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