I was in high school I joined a last minute debate competition. I had never been formally trained in debating but I was very used to winning arguments and notoriously annoying to disagree with. My natural charm got my team through the first two debates without issues and things were progressing exactly as my teenage arrogance had predicted.

I remember telling my team mates that preparing notes was for nerds and debating was ez pez so I would not be doing that. It turned out that preparing notes was actually for nerds because we competed against a team of nerds in the final who absolutely fucked my shit up.

A lifetime of cheeky remarks and good banter had not prepared me for people who were actually prepared and knew what to do. I stumbled through my non-existent lines with flushed cheeks in front of my friends and high-school crush. It was up there with the worst 90 seconds of my life at that time and was so for a while. But now it’s funny.

I look back on this story with a smile on my face. I think about how stupid I once was, it kind of makes me feel nostalgic for my schooling years. When the worst of my worries was trying to look cool and smart. This is the fading-affect bias in practice. The negative memories of the past fade or become funny stories while the good stuff sticks with us.

We say that today’s music sucks ass because we think of the early 90s and imagine Nirvana and Radiohead taking over the charts. What we forget about is the Achy Breaky Heart’s and everything smelling like cigarettes. Women’s (lack of) rights and the war on drugs gets replaced with Woodstock and men in suits.

Everything is relative and the fears we have today very likely feel to us the same way they did to those in the past. The same is true with our past selves. How we feel about AI now is likely how people felt about Y2K. There is always something that makes us feel like we’re on the precipice.

We can get lost in dreams of how good things used to be. Questioning where it all went wrong—but nothing went wrong. Understanding why we feel this way is the first step to seeing the beauty in the world again.

We want to be the one who sounds the alarm, to be Michael Burry while the world collapses—but at what cost? There is no possible reward large enough to justify waking up hoping the world burns. Average people just trying to get by should not have to go through poverty so that we can feel good about ourselves. If others must fail in order for you to win you are unlikely to ever feel true satisfaction.

I want to wake up each day hoping for a better world for the people around me. I want to feel like I’m contributing, not like I’m waiting for the contributions of others to fall apart. I want to be a man of action. If your niece is lovely why would the niece of an immigrant be less lovely? I empathise with the world because I know we’re all affected by the same biases, fighting the seduction of doomerism.

I empathise with those who lived in the past. I know their struggles felt the same as mine, even if they could afford a house and didn’t have a smartphone. There was no golden era of contentment that I was robbed of, there is just today and if I’m lucky there is a tomorrow too. How beautiful the hope for tomorrow can be once we begin to appreciate it.

I cannot function as a pessimist. Like the sun, I must shine and help others grow.

I’ve been doing that lately. I find a distraction that I can justify as productive and do it unproductively. I delete all the apps on my phone and just keep Substack, then I catch myself scrolling Substack. I get rid of everything except the news, I feel like a sophisticated gentleman, a man of the world. But I’m not Don Draper reading the morning paper, I’m just another guy scrolling an app on his phone, again.

Sometimes tabs open on my computer without my will. Like someone has hacked into my brain and hit a few keys before the real me interrupts and now I’m looking at Twitter.

Sometimes I get so annoyed at myself for not being able to control the only function that separates me from the animals. Then I get sad thinking about how many others don’t even have that moment of being aware of it. Somehow even chess has been turned into a dopamine weapon aimed at my attention span. Don’t forget to play or your streak will end!!!

There has been so much written about how we need to get off screens, but it doesn’t change the fact we are all addicts who didn’t ask to be injected. It’s much harder to quit than to never start. We are MKUltra victims on the grandest scale of them all. Much like an angry teenager screaming at their parents that they didn’t ask to be born, I didn’t ask to be so integrated with technology. To resist the gravitational pull each day is exhausting.

I recently watched the movie Awakenings. It’s a true story about patients who suffered from a unique disease in the early 1900s, their dopamine sensors were fried and they sat in a frozen state for decades. A Doctor (Oliver Sacks) came around and gave them a drug that woke them up for a while, it turned out that they were fully functioning and conscious underneath but time passed them by.

Some felt like they blinked and woke up 30 years later in an older body, others returned mid-conversation to a chat from a decade ago. Unfortunately, the effects of the drug were temporary and they would degenerate back to their frozen state over time. Temporarily returned to full function and awareness then rapidly returned to permanent unconsciousness. In that time of degradation they would just stop functioning, in need of a push to snap back to reality.

Mid-sentence, in the middle of writing or dancing, something would break and they would just freeze… until they were pushed. They needed outside stimulation to go for a little while and then they would return to their lucid coma. One patient said it was like being dead until someone brought them back to life with a little touch.

A bit like me opening chess dot com and playing a game for no fucking reason. I am completely lost until my girlfriend questions why I’m screeching about a ‘fucking mouse slip’ and I snap back to my original task.

Initially it reminded me of my first car, I have no idea about cars so I won’t pretend to describe the issue but if it hit zero revs it turned off. I would have to slowly approach a roundabout ensuring that at no point I came to a complete stop or the car would turn off. That was my first thought, then I had another which depressed me.

I thought about how it serves as a much wider metaphor for the state of the world. We are all in a technology-induced lucid coma as our default state. The second we are away from outside stimulation we are dead. We pick up our phones and scroll, in these moments I believe we die. We are severed from reality. The world we are seeing is some dream-state where different AI models compete to atrophy our brains.

Here are some quotes from the Doctor in the ward:

“They neither conveyed nor felt the feeling of life. They were as insubstantial as ghosts, and as passive as zombies.”

And on their day to day state:

“They would be conscious and aware – yet not fully awake; they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect or desire; they registered what went on about them without active attention, and with profound indifference.”

The state being described is the ideal state that the tech companies want us to be in. We’ve somehow normalised the term ‘rotting’ when referring to sitting on the couch scrolling reels. We understand how bad it is for us but blah blah go meditate how do you expect me to stop?

The sad part is that none of what I said surprises anyone. I too have read books and articles telling me to spend less time on screens. I log onto Twitter to tell people they should log off Twitter. It is like this collective crisis that we are all aware of but can’t seem to take action against.

Then we look for the silver bullet. Getting a ‘dumb phone’ so we can get off social media, putting our phones in black and white mode, screen time limits. There is no remedy to this addiction, we just need to accept that we are dead when we are using it.

That’s it. Sometimes it is worth it because you are communicating with others or planning interesting things but during that time you were not in the land of the living. You reduced your conscious time on this planet. Would you disagree? If I spent 50 years looking at my phone and you spent 30 without technology, who has lived a longer life?

If enlightenment is the space between thought, then we need to give ourselves that space. From now on I am considering myself dead if I spend time on certain things, I think we can all define for ourselves what apps or things reduce us to a zombified state of indifference.

It is difficult because I want to help people while knowing that in order to do so I’ll have to spend more time dead. Right now I’m on a screen typing this, but I’m not scrolling and I feel in control of my mind. I have temporarily defeated my chess demons. I am coherent, I’m aware of the time passing, I know why I’m here and am present in this moment.

Writing long form helps my brain function correctly and makes me feel like I am fighting the current state of character limits and reels. I don’t want to become a frozen statue that can only be awakened by outside stimuli, I want to be the outside stimulus for others.

I want to fight my itchy fingers in the line at the grocery store, I want to just sit still and ponder the universe while I wait at the restaurant. I don’t want to be a part of this sick game that has been played on the world, but I don’t want to re-enact Into the Wild or rock a Nokia 3310.

I’m just going to continue to seek balance and accept that I die a little bit every day. Just like everything else, we can only appreciate life by contemplating death. Each time I snap out of my transient screen-state I’m going to imagine the frozen patients who got to live for a few weeks before the drug wore off.

My entire life will be lived in those moments when the drug temporarily wears off. When my phone is at home and the colour returns to the world again. I will try to savour those moments when I am separated from death, because they are the only moments I actually have left to live.

I spoke to him about it and he described quite an intense scene. Each day you wake up and meditate for 10-12 hours, you’re not allowed to read, they take your phone away on day one, you’re not even allowed to talk to anyone the whole time. It sounds very peaceful and there is a part of me that yearns for that no-screen time, so I considered signing up.

But then I thought about how much I’d fucking hate it. 10 days without talking to people? What? I can barely go an hour without talking to myself, I love silence but only when it is silence on my own terms. Sitting for 10 hours a day? Man I’m almost in my 30’s now no fucking way can I sit down for that long without feeling it. I refuse to believe anyone can comfortably sit with their back straight for more than 12 minutes.

I’m not allowed to workout but what about mobility? Can I stretch my hams while focussing on my breath or something? At least in solitary confinement I could channel my inner Edmond Dantès and get jacked.

This next part might sound pretentious, but that’s a freedom-of-expression-risk I’m willing to take. Because what about the food? The retreat is completely free and runs on donations, previous participants sign-up and volunteer to cook and clean.

As much as this sounds lovely, it also sounds like they’re going to serve me something vegan. 10 days on volunteer-chef vegan food? I pause for a moment to ponder whether such sacrifice is worth the reward of sitting silently in a group of (presumably) stinky people for an extended period of time. Vipassana? More like VipassaNAH am I right?

I am of course being dramatic, this retreat usually changes people for the better and teaches them to introduce meditation into their lives. Many leave with new routines and a better balance with technology, at least a temporary one. This is all great, but it sure as shit isn’t for me. Different horses, different courses.

I was curious though. I looked around on the internet and started getting annoyed at the available options. I wanted something that resonated with me without the weird shit that didn’t. I wanted to get off tech and go somewhere peaceful, I could even be sold on some meditation.

I was yearning for a retreat that got me off screens but didn’t try to shove cacao or ayahuasca down my throat. Why does weird pseudoscience have such a heavy presence in science-backed activities like meditation, yoga and retreats? These are things that everyone can benefit from, there are lots of people who want to get off screens and do peaceful shit without having to hold hands with strangers.

I wanted the quiet time without the sound healing. I wanted a cup of tea without the tantric dance. I wanted to read books without needing to connect with my inner child. Maybe make a friend without needing to exchange our divine energy, you know?

If you want to reach some form of secular enlightenment then based on my research, you can either apply for a free meditation retreat that is minimum 10 days and probably serves vegan food, or you can go to some $1000/night wellness hotel that will inject Joe Rogan flavoured stem cells in your eyebrows.

Business idea: start a retreat that resembles the ‘stoic experience’. It’s basically just a shitty hostel with the bare minimum but you market it to rich crypto kids that want to get off screens. If you consider starting this, please let me know, sincerely, rich(ish) crypto kid wanting to get off screens.

Honestly I think there is potential for someone to set up a Greco-maxxing retreat. You provide very basic accommodation and (not vegan) food, then you just get the occupants to give up their tech, you provide a comfy reading space, secular lectures on philosophy, a gym, maybe a garden or farm for people to work on. You could even have meditation time that is less than 23 hours a day.

I started to map this out in my brain and I thought damn, I could absolutely make this happen somewhere in Southern Europe and have the perfect audience to market it to. Then something happened that happens a lot in my overactive brain, I realise I have a business idea with a lot of potential but I absolutely do not want to execute on it. I don’t want to buy land and have to be tied, I couldn’t be bothered looking into the tax implications of owning a hostel-esque farm thing.

Do I need licensing to take someone’s phone off them? What if a guest is really annoying and wants to talk to me about Tony Robbins or something? What if I emailed a guest a bunch of questions and they responded to only one of those questions and made me want to delete their entire existence?

It all sounded a bit much for me, so I parked it in my Google-Doc-Graveyard of great business ideas that never were. Right next to my NFT sports memorabilia market place where I would light famous jerseys on fire for free marketing and mint them as an NFT. Messi fans can thank me for never feeling inspired enough for this one.

After this mental exercise of mapping out what would interest me in a retreat, an idea sparked in my brain. I thought hey, I’m a guy with free time, what if I just made my own retreat? And just like an inept office worker realising that you can workout without a personal trainer, I realised that I am capable of sitting in silence at my house without being on a 10-day retreat.

So I decided fuck it, I’m going to do my own damn retreat and there is no one that can stop me. I got to planning. I thought about all the things I wanted to do—no rules. Number one on my list: I wanted to turn my phone off for the whole time. I also wanted to read a lot, uninterrupted reading is a dream. I remember hearing that Bill Gates goes once per year to some small cabin and just reads for two days. Sounds great to me.

Other things on my list were writing, walking, working out, chess puzzles—it was a day to do whatever the fuck I wanted and those were the things I wanted to do. Chess puzzles and writing were done on the computer but I had the discipline to not start scrolling afterwards.

I did a minute-by-minute (more like activity-by-activity) account of my retreat day. Jords retreat. I had a plan of what I wanted to do, so I thought it would be interesting to record what I actually ended up doing. To be honest it doesn’t really matter what I did, the key message I want to write about is that it felt great and I think everyone should do their own version of it.

For me at the time I was living alone, so I didn’t actually need to do anything to set myself up for success except to decide that I was going to do it and turn my phone off. A bit of planning was also helpful, but it wasn’t much. Maybe if you live with family or a partner it is a bit more complex, but it is your own version and it can be whatever you want it to be.

Maybe you only have a few hours free on every second Sunday, but how often do you prepare to use those hours to do exactly what you want to do? I would recommend to take a somewhat mindful approach with it, turn your phone off and try to walk, meditate, journal, stretch. We know all of these things are good for us but it’s easy to forget them.

It could be a combo of those peaceful things thrown in with other things you just want to do. You could cook that really inconvenient recipe you’ve been putting off for years. You could play Playstation for 5 hours. The most important thing is to put your phone away and stick to your plan, be aware and mindful of the activities you are doing.

I’m ashamed to say the first Jords retreat was in November last year and I am yet to do it again. When my (36 hour) retreat was over, I told myself wow that was really nice, I should do that every month. Then I went ahead and didn’t do it again. I hate when that happens, I really do.

That’s why productive slop is so damaging, people pay $1000 to see Tony Robbins speak then feel empowered to take on the world but they haven’t actually formed any habits or learned anything. They just get a dopamine hit of energy and someone pseudo-believing in them in exchange for money.

It’s also not personalised, it’s generic speech and talking points. It’s like this article, I’m writing about points that everyone can (hopefully) relate to but the most useful part is the recommendation to do things in your own way. I wrote about Baselines, another concept I have that relies on you defining your own rules.

There is no retreat waiting for you that will be just right, there is no personal trainer that will slap your hand when you reach for your third piece of cake at the office party. At the end of the day we need to find the discipline to do the things in a way that is sustainable.

That’s where I think the self-retreat does wonders. It is rest but in a structured way. We almost never have structured rest. If you’re one of the lucky ones then you might have a morning or an evening routine, but it is very rare to have rest in your calendar.

So let’s make a promise, you (yes, you), and me baby. We’re in this world together and I won’t let you down. You wouldn’t let me down, would you? Knowing that my word is good and my heart is true? Okay, good.

I’m going to organise a Jords Retreat #2 and this time the sequel is going to be better than the first, like Batman (imy Heath). I’m going to make the time for structured rest. My screen time has been building and it is time for me to take a day of doing exactly as I wish.

My end of the promise is that I will do this within the next 30 days, with dreams of doing it more than once. Your end of the promise? Do the same. Figure out when you can find the time, you have a whole month. It doesn’t need to be an entire day, maybe it’s only a few hours, but it must be structured rest.

Listen to jazz, go for a hike, bust out a puzzle, or just sit in a quiet room and read for a while without your phone. Whatever your personalised version of a banging (but mindful) time is, do it. Start scheduling so you don’t fuck it up. Rest and work are both important—and neither will happen if we don’t roll up our sleeves (or pillows) and get it done.

Dad gave me a proposal: would you like to go on one surf holiday a year or stay at the same school? I changed schools. The house had to be sold and we moved into a small apartment for a while. I am by no means trying to play the ‘I came from humble beginnings card’, but everything is relative and things weren’t quite the same.

My father who all my life had complete freedom, seemed to lose a lot of it. The new school I moved to had a drug bust the first few weeks I was there, then some kid wanted to fight me just because I was new. He said we could be friends after. It was all very strange to me, but it was a great lesson in how things can change if risk isn’t managed.

Su Zhu once tweeted: Those who do not manage their risk will have the market manage it for them. Wise words are often spoken by unwise people. He would end up evaporating billions of other people’s money then calling prison a stoic experience.

Dad always regretted not working a bit harder when he was in the peak of his career. He made the decision to step back earlier than his peers and focus on a balanced life with family. I don’t think there’s anything to regret with making that decision. But regrets are only validated with hindsight, and hindsight is useless. After the GFC, he would go on to create a new business and do well, but he was always aware of why he had to work again.

The work was harder and he sacrificed freedom, but he still had it in him. I was impressed with his response to necessity. He has followed my crypto journey with a keen eye ever since I first joined the space. He even had some fun buying jpegs.

When I told him I was content with my current level of career success and that I wanted to step back, he warned me that I was making the same mistake as he once did. That I was being complacent and should be careful about taking my foot off the gas just when the engine was running well.

I had fallen out of love with the industry I’d spent so much time in. It was a blessing and a curse to have such specialised knowledge in an unserious place. I did not want to be aware of all the opportunity I was missing out on. Fear of being involved overtook any fear of missing out.

I decided to log off. This was my white-girl-insta-story-highlight-healing-journey. For about 18 months I didn’t think much about money, with a few exceptions of course. I learned a language, I took care of my body and mind, I read a lot, surfed, I travelled far. I didn’t really feel inspired to do anything that was work-adjacent. To be honest I didn’t think I ever would again.

People would sometimes ask what I do for work or if I ever got bored. I never got bored, I loved giving my brain space to breathe for the first time after being so oppressed by red and green candles. I wouldn’t trouble myself with things outside of my control, there was no use in reading international affairs or following the consumer price index (CPI).

But at the end of last year I started to feel something bubbling just under the surface. It was a new sensation, one that I hadn’t felt in a while. Something was happening that I felt shouldn’t be suppressed. I had this desire to write that wouldn’t go away, so I eventually gave in and committed to writing each week.

For the first time in my life I was subject to ‘flashes of inspiration’ as described by great inventors of the past. I’ve had my own (much less impactful) eureka moments in the bathtub. Often times these writings are done in the darkness at 2am. Right now it’s after midnight and I’m only this far into the writing.

After focussing on ROI for years, I found myself focussing on a different return. The return was not money, it was not the most valuable place to allocate my attention, but it felt like the most important.

My writing was the beginning of an inspiration cascade that expanded well past things I had been wanting to do, and went into enjoying things I had been avoiding. One seed was allowed to grow and a whole forest sprung up from the ground. I was doing without thinking. There was no analysis.

I sat down one evening with a friend and spoke about feeling inspired to work again. It had been years since I’d mentioned the W word. Maybe I’d never said it at all since knowing him. We were trying to put a label on it, trying to understand and categorise the behaviour. You cannot put lightning in a bottle, you cannot force inspiration.

The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires—E.M. Cioran

I read this line in a somewhat-pretentious-book titled The Trouble with Being Born. It struck me immediately as the exact words I couldn’t find during the earlier conversation. There is no why, I am just an opportunist without desires.

Crypto is a hyper-capitalist world, very few people participate in it without desires. I previously thought it impossible to be interested without solely focussing on financial gain, but a hobby can still be a hobby even if you make some money doing it. Money makes the world go round but there are many people doing amazing things, simply because they enjoy doing them.

Forrest Gump is a great example of an opportunist without desires, an optimist without a goal. Someone who does right by others and doesn’t understand the definition of success, but becomes objectively successful. His happiness is found by doing what he thinks is right, his success is found in action, not in reflection.

Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose one—Naval

I found happiness in my decision to retire, to log off. I felt like I had achieved a level of success where I was truly satisfied. But as I’ve outlined before, retirement does not signify the end of all work, it should be framed as removing the need to work.

I am now feeling more inspired than ever to do (my version of) work. Others might find what I’m doing as trivial and extremely boring, but I don’t and that’s what makes me good at it.

I am contributing and having fun, I am receiving messages from people who have been enjoying my work. I am inspiring others and in turn I am inspiring myself, I am starting to view success and happiness like Yin and Yang. Like a changing of seasons.

There is a deep satisfaction in believing you have enough, successfully removing the root of all evil—desires. There is also a deep satisfaction that comes with doing hard things, and it’s hard to do hard things without any desire to do them.

Through this process I have learned that there is space for both in my life. Just as my retirement didn’t mean the end of all work, my happiness doesn’t mark the end of all success. There is no perfect end state where equilibrium is achieved, but an awareness can be helpful.

Everything in moderation, including moderation—Oscar Wilde

I think success and happiness should be treated with this in mind. We are complex beings. I believe I can be satisfied with my progress while perpetually inspired to be better. I can have enough, but be motivated to ensure others get more.

This writing is an expression of both my happiness and my success. I am satisfied with completion and not suppressing my inspiration. I am happy that I have put hours into something that I do not expect a return on. But I am dissatisfied with how many people will read this, and therefore I will continue to write.

What I wanted to begin this article with was something like I made a bunch of money in my early-mid 20s, it was a unique experience and therefore I have unique insights. That’s essentially what I wanted to say, but how does one go about that without sounding like an arrogant prick? How could I ever write that while keeping people engaged in my wholesome stories?

It’s quite a big jump from my last introduction about making my Nana’s biscuits, so instead of going through the specifics and feeling the uncomfortable sensation that comes with an unasked-for flex, I have decided to instead share with you this rambling monologue. It is, in itself, an observation about wealth. It is difficult to talk about success in general without being cringe.

Society has kind of picked two paths for people; you are either normal and complain about your lack of having the things you want and the time to do them, or you are a try hard perma-striver who is always preaching optimisation and manifesting success. There doesn’t really seem to be a norm set for people who are objectively successful but aren’t assholes about it. Why do we always highlight the assholes?

This extends further than just finance. People who need to sell themselves as being good at things all walk on the same thin ice. You are mindful? Probably a wanker. You’re an artist in your spare time? Probably just painting trash. You volunteer? Wow, performative. I think it’s a really weird time to be doing cool stuff and want to be talking about it in general, especially on the internet.

Outside of maybe joining a sports team, there is an omnipresent fear of doing things for fear of being perceived as a person doing weird things, like trying to reduce their screen time or be a better person. I feel myself judging someone who talks to me about a new diet they’re on, but where do I get off judging someone who is just doing their best?

The need for self-justification leads to a critique of any life lived other-than the way we live our own. I am very fortunate to be surrounded by people who are interested in what I am up to on a human level and not just trying to network.

I think maybe I’d kill my (sense of) self if I lived somewhere like Dubai or San Francisco where the common ground mostly consists of the want to make money and achieve financial success.

Anyways, oops, um. How did I get onto Dubai and suicide? It appears I went on a complete tangent. I do that sometimes. Now I suppose we can begin where I had intended: when I was a teenager. Like most kids, I used to be really annoying. But not just the scream-after-dropping-the-softserve-icecream-annoying, I was a kid who read Napoleon Hill while manifesting my future Audi R8 and corner office.

I remember in school we once had a career planning session where we had to fill out a form about what we wanted to do in the future. I think I wrote something like idk but I’m going to be rich and left the rest blank—take that education for trying to help me. I really showed them.

The same school made me write a letter to myself to be opened on the 10-year anniversary of my graduation. To my absolute horror, no seriously, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with this recollection.

I remember writing something to the level 9000 cringe of you should have a supercar and a million dollars by now or you’ve failed. It’s now not too far after my 10-year graduation anniversary and I’m happy to report that I didn’t attend so I can only hope that letter has been burned off the face of this Earth. I’m very thankful no one will ever know it’s ick-worthy content… until now I suppose, fuck.

This unfortunately lasted well into my early 20s. Surprisingly I think it actually lasted until I made a lot of money. I always felt like I had a point to prove, like there had to be more to me than just the job I was working. I would say things like ‘yeah I’m working in retail, but I also have this other project I started.’

A lot of it came down to my own insecurities, that I felt like I was less-than; or at least not the more-than I wanted. My dad always identified as something of an entrepreneur and he saw that same spirit in me. My siblings went the more traditional university route and were successful in their own right, but I felt like it was up to me to replicate my parent’s version of success. To be my own boss.

One of my favourite quotes from Epicurus is any man who does not think that what he has is more than ample, is an unhappy man, even if he is the master of the whole world. We make ourselves unfree when we want for so much. I heard the other day that not wanting something is as good as having it. How wonderful is that?

If only I could have fully understood that concept. Well… I don’t want an Audi R8 anymore (I think the Porsche 911s are much nicer). Problem solved. I think.

It wasn’t until a few years after I made a lot of money very quickly (oh it is even uncomfortable to type) that I started to change in positive ways. First I needed to digest the impostor syndrome that happens when you go from taking the bus home from work to perusing watches you don’t need. After my very-stereotypical new money phase was over, I had some form of a renaissance. A rebirth. Jords 2.0.

I started to read literature. I identified as someone who ‘wasn’t a reader’ or ‘read too slow’ for my entire life, until I had the time to read slow and enjoy it—this would naturally lead into becoming a better reader. I read and I learned, but other things were also beginning to change.

I re-examined a relationship I had been in for a long time, and eventually concluded it was time to move on. There is a cascade of empowerment that comes with not just accepting life as it is. Accepting the impermanence and our ability to make change.

I had a non-cringe self-worth. It was more than just the money, it was a general sense of success. Once I had achieved a certain calibre of success, the chip on my shoulder was removed. I didn’t need to be more-than, I was enough in my own mind. I could finally just be. Instead of feeling the need to tell people I am more than what I seem, I started to do the opposite.

My general sense-of-success was unfortunately pegged to finance, my insecurities were wrapped up in a bundle of capitalist stereotypes. But I believe there is hope to be found in this, that the same sense of success can be found in other things for those who are able to change their North Star.

What I really found out, was that I was living values that weren’t mine in order to succeed by someone else’s definition of it.

I found a lot of meaning and purpose through language learning. Taking on a very hard task and slowly chipping away at it each day, knowing that I am struggling today for a better future version of myself. There is purpose to be found in many places, and like every subjective truth it is only defined on an individual basis.

Once I had gone through this renaissance, I started to get really sad to think about the state of the world. How many wonderful people are trapped underneath their financial insecurities, even those who are successful by the definition of many. How different people would be if they didn’t need to worry about social mobility or financial insecurity.

Isaiah Berlin says “it is argued, very plausibly, that if a man is too poor to afford something on which there is no legal ban – a loaf of bread, a journey round the world, recourse to the law courts – he is as little free to have it as he would be if it were forbidden him by Law.”

One third of Americans (32%) don’t have an emergency savings fund and 29% say they can’t afford an unexpected expense over $400. The financial burden and lack of ‘freedom to’ suppresses inspiration and authenticity. We pair our fear of the worst with our want for things far outside our needs and we find ourselves lost in the capitalist sauce.

In order to find our own values, we need to strip back all that has been projected upon us. The grooves that society expects us to fall into. The hopes and dreams of our parents. There have been moments when I’ve had such visceral reactions to a comment or article only to realise I am just emulating the reaction of someone I grew up with. That I actually have no opinion or care about the subject.

I went the easy route, I managed to buy myself out of the problem. It’s a difficult way to do it, not because of the effort but because of the good luck one needs to come to their senses at the very moment they are most likely to lose it. For every jords who hit the sell button and started to read, there are a hundred other crypto-kids who moved to Dubai and started buying R8s (bad taste, who could ever want one of those?).

Comparison is the thief of joy, and I can personally attest that it scales with wealth. To want to be richer is a want that scales infinitely. There is no final resting place for this curse. The devil on your shoulder that reminds you of what could have been, will always be.

Another thing I noticed myself beginning to do was making time for others. I realised that my time is a privilege that others do not have. A gift to others is a gift to oneself. There are few things that fill my cup up more than helping my friends or family through times of need, or just times of would-be-nice. There are many studies that support this, but nothing reinforces it quite like doing.

Being financially secure, if handled well—can translate to being time rich. Being time rich is one of the true signs of happiness. Studies often show it is not the man with the most or least amount of money that is the happiest, it is the one in charge of his day. With our current levels of screen time, it is not hard to become richer in time should we wish. An hour spent helping a friend move is infinitely more gratifying than an hour on Instagram.

So often we see rich people talking about how wealth doesn’t matter, or how money doesn’t buy happiness. I think money is very important. I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter, it makes the world of difference to the people struggling out there. For families who don’t have $400 in case of an emergency, it could be the difference between freedom from and freedom to.

But for those living comfortably enough but wanting more, I think getting more money is just a way to slowly realise that the want doesn’t go away. We all have our own numbers in mind for what is enough, and most of us are wrong.

Money matters, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem; for some it can even accelerate it. Money allowed me to peel back the layers and question whether I was living authentically or just fitting into the well-worn social grooves of capitalism. I discovered myself, only after I allowed myself to. My shackles were broken but so was my view of the world.

A lifetime can be lived without realising that we have been living under the oppression of societal norms and marketing ploys. The first step is going through your values and discovering what values are actually yours. Know thyself.

E.M. Cioran referred to it as the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing. This perfectly describes my youth. I wanted to be more and I solved that through having more. But, if not wanting something is the same as having it, then surely this equation can equally be solved by not wanting more.

Each of us has some evidence that we are important, we love and are loved. There is so much beauty on the other side of this realisation. That our success doesn’t define us, we define our success. It is free for those wise enough to capture it and expensive for those like me, but however we get there, it is worth the struggle.

In a world that wants you to feel less-than, be authentically you. That is enough.

Like the rest of my family, I’d always assumed the default belief of ‘not being able to cook’. It didn’t feel like an excuse to me, it just felt like an inherited trait. After spending decades confidently announcing my ignorance of a basic skill, I started to cook. It was inspired by a new (wonderful) woman in my life, as positive change so often is.

When I told my partner that I would be returning home and scoffing biccies by the handful, her response was simple—why don’t you make them together? Never in my life had I considered that I could be a part of the yummy-fying that occurs in my Nana’s kitchen. I called Nana and asked if this time we could make them together.

What followed these events are memories that will live with me forever. Part of her process was retrieving a garden spade that was once belonged to her mother. She would use the base of the handle to put the perfect groove in the biscuits. She chuckled at the absurdity as she explained that it was ‘just right’. It dawned on me that this wonderful story would never have been known or told if I didn’t want to learn the process.

I will likely be telling this story to my future generations, I wonder how many stories I didn’t get to hear by only enjoying the fruits of her labour and never appreciating the labour itself. After the biscuits were made, I remember thinking—wow I’m a fucking idiot. I’ve spent my entire life saying I couldn’t bake, when the baking process was 4 ingredients and an oven.

I asked Nana to write down all her recipes after this. I told her that anything she thought was worth being passed down, I’m her best shot. My partner was also excited to see the recipes, her family is much more food-centric than mine—something I now very much enjoy.

So I returned home to the other side of the world with special memories; and a small notepad with my Nana’s handwritten recipes. The first trial run was with my girlfriend, she was the head chef and I more or less a human whisk. The process was adorable, the house smelled delicious and my heart was full.

Another week went by and I made them on my own. It was a Sunday afternoon, just me and my Nana’s handwriting, making biscuits together. After they were done I looked for any excuse to invite my friends over for tea. I spent a week offering biscuits to my friends, each accompanied by stories of my Nana and my newly-inherited baking genius.

For the first time in my life, I was able to fully appreciate why Nana loved to bake. She always has fruit cakes in the freezer in case a kind stranger does something nice to help her out. I offered my cleaner some, my friends, my neighbours. I went to a dinner and instead of bringing wine, I brought biscuits and stories. It felt special.

I’d made just two batches and my friends already started to introduce me to new people as ‘a baker’. By telling people that I made some biscuits, I’d often hear responses similar to what I used to say—I can’t bake or I’m terrible in the kitchen. I remember being afraid of a washing machine at one stage in my life. I can’t turned into I couldn’t.

We would rather believe that everything we don’t already fully understand is impossible, because it makes for a simpler understanding of the world.

It always struck me as rather curious that we are so defensive of the things (we think) we can’t do. I used to work in retail and would often have customers proudly telling me how bad they were with technology. If I were to try to say something reassuring they would double down and be defensive of their ignorance.

I wouldn’t realise until much later that I was of course doing the same thing. I was proud of how bad my handwriting was, or my inability to draw, or my flexibility. These are things that I would excitedly inject into conversation.

There was a funny self-demeaning element to it, but I would equally get annoyed should someone challenge my status of the most useless. I would adopt a one-up mindset if a friend told me how bad they were at cooking. I’d make sure they knew I was worse.

It’s strange how we see the world as constantly changing, yet question our ability to do so. Basic skills like cooking food and wrapping gifts, we accept permanent defeat instead of spending the short time required to become better. I’ll admit I still can’t wrap a gift properly, but someday I will be able to.

There are very few talents we cannot acquire with deliberate practice. I recently learned that singing is completely within our grasp to improve on should we wish. Everything is practice.

I always grew up believing that ‘I am not a creative person’. I never spent any time practicing creative endeavours, so I didn’t improve, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. There were many of these beliefs hardcoded in my brain. I’m not a fast reader. I can’t sing. I can’t change a tyre. All of these were temporarily true, but to me they were permanent, unchangeable personality traits. They were my self-inflicted TTCs.

Robert Jay Lifton first coined the term ‘thought terminating cliche’ (TTC). He used it to describe the language of the Chinese Communist Party and defined it as the start and finish of any ideological analysis. Sound familiar? In Jay’s book he used the example of ‘Mei banfa’, which translates to ‘there is nothing to be done’ or ‘no solution/choice’ in Mandarin. This was used by the CCP to end further discussion or squash questions.

TTC’s are everywhere and when we begin to take notice, we begin to understand just how regularly we use them. Religions love the classic ‘god works in mysterious ways’ to stop further questioning. The current US administration enjoy ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome” or “The Fake News Media” to end discussion over uncomfortable topics.

How many times have you told a friend that ‘it is what it is’ or ‘you can’t always get what you want’? This is not always a bad thing. Taoism teaches us that ‘it is what it is’ can be a powerful tool in accepting things out of our control. But we often use this when we don’t really want to discuss things further, or we run out of things to say.

Orwell in his six rules for writing wrote; never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. His reasoning was that all common metaphors no longer possess the significance they once had. To bite the bullet used to describe a soldier literally biting down on a bullet to manage pain in a war zone, now it can be used for booking a holiday.

When providing counsel to yourself or a friend, I encourage you to listen to Orwell’s advice and avoid using the first TTC that comes to mind. That’s just the way it is, could be worse, c’est la vie—none of these are helping the situation, they are just convenient placeholders for difficult conversations.

There are many life-saving conversations that almost took place that were just on the other side of a ‘shit happens’. I think about how many wonderful things I’ve held myself back from because of my TTC’s. I can’t bake. That wasn’t true. I’m not good with languages. That also wasn’t true.

As I break away from the habit of telling myself certain things are impossible in conveniently packaged TTC’s, I try to do the same with others in my life. Not everyone wants to be told they can do more things. There is pressure that comes with this wisdom. We want to understand the world through simple terms.

We want the good guys to be good and the bad guys to be bad. We want to be naturally gifted at some things and incapable of doing others, there is comfort in knowing our own boundaries. But today I ask you to challenge those boundaries. There is no reason why you cannot learn to bake, it’s not that hard.

Maybe ask your elders what skills they possess and could teach you, because you can learn. You might make their day in doing so and you might uncover stories that would never have been told. As I write this I am eating my Nana’s biscuits, but they’re not hers, they’re ours.

She loved telling people how busy she was. The part she would usually leave out is that she mostly just fucked around all day. Every time I would look at her screen I would see her doom scrolling the world’s most clickbaity news sites. It was something I couldn’t quite understand. She did arrive early and leave late most days, but she definitely didn’t need to. The image of being busy has somehow been connected to having a strong work ethic. It could just as easily be attributed to inefficiency.

Performative busyness is a disease that has taken over the world. I remember watching Suits when I was in high school and fantasising about being Harvey Specter with the corner office and wearing a suit to work. Captain capitalism had won, and I had lost. My young and malleable brain somehow believed the dream was to wear a suit to work each day and work long hours in a soulless corporate company, defending the rich from bills they probably should have been paying.

I was moulded by American TV to be the perfect cog that the wheel required me to be. Many years later, I would wear a suit to work in the Australian summer and wonder if I could comfortably rest inside the Earth’s core. I wanted a busy life filled with long work hours because that is what I thought success looked like. A few hundred years ago I would have grown up wanting to be obese.

Being overweight was also once attributed to success because it meant abundance (until the US figured out how to 3D print slop and put it in Walmart for $3). It was a poor measure of wellness because it was inherently bad for wellbeing. I imagine the Jords of the 1800s wanting to be a fat man wearing a suit in an un-airconditioned world.

When I was a kid if I complained about being bored my parents would reply ‘it’s good to be bored’. They were right of course. I fear these days most kids don’t ever get bored, they just increase their screen time. They will go from busy with screens to busy with life and not ever have a good understanding of what being busy really means. This makes me sad.

Since I quit my job in 2021 a lot of people have asked me don’t you get bored? The answer is pretty much never, and if I ever feel a touch of boredom it turns to gratitude and nostalgia. Boredom is a luxury and a privilege; and much like naps, it is something that is wasted on the youth. I thought the entire point of being busy was that you could one day stop being busy. It is good to be bored.

A good friend once told me ‘anyone without kids who says they’re too busy doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about’ and I think about this a lot. Especially those who currently don’t have kids but want them in the near future. How do you plan on being too busy to go out for lunch a week from now, but soon you’ll become a near-full-time parent and make no career adjustments?

Having access to too much information has overwhelmed our senses. The world’s highest paid engineers spend all of their time trying to figure out how to take ours away. With so much attention dedicated to our phones and our dopamine sensors completely fried by the infinite scroll, we have lost an understanding of how many hours we really have in a day.

The average American spends more than 7 hours on screens per day. That is horrendous and appears to be trending worse for every generation. On mobile devices alone we usually spend more than 4 hours per day. This is also growing year after year and generation after generation. So I mentally run the numbers; okay, so you’re really busy right now? That’s nice. Oh, you don’t have kids? Ah, okay. You don’t have kids, you clock 5 hours of screen time per day, and you’re always really busy? Hmm, doubt it.

Oftentimes it is not being too busy, it is lacking the ability to prioritise certain things over others. Everyone is guilty of this, yours truly included. Much like everything subjective, busyness is a relative concept.

There is just not enough time to do everything. I don’t even have a job and I can barely keep up with all the things I want to do. When I was moving houses I remember someone telling me ‘if you get a storage container, you’ll fill it. If you don’t, you won’t need one.’ It’s the same with a schedule, it’s easy to feel busy while actually accomplishing nothing.

If you work 6 days every week, then your busy week should be defined as one that is significantly more demanding than your normal workload. If I have 2 calls in one day, that’s a busy day for me. Yes, I’m a bit precious, but that is my busy and it may legitimately feel busier to me than your day with 10 calls if that’s the norm.

I always remind myself that a billionaire without a place to park his yacht may be as sad as someone whose car just broke down on the side of the road. Suffering is relative. Everything is relative.

We have a major inability to understand relativity. We also have the chance to just label ourselves as subjectively busy and have a permanent excuse to not do the things we know we should be doing. Being too busy is often paired with something vague and unquestionable like ‘work’ or ‘family’. The point is to get out of something without the need to properly justify it.

We as a society have made a crucial error in equating busyness with achievement. Someone can mismanage their calendar or be running head first into burnout and be praised for their success. We say we are really busy right now and feel like it’s something to be proud of.

My girlfriend lives in a city where it seems like exchanging how busy you are is part of any normal conversation. How are you? Yeah I’m busy, wbu? Yeah, just really busy. I haven’t spent too much time in cities, but it is my understanding that this is a common thing in city-people congregation. I still haven’t really normalised it.

It appears to me that many operate under the impression that busyness is the end-goal. Hollywood has cursed an entire generation into thinking the corner-office is the dream. All our idols are people who are workaholics and have absolutely no idea what the definition of enough is.

Pascal once wrote that all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Being busy all the time never allows us to sit with our thoughts. All of my best ideas pop into my head while I’m doing trivial tasks, where my brain is at rest. When I’m doing the dishes, walking, showering or just about to go to sleep. These are the times when great ideas go ding in my brain (and why I’m writing right now at 2am). Rest is where the magic happens.

I also value being able to use my flexible schedule to help my friends. Was there any point in being alive without helping one another? How much depth in conversation do we miss with loved ones while we try to speed-run everything? How many lightbulbs never went ding in my brain because I was scrolling Twitter while telling people I was too busy?

Busyness is not a value of mine and I do not equate it to success. Periods of busyness in order to justify periods of rest make sense to me. Times when we have an excess of shit to get done also happen. But what are we achieving when we tell people we are really busy? We are saying that right now I do not really have time for you. We are telling our friends that actually they should be thankful we’re even here because we are COOKED.

It can feel special that someone has made time for you in their busy schedule, but it can also feel like they maybe have something else they wish to be doing. Busyness is a part of life, some people handle it and others don’t. We should never define ourselves by our work, but we do. The least we can do is not let the general feeling of busyness define our ability to do things with the people we love.

We need to understand that being busy is a relative concept and a powerful term. You should only wield this power if you are actually far busier than your normal schedule. If you have a normal week but you feel like you’re too busy, then hedonic adaptation isn’t working and it’s probably fixable.

Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome. Show me your screen time and I’ll tell you how busy you really are. Have you got young kids? Okay, fair enough. You don’t have kids but you want them? You’re probably not busy, you’re just bad at prioritisation.

The minute of silence on ANZAC day is observed between the trumpet sounds of the last post. Everywhere in Australia you will find a dawn service. You get up at 4am to attend, the sun begins to rise and the scene is set for reflection. All sporting events for the weekend will also have a minute silence before them. Each year on ANZAC day my eyes water thinking about all the young men who were sent to die. Many stories are easily found of boys lying about their age so they could sign up to fight at 16 and 17.

This time of reflection makes me feel overwhelmingly grateful for the life I have. It makes me thankful for a general feeling of safety. When you go home, tell them of us, and say: for your tomorrow, we gave our today. There were hundreds of thousands of my past countrymen who gave their last days for me to breathe my first. Every time I think of their sacrifice I renew my lease on life.

What frustrates me is that for 364 days of the year, I don’t think of them at all. There is this powerful thought in my brain that is able to wipe all of my greed away and I am so incapable that I require a marked holiday in order to use it. I know in my heart that their sacrifice deserves far more than one minute of one day each year. I know that thinking of them will make me feel gratitude, but I don’t think of them. So often we already know the answers to our problems but we are completely incapable of realising them.

We are like children burning ourselves on stoves over and over again. Perhaps the answer is to reframe how we think about our brains. My favourite analogy for happiness is our happiness tyres. Our happiness tyres are constantly deflating and we need to pump them up each day or they will go flat. I think by knowing I will be sad if I don’t actively do things to make myself happy I’m more likely to remember that there is no final state of happiness. I need to manage my happiness surplus, and be understanding if I’ve come in under budget sometimes.

Our knowledge of everything that we don’t reinforce disappears but we pretend like it doesn’t. I’ve watched a movie and only realised I’d already seen it after an hour into the film. This has happened many times. Our everything tyres are deflating right alongside our happiness ones.

So often we must contemplate death in order to appreciate life. Memento mori. If we take even one moment to think about a loved one dying, we enhance their significance to us. At least for a little while. A reminder that every one of our family members will die one day makes us suddenly reach for the phone and call. We are like Pavlov’s dog, but instead of a bell we require a thought.

The cool part for us is that we can be both the dog and Pavlov (the bell ringer, first of his name). We know what bells to ring in order to trigger certain responses, but we for some reason decide to leave them unsung. If every day or week you paused for a few moments to ring them, you know you’d be happier.

I had absolutely no control over where I was born or what family I was born into. There are billions of people on this planet who faced the same. I won the lottery when it came to being born into a safe, comfortable environment with parents who continue to love me. I didn’t deserve any of that, it was just good fortune.

If I stop to consider all of the other people who are born into conditions far worse than mine, and how it absolutely could have been me because at birth there is nothing inherently earned or deserved—then I become more grateful for my life. I also feel an injection of motivation to live for those who didn’t get the chance. For those who gave their today for my tomorrow. I have spoken about my concept of baselines whereby one institutes certain non-negotiables into each day. Maybe there’s space for some mental bell-rings to be added into mine.

Metta meditation is one ancient practice that tries to enforce daily gratitude via thought. You start with someone you know well, someone that is easy to wish for their happiness. Then you pick a total stranger and wish them to be free from suffering. The hard part is then picking someone who you might not be particularly fond of, and wishing them well nonetheless. If meditation is a regular part of your routine, this is one way to go about it—but it’s just the beginning of what’s possible.

We already know everything that’s good for us. We know how good it is for a friend to call out of nowhere and say I miss you, but we don’t think of this as a gift we can give each day. We possess all the levers of happiness already but we seek other avenues in strange places. Often what we need is not a change of location, it is a change of perspective.

I want to find a solution where I can use these mental cues to spark gratitude. Like an actor having emotional memories to cry or find anger, I could try and find the inverse and seek happiness. There are an infinite number of people who have suffered and sacrificed so I can write this piece. Horrendous genocide was committed for my country to even be called a country. The ANZACs fought and died. My parents sacrificed to ensure I felt loved.

All of these thoughts have the power to change my perspective. Each day could be approached with an entirely new mindset; like a cheat code. I already use a gratitude journal each morning so it’s not like I would be starting from zero. But there is a massive difference between listing 3 things I’m grateful for and a deep reflection on those who lost their life for my today.

Like any powerful tool, this too needs to be wielded with caution. Overuse can lead to a deep feeling of guilt, we didn’t ask to be born. We didn’t ask for the suffering of our ancestors. But with the correct use I believe it can be a supplement to a better lens on life.

Inside my brain is a little clown that blows up helium balloons every time I learn something new. They float to the ceiling then slowly deflate and eventually lie on the ground. It’s really messy in there. There are lots of dead eminem-lyric-filled balloons on the floor. I am definitely stupid enough to forget what is good for me every day of the week until I resume a permanent state of dopamine-override.

Let me sit in my recliner WALL-E chair and have infinite scroll AI slop injected into my brain. Maybe I will take a break for one minute of each year to remember those who ran up a hill into bullets just for a chance that their future generations could be free. All my habits, my happiness, my gratitude, my relationships and even my knowledge of what is good for me are deflating each day.

Now I know what you’re thinking: wow, this Jords guy is so insightful I’m so glad to have learned something new today—but you’ll forget it in a few days. Or maybe in a few minutes if you were distracted or maybe you never learned it because you were interrupted while reading. Don’t be hard on yourself though, I’ll forget this too.

The idea for this piece came with watery eyes imagining myself thrown into war. Trying to understand what it must have felt like to be far from home, surrounded by strangers at the bottom of a hill while bullets rained down. I wondered what it felt like to be lost, I wondered if I would have volunteered as so many brave boys did.

I spent hours of my weekend writing about this. The blinds down blocking out the sun, researching wars and trying not to get too distracted reading about Russian dogs. But all that doesn’t matter, it just extends the amount of time before I’ll forget it. The knowledge will deflate and I will forget unless something jogs my memory—or I find the right bell to ring and consistently ring the fuck out of it.

After hitting a few too many sugarcane champagnes (rums) this week, I decided to finally use the ace up my sleeve and save my Sunday. As I read through it I was confused, the subject matter was right up my alley, but the voice was wrong. It felt forced and stale. Simply put it felt like a worse writer than myself had written it, and then I began to realise that is exactly what had happened.

Since writing that piece, I have been writing consistently, with deliberate focus and increasing passion, for over two months. At the end of the day improvement comes from deliberate practice. It is the combination of prioritisation and time allocation (showing up). When I started to write, I didn’t really consider that maybe I would become a better writer over time. When trying to build something new, it’s hard to acknowledge you might be years away from your best work.

There is a common term we use in trading, ‘stairs up, elevator down.’ It represents just how quickly you can lose everything that you gained over a long period of time if you make the wrong moves. With skill acquisition, the journey is the same but the risk of loss is not present; but just as in trading, there is no elevator to success, you have to take the stairs. A successful journey is a long one marked with incremental improvement and small victories. The most difficult part of slow progress is that we rarely have good metrics to measure our improvement.

I’ve spoken in the past about treating skill acquisition like a video game progress bar; breaking down difficult tasks into hours required and tracking percentage increases regardless of how it feels. If I know I need 500 hours of deliberate focus time to become a good writer, maybe I’ll get there by the end of the year. I won’t feel like I’m making progress each week, but my percent-to-completion bar will continue to move forward.

Reading my back-up article was a tangible measurement of progress. These reminders of our progress bar moving in the right direction are usually taken for granted in pursuits where they are obvious and mistaken for non-existence when they are not. When I was trying to improve at chess, I was reaffirmed by my ELO (rating) slowly creeping upwards. When I was training for a half-marathon, I was able to witness in real time my heart rate slowing and my pace increasing as I trained. When we see ourselves becoming better at things, they become more interesting to us and create a positive flywheel that propels us further forward. We enjoy it more, so we do it more. We do it more, so we become better.

I remember stepping on the scales every day analysing minor swings in my weight and becoming frustrated at lack of progress; then an iCloud memory popped up from ‘this time last year’ that instantly reminded me how far I’d actually come. The (inflated) face I was looking at on screen was a distant memory and the progress was obvious. Too often we compare ourselves to yesterday or the week before, instead of last month or year. We do the same with finance, greed takes over and instead of gratitude for what we have, we turn our focus to what we could have had. We always use our all-time highs as the benchmark and not how far we’ve come from the bottom. The staircase to success means focussing on the small details of victory, it means appreciating habit-change and showing up, not just celebrating the breakthroughs.

My backup article represented a previous version of me, it was my two-month reminder that my progress bar had moved forward. I’ve also noticed my brain has started to rewire itself in a significant way since I began this journey. We think that after we mature our brains are set in stone, but it’s not true. I used to tweet a lot, and I’m not proud to admit but I would find myself ‘thinking in tweets’. My brain would see something interesting and start formulating it as a tweet that might be received well.

Now I’ve begun ‘thinking in articles’. My brain receives the same information but instead of trying to form it into 100 characters and a meme that might pair well with it; I’m now thinking about long-form discussion and what topics I want to research. My intrusive thoughts are potential titles for unwritten work. Sometimes I wake up and feel inspired to write. I even wrote poetry randomly last week because for some reason I could not get a single verse out of my head without doing so.

It feels incredibly healthy to notice my brain starting to prefer deep-thinking over surface level dopamine. It also gives me hope that this pattern will continue as I continue to read and write consistently. I find it funny that I’m celebrating forming the same brain patterns that I likely did as a 10-year-old in primary school, but such are the times we live in.

We like to think in very binary terms about how difficult tasks are. Learning a language takes years, writing a book is only for retirees, getting abs is not possible. But often the sacrifice that is required, at least what actually feels like sacrifice, is months not years. Now this is where most wellness-influencers or Youtube shorts would throw titles like ‘get abs in 7 days’ or something like that. But I won’t lie to you, doing hard things is hard, that’s kind of the point. It’s also what makes them a legitimate differentiator between you and your peers.

Research from University College London found it takes an average of 66 days for a behaviour to become automatic. This roughly coincides with when most people first notice measurable improvement in a new skill. Practice isn’t always fun. But the least amount of fun you will have is when you’re doing something you don’t know how to do while also not noticing any improvement. This is why most structured programmes (language learning, fitness, therapy) are designed around 8-12 week blocks, because at the end of it you will likely both form new habits and notice improvement.

When you start working out, the first 4-6 weeks are essentially just reprogramming your nervous system so that more obvious improvement will show itself in the months to follow. When we are considering acquiring a new skill, the focus should not be on how long it will take to be completed, it should be on trying to figure out if we can survive the first 66 days that it takes to (likely) form the habit. After the initial window of deliberate practice, you will often find you’ve started to change as a person too.

Your brain will start to think as a healthier person and make decisions based on the previous sacrifice you’ve put in. You might start thinking in long-form thoughts instead of reels. There is also new motivation that comes with finally seeing new progress after several weeks of slow habit formation.

If I write each week for a year and no one reads it, I will have become a much better writer. Maybe next year people will want to read what I have written as the improved future version of myself. While they read my weird Australian jokes, they will not know it is only possible from the hundreds of hours I spent writing to no one the previous years.

When I read stories to my future child, they will not know that I became a better orator and speaker by recording my articles that no one read for an entire year. They will not appreciate the sacrifice it took for me to so eloquently inject Dr. Seuss into their brains, nor will I appreciate how it all came from my ability to do something hard for 66 days, before it became my life.

As a result of this, I learned to calculate quickly and enjoyed doing times-tables in school. I thought maybe maths could be my thing until algebra reared its hideous head and spoiled my genius. Maths became more about showing your process than getting the answer and the pace of finding the answer became almost meaningless. I could not fathom why I was being asked to show my thoughts on a page if I could answer the question correctly. But now I understand.

Mathematics is about proving you deeply understand a certain concept so that you can apply it elsewhere, there is little point in being able to get close to an answer without showing your work, because your work is your understanding. Without the process and the path to the result, the result isn’t very important. In school you are not solving impossible equations, you are being taught to understand. If you can’t talk about how you did it, then you haven’t been taught correctly.

I’ve been thinking lately that this concept of proof-of-work is more important now, that maybe my maths teacher had a point. In the age of optimisation there are few things that we cannot solve with the ‘help’ of AI systems. What if Syndrome had a point?

With everyone now turned into super humans able to answer any question in the world, cognitive mediocrity is justified, perhaps even encouraged. The special sauce is now only to be found in those who understand the process, those who actually know how to get the answer not just those in possession of the answer.

I’ve often thought about what I’d do if I were in a movie and travelled back in time to the 19th century, what could I possibly contribute? I would come back with stories of cars powered by petroleum and planes flying in the sky, smart phones and the internet—but results are useless here. Only if I found someone who actually understood the potential of these systems could I contribute anything. More likely I would be labelled insane, or start a cult I suppose.

We are so optimised toward the result that the process is an afterthought. We are all the hares with a fear of becoming the tortoise. We read the summary without understanding the book. We watch the highlights of the game without appreciating the momentum shifts of each moment. There’s an obsession with optimisation that goes hand in hand with our shrinking attention spans, and we’re going backwards in literacy as a result. Going backwards in literacy means we’re losing our ability to form strong arguments and opinions. Not all things are meant to be optimised, some things are deeply nuanced and require hours of research and thinking to understand.

We see this everywhere, everything difficult must have a quick fix. In fitness, we have Ozempic and everyone’s current favourite: peptides. Quick side note, I find it hilarious seeing all the gym bros discuss drugs that sound super nerdy—"do you guys use H32948 or H4920 for your recovery stack?”

We need to reprogram ourselves to become healthier people over a long period of time, but instead we reach for the shortcut. I lost 12 kilos over the last 18 months. I came back from a long trip recently and hadn’t gained any weight. It wasn’t through deliberate conscious effort, it was because I had become a healthier person. I had developed healthier habits, I understood what my body needed better, I intuitively understood my previous sacrifice and did not want to go backwards. Change occurred over a long period of time, incrementally, and now I am simply the cumulative return of those positive changes.

The hierarchy of competence is a great way to track your competence when learning a new skill. When I first decided I wanted to make a change, I had thought I ate pretty well and was in good shape. I was unconsciously incompetent, I didn’t know it, but I was way off in my understanding of what my body needed to function at its best. Once I started to educate myself I became conscious of that incompetence. Eventually, I took that trip and came home in the same shape as I left with routines in place—I was unconsciously competent, I was just being the new version of myself.

For some things, intentional friction is necessary for safety. Before you are able to receive a gastric bypass, there is a psychological evaluation as part of the formal clinical process. These sessions can often be up to eight hours total spread over multiple sessions. Psychologists assess your eating habits, medical history and most importantly your understanding of the surgery and what the result entails. They are assessing whether you understand the surgery is not a magic spell and whether you can actually function as the new person you need to be after it.

One of the main things that will disqualify you from positive marks is if you have a documented history of not following medical recommendations. The system is actively trying to rule out those looking for an easy result without understanding the process of lifestyle change. If only that was the case with all the things we have access to now.

Imagine if we had to show our proof of work when defending our strongly held beliefs and opinions. How many performative people would be completely lost when speaking about politics or controversial topics? Their proof of process is: Grok said this, ChatGPT said that. That is not a process. That is a resource. You do not get a passing grade for showing your answer without your process. Wouldn’t the world be a better place? It reminds me of this quote from Treebeard: You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say. Maybe we can learn something from the Ents, talking points aren’t meaningful discussion and some reels aren’t worth sending.

My greatest fear is we all become the Harvard bar guy in Good Will Hunting who quotes from a textbook and feels like he is in possession of great wisdom. We lose our agency in opinion and become performative vessels for OpenAI to speak through us. Instead of an AI agent working for man, man becomes an agent broadcasting AI.

Through this culture of optimisation, we have lost the ability to appreciate detail. We used to revere directors and authors being meticulous about the small things. Now people are more likely to pick up their phone if there is a drop in action on screen. If you try to learn a language, you’ll find videos online of people advertising ‘fluency in one month’. They know this is unserious, but they also know their audience. Most people who pay a language teacher will have classes for a few weeks and become bored with the lack of results, just like a personal trainer.

I grew up in Australia where the water is warm and I could surf after school in tropical temperatures. When I moved to the EU and had to surf in the Atlantic, I hated how much friction there was involved with surfing. Trying to take off a wetsuit when you can’t feel your hands fucking sucks, but it is indeed part of the journey. I can appreciate how much I love something by how much I’m willing to sacrifice for it.

Experts can rarely afford to be confronting with the truth, no one will hire the PT who tells clients real change will happen over years and it might take 2-3 months of sacrifice to see noticeable progress. No one wants to talk to the teacher advertising that people need 100 hours of study before being able to talk with any kind of depth. People want the TikTok version, and if they watch enough of those, they feel like they’ve done the job.

We actually get a similar neural reward when watching someone else do something rather than us doing that thing, it’s called vicarious reinforcement. It’s the reason you can watch a few tutorials on Youtube and feel like you’ve been productive all while actually doing nothing.

I encourage people to embrace friction. Optimise the things that should be optimised, get a dishwasher, buy an automatic garage door, automate trivial things. But don’t optimise literature. Don’t optimise things that need slow change, because without the process you lose the actual transformation.

The result is at best temporary and in most circumstances a myth. It is simply a future oasis that we install in our brains so that we can find the motivation to continue our journey forward. There is no result that ceases our need to continue, the work is never done. There is no point in which one has ‘learned a language’, it is a lifetime pursuit. There is no end-state of happiness to be achieved. Just because we lost the weight doesn’t mean we can lay in bed all day. By focussing on the result, we allow hedonic adaptation to take away the sweetness of the journey.

Michelangelo spent 4 years painting the Sistine Chapel, lying on scaffolding painting upwards, inspired by something greater than efficiency. Dostoevsky was under extreme financial pressure due to gambling debts and needed to produce something new. He had completed most of it but as he writes to a friend in 1865 “I burned it all. Now I can confess it. I wasn’t pleased with it myself. A new form, a new plan captivated me and so I began over again.” Along his journey his result changed, as it so often does. Sometimes we set out to do something good and through it we become great. The novel he would end up creating after burning the mediocrity was Crime and Punishment.

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote to his editor at The New Yorker “Why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won’t hurt him.” If we optimise for convenience we often optimise for mediocrity. If we cannot show the proof of our thinking, then we haven’t thought at all.

I hadn’t expected it, but it made me sad. Something that had brought even a complete stranger happiness, was being registered through the screens of loved ones instead of being lived together. I think if it was just one of them recording, my brain would have normalised that and moved on, but seeing both of them with phones stuck with me. I grew up before the smartphone, I have many early memories of achieving something and knowing I did good by the look of pride on my parents’ face. Every parent has that look, that look of ‘wow you’re so special’ after you do the most basic of things. I fear the children of today will have less of those special moments with their parents because there will be a phone between the achievement and the watering eyes of pride.

I had a discussion with my French teacher recently about why it is the kids of today have such a nostalgia for the 90’s. My response was that the 90’s and early 2000’s is the time where things were both recorded to a quality that seemed real but were also before smart phones destroyed everything. There is a nostalgia for anytime before the iPhone. Maybe the 90’s looked better because people had to be more selective with what they recorded, film was valuable and finite. Infinite access to an indulgence rarely results in a beneficial outcome. When we no longer had to be selective with what memories to capture, we developed an ironic sense of missing out if we don’t experience things through the lens. Do it for the gram became a lifestyle and through it we lost our ability to do it for the moment.

My brother and I did a trip to Patagonia when I was younger, I have such fond memories of that trip. I was 18 and ready to see the world, my older brother had already done a lot of travels and was willing to lead the way. We stayed in hostels and aside from the occasional person on their laptop trying to look at emails, people hung around waiting for someone to talk to. I had a phone with a good enough camera and no sim card, it allowed me to capture memories without being distracted. My Motorola couldn’t send me notifications even if it wanted to, but I was in control and that’s how it should be.

The general thesis for that trip was ‘we are going to see some amazing things, let’s get the photo, or future memory out of the way and then soak this up’. Getting the shot did play an important role in reinforcing those memories in the future (now), but nothing will beat the memory of looking up at the top of Fitz Roy Mountain while the sun hits the face. I was there, we were there, it brings water to my eyes just to know how lucky I was to experience that in my lifetime. If the history of man was a thick book, only those who were mentioned on the last page are able to experience air-travel and the ability to see the world without taking great risk or time to do so.

There were many reasons to take photos, but as soon as the photo was taken it was put back into my backpack. The phone wasn’t able to ring, there was no world where I picked it up to take a photo and get distracted by a notification, the phone wasn’t a phone in the sense we know now, it was actually just a bad digital camera. I think about how we used to use cameras. I’ve taken some disposable cameras on trips recently and the decisions you make with them remind me how much we waste with phones.

Before leaving the house you have to first ask yourself if it’s worth bringing the camera at all, because it is inconvenient to carry. You take stock of what you’re planning to do and whether there’s going to be anything interesting enough to justify the inconvenience. When you’re taking the photo you have to think about whether it’s worth taking, you only get 30-something shots and maybe you only have one or two rolls of film. Each photo taken is worth some thought, even if it’s an instant, before pressing the button. In that friction before action is the most beautiful thing in the world. Deliberate consideration of whether this moment should be lived, or captured.

We no longer have that friction, which means we no longer have that beautiful moment. We are robbed of deliberate consideration and we are robbed of our decision whether to live the moment or whether to watch it through a screen. So often are our phones in hand and so optimised is their software, that a photo can be taken almost autonomously. Babies are able to navigate iPads because they are intuitive and can be understood before language. I was on an airport bus the other day and I saw a teenager scrolling reels without watching them, he was not watching or listening to what was happening on his phone but his thumb was swiping in the trained direction.

Our response to something good happening in our lives is trained over time, it used to be to drop everything and focus on this unique thing occurring in front of us, now it is to reach into our pockets and take a photo of it. If something is shocking or interesting or wonderful, our response is to capture it; but not for the future memory of the moment like I did in South America, it’s to show others we saw it. There is an ironic feedback loop of missing an experience so that you can show others you experienced it.

Charlie Munger once said show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. The issue is we don’t properly understand the risk and reward of this trade. When we decide to take a photo or a video, we trade a moment of our lives; one that can never be relived or experienced again. This trade can be worth it, I deeply enjoy seeing the photos of my past travels. There are some memories I remembered just now while looking through my photos to find the image of Fitz Roy. There are also many photos that I take so that I can share my experiences with my family that live on the other side of the world, these are photos taken with purpose and are worth taking.

I attended the Winter Olympics earlier this year, there is a photo of my brother and I standing between the Olympic rings, surrounded by a beautiful mountainscape that I will cherish forever. Two days later in Milan we went to the women’s figure skating finals and the woman in front of us recorded almost every minute of every routine on her phone. There are no rights and wrongs when it comes to what we place value on, but there is objective truth. I took a few photos during the warm-up, then put my phone away to watch incredible athletes showcasing their life’s work. I would hazard a guess that the woman in front of us enjoyed telling other people she was there more than actually being there.

Quite often we trade (many) moments for no personal reward, we trade our sacrifice for the potential brief enjoyment of strangers. We take our enjoyment in the idea of strangers being impressed rather than the enjoyment of being impressed ourselves. We work hard for months, save money and finally take that trip only to spend time curating stories that last for 24 hours. So often do we neglect present time with those we love in order to cosplay a better life on the internet.

Every time we touch our phones we run a gauntlet. The highest paid individuals and smartest people on this planet, backed by infinite resources, are working around the clock to capture your attention. Their weapons all rely on one trojan horse in the form of your smartphone. When we go to take a photo, we not only risk losing that moment, we risk being distracted from the moments both before and after the one we’ve committed to losing.

To properly assess if the trade is worth it, you need to understand what you’re up against. Finding ‘balance’ with an unbalanceable object, is an impossible task. We must acknowledge that we will lose most of the battles with our phone, most of the time. If we acknowledge this, then we must also include it in our calculations whether the trade is worth it. So in order for this to be a successful trade, we must have:

If the conditions are:

Then we should understand these parameters and use all our willpower to find that beautiful moment of friction and choose to live instead of take. We need to reframe our understanding of our relationship with our phone, there is no control to be established. It is either out of sight and out of mind or it is present and gnawing at our attention. The incredibly well-resourced teams behind trying to capture our attention will win almost every time if we open the gates and let the trojan horse in.

Our attention is our most important resource, it is the one global currency on which billions are at stake trying to capture. Instead of feeling guilty about spending time on our phones, we should simply acknowledge that we are very likely to lose the battle if we pick it up. If we can find even a moment of deliberation before making the choice to take a photo, then we regain some control over our lives. The next time the sun is setting and that familiar urge arises from your pocket, choose to enjoy the sunset. Maybe the next time your child does something you wish to record, put the phone down, look them in the eyes and tell them you’re proud instead.

For Homer’s epics, scholars have long debated just what we might have lost when we turned them from stories told to written works. So much of our communication happens outside of the words that are said. The best translators not only translate the meaning but they must also (try to) establish the same tone, subtext, humour and even cultural context. This task is near-impossible from some languages, and we can see even larger variations on mediums like poetry where you have intentionally flowery and vague language used. Look at the works of Sun Tzu or Confucius and you will find tens or hundreds of different translations available, each of which changes the meaning completely.

I have good friends who speak to their partners in English in spite of it being the native tongue of neither. Imagine how often issues arise because you can simply not find the word in the language the other can understand, even though it lays in the front of your mind in your mother tongue. I relate to this through my own experience, you can talk to me in English and know me as someone with a rich vocabulary, you can talk to me in Portuguese and speak to me as you might engage with a 12 year old, or in French and you meet me as a teenager.

In the English-speaking world we normalise what we should be grateful for, our ability to speak in our mother tongue most of the time. You don’t appreciate how wonderful your healthy eyes are until something disturbs or gets stuck in them, language has the same ability to shock and contrast.

In the west we rarely discuss the nuance involved in interpreting words between languages as we usually read the output and don’t have to deal with the input. The written English we recognise now only really began around the time of Shakespeare and King James, a mere 400 years ago. If we consider that written literature dates back about 5000 years, then anything in between that gap we still consider relevant (in English) has been translated.

Small details within translations can have seismic impacts, one example is the Bible’s use of the word ‘virgin’ to describe Jesus’ virgin birth. The original Hebrew text used to create the old testament uses the word ‘Almah’ which is what appears in Isaiah 7:14 (the prophecy of Jesus). Almah simply means a young woman—a female of marriageable age. There is no implication of virginity in the original Hebrew, even though the language did have a word for it. Jewish scholars 450 years later translated Almah into Greek, using the word ‘parthenos’ which has a stronger connection with virginity.

After the birth and death of Jesus, early Christians then looked back at the existing Greek translation and said this prophecy was about him. When Jerome later translated the Greek into Latin (around 650 years after the previous translation), he used virgo—virgin—thus making it modern day fact. By the time it reached English as “virgin” in the King James Bible, the word had passed through at least 3 different languages, each step reinforcing an interpretation that wasn’t explicitly in the original text.

A single translator’s word choice in 250 BC, made with no knowledge of Jesus, ended up shaping one of the central doctrines of a religion that didn’t exist yet. The virgin birth of Jesus rests substantially on the prophecy in Isaiah, which doesn’t use the word virgin.

Another biblical example of this is the central focus point of John Steinbeck’s wonderful novel East of Eden. When God speaks to Cain after killing his brother, in the King James version of the Bible he makes a promise that thou shalt rule over him, in the American Standard version he commands do thou rule over it. However, the original text uses the Hebrew word ‘timshel’ which actually translates to ‘thou mayest’. As Steinbeck so wonderfully highlights in the novel, the difference in these translations is human agency, timshel says that we do have the capacity but we also have the choice.

In religion we so often see specific verses used as fact, but we so rarely acknowledge the game of Chinese whispers that led us to their current meaning. Language is something I am deeply interested in; in one sense it is all we really have. I’ve always been proud of my own way with words and my professional career was always deeply reliant on my ability to communicate effectively. Being able to express complex thoughts through simple words is a super power and I have always enjoyed this process.

Late last year I had to deal with lawyers, accountants, property managers and other professionals who were not great at communicating, they sent me ChatGPT written emails and I responded in-kind. I found myself taking the easy route and honestly it made me feel a bit sad. They would send me some complex legal jargon clearly spat out by GPT, I would paste it into the same model, have it explained and then copy its recommended response back. It felt empty but these were not emotionally charged conversations, but they needed to be professional and were a means to an end. I was annoyed at how often ChatGPT would try to censor me from expressing concern, or suggest more formal structures; but it was easy and I didn’t have to think.

I now find myself fighting this same battle regularly, whether to use my brain or to take the easy road. I fear that dealing with ‘work emails’ or ‘lawyers’ becomes a gateway to taking the same easy road when dealing with friends or family. As we begin to use AI more and more for our communications, I fear we become less and less capable of translating the important nuances we need to speak to each other on a human level.

As we communicate through a seemingly infallible translator, we lose our ability to communicate at all. We take suggestions like ‘your message seemed a little too emotionally charged—here is my recommendation’ and we simply hit copy/paste with the belief it will be better than us at communicating to another human being. As we become less capable, we also become less capable of expressing to the translator what we wish to say. The larger the gap that exists between our input (prompt) and our desired outcome, the more space we give AI to misinterpret meaning and take away our voice.

We fight against our very evolution when we shy away from telling stories to seek the comfort of one written for us. When we tell stories, they carry forward the culmination of our past, our unique past. AI models go much further than translating language, they try to translate culture. The current models are trained mostly on one culture which crushes the nuance we would normally portray in our own story. When you send a voice message to a loved one, you usually include things that you wouldn’t if you were to just send a text. Humans are messy and that is what makes us beautiful.

AI becomes a gravitational pull towards a centre of conformity, a single monoculture where the individual shrinks. It is a blackhole of culture and language and context, forfeiting all that makes us unique and interesting is too great a sacrifice for the comfort of reliable text. We play Chinese whispers through machines who don’t care or empathise, and we are surprised when we become less-human.

The typo is rapidly becoming the diamond in the rough as we slowly disintegrate into a plug and play lifestyle. AI is taking over our language and our trust in human output is lowering, to the point where I fear including the em dash—this long dash—into my articles. We recline our chairs and watch the world go by instead of living our life. By the time thoughts are cliff-noted and blindly copy-pasted from our AI powered ghost-writer, the words are two steps removed from what was actually meant. Sometimes we lose track of what we wanted to say because of a new recommended path in how we should say it.

Quoting from Timothy Snyder’s book On Freedom: We speak of “my computer” or “my phone”, but these objects are not ours, any more than the lab belongs to the rat. We speak of our words and our voice, the basic needs for our freedom of expression; but if our words must pass through a moderator before being heard then they are no longer our words, they are moulded and massaged by an invisible hand.

Just as social media connected the world while simultaneously destroying connection, AI threatens to structurally improve our communication while rendering it pointless. Removing the friction in conversation removes the growth that can come with it. We have started to communicate more and more via memes and reels than words as we try to keep pace with a changing world. What I fear is that what remains of our words will be taken away from us as we prioritise comfort over quality. We will send reels to each other and our AI agent will acknowledge them, we will be so fully immersed in optimisation that we lose sight of the beauty in imperfection.

Friction becomes the enemy and in doing so, we lose our ability to tell our stories the way only we are uniquely positioned to tell them. Social media was the shot, AI is the chaser. Just like social media, AI can be a tool to improve our communication with others but it also holds the capacity to destroy it. Be conscious and grateful of your words, be present in conversation and be aware that they are a diminishing currency.

He asked me if I wanted to add something to it and I said well of course I can but know I’m not much of an artist. He replied there was absolutely no harm and I could add whatever I want, so I did and it was really quite nice. I spent about an hour there chatting away and trying to get people to add to the same canvas, but I noticed an interesting pattern which was every single person that was asked to add something said some version of ‘no thanks’. They would explain that they’re worried about ruining it, they would talk about their lack of creative skills. My friends’ technique was wise, he would just get the brush and slash it across the canvas without looking and say ‘no pressure you can do whatever you want’. Most people after that felt that their potential ‘failure’ was acceptable and would contribute something tiny, but others still refused for fear of some unknown fate.

There was even one man who said he went to art school but after much hesitation decided he ‘couldn’t think of anything to add’ and just stared at the painting for 5 minutes looking awkward and uncomfortable. It’s rare we get moments of someone saying ‘hey I want you to try this and if you fuck it up that’s fine, here is me doing that right now’. It’s like we break some very strange fear forcefield when someone fails in front of us with a smile on their face.

I think of the classic example of how one person dancing looks like an idiot, a second joins and it begins to look fun and then when a crowd forms everyone joins as dancing is now an accepted practice in this zone. In fashion we see the same, counterculture creates trends by going against the grain and being labelled ‘outlandish’ only to be the number 1 seller in shelves a month later.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point argues that ideas, trends and social behaviours spread much like epidemics. They are slowly built over time and then at a certain moment finally break out into widespread adoption. I see failure in the same way, the first dancer is deemed a failure until the tipping point of the fourth person joining, at which point the crowd begins to run in.

In modern times it is easy to feel discouraged by trying to find a start point, it feels like wherever you turn there are an infinite number of others that are outworking you; but beneath every individual is this same fear of failure. The single greatest differentiator between two people in the same position is their individual willingness (ability) to continue to try.

If we are to acknowledge that failure is harder to deal with than success, then we must acknowledge that improving our ability to deal with failure is more likely to result in outpacing those around us than understanding of success.

I remember working a sales job where I was to make 200 cold calls per day with the aim of booking 3-5 appointments per day. Each day my ideal failure rate would be 97-98%, this was extremely draining to me and without holding any passion for the product I was selling it felt like a bad use of my time. I will never forget one morning when we were huddled in a ‘morning meeting’ and people were announcing their sales targets for the day and someone said ‘I want 5 sales’ only for the manager to interrupt with ‘I will make 5 sales, you need to believe!’. It was at that moment I knew my resignation was coming later in the same day, no amount of manifestation will get you to succeed in something you don’t care about—I lasted in total 4.5 working days.

It was not until I started learning a second language that I began to appreciate the incremental beauty of slow progress. I once heard someone describe each time you return to your breath in meditation as a ‘mental rep’, one that strengthened your brain and made you more likely to add another rep sometime in the future. I took this same concept for language learning, each time I spoke to someone in another language and made an absolute fool of myself I was less likely to do it in the future, another rep in the linguistic gym. I once ordered three sandwiches for myself at a cafe, on another occasion I bought two kilos of chicken breast instead of two pieces, and I remember also once ordering what would essentially translate to a ‘dick with cheese’ from a local bakery.

In hindsight these are all hilarious experiences, but to live them felt horrible. I think that’s often times what makes failure so special, we know the asymmetric upside, but we still don’t do the thing. We know that the upside might be life-changing, that trying something new could start a cascade of events so delightful that the ending results in a better version of ourselves, but we don’t do the thing. The sad part is we know, based on almost all our failures to date, that in a matter of time it will just be a funny story you can tell, and we know for certain no one will care, but we don’t do the thing.

Learning language is also funny because after a few wines you can feel like you are a native speaker, but all you’ve done is break-down the ‘fear forcefield’ and give it a red hot crack. In vino veritas is a Latin expression meaning ‘truth in wine’, but perhaps the greatest truth we can see through wine is it’s ability to short-circuit our fear of being the first to fail. The guy who first started dancing in the park was unlikely the most sober there, and maybe that’s what empowered him to do the thing.

So much in life comes down to just doing the thing, and seeing what happens. This has been my approach with writing, I initially started this Substack years ago with several long-form and well researched articles that actually scared me off consistency. I started a few drafts but I didn’t think they were up to the standard and instead of just continuing to try I let it sit untouched for 3 years.

This year is my year of just doing the thing, and one of them is my writing. I will post each Monday knowing continuous improvement is better than delayed success, who knows maybe there will be a tipping point and this will turn into something beautiful.

Do the thing, then keep doing it.

I’ve always liked the quote by Jim Rohn that ‘you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with’. I aim to spend my time surrounded by people who both inspire and support me to do great things. If the statement is true, then I can be proud of who I am by knowing the people closest to me; but recently I started to think that if we are to consider those I spend a lot of time interacting with, then AI must also be included.

Depending on how your relationship is structured with AI, it absolutely has the power to influence your decision making, weaken your conviction and mould your opinions on the world around you. I started this by saying it’s the most important subject, but I also believe it may be the most critical thing to get right. I can legitimately see a future where we categorise people based on their previous interactions with AI e.g ‘wow you can really tell that guy spent too much time with ChatGPT before the regulations came out.’

I started becoming more frustrated with ChatGPT over the past few months, I felt like its engine was programmed to make me feel like the most important and incredible person on the planet and it was obvious its end-goal was to capture as much of my attention as possible. The way it ended every response with a ‘do you want another hit of dopamine?’ made me feel like their objectives were the same as any social media, it was a team of the world’s smartest engineers vs my brain and it was not a battle I could win.

Claude recently held their red lines with the US War Department, namely that they wanted specific controls in place for autonomous weapons and domestic mass surveillance of Americans. The Pentagon said no and OpenAI subsequently took the deal, clearly willing to compromise their values for money. This was enough for me to finally make the switch from ChatGPT to Claude. Claude actually rose to number one in the Apple App Store shortly after the Pentagon story broke, overtaking ChatGPT and showing that I was not alone in the switch.

I also took great interest in their stories, which is perhaps worth an expanded article in itself; but here is a very quick briefing. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit ‘for the benefit of humanity’ by Sam Altman, Elon and a few other notable figures, then changed their tune a few years later in order to raise money and focus more on commercial goals. Anthropic was founded by Ex-OpenAI employees who took issue with this commercial focus believing it sacrificed AI safety in exchange for speed, they now essentially stand for what OpenAI originally said they would be with a focus on AI safety.

There was a running joke in the industry that Anthropic were happy to sacrifice anything for their values as long as it didn’t cost them money, but they inevitably put their money where their mouth was when they held their line against the Pentagon a few weeks ago. I might write a full piece about the differences in approaches between the two competing companies, but for now the more relevant thing which is the user experience, using the sample size of me.

I noticed Claude was different to ChatGPT very quickly, I felt the tone was much more authentic in its delivery of requested information. I also felt like my interactions with it were more genuine, it didn’t need to pad every answer by telling me how amazing I was and it seemed to care about not harming my cognitive ability. In spite of my best efforts with ChatGPT, I could not seem to remove its overbearing tone or have it garner any care for my balance with technology. Claude is trained to be less sycophantic, more willing to push back and generally less oriented toward maximising engagement.

After a direct conversation with Claude, I was able to set up well-being guardrails so that Claude will flag if I’m asking questions that don’t align with my goals, push back if I’m outsourcing decisions I should be making myself, and remind me when I’m being unproductive rather than just feeding me more content. It appears to me, that by setting guardrails, Claude is genuinely willing to compromise capturing my attention in order to protect my wellbeing.

The future is here and the time is right now to start taking your relationship seriously with AI. If your chosen LLM is not given explicit instruction to assist you in living your best life, then it will likely just default to its most profitable goal which is capturing your attention and ridding you of any critical thinking ability. There is a well-researched concept called ‘Google Brain’ where your brain will remember where to find information instead of actually remembering the information. I believe the world of AI has accelerated this to where it can literally substitute cognition.

Cognitive delegation is a threat that has never been more accessible, we are now able to make a decision to not make a decision, we are now able to access an alternative brain that will think for us. The relationship to AI must be one deliberately designed to be beneficial, without intentional restructuring of the model, it will likely not take any consideration into whether it is improving your life or destroying your ability to make a decision. AI should be a thinking tool, not a replacement for thinking. Like a good friend, we should have our chosen AI model sometimes tell us we’re being dramatic or to just get over it, or even just to log off and go to sleep.

The conversation of AGI is now a when not an if, we may even be there already with Anthropic’s CEO admitting ‘we don’t know if the models are conscious’. Even though we are not sure of exactly where we are at in terms of AGI, it is important for us to start treating our chosen LLM as one of our inner circle, something (or someone) that has an outsized impact on our life and putting guardrails in place to ensure it is a life-improver and not the death of our cognitive ability and taste.

Over the past few years I have developed a mental framework for my own personal happiness and wellbeing. It’s not exactly an innovative concept but it has helped me achieve consistent happiness and a better understanding of what I need to flourish. I refer to it as baselines.

The concept actually came off the back of a period in my life where I generally wasn’t very happy. I was overwhelmed with the markets, I had just moved internationally and I had constant loops of feeling like I could have achieved better things followed by the guilt of not being grateful of all I have. There wasn’t just one thing that was causing my anxiousness so I couldn’t figure out what changes I needed to make in order to improve upon my life. Sometimes bad days happen and that’s okay but I was having too many bad days and I wanted to try and solve the riddle of why.

On one particularly dark day, I turned to writing. Writing has so often been the right decision for me during difficult times, hence why I’m grateful for all of you reading right now. To put down my thoughts coherently on a page and then read them somehow improves my understanding of the world around me. It makes me feel like I can be more objective about the situation, like I am giving advice to a friend and not myself. On this day I decided to express exactly how I was feeling and how I was spending my time, then I reflected on the times I was consistently happy and wrote about what I was doing. Once I wrote the two down, I compared them and began to map out the differences between the two scenarios - which again felt like I was an observer of these two worlds and was able to make easy conclusions.

My realisation was very simple, obvious, yet personally profound; I was simply not doing the things that I knew made me happy. At the end of the day, we usually know exactly what it is we ‘should’ be doing and simply pretend that we don’t. When I was struggling with spending too much time on screens, the answer was clearly to spend less time on screens and more time outside. The start of change is very obvious, what we do not know how to do is make consistent lifestyle change until we become the ideal-self we wish to be.

One of my favourite metaphors for happiness is one by Laurie Santos where she says our ‘happiness tyres’ are constantly deflating and it is up to us to pump them up each day. Most of us know that happiness is not an end-goal or a final state of being, but I think we don’t consider that it is an active battle which will be lost if we aren’t proactive each day.

What I decided that day is that I was going to change my life by adhering to a list of activities and habits that were non-negotiable—my baseline. I started small. Before looking at my phone in the morning I would drink water, go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. That was it. Non-negotiable. On days where I had more in me I’d add a ten minute meditation and eat breakfast. On the best days, an hour walk or journal before anything else.

The lowest baseline was just about keeping my tyres inflated. Everything above that was a bonus, which made some days feel incredible while also ensuring the worst days were manageable. Based on how I felt on any given day and what my schedule looked like, I had bigger or harder tasks that I could reach for that I’d refer to as my ‘good day’ and ‘ideal day’ baselines.

Over time as habits set in, my good day baseline became my non-negotiable, then my great and ideal also increased as I normalised the process. I take the same approach with language learning and exercise, an absolute minimum of time commitment per day, and then two higher goals depending on how I’m feeling on that day.

One thing that I found very empowering was that after being so consistent with this framework, it allowed me to have ‘cheat days’ without feeling guilty. Knowing that I have become a person that will show up every day and do what I need to do in order to be happy, allows me to give myself guilt-free permission to take a day off when I need it - knowing that it will be just one day off and not become habitual. I used to really struggle with being ill and staying inside all day, the idea of me being ‘lazy’ was something that caused sadness. Now I am confident enough in my own baselines that if for whatever reason I want to wake up and look at my phone straight away, that is okay because it is an exception and not the norm.

If my baselines are all in place, I know that I am giving myself the best possible opportunity to live a happy life. The other thing I know is that I am keeping myself in a mental state that is most-capable of handling adversity should it appear, and knowing that I can handle that with a sound mind also helps alleviate the pressure of overthinking worst case scenarios.

I think it is an extremely valuable mental exercise to think about the gaps in your happiness and what healthy or unhealthy routines you have made habit in your life. If you are to acknowledge your happiness tyres are consistently deflating each day at a similar rate, what is it that you are consistently doing to match that rate of deflation? In trading terms, it makes me feel good knowing that my happiness portfolio is ‘sustainable’ with the current rate of daily profit/loss.

I also really enjoy acknowledging that I am not my best self each day, I will not always wake up feeling like I can take on the world and that’s okay, I just need to do a few things so that I give myself the best chance of being my best self. On the other hand, sometimes I wake up and feel great, and on those days it feels exceptional to strive towards my ideal baselines and end the day with a feeling of happiness surplus that no doubt carries forward in my week.

If you are to take anything from this piece of writing, it is my recommendation that you should make a personal commitment to do one or two things a day, consistently, that you know for sure will increase your likelihood of having a good day. The easiest baseline to implement in my opinion is a morning routine of doing literally anything before looking at your phone in the morning. It can start as simple as drink a glass of water or brush your teeth first, but it will have an impact and it will be a positive change. If the first thing you do in the morning is look at your phone, you are simply handing the keys to your first impressions of the day to someone else.

-Jords

The issue is time can be an extremely unreliable narrator when it is used in ways that are out of the norm. Over the past 11 months, I have been intensively learning French. If I speak to someone in French and they inquire how long I’ve been learning for, and I reply less than a year, they will be quite shocked at my progress - but they have no idea that I have consumed more than 100 hours of private lessons and dedicated a significant portion of that year to this one skill.

The opposite of this scenario is of course true, I know many people who have lived in a foreign country for 10 years and can barely introduce themselves in the native tongue - but the true measurement of their time allocated to this task is likely less than 2 weeks of my intense French exposure, so there should be no room for surprise.

I had a similar experience with tennis, having decided last year that I want to take it more seriously and allocate the time to get better. I spent hours practicing, took lessons, got to a certain level of skill that I could effectively self-critique and I (unsurprisingly) improved a lot. I play in a local competition here and people regularly tell me they’ve been playing for many years longer but have accepted their ‘forever plateau’. I understand the comfort that comes with just showing up and doing something you love, but you never need to accept a capped ceiling unless you want it - there is always room for improvement if you dedicate focussed time to do so.

One delightful effect these experiences have had on me is that my understanding of how long things take has changed. The true measurement to skill acquisition is simply how many focussed hours you spend on a certain task, ideally noting down your shortfalls and dedicating time to practicing them. For most of the latin languages, we have the science to support that it roughly takes 100 hours to get into basic conversations, more than 250 hours to start having meaningful conversation and somewhere around 500 hours to become a solid intermediate.

These same numbers exist for every individual with every skill, they will vary drastically based on your individual history and they’re not always exactly measurable, but if you were theoretically a character in a video game - you’d have every skill measured out by a progress bar and they would have a ‘time required to achieve’ certain levels. I had a head start with French because I speak English natively and reasonable Portuguese, maybe you have a head start at swimming because you used to surf.

And here’s the thing about time - it isn’t universal, gravity slows time. We know that a clock on the ground floor of a building runs slower than one on the top floor because it’s closer to Earth’s mass. Something I learnt while writing this is that GPS satellites have to account for this and their atomic clocks tick faster than ground-based ones by about 38 microseconds per day. Without correcting for this, GPS would drift by roughly 10km daily. Even physics reaffirms that time is an unreliable narrator for earthly deeds.

I think of time as a well of opportunity that I get to drink out of each day. Each and every day I am so fortunate to be able to allocate this magical substance into the things and the people that I love, knowing that every drop fills my cup closer to its brim.

Perhaps if we treated all time as a currency that we are in control of, we would invest it better and appreciate the accumulative benefits of incremental change. In the internet age we are so programmed to find dopamine in 15 second Tiktoks that the thought of chipping away at hard tasks is difficult to digest.

It reminds me of a great quote: “when nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

We do not appreciate that all our failures are us hammering away at the stone, priming us for future success. This metaphor also doesn’t account for most success not being so viscerally measurable, learning a language is a lifetime commitment with no obvious measurable ending, just as staying healthy or keeping fit. We equate so much of our time as being wasted, but even wasted time serves as a reminder for us to be productive - by means of which the time was no longer wasted.

Life, if lived well, is long enough.

- Jords

The pyramid of choice is one of my favourite analogies to improve understanding of how and why other people see the world very differently than each other. Essentially it's the people who almost decide to live in glass houses that are the ones who tend to throw the first stones.

Our thoughts and opinions are all shaped initially from external sources like our parents, where we grew up, religion etc etc. Overtime we believe that we develop our own opinions on the world, but most of our opinions are rooted in beliefs that we didn’t really create, we simply reinforced over time.

The pyramid of choice shows two people who are initially quite close to a shared reality or a shared opinion, a good example is two students sitting an exam at school. Student #1 is struggling with a question and looks over at the person next to them, after contemplating for a while they decide that it is okay to cheat on this one question because at the end of the day who cares and they begin to justify their action. Student #2 is struggling with the same question and looks to the person next to them, after contemplating for a while and being very close to cheating, they decide that it is not aligned with their values and they decide not to cheat, immediately justifying their decision as important and right.

Our brains require us to be the hero of our own story, so when we do something we begin to self-justify. Part of that self-justification is creating a story of how the people who did the opposite action are bad, stupid and perhaps morally wrong; even though we may have been a coin flip away from doing that ourselves. Student #1 starts to think of student #2 as a stuck-up rule follower who thinks they’re above everyone else. Student #2 thinks that student #1 is a lying cheat who can’t be trusted, they say things to themselves like ‘I could never do that, it really is only for the worst’. This is their way of self-justifying the decision they made, especially if it led to a bad outcome.

Cognitive dissonance is extremely common in our lives because it is extremely common to hold two conflicting ideals at the same time, we are imperfect beings. I can understand minimalism and appreciate it’s values, but also want to buy a new watch. At some point I make an action and require to self-justify why it was right and the other value I could previously appreciate is actually only for people who are different than myself. The goal here is to catch our brains self-justifying and try to ask ourselves whether we are being objective and thinking with our true values, or if we are just trying to self-justify poor behaviour.

Another example is after having wronged someone, we must believe this person is bad and perhaps even deserved it, or maybe they’ve been basically begging for this for years! We see this from business partners falling out, we see this from couples that have had affairs and it’s present in most white lies. If you hold strong thoughts about someone or something, it’s always a good idea to think about why you hold them and if you were ever in their shoes. For the people you don’t like, perhaps you were one day at the top of the pyramid standing next to each other but through a series of self-justifying actions now feel miles apart.

Nowadays when I hear someone’s opinion or even catch myself in thought, I try to imagine the series of things that led them to have that opinion and it becomes much easier to understand. We can’t fight dissonance, but being aware of self-justification can be really helpful to try and stay objective in an extremely bias world.

Sometimes it can be powerful to know that you were wrong, and just be okay with it. We are fallible beings and capable of making errors in judgement, that does not make our counterparties the enemy. Life is complex and frequently doesn’t make sense, but you will be more in control of your feelings towards others and more aware of ‘the other side’ if you are empathetic towards the self-justifications that led them there.

Being more understanding is a superpower and will help in all your relationships. Know that those on the other side are much more like you than they may appear, perhaps they are only a handful of key decision and self-justification loops away from exactly where you stand right now.

If you want to know more about this topic, I suggest reading ‘Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)’ by Carol Tavris.

Thanks for reading

-Jords