Writer. Illustrator. Storyteller. Author of The Inner Compass: geni.us/innercompass
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Today's the day! My book, The Inner Compass, is now available.
We live in a world where we listen to everybody but ourselves. This book is about building conviction in your own voice, despite the doubts and fears.
I'm so excited to share it with you: amazon.com/dp/B0FGDJBR7T
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"Money is the great everything and the great nothing."
How do we internalize this contradiction? How do we accept the inevitability of money, while also recognizing its pointlessness?
These are some big questions. Here’s my attempt to answer them: moretothat.com/the-nothingne…
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This is my once-every-few-months reminder for folks to remember this @morganhousel piece. Still one of the best stories I've read in the past few years.
Read it and hug your loved ones extra tight this holiday season. collaborativefund.com/blog/t…
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Why alcohol is a feature of social gatherings:
Whenever you interact with someone, a gap emerges between who you are, and who you are presenting.
This is why the person you are with your boss isn’t the same as the person on the couch watching Netflix. Or why the person you are with your best friend isn’t the same as the person you are with an acquaintance.
Each relationship contains a culture of behavior that you oscillate between, which means that you’re constantly presenting a different version of yourself across a wide range of interactions.
What this means is that it becomes increasingly difficult to know who you really are. If a certain version of you emerges with this individual, but in the very next moment you toggle another set of behaviors with another, then that means your very identity is switching upon context. And the more you have to maneuver between various projections of yourself, the more difficult it becomes to get a handle on what "yourself" means in the first place.
This is why you’re likely exhausted after large social gatherings, and yearn to turn on the TV and watch something brainless until you drift off to sleep. The fatigue is not caused by the rigor in which your mouth is moving to talk, but rather by the constant switching of identity that occurs in these situations.
It’s no surprise that alcohol is a feature of these gatherings, given that it helps to merge your identity into one unit for the duration of the night. Confidence is nothing more than the assertion that you know yourself, and alcohol helps do this at the expense of clarity.
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Why reading is an antidote to loneliness:
Loneliness isn’t the absence of people, it’s the absence of curiosity. As an avid reader, I come into contact with this realization all the time.
The very act of reading is a vote for solitude, as it’s one of the rare mediums where you have to be fully present to interact with the material. It’s just you, the book, and wherever you’ve chosen to read it. Having friends and people around is not a feature of the experience.
Yet amidst this absence of people, you don’t feel lonely. If anything, you feel like you’re in the company of someone you care for, deeply engaged in whatever they have to say. That’s because the act of reading is also a vote for curiosity, where you allow the musings of another to come in contact with your worldview. You’re welcoming the author into your intellectual home, providing them with the opportunity to share everything they know.
That’s why I believe that reading is one of the antidotes to loneliness. You don’t need the physical presence of a person to feel the warmth of their ideas, as your curiosity for those ideas is usually enough. And as long as you can retain this curiosity for the thoughts of another, the fog of loneliness won’t have the ability to touch the shores of your mind.
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"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays." — Kierkegaard
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Why reading is an antidote to loneliness:
Loneliness isn’t the absence of people, it’s the absence of curiosity. As an avid reader, I come into contact with this realization all the time.
The very act of reading is a vote for solitude, as it’s one of the rare mediums where you have to be fully present to interact with the material. It’s just you, the book, and wherever you’ve chosen to read it. Having friends and people around is not a feature of the experience.
Yet amidst this absence of people, you don’t feel lonely. If anything, you feel like you’re in the company of someone you care for, deeply engaged in whatever they have to say. That’s because the act of reading is also a vote for curiosity, where you allow the musings of another to come in contact with your worldview. You’re welcoming the author into your intellectual home, providing them with the opportunity to share everything they know.
That’s why I believe that reading is one of the antidotes to loneliness. You don’t need the physical presence of a person to feel the warmth of their ideas, as your curiosity for those ideas is usually enough. And as long as you can retain this curiosity for the thoughts of another, the fog of loneliness won’t have the ability to touch the shores of your mind.
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Announcement!
I wrote a book, and it's coming out on July 8th.
It's called The Inner Compass, and it's about trusting your intuition in a world that makes you doubt it.
I'm so excited to share it with you.
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We often view work as the thing that allows play.
We work hard to cultivate the resources needed to afford freedom of mind. If anything, this is the default setting we operate on.
But perhaps we’ve gotten it all wrong.
The other day, I was playing with my daughter, and we were both having the greatest gigglefest ever. It may have just been 15 minutes, but I wouldn’t know because the very concept of a minute was nonsensical. It was just me, her, and an array of stuffed animals that were co-existing outside the bounds of time.
I thought about this, and it made me wonder if we actually have everything in reverse.
What if play is what life is really all about, and work is just a big illusion that we’ve fallen under?
At what point did we start tying self-worth to the work we produce, instead of tying it to the joy we share with the people we love?
We try to bridge the gap by telling people to do work that feels like play, but that advice still puts work first. Play for its own sake has been suppressed, and I want to do a better job surfacing it once again.
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"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays." — Kierkegaard
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Beware of the time trap of productivity:
Burnout is often associated with working too much, but the real reason it happens is because you have defined yourself by what you produce.
It’s not just the exertion of energy spent during your working hours, but the exertion of thought spent when you're not working.
It lives in the moment where you’re physically with your family, but mentally planning out what you need to do next. Or when you keep looking at the time when you should just be enjoying lunch.
One thing we often forget is that our measurement of time is a mere tool. We have minutes, hours, days, and so forth because they help us plan when to meet, work, and rest. We categorized time in this way to have it serve us.
But in a culture so focused on managing time, we have become subservient to it. By scheduling your day down to the last minute, you introduce an anxiety from managing your real-time progress to an imagined vision. Each glance at the clock fires off a thought about whether your day is going like it’s supposed to, or if you’re falling behind.
This is a mind that always views the present through the lens of past and future, and can never be anchored in the “now.”
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