One maddening tendency of any small electronic device is that whenever the battery is low, it wastes most of its remaining power beeping and flashing to tell you that battery is low.

Similarly, the human body comes with many self-defeating features. For example, whenever you’re low on oxygen, say while trying to recover your electronic device from the bottom of a public pool, the body goes into panic mode, raises the heart rate and burns away what little oxygen you have to work with.

The mind exhibits this kind of foolishness too. In has a cruel habit of misplacing its wisdom whenever you need it most. There are certain truths I really need to remember when I’m in a panicky state, which is exactly the time they are hardest to remember. So you may want to bookmark these gentle reminders, because the next time you’re overwhelmed you will never remember them.

1. The sky has fallen a thousand times already

I can’t count the number of times my world has ended. At least several dozen times in my life I’ve found myself in a situation so tangled and hopeless that I could not believe I would ever be happy again. Somehow, during each of those personal apocalypses, I forget that each of the previous ones somehow worked themselves out and are no longer relevant. Yet in real-time, the current catastrophe always seems to promise the death or at least permanent disfigurement of my entire life, and I crumple into despair and indignation. If only I could remember that almost all of the problems I’ve ever had are currently solved except the two or three most recent developments. This is just the way life moves along. It is my problems that are always marching to the gallows, not me.

I’m sure your sky has fallen many times before too. The overwhelmed mind underestimates the scale of a human life and therefore over-calculates the ultimate importance of any particular problem. Don’t be fooled.

2. Your problems are the same problems human beings have always had

You will never end up finding a way to suffer that hasn’t been fully explored yet. Heartbreak, death of loved ones, sickness and old age, chronic pain, shame, addiction, failure, poverty, and introspective nightmares are all realms that have been braved by people consistently and exhaustively for thousands of years, and to degrees much worse than yours. There are ultimately only a few basic kinds of human trouble, and they’ve all been suffered and confronted before.

Humankind’s vast experience with suffering is an asset to every one of us, because for every classic human problem there is a world of literature about the best ways to deal with it that other humans have found, and it’s never been easier to get access to this wisdom.
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The other day in the office I prepared an email for an outspoken co-worker who sits a few cubicles over. I knew that he’d have follow-up questions for me immediately, and that he wouldn’t bother emailing them — he’d just summon me by calling my name over the cubicles.

I knew he would do this the moment I clicked the send button, because he would see the subject line pop up in a little box on his screen. This sequence was so predictable, so inevitable, that it struck me that the button I was about to push on my mouse might as well have been a button on his brain. Our minds respond so immediately to signals from electronic devices that we’re almost cyborgs already. In the 1980s William Gibson wrote nightmarish books speculating about a future rife with these alarming powers, and now they’re so normal they’re boring.

This hyperconnectedness excites me at least as much as it scares me, though, because it can create amazing turns of fortune. In a similar miracle of brain-to-brain electricity, a single tweet in January caused my whole life to pivot overnight and leave me on a much more empowered course.

Somewhere out in the vast folds of the internet, a blogger I had never heard of discovered a blog I had heard of (because it was my own) and said so on Twitter. This led me to his blog, which proceeded to make my life explode with possibilities and optimism.

The blogger was Mr Money Mustache, who I mention often, and his tweet sparked a neurological renaissance inside me as my brain made new connections between the causes and effects of happiness, money and work. Those landscapes all look very different now because of that tweet. I learned money has more power to create happiness than I suspected, but only if you use it in a completely different way than the typical consumer does.

After that night, instead of buying more needless objects, I put my money in a big, unspent pile, and will now use some of that pile to buy time with which to earn a living outside the jurisdiction of The Man. I gave my notice last week, and as of October 11th I will be working for myself full time.

This means I’ll be making much less for a little while, but I don’t mind that at all, because I become immediately freed from paying the dozens of insidious costs of a steady corporate paycheck — the anti-creative cubicular environment, the dark and fearful mood that descends every Sunday evening, the treadmill of forgettable tasks that have nothing to do with my values, and the attitude of total subordination that’s required to stay employed, to name only a few.

And although they’re not strictly forbidden by living as a fifty-hour-a-week employee, certain pursuits had become a lot more difficult. Since I’m already using my evenings and weekends to run a blog, maintain a few friendships, and keep my home and clothing clean, “electives” like exercising, reading, and conducting creative experiments never find a consistent space to flourish as habits.

With only two weeks of these kinds of constraints left, I’m already feeling some of the fresh breeze from outside the tunnel, and I’m eager to air out some long-suppressed interests. In the spirit of effort-multiplying efficiency advocated by MMM and his frugal cohorts, my first order of business is to use my new-found autonomy to read a hell of a lot more books.

During my years of being an overworked spendthrift, I acquired books at a much higher rate than I actually read them. So I have a surplus of books I’ve been meaning to get around to, and I’m actually making a point of getting around to them.

As much as I loved reading when I found myself doing it, I’ve allowed long stretches of my life to go by without finishing a book. If I’m now going to be answering the question, “What do you do?” with “Writer,” then I ought to be immersing myself in examples of the craft.

For a writer, reading pays triple-time, serving simultaneously as entertainment, self-education, and the refinement of writerly sensibilities, so reading an hour or two a day is now both doable and justifiable. A book a week seems like a good benchmark. It’s ambitious given my track record, but totally achievable — even George W. Bush claimed in his memoir to have read 95 books in a year. So according to my math, if I’m half as smart as the second worst president of all time then I’m almost there.  Read More

Sometime between the day I first photographed Manhattan and the day I wrote about my first uptown naked party, a New York based website called Thought Catalog approached me about reposting some of my articles.

I said yes, and I’ve been contributing material occasionally ever since. TC has a much bigger audience — most of the Eastern Seaboard’s twenty-somethings, I think — and I know many of you found Raptitude by reading Thought Catalog. Some of my pieces hit it bigger there than they ever did here — How to Make Trillions of Dollars made the front page of Reddit, which would have crashed my site if it had linked directly here.

Thought Catalog has an ebook division, and over the last few months I’ve worked with them to assemble a collection of Raptitude articles into a book, called This Will Never Happen Again.

Since very early in this blog’s life, fans have been bugging me to both release a Best-Of compilation and give them a way to read Raptitude articles on their Kindle. The time has come. The book is available now, through both Amazon and Apple iTunes.

This Will Never Happen Again contains revised and repolished versions of classic Raptitude articles, including A Day in the Future, Die on Purpose, and What Love is Not, along with an opening essay and a previously unreleased article called The Bedtime Ritual.

I want to clarify that you do not need a Kindle or e-reader to read it. You can download Amazon’s free Kindle app for your computer or mobile device here. It takes two seconds.

Also, if you like it, please leave a favorable review on Amazon or iTunes.

Thank you, I love you people.

Get the book now. Be reading in less than a minute.

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Photo by David Cain

The city was behaving very strangely while I was out walking Saturday morning. Cars went by too slowly, as if they were stalking me, or someone. Every pedestrian but me seemed to be have a backpack or a large shopping bag, and I knew most of them didn’t live in my neighborhood.

A young woman walked by pushing an empty stroller and the paranoia really started to creep into my muscles. I suddenly became convinced that I was being filmed. A passing Cavalier came to a stop in the middle of the street and sat there for a moment. Whatever was going to happen was about to happen now. Two Middle Eastern men got out, leaving the doors open and the engine running. They trotted into a back alley, and emerged carrying a coffee table.

I had forgotten that it’s Winnipeg’s giveaway weekend, where citizens are encouraged to leave their unwanted home furnishings on the boulevard in front of their houses, for others to pick up if they like. Thrift-minded Winnipeggers hit the streets early Saturday, usually in pairs, to skulk through other people’s neighborhoods at creepy-slow speeds, hoping to find anything that may possibly be useful: worn-out golf bags, folding chairs, tarpaulins, drawerless dressers, dresserless drawers, sander belts, axe handles, maybe even a pair of Shake-Weights or a Jolly Jumper.

I’d intended to put out my items before the foragers left home: a tiny computer desk, a box of low-quality paintball gear, and a particle-board bookshelf. I forgot but knew it would be no problem finding a taker later on. The most important thing not to forget on giveaway weekend is to keep everything you do wish to keep as far as possible from the front boulevard. It’s even dangerous to leave something anywhere in the front yard. Every year careless people lose bikes, lawnmowers and garden gnomes, because anybody could haul it off and, if stopped in the act, make a case that they thought it was free.

Quirks aside, I love that we have giveaway weekends. There’s something beautiful about how it allows an object to regain its lost worthiness, by gaining a new owner. When I did put my items out later in the morning, they were gone before I could return to my desk with my coffee — I had hoped to see their new owners through the window.

The value of everyday household stuff has dwindled noticeably in my lifetime. I remember accompanying my dad, one Summer weekday when I was ten, to a little shop to get the family VCR repaired. Repaired! Can you imagine that? There were people running a profitable business fixing small appliances — toasters, coffee makers and Video Cassette Recorders — because even a few decades ago there was an expectation of lasting value in these things. Today we typically bury malfunctioning electronic devices in the ground and buy new ones. It’s possible that there will be a time when children are surprised to hear their parents used to have their cars fixed too.  Read More

In the opening months of 2000, NBC Universal launched Oxygen, a new cable channel aimed at women. At the time, it aired a lot of syndicated reruns of television shows with female leads, such as Kate & Allie and Cybill, but also a lot of original programming.

Robin Epstein, a New York based writer, got a job as the head writer of one of those original shows. It was a quiz show called Clued In, in which the contestants were schoolgoing teenage girls.

She loved the idea of young women demonstrating to the world that they were knowledgeable, intelligent people, defying the stereotype of the ditzy teen girl. Part of her job was to write the questions the contestants would have to answer.

Epstein had heard about research suggesting that until the age of about eleven, girls and boys exhibit about the same inclination to raise their hands in class and answer the teacher’s questions. At age twelve or thirteen, girls tend to show a dramatic decrease in classroom studiousness. There was nothing to indicate that girls were less intelligent than boys, but it almost seems as if girls, at pre-teen age, begin to focus on not appearing smart or keen.

It was controversial view, and Epstein wanted to prove it wrong on national television.

That is not what happened. When the show aired, the questions weren’t particularly difficult for their grade levels, but the girls were getting very few of them right. This was very discouraging to Epstein — she felt that not only was she failing to show that these girls were as smart as anyone, but she was making them look dumb.

More of this story, and clips of the show itself, can be heard here on the long-running radio show This American Life. Host Ira Glass asks what she did when she realized the girls couldn’t answer most of the questions.

“You dumb down the questions,” Epstein said. “You give them things that anyone — anyone of any age, any mental capacity — could possibly answer.”  Read More

I’ve been writing down my thoughts my whole life, although they were never very organized until recently. Often I’d write down an epiphany I had, in the middle of my science notebook or in the margins of a handout, unsure if I would still find it profound later.

I was always afraid of people finding these thoughts, I guess because then they’d know whether I was smart or just thought I was smart. So I’d put them in quotes, and attribute them to a fake name, circa a fake date. If anyone found it at least it would look like it wasn’t my thought. If an entry struck me as especially profound I might attribute it to a real person who was known for being smart. Oscar Wilde or the Dalai Lama.

This secretiveness was a persistent theme all the way through childhood and into my twenties. It gave me a sense of control over how others saw me. I was embarrassed to want certain things. I was embarrassed for other people’s desires. I felt like people’s wants should be extremely private because they reveal so much, and so I didn’t want to let other people in on mine. I didn’t want other people to know what was motivating me at any particular moment.

My parents were always sensitive to my sensitivities, even though I had a hard time being candid with them about my intentions and motivations. If I was dealing with something tough they’d always be willing to sit down at the dinner table with me and help think up solutions. But I hated hearing their advice, because they thought of my problem very logically and I knew they were right. The answers to my problems were always simpler than I wanted them to be.

More than any other aspect of life, I found the job-hunting process demeaning and embarrassing. The prospect of pavement-pounding alone always overwhelmed me, and so I sought the wisdom of my parents. Job hunting had always made me feel like a beggar. I hated asking people with jobs to give me a job. My Dad’s suggested approach was rational — decide how many businesses to apply at every day, then go do that every day until you have a job. It’s simple and it will inevitably put an end to your problem.

The thought of actually doing this terrified me though, as it almost guaranteed the occasional moment of stark embarrassment that I would do anything to avoid. So my approach always involved sidling around the most challenging part, and trying to land a job with emails and job websites. This isn’t very effective and made the problem last months instead of weeks, creating many times more pain than necessary, even though the whole reason I was doing it that way was because I wanted to avoid pain.

This is a theme I keep noticing in life. My problems are always simpler in the eyes of others, just like other people’s problems seem simpler to me than they make them out to be. If a friend came to me today with a dilemma and he didn’t know what to do, I’d have no problem telling him “What I’d do.”

Strangely, it’s almost always obvious what others should do, and less obvious what we should do ourselves. I’ve become increasingly aware of this phenomenon, both on the giving end and receiving end of advice.

The question is, who’s mistaken? Is it that others are always oversimplifying your problems, or is it that you’re always overcomplicating them?

I think there is, almost always, at least a bit of both going on. But I know that in my case, I’m normally the one with the more distorted view of my problem and I’d bet most people are that way too. It’s easier to be rational about other people’s problems than your own, because you’re much less emotionally invested in other people’s problems, so you can stay more rational about it.  Read More

Just before diving into East of Eden, Lily absorbed a novel of almost the opposite kind — short, contemporary, overstated — unclassic in every way. She really liked it and wanted me to read it.

Unlike most people, I put down most books I start. There are a million books to read, and I don’t know why people force themselves to finish books they are no longer enjoying. Lily knows I do this with a hair trigger, and she wanted to make sure I gave this novel a fair effort, giving it time to grow on me before I passed judgment on its jokey tone.

“You have to wear a certain hat when you read it,” she said. “Your board-game-playing geek hat.”

I did, and when I began I could see why she said that. It’s called Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Every character is a caricature. The prose was a little too up-to-date for my normal tastes: repeated references to tweeting and industrious ex-Googlers — one character is reading the Steve Jobs biography that was released shortly after his death. Copyright 2012.

I made sure I was wearing a somewhat silly hat for the first thirty pages or so, and I’m too hooked on the story to put it down now. But I did need to make a conscious effort to get into a not-so-serious headspace when I began, or I might have jumped to something else.

The metaphor of putting on a particular hat to approach a particular endeavor is as old as any. They typically correspond to archetypes or professions — you can put on your stoic laborer’s hat before tackling some yardwork, your monk’s hat as you sit down to meditate, or your scholar’s hat before sitting down to study for an exam. But there’s no definite category of qualities that can be represented in a “hat.”

While eating salad on Lily’s balcony one evening last week, we talked about how she’d used different hats — the proverbial type — as a way of deciding what tone of thought to bring to a particular situation, with the idea of becoming more conscious of where her head is right now. When she’s feeling down, for example, she deliberately puts on her mopey, self-pity hat, and suddenly the whole episode seems more ridiculous than serious. Hats help us see where we’re coming from, or where we ought to be coming from.  Read More