chris michel – @habits

Oldie and goodie: “there is real joy and meaning to be found outside the secular system of wealth, status and eternal youth”

An article I re-read time to time, Chris Michel’s The Puzzle (which I’m adding to my personal bible). Some excerpts below:

I’ve spent sweltering afternoons in monasteries, sheltered in the high Himalayas, zodiacked around Antarctic Icebergs, cruised at the edge of Space, wandered among remote South Pacific tribes, ridden through endless tea plantations, worked the fishing lines in Indonesia, and cried at more than one sunrise. I’ve seen and experienced more than I deserve, hoping that somewhere along the way, I’d find myself. What self-respecting explorer communes with Buddhist Monks at the foot of Everest and doesn’t have a spiritual awakening? In the movies: none.

I know that there is real joy and meaning to be found outside the secular system of wealth, status and eternal youth. It’s not our fault; it’s our programming. But the answers can’t be found in accumulating more. You knew that already.

Go read it!

Craving, desire, and attachment are the sources of suffering

buddha-under-tree

I’ve seen more dissatisfied 20 something’s in SoHo than their counterparts in rural Jodhpur. I know that there is real joy and meaning to be found outside the secular system of wealth, status and eternal youth. It’s not our fault; it’s our programming. But the answers can’t be found in accumulating more. You knew that already. – Chris Michel, The Puzzle

I read The Puzzle at least once a quarter. And I’ve saved quotes from it to my Personal Bible (an evolving ebook collection of my favorite writings and life advice).

From philosophers to grandparents, we’ve heard them countless times. But, hearing something isn’t quite the same as observing it. I won’t bore you with specifics. Suffice it to say, I think the Buddha had it right when he said craving, desire and attachment are the sources of suffering.

I don’t think you can fully remove craving, desire, and attachment from your life. I crave Ichiran ramen in Tokyo. I desire alone time to read books on my Kindle. And I’m attached to my iPhone and that glow of unread messages and new notifications.

We are animals, and animals have emotions. We can no more remove emotion than we can become computers. No one makes real life decisions purely, or even mostly, through logic.

But Buddha knows all this. Of course he does. I don’t think Buddha’s point is that we must eliminate craving, desire, and attachment. He knows it’s not possible. I think he just wants us to become aware of this truth. To treat it like a natural law, like gravity and the sun rising in the east. And, once we acknowledge this wisdom, there seem to be two paths which we can follow. On closer inspection, however, they both lead to the same destination:

Path one is to want less if we wish to suffer less. The fewer objects we crave, the fewer people we attach to, the less moments of pain we will endure. Similar to stoics & ascetics, monks & nuns, we slowly remove and eliminate and detach ourselves from the world. With time and patience and meditation, we stop feeling pain. We stop suffering.

Path two is more complicated. Maybe we’re ok with suffering. Maybe we want a lover or a dream job so bad that we’ll gladly take the pain. And for Buddha, that’s ok too. He just wants you to understand them, to understand yourself. Because as you recognize and unravel the nature of your cravings and desires, you will learn to let them go. You will see them for the temporary, silly flights that they are.

You will see that it’s not the world which causes you to suffer, but yourself.

And that is his ultimate point.

PS I’m writing a book I call The Soul Habit, about how anyone (everyone!) should study religion as a source of wisdom, self-help, life advice. More details here.

Amazing Media – 10 recommended readings

Recently I’ve begun saving and annotating my favorite blog posts, articles, videos, etc. Here’s the page where I’ll add new stuff (and old stuff, re-discovered).

I’ve learned that the value of great media is not the first time you consume it, but re-absorbing and re-experiencing it over time (and doing so mindfully).

98% of what we consume is crap – shouldn’t we treasure the 2%? You don’t see tennis players practice a new forehand once and just walk away. And there’s a reason why organized religions have ONE TEXT that they read, re-read, and re-re-read.

Here are 10 of my favorites:

It’s Not About You: The Truth About Social Media Marketing by Tim O’Reilly (LinkedIn) – the most effective social media marketing is creating tools and content to help communities achieve their goals. Snippet: Your job, in short, is to uncover and activate latent social networks and interest groups by helping them to reach their own goals.
The Dividing Line (Max Cho) – simple yet profound. If anyone is curious what Jeff Bezos is thinking…
10 Charts About Sex (OkCupid blog) – people are fascinating. Sex is fascinating. People’s sex habits, man! Snippet: Curvy women pass skinny ones in self-confidence at age 29 and never look back. They also consistently have the highest sex drive among the groups. Curvy, as a word, has the strongest sensual overtones of all our self-descriptions. So we’re getting a little insight into the real-world implications of a label.
Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. “Hacking” by Paul Buchheit (Blogspot) – great and simple explanation of a valuable outlook on life and work. Although as important is WHAT you work on – problem choice is as important as the HOW. Snippet: Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the truth, and discover the actual rules of a system. Once the actual rules are known, it may be possible to perform “miracles” — things which violate the perceived rules.
The Puzzle by Christopher Michel (Explorers.com) – beautiful and profound piece by Chris Michel on travel and by extension, life. Snippet: But the answers can’t be found in accumulating more. You knew that already. Well, so did I, but I’m not sure I really believed it. I do now. Happiness is reality minus expectations. And Americans, in particular, have some pretty high expectations. You do the math.
That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger (NYT.com) – fascinating reporting on Jure Robic, one of the world’s greatest ultra-endurance athletes. Snippet: The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback.
33 Animals Who Are Extremely Disappointed In You (Buzzfeed) – hilarious photos
What Is Your Biggest Secret Desire That You Are Ashamed Of Telling Anyone? Reddit – love reddit for precisely these sorts of half-crazy, half-brutally honest windows into human psychology. The top vote-getter: In the middle of the night, I would pack one bag and drive away from my life. Not look back for one second and drive clear across the country. Find a small, rural town and just rebuild where nobody has an idea of who I am.
Cities and Ambition by Paul Graham (PaulGraham.com) – a personal favorite among PG’s non-startup essays. Snippet: How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. […] Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.
George Orwell: Why I Write (Orwell.ru) – Snippet: And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.