76 Years Old, WTF--a retrospective

So here it is, another year of life behind me, and another year of life in front of me. And what a year this has been! And what a year ahead!

And here I am. 76 years old. WTF.

Six years ago, in the first post I wrote I said:

And I still think that. When I wrote that post, I had some ambitions:

Looking back

So how’s it going?

My birthday is close to the new year, so I can use Blogger’s Archive widget to tell me that I wrote a record number of posts in 2018—107, so far, versus 89 in 2016, my previous best year. I wrote 21 in November, my best month this year, probably ever, due in part to my High productivity blogging workflow. Nope. That didn’t work. It was this or this or this. Nope. Maybe it’s fallout from The Stoic Challenge.

More likely it’s the result of a lot of work over a long time. For my benefit (and for the further benefit of Future Me) here is my accounting.

Changes

I’ll start with this post: Thank you, Past Me. Thank you random stranger

I wrote that in June 2017 and it’s an inflection point. Even though I was happy about my life, I resented the fact that I had not done more. I blamed that on my past self. “Fuck you, Past Self, you lazy fuck.” And I was unwilling to work hard to make things better because “Fuck you, Future Self. What have you ever done for me?”

That posts marked a change. Instead of resenting Past Self for what was missing, I was grateful for what Past Self had given me. Instead of selfishly refusing to make sacrifices that would benefit my Future Self and not me, I decided to “pay it forward,” My life themes changed from resentment to gratitude and from selfishness to generosity—just like that.

In 2017 I discovered David Deutsch who crystalized my view of the world and my purpose in life. My job is knowledge creation. I’d determined that earlier, but he made it more evident. And he defined knowledge: it’s information that the environment causes to persist. Knowledge does not require a knower. The goal of knowledge creation is the development of good explanations, not just facts. I wrote my first post about Deutsch here. David Deutsch — reading and viewing 1 of several.

To get the rest of the trajectory right, I need to go back to 2015 when I read Sam Harris’ book, Waking Up. That renewed my desire to understand the nature of my mind and to see through the illusions of reality. Harris inspired me, but it has taken a long time to turn that inspiration into consistent action.

In 2015 I started working with an Internal Family Systems therapist. I wrote about it here. I learned about IFS from a Great Courses course that I wrote about here.

At the beginning of 2018, I read Get out of your head and into your life. That book helped me understand why so much of what I’d tried to do to self-improve had been a failure—and an inevitable failure at that. The book gave me profound insight into the nature of my own suffering. It linked the Buddhist idea of suffering and the psychological concepts I had been studying and using.

That and some work with another personal coach brought me to realize that I had been fooling myself about my commitment to self-improvement. In Whatever it takes I acknowledged that I was more committed to seeming to want to improve myself than to actually doing the work.

Around August 2018 I got turned on to Jordan Peterson (h/t Daniel). By the time I wrote Jordan Peterson on the rise of the new media) I’d listened to hours of his university lectures on personality; to interviews; to other talks; and parts of his Bible series. I bought and started to read 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. He’s been a significant contributor to my evolution.

Peterson talks about suffering and the inevitability of death. And he talks about the solution: get your shit together, take responsibility, sacrifice to make the world a better place.

In September I wrote Mortality 101 and started to think seriously about my inevitable and not-too-distant death. I thought about what to do with the rest of my precious and miraculous life. And I continued in What matters?).

I’d encountered Ryan Holliday and subscribed to a monthly newsletter he writes with his book recommendations. In October he announced a “30-Day Stoic Challenge.” I paid $30 to get an email a day with a challenging exercise based on the Stoic philosophers. I wrote about it in November in The Stoic challenge: doing your job. That was another inflection point. I’d already cultivated some of the habits that Holliday recommended—early wake-ups, cold showers, fasting, and facing my inevitable death. I realized that Stoicism was a philosophical framework I’d been slowly building for myself.

Sam Harris came out with his “Waking Up Course” on Android. Because I’d been a subscriber—first on Patreon and later through his site. As a result, I got a free subscription. Lucky me. I might otherwise have been too stupid to pay for a subscription. I wrote about it in Waking up with my personal coach.

The course was what I need to finally get into a regular meditation practice. I finished the first 50 lessons, ten minutes each in about 51 days. Since then I’ve been doing the ten minute guided meditations he releases each day.

Then I discovered “The Mind Illuminated” which I wrote about here. My daily routine now begins with a 10 minute Sam Harris guided meditation, followed by a twenty-minute meditation, TMI style.

Today

Six years and this is the first time I’ve looked back over what I’ve written and how I’ve changed. Really? Six years of writing and barely ever a backward glance.

From time to time I’ve linked to a post that I’d written earlier, but I’ve rarely taken time to read what I’ve linked to. That had changed by the time I wrote Waking up with my personal coach and looked up a whole series of posts I’d written about self-awareness.

And now

And now?

Now, thank you so much, Past Mes!

I am so grateful to every one of you who took the time to leave something behind, something that I might use.

I am grateful for every post on the path that I’ve outlined. And I’m also grateful for many the discoveries that I have not written about. I know that within the posts that I’ve cited that there are details—bits of valuable knowledge that many of you discovered before you died. And I pledge that you will not have toiled and suffered in vain and I promise that I will instruct Future Mes to respect, and honor, and be grateful for their legacy.

You have gotten me here, to this wonderful place, and you’ve left treasures along the way for me to go back and to find. I will spend the time to go back and recover them and embody their truth.

There are discoveries made by other Past Mes that I’ve recorded in my brain. They are faint traces, not fully embodied. It will be harder to recover them than the one I’ve documented in my posts. I promise you that I will make a practice of retrieving and recording what you’ve learned.

The future

The past has led to the present, but the path has been meandering. The objective has been “better” but without a definition of what “better” might mean. Peterson again: People avoid setting goals because setting a goal articulates an ideal, every ideal is a judge, and sets the criteria for failure.

So the future is going to be more writing, and more reading what I write. It’s hard to create knowledge and easy to forget it. This blog contains six years of knowledge and some of it I’ve lost by forgetting.,

But I’m a cyborg. This blog is part of my memory.

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