Unedited. Will probably clean this up in the future.

I’ve danced with my mortality from a young age (perhaps because I’m deranged), and I think we all encounter our mortality on a regular basis. A car accident. A death in the family. A shocking injury. All of these things becon you to “live like you are dying”. But I think that’s a horrible way to live. What is it about the decisions made by dying people that make them so vastly superior to those made by people who are fully alive? I’m not sure. Minimizing my deathbed regret is not how I will optimize for my living days.

Mortality always comes up when I’m thinking about the future, and that topic (the future) seems to occupy a fair amount of my time. As you grow up you become a better builder: instead of piecing together time segments that are hours of a day, or days of a week, you start to put together projects and trips and experiences that can take years. Tack a few of these together and pretty soon you’ve exhausted the space available. You slam into the finite wall of life. It’s like the grey figure of mortality strolls right into the center of the frame as you try to photograph your perfect life, stares directly into your soul for a brief moment, then walks up to you and shakes you by the shoulders saying “this. is. not. real”.

Of course mortality is no dummy, he’s not talking about reality. “Reality is not real” is a statement that no character of my imagination would dare toss out. No, the statement has more to do with the constructs: experiences, places, jobs, things, ownership. The pieces with which you’d build a perfect life if you chose to build one. I’ll come back to this.

But first: I don’t want to own a house. Mostly because I don’t want to “own” a mortgage. But part of it lies in this same concept. Whenever I tangle with the idea of owning a house, I’m not thinking about how many walls I could knock down without anyone’s permission. The first concept is how long it would take me to pay off such an investment, which inevitably leads to me straight into the finite wall of life, which drops me back into thinking about reality. If ownership is transitory, then how do we draw the distinction to renting? Aren’t we all just borrowers of everything we “own”? What do I earn by adopting a construct that ties me indelibly to a massive, singular point in space?

But if we dump all these artificial constructs that we use to slice and dice and make sense out of life, what are we left with? Well, nothing really. You can’t go on without them because your ability to reason about the world depends on them: they are important. Yet if we can scrape the meat off the bones that hold everything together, I think something stunning emerges.

Life isn’t about experiences or trips, jobs or people, places or sounds. All these things imply arbitrary divisions of space and time that are not intrinsic to the human condition. Life is about moments. But these moments aren’t sunsets and feeding at the soup kitchen or trips to Spain. They’re moments where what you feel inside connects vividly to the world which it attempts to run from most of the time. Maybe it’s that vapid disconnectedness that follows a big deadline, the mania that accompanies a defiance of expectaction, or that tender moment where you relate to another individual on a surreal level. Connectedness.

I live for moments, because moments are the interface between me and everything, and feeling connected to everything makes me love life.

In the world today there are a many voices squealing for your attention and a share of your mind. Ideas live and die through their human hosts and attention spans are growing shorter every year. An idea that could comfortably retire in the minds of a few can’t make ends meet these days. He must slavishly reproduce: continually racing from mouth to ear in hopes that he is not forgotten. And the young ideas do this well, their hustle is admirable. Those with money at their heels or an infectious personality have no trouble surviving in this economy. But the unemployed cannot be conflated with the undeserving. The system is geared against them in the same way that industrialization changed the fates of farmers everywhere. And who would doubt that farming is a noble trade. But under the clouds of ideas outspoken there is a dearth of new sprouts and the death of old trees. And with this shift, our world becomes venue to an unnoticed senicide that risks our most valuable possessions as humans: our accumulated ideas.

There are not many representatives of the unconnected lifestyle on the internet. Save a few homeless people who utilize libraries to update blogs about their adventures, most of the unconnected stay that way. There’s also nothing particularly “viral” about their way of life aside from maybe making do with little or failing to gorge themselves on all that society has to offer. But if this group had a representative, she would be a quiet person with a meek personality. I suspect to meet her you’d need to drive many hours away from town to discuss life as it once was. The encounter would be meaningful, no doubt, but you’d easily leave with the impression that this sort of life is simply not yours to hold for now. Maybe later. And this woman is one of many. The Quiet.

But walk into a grocery store and pan the aisles. Millions of brands, messages, colors, slogans. Not bad things, but certainly loud. On the streets outside, the loudest get to eat. Democracy is about being heard, and part of being heard is heaving a megaphone at every person in earshot. “Without awareness, we will be smothered. Join me in chorus.” The timid and cautious at work get left behind as the risk takers grab the stage. Their entrance is met by applause from the audience who were holding out for a hero the whole time. “Thank goodness he’s come; this man will right our sinking ship.” We enamor ourselves with the self-aggrandizing and make celebrities of the most vain. And to our defense, we certainly don’t leave them without instruction: “Dance. The public eye is also the hand that feeds you.”

And maybe our saving idea is already in our midst. Maybe our champion is loud and we’ve found him and our only task is to cheer him on. Perhaps we’re doing things right after all!

…but I can’t help but wonder if the Quiet Truths are walking home, bored of the bitter fights for attention and unable to rectify themselves with a world that requires they change to be wanted. I’m really not saying that change is bad and progress is our enemy. But I do think the failure we’ve hoisted is a flawed economy of ideas, simply because we have no means to measure our losses and no way to stop the bleeding.

Here’s to hoping our true idea hero hasn’t given up yet, wherever he is.

A lot of people think the key to retirement is savings: packing all those little pennies you find in your budget into an account that grows and grows through compound interest. The real key is to keep your spending from catching up with your salary growth. The temptation is to spend a vast majority of your raises. You shouldn’t do this. If you can somehow keep your hands off that money, you can add years to your retirement. Why? Because pacing yourself is key. Deny yourself now, slow down just 1%, and you’ll gain a couple years on the other end. To illustrate this, pictures! (This is for a single person with a lot of missing factors, but suffice to say the general trend continues whether you’re a family of four or currently homeless).

Look at the increase in years as spending growth tops 4.5%. This is for two reasons: you’re saving less and you’ll expect to spend more in retirement. Nobody is the “I’ll live in a cardboard box” stage straight out of college is predicting that they’ll need a giant house and three cars in twenty years in order to be happy. Moderating this compulsion is key to financial independence (which, I think, it fairly critical to doing good work on this Earth).

You can play with the Excel sheet here. Now, why do we do this? Because the sooner we can free ourselves from the bondage of spending, the sooner we can get around to doing things that we actually want to do. You can do this by foregoing the $20,000 car now or the $400,000 yacht when you’re a millionaire. Both are equally difficult, but one will save you years and years of slavery. People budget, but none of that number dumping and recording actually matters if you’re not doing the central act of saving: not spending.

I think sometimes it’s useful to think of life like a chance encounter in the wilderness with a water fountain that dispenses lemonade. The modern instinct (aside from acting out your awe) is to think of a way to bring it back to civilization, or collect it for use later, or share it with friends, or sell it. The realization that your waterproof hands are no good for carrying liquids can be a bit exasperating. I think the trick is just to drink and drink and do your best to ignore your instincts. It’ll be gone soon, and even taking it in won’t stop that.

Were you to ask “why” repeatedly about anything in your life you would be left speechless. The big picture of the grander scheme of things from 10,000 feet is nothing. Similarly if you look at the details of every facet and iterate repeatedly, getting closer and closer to what you aim to observe, it ceases to exist. Like the blueness of the sky, or a mirage. There is nothing there.

We exist floating between two slices of nothingness, and the challenge is to resist flying off the planet or digging a hole through the floor. As tempting as it is to dismantle the illusion and discover what reality “really is”, our existence within the apparition defies attempts to break free of it. Our life depends on it.

In Western society, the mass of distractions be they advertising or diversions or endless consumption threaten to push us to higher and higher levels of abstraction to stay afloat. We cannot comprehend every detail of our existence so we create layers on top of layers in order to comprehend our world. But as we float higher we are pushed further from the sweetness that is found in the center of simplicity and complex beauty. For some, the momentum of the flood forces them out of reality into a dream world where actions have no real consequence.

• Nature, in the common sense of the term (such as trees and mountains and dirt) is infinitely more complex than human creation. It is the result not of a system the size of a human brain, but of a system the size of the universe. But when nature becomes a commodity on which to build our creations, we are forced to rob it of its inherent beauty in order that we can comprehend it sufficiently to use it.
• Humans are very complicated beings with long histories and a stunning number of facets of personality. But if we are to manage them, they cannot be fully human. A human who has feelings and acts irrationally and desires contradictory goals cannot be modeled well. On the converse, a human unmodelled cannot be truly interacted with without creating the model. Follow without leading.
• Tragedy can be radiant if we allow it full expression. By limiting our investigation of events to a simple balance of positive and negative, the emergent properties must be stripped out. The human condition is defined rather than fluid. The simple answers are blocking us from the richness that they try to hide. Deeper than “this was bad, but it brought people together”. Deeper than bad or good.

The solution is to be less explicit. Not everything has to be conveyed. Save a picture in MS Paint in black and white and you’ll never see it in color again. Traveling between the levels of consciousness (complexity) takes practice, but enables you to see the beauty of brokenness and marvel at the enormity of human history in the same cycle of inhale and exhale.