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