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My mother’s linen closet door is covered in drawings made by her grandchildren. This gallery is always in rotation, and the subject matter of the artwork changes as the kids age — trucks, sharks, unicorns, skyscrapers.

For a while there was a felt pen drawing of a group of stick figures, all playing with oversized fidget spinners. I presume this picture was drawn in 2017, because the rise and fall of the fidget spinner trend happened almost entirely within that calendar year.

Google search popularity of fidget spinners in 2017: Wikipedia

Over 200 million of the things were sold, making it a nearly one-billion-dollar industry that came and went quicker than the original run of Twin Peaks.

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Post image for How to Become Wise

On Twitter the other day someone asked why he should continue to experiment with mindfulness meditation — specifically, what does it do for you when you’re not meditating?

Others and I gave the usual replies: you don’t get stuck in rumination as easily, you better appreciate the ordinary sensations that make up life, and it helps you suffer less over your pains and get less addicted to your pleasures. It seems to shift your natural inclination towards healthy behaviors, and away from unhealthy/self-defeating behaviors.

However, saying all that doesn’t clarify why mindfulness meditation might do those things. Does closely observing the flow of your experience just make you a better person somehow?

I would say… yes, probably. A wiser person, at least. Meditation makes you wise, and wisdom makes better ways of living feel more natural, and worse ways feel less natural.

But how? Reflecting later on how my response didn’t answer the poster’s real question, I thought of an analogy that might do a better job.

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Imagine you’re having a hard day, and you get home to find that someone has left dinner for you. It’s exactly what you wanted. Lasagne! Or maybe green curry, or tacos.

What good fortune. Some thoughtful person predicted that you might want a meal right right about now, and made sure you had one.

Of course, this thoughtful benefactor could be you, just earlier. Last night, your past self recognized the value a ready-made meal would have for tomorrow’s after-work self, so he left one for you in the fridge.

Now imagine that your past self didn’t only prepare a meal for you last night, but wrote a book a few years ago. Not only do you have dinner waiting for you, but you also receive royalty payments, enjoy increased clout in your industry, and have the skills and confidence to write more books. You’ve inherited much more than dinner from your forward-thinking past self.

Perhaps your past self earned a degree or certification, which got you the job that elevated you beyond paycheck-to-paycheck existence. Maybe she figured out WordPress one weekend, and started a restaurant review site that now has thousands of followers. Maybe she finally read T.S. Eliot’s poems after thinking about it for years, and it precipitated your first genuine spiritual connection with ordinary life, which you’ve felt all of your days since. Maybe she did all of those things.

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People who know they’re serious procrastinators should always have a “nuclear option” at their disposal.

By that I mean a button, a switch, a no-turning-back phone call that will put into motion an unstoppable force capable of smashing through your usual hesitations when nothing else works. You definitely want one of these buttons, and it’s easy enough to set up.

If I can’t bring myself to get around to an important task, such as filing a tax thing or making a doctor’s appointment, I invoke my nuclear option: I give my best friend three hundred dollars in cash and tell her to spend it if I don’t prove to her that I’ve done the thing by a certain date and time.

This sets into motion several unstoppable forces that make the outcome inevitable:

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In all my years of school I never studied. Chapters from the textbook were assigned regularly, but I didn’t feel like I could read them. I didn’t know how to stay interested enough to absorb any knowledge from them.

Studying, for me, amounted to looking up bolded words in the glossary and trying to remember what the teacher had been talking about when she said, “This will be on the test.”

I was well aware that studying is a normal thing people do, an obvious and straightforward solution to school’s challenges, just as washing the dishes in soapy water is an obvious solution to having an unsightly pile of dishes in the sink. Whenever I sought instruction on how to study, however, it was assumed that one could simply read a textbook when necessary, and I could not explain why I couldn’t do that.

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Post image for Don’t Forget to Swim Now and Then

Imagine a world like ours, except that it’s fish that became the most intelligent creature. Somehow they learned to harness tools and technology, and built a fish civilization as advanced as our own.

In this world, fish travel between sea, air, and land with ease, using little hover vehicles. Their technology allows them to have fish cities, complex fish politics and fish economies, fish entertainment, fish fashion, fish philosophy, and fish science.

Modern fish are able to live lives their premodern fish ancestors couldn’t have imagined. They can be accountants and bus drivers and FR managers. They can even live in places where there’s barely any water — they just import food and water from the ocean, or ocean-like farms.

It’s been millennia since fish had to subsist by living in the open ocean, dodging sharks while cruising for food. Entire fish empires have risen and fallen since that time, and now only a few rare hobbyists, like the guy on the TV show Survivorfish, have any ability to survive on their own in the wild.

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Post image for Getting Better at Being Human

In biology class, you learn that every life form adopts a niche: a little role in some corner of the ecosystem, where it earns its daily bread by doing a rather specific thing.    

For example, the dung beetle collects animal poo, presumably because nobody else was already doing that, then rolls it into balls and lays its eggs inside of them, giving its larvae a handy source of nutrients.

The beaver gnaws at trees until they fall over, then drags the logs into piles. These piles dam streams and rivers, creating artificial ponds, which hide the beavers from predators and expand their access to food.

Squirrels, being better climbers than mice, once fed themselves by collecting seeds from hard-to-reach branches, and now specialize in stealing cherry tomatoes from my garden.

In blogging school, you learn the same principle: every little blog trying to make its way in the vast content ocean must establish itself in a niche. It needs to stake out a little corner of the action, a little field it can work, so to speak.

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Post image for How Does the Room Sound Right Now?

Thousands of books have been written attempting to point people to the difference between mindfulness and “paying attention” as we normally do. I’ve read a lot of these books, and even written a few.

There are simpler ways to get at the concept though.

If you want to grasp what is usually meant by the word mindfulness*, all you need to do is to find the answer to a simple question: how does the room sound right now?

By “the room” I really just mean wherever you are. You could be in a room, or outside, or in a stadium, in a cave, scuba diving among coral reefs, whatever. The point is there’s always something to hear, wherever you are.

If you wanted to know how the room sounds, how would you get the answer to that question?

Well, you’d listen to it.

Try it now. Find out how the room sounds. Take a good twenty seconds to inquire, by listening.

. . .

So how does it sound?

You might say, “Well I hear the laptop fan whirring, I hear a large vehicle rumbling around out there, maybe a garbage truck. There are some distant voices, and also some pigeons warbling out on the eavestrough. I can even hear my breath escaping my nose at times.”

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Post image for How to Think About Politics Without Going Insane

The first thing every human learns about politics is that there are things you can say that will make people hate you, and things you can say that will make people approve of you.

What those things are depend on the beliefs of the people around you, which depend mostly on where and when you grow up. Say aloud that you think thieves should go to jail forever, and in some places your peers will agree with you and make you feel good and normal, and in other places they will call you a horrible person and whisper about you at the other lunch table.

The same thing happens with every politically-tinged belief you utter, even before you even know politics is a thing. If you suggest that hunting for sport is wrong, visible tattoos are a reckless life choice, conscientious people don’t drive SUVs, or church teaches people to live moral lives, you’ll get either approval or pushback, depending on who’s around.

You learn quickly what the others want to hear and what they don’t, ingraining within you a sense that some of your thoughts make you worthy of acceptance, and some make you contemptible.

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Post image for 10 Things I Want to Communicate to the Human Species Before I Die

We all have our causes. Henry Heimlich was determined to teach the world that you can save a choking victim with abdominal thrusts. I want to convince the world to eat unseasoned vegetables, help irksome strangers, and do eccentric thought exercises.

. . . and many other things. Here are ten insights I feel a need to impress on the world somehow.

Take my pleadings as seriously as you like. I’ve written in greater detail about some of these points already, and will elaborate on the others eventually.

1. Your shopping cart doesn’t need to go wherever you go.

This is a minor point, but most people don’t seem to know this. You do not have to wheel your cart right up to every item you want to buy at the grocery store. The cart is a bin with wheels, not a car. If there’s any appreciable cart traffic, you can park it in an out of the way place, then fetch any nearby items much quicker on foot. It’s seldom necessary to navigate a two hundred pound cargo bin down an aisle choked with other carts, just because a few items on your list are in that aisle. Gather on foot, move around the store with the cart. This method ensures you never need to block anyone from accessing anything or passing by, and will almost never have to wait behind someone else who is doing that. Treat the cart like a mothership rather than a truck.

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