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December 2015

tree through roof

Raptitude’s birthday is March 15th 2009, but it was conceived in the last days of 2008. My job was extremely slow and I was aching for both a new hobby and new career, and ultimately I found both.

The central idea at the time was to do self-improvement experiments, and I did, but those later became secondary to my essays about the human experience.

I have a strange relationship to my experiments. They are many readers’ favorite part of this site but they’ve never been mine. I’ve done 21 over the last seven years, and about half the time they founder to one degree or another—I attempt to do some new habit for 30 days, get sick of it and throw up my hands or limp to the end. I do always learn something however—about my habits, my motivations, my values—that helps me find a more sensible place in my life for the activity in question.

People are always asking where I am with a particular experiment, so for the last post of 2015 I’m going to update you on all of them, right from the start, even the disasters. I hope you enjoy it, and maybe consider doing an experiment of your own this coming year. Read More

Post image for Camp Calm

The end of the year has a certain weary energy. All months have their own feel, and December’s is an exotic combination between the bustle and congestion of the holiday season, and the blank check of a whole new year lying just past it.

Somehow we’re only two weeks from the ball-drop, and it’s time to start thinking about what you want this next year—your 35th, your 19th, your 68th, whatever it is—to be like.

I’m generally skeptical of New Year’s Resolutions, not because the New Year is a bad time to improve ourselves, but because a once-uttered promise to ourselves doesn’t really change how we live. We need new, well-defined behaviors, applied consistently for at least three or four weeks, to give us a dependable chance at lasting changes.

In other words, it’s regimens, not resolutions, that create those dramatic improvements we dream about every December.  Read More

kitchen window

If you could somehow go back and review your life, the way athletes study game film, you’d notice a particular trait shared by all the moments in which you felt content.

Everyone knows the type of moment where everything is fine and nothing is missing. Often there’s nothing especially noteworthy happening. Standing on the porch as the rain turns from drizzle to downpour. Folding laundry on a sunlit bed. Making a sandwich in a hostel kitchen.

When you’re experiencing contentment like that, sensory details seem significant and beautiful. At a concert, you might be absorbed by the violet light and the bass notes in your chest. In the hostel kitchen, it’s the sun in the frosted window pane and the voices of the Dutch couple in the next room. For all their ordinariness, these scenes seem complete and feel satisfying.

In these moments—in all of our best moments—time is gone. It’s just not important, or even perceptible.

And I don’t think it’s just a matter of losing track of time. It’s just not included. Time is something we add to the present, an idea we map onto our actual direct experience of the world.

We had to invent time, at some point. Clearly we evolved from animals that had no concept of past or future. Life, to them, consisted only of what was happening. Gradually, they began to benefit from impulses that took advantage of the fact that conditions change—fattening up as the weather gets cooler, hunting more when the moon is bright. But they didn’t impose any math onto their experience. They certainly didn’t see a given sunrise-to-sunset experience as numbered rectangle on a grid.    Read More

solo musician

Lots of people ask me about getting over shyness, so I’ll tell you what I know. I’ll never be a center-of-attention type, but over the past decade I’ve gone from being too timid to even order food over the phone, to feeling like I’m the more assured one most of the time when I meet someone new. I believe this kind of transformation is possible for just about anyone.

Being shy and being an introvert are often conflated, so we should clarify the difference. An introvert is someone who is stimulated by the inner world of thoughts and feelings more than they are by external events. I am an introvert, and you probably are too—this blog has always been focused on that inner side of life.

Shyness is a self-reinforcing nervousness around people, especially people you don’t know. I don’t believe anybody actually likes being shy. Being reserved is one thing—I’ll always be a happily reserved person—but shyness is not a pleasant quality to bear. It’s a form of chronic pain.

Most people experience it to some extent, maybe only in certain situations. But for some people it is a pervasive, self-defining feeling. These examples from an older post may sound familiar:  Read More

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