why i want to cap my income

for better or worse, most of favorite reading is comes from black feminist women or old white transcendental men. in some ways, this is surprising. in other ways, it’s totally not. go figure. 

anyway, i was instructed to read walden by henry david thoreau a long time ago. although it was long and rambly, one thing has stuck with me: his thoughts on economic needs, work, and time.

essentially, thoreau believed that most people in the world worked too much. he believed that the increased standard of living from working a lot wasn’t even close to worth it. he thought people should figure out exactly what their basic needs were and then work enough to meet them. at that point, they should stop working and actually enjoy life. for him, this came out to working about six weeks a year. he then took the rest to wander around in the woods, travel, and engage in other shenanigans.

when i first understood what he was saying, it literally blew my mind. since then, i’ve realized at several critical moments that his thinking about this lines up with much of my thinking about alternative economies, intentional communities, and enoughness (some of which is catalogued here and here).

needless to say, i have been inspired by his thinking and i’m actively working to integrate it into my life. for me, his thinking translates to me as calculating an income maximum for myself. once i hit that every year (which will include some savings, but not thinking about retirement scale savings), i want to be free to stop doing things that generate income or if i do continue to generate income, i want to be intentional about giving away the excess. if i’m really honest, i’d love to have enough savings in the bank to not work for an entire year (sabbatical). but given that i don’t actually need that much resource to live for a year, i don’t think that’s outlandish.

anyway, here’s another blog post on thoreau’s thinking about income and working hours that includes some actual quotes. good shit.

why i don’t follow people i will likely never meet (including pop stars and movie actors)

for most of my life i have been very clear with myself and with others about intentionally removing pop stars from my sphere of care. not that i don’t care about them as people, but i have little interest in following along in their personal affairs. this baffles many of my friends. they genuinely can’t understand why i still don’t know the difference between leonardo dicaprio and hugh jackman.

i’ve always said that i don’t follow pop stars because i would rather know my neighbors. i would rather save brain space for information about people who personally care about me and whom i care about.

recently, i learned about dunbar’s number (in my post about being over-networked). i also have learned (probably from an episode of onbeing, though i can’t remember which one) that our brains don’t differentiate between digital relationships and face-to-face relationships. finally, i know from personal experience that social media and ubiquitous computing (via cell phones) now allow us to follow the lives of pop stars minute by minute if we want.

all of this to me points to one really terrible conclusion: closely following the lives of pop stars and media figures literally limits the number of intimate connections we can have. our brains actually can’t hold more than a certain number of faces and relationships. for every pop star that someone follows intimately, that’s one less person they can be close with in their actual community.

so now i feel justified in my approach to just not give a fuck about who got married to who in 1998. i don’t want to know the names of that movie star’s kids. i want to save my brain space for people who live in my community (wendell berry style).

oops.

my personal framework for making tough decisions

nothing about this idea is revolutionary, but i still think it’s helpful to share.

back in may, one of the guys i mentor reached out to me. he was struggling with a difficult life decision and wanted some advice. as we talked, he explained that he was alternating between two predicted outcomes of his decision that were both fairly extreme. it become clear to me that he didn’t have a clear understanding of all of the possibilities open to him (just the two extremes). 

to borrow a term from my math days, he didn’t understand his solution set or solution space. in my opinion, it was this lack of awareness of the entire realm of possibility that had him paralyzed. so i shared with him a simple trick i use in moments like that.

find a way to frame the choice as a two way street: either i do X or i do not do X. then, for each path, really think through the best and and worst possible scenarios.  make sure all four options are actually possible. you now have the boundaries of your situation. of course, there are other possibilities, but now you know the limits.

what this often surfaces is that the worst case scenarios are rarely as bad as we perceive them. regardless of which path gets taken, the worst possible thing that could happen usually isn’t that bad. that knowledge then takes a ton of the pressure off of the decision and makes it much easier to just pick something. the

so that’s it. frame the choice. map out best and worst cases. make a decision and then move on it. not complicated, but super helpful.

on creativity, getting outside of your normal, and gamma brain waves

recently, my friend andrew plotsky (of farmrun), tipped me off to a new, incredible podcast called obsessed with design. i just finished the episode with von glitschka and von’s thinking about gamma brain waves has added complexity to my thinking about creativity and flow (i have a few posts about this sort of stuff).

during the show, von described how a book, zing, inspired him to get out of his regular work spaces in order to be more creative. a section in the book talked about how important different physical spaces are in opening up mental space to generate new ideas and get over creators block (it’s like writers block).

then von gave a tedx talk about why ideas are so hard to come up with. his pre-talk research lead him to a paper about brain waves and how ideas are formed. turns out that with gamma waves, which are the highest level of brain function AND are impossible to sustain for long periods of time, are where ideas and creative solutions come from (pardon my shorthand, haha).

von further connected these two points and concluded that this is why successful creatives have varied workspaces. spaces your frequent often create inhibitions and restraint so changing it up is important. it’s also important to be able to stay with the gamma waves for long enough (which requires focus) to allow thoughts and ideas to connect in a meaningful way.

these points just continue to deepen my ‘why i don’t do morning meetings’ thinking. having dedicated, uninterrupted blocks of time to do heavy-thinking work is so critical to me. and i know that sometimes having those blocks of time in new spaces really helps.

von’s gamma brain waves research also lines up with my friend cyndi’s research about how certain types of thinking literally consume more energy (i think she said in the form of glucose). and once you use up the glucose you have on hand/in brain you’re out. it makes sense to me that that production of gamma waves would be resource intensive.

interesting stuff…

hugs

so hugs are a big deal for me. most people in my life know me for my hugs. i commit. really. i used to not think it was a big deal. however, the older i get, the more consistent the feedback is. i’ve even heard that people talk to each other about my hugs.

this post is about a little of the story behind my hugs.

first things first, i definitely owe the origins of my hugs to my hometown youth group community. there’s a long list of mentors who supported us growing up (along the likes of roshad, matt h, marty, davy w, bk, stu, fettig, william c) and hugs were pretty key to some of them. especially roshad. there was nothing like being held by roshad. there was so much love in those hugs.

one of them once told me that men hugging is really important. they hugged us because (1) they knew that some of us had never actually been hugged well by our fathers and (2) sometimes a good hug can keep someone alive (there was a significant amount of suicide in my hometown).

as i got older and starting mentoring other younger guys, i too, started to see the importance of good hugs. it’s ironic that in america’s hyper-sexualized culture, non-sexual, non-romantic touching is essentially taboo. which is unfortunate because good hugs make everyone feel good. interesting, hugging can actually make relationships better (see hugging meditation).

ok, last thing: we used to have a joke about how you could tell how close two people were by the distance between their pelvises when they hugged. sometimes we joked and would hug forever to see who pulled away first. but in the end, many of us made a habit out of committing to really holding each other. it really makes a difference.

so when i hug i commit to really holding and being held AND i commit to as little pelvic distance as my huggee is willing to allow. for a while, i thought i was weird for really hugging people, but now i’m starting to see that maybe it’s a gift.

hm.