• Is part of my problem with focus due to my brain's constant reevaluation of priorities? Like, if my immediate priority is to fix the foam gravestones that broke last Halloween, then my next step is to go to Menards... which feels like way too much effort compared to the payoff. So I decide it makes more sense to build up a list of things I need from Menards and wait until that list becomes high value enough to execute on it. Meanwhile, the foam gravestones sit in my garage, losing value every day that Halloween approaches. Instead, what if I just finished the task without trying to get the maximal payoff?

• One of our most important evolutionarily significant traits is our ability to recognize patterns. Here's my question: do we overindex on the importance of pattern matching simply because we're good at it?

• One of the coolest parts of mindfulness and awareness is seeing it manifest in everyday occurrences. For example: the other day, I was out on a walk and decided to listen carefully to the noises I heard. As a car drove past me, it felt like I could hear the pistons firing inside the engine.

• My Anxiety Attack Mitigation playlist was assembled as a way to... well, mitigate anxiety attacks.¹ I realized while listening to it this month that the way this works is to induce joy and confidence. Are anxiety and joy two sides of the same coin?

• A growth mindset is easy to achieve when I'm surrounded by people who give me energy, and a scarcity mindset is easy to achieve when I'm left alone with my thoughts for too long.

• There's something magical about watching grown men play a game of football in the misty rain. We're meant to be outside on a rainy day. It's rejuvenating.

• When I make statements like "I want to solve problems that are worth solving," I think what I actually mean is "I want to contribute to solving problems which are only solvable through collective action."

• There's so much to be afraid of. There's so much to celebrate. All you can do is keep your chin up and keep pushing forward.

• I have a simple litmus test for the efficacy of Siri: "Hey Siri, shuffle playlist 'pump up'." In the initial launch of Voice Control on iOS 4, this started the music app and began playback within a second or two. Anecdotally, over the last 15 years, it feels like this test has gotten progressively slower. This latest Apple Intelligence-powered release of Siri is roughly 1.5x slower than the previous iteration of Siri.²

• I came home from an early chilly walk to write this post and saw my son awake in the living room chair watching his tablet. I told him he shouldn't be on screens so much today (we've been on screens a lot this Thanksgiving weekend), and he responds by turning on the TV, starting a YouTube video, and dancing along with it. I love this little guy.

• I had a Czech lager the other day that was incredible, and it made me wonder if my Czech relatives would have enjoyed it as well. I bet they'd be proud of me right now. I think I'll be pretty proud of my descendants, too.

• The common theme of my journal entries from November are issues with confidence and focus. If anyone has any tips on improving either of those general areas of my life, I'm all ears.

• A major roadblock to fully enjoying life is a vague fear that I'm constantly being taken advantage of. I'll spend $40 less on a concert ticket because it feels like I'm rebelling against Ticketmaster, but all that act of rebellion gets me is a subpar artistic experience. I should start factoring in that $40 as the cost of maximizing joy and being more fully present.³

• A video I watched about blindfolded speed runs of Super Mario 64 introduced me to the concept of "beat counting." Basically, you listen along to the beat of the song in the level, and then you time out your movements according to the beat. Wild!⁴

• Another video I watched explained the point of poetry, which is to drop you into a certain experience made for you to contemplate and reflect. It's a simple concept and immediately transferable to any art form... but again, it's my predilection for trying to understand the rules of any given system which hamstrings me from fully appreciating art.

• This Marcus Aurelius quote resonated with me this month: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it. And this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Maybe this quote can help me with confidence?

• I spend too much time stressing about whether I'd be able to survive in any era prior to the one I'm living in. Like, would I have survived in the colonial era? Or in the pharaoh times? Or in the Paleolithic era?⁵

• I know I'm only able to focus on one thing at a time, but it's rare that I'm able to choose what that one thing is. If my wife asks me to bring the Christmas decorations out from under the house, I'll come across my box of cables that's on the opposite side of the crawl space from the Christmas decorations. 45 minutes later, I'm sitting buried in a bunch of piles of cables, none of which are any more "sorted through", and I still haven't gotten the Christmas decorations out.

• When I was a younger, I remember learning about the concept of a golden birthday and wondering what I would do for mine (which was 30). I thought maybe a grown-up gift to get was a new car. I can't believe that at age 37, I bought myself a new car for my birthday. As much as "adulting" and "growing up" sucks, it also unequivocally rules.⁶

• I've been playing around with a new mantra this past week: "win this moment." Whenever it's popped into my head, it's worked for me. Struggling at mile 3 of a cold jog? Win this moment. The boy wants to explain something to you about Rainbow Friends? Win this moment. A unit test keeps failing with an inscrutable error message? Win this moment. Walking through the kitchen and tempted by a cookie? Win this moment.

• I've decided I'm going to watch through all of the movies in my movie collection. I did this with my music collection and it took me 5 years to complete it, so I'm not sure how long this is gonna take lol. My rating system consists of two binary questions: "am I glad I watched this?" and "will I ever watch this again?". I'm thinking I might build a sub webpage here to track the movies I'm watching with this system.

• I never understood the concept of expressing love through cooking until I watched my mother-in-law make an entire Thanksgiving dinner this year. I've always viewed cooking as a utilitarian pursuit with a goal of filling bellies. I get now that you can put in an insane amount of effort into something simply for the satisfaction of smiling faces, as well as the joy you get from providing a space to assemble your loved ones in a single room in the midst of our chaotic lives.

I’ve consumed a few pieces of content recently which all seem to converge around a central theme.

A good friend recommended I read the book Hope and Help for your Nerves, a book originally written in the 1960s by Dr. Claire Weekes, because it provides a simple framework for beating the cycle of anxiety once and for all.

I found myself occasionally wincing at some of its dated references¹, but mostly, I found myself unable to put the book down.

Every time she starts a new chapter, she introduces a new character who is undergoing some form of nervous breakdown, and I find myself completely captivated because I can 100% see myself in the vast majority of these people.²

So what is this simple framework for taming anxiety once and for all?

1. Facing (confronting anxiety instead of avoiding it)
2. Accepting (being okay with the situation without adding resistance)
3. Floating (pretending you’re on a cloud, allowing feelings and sensations to come and go without resistance)
4. Letting Time Pass (understanding that recovery takes time)

Today, I’m supposed to be camping with my family, but I woke up feeling horrible, so I stayed back while my wife and kids took off.

After taking a nap, I decided that it was the perfect day to work through my YouTube “Watch Later” backlog.

Near the top of my list was a TEDx talk from Olympian Deena Kastor where she shared her technique for introducing joy into the things we dread the most.

This was the "chaser" to the "shot" provided by Dr. Weekes.

I used to find it easy to introduce joy into my life. I loved running my own business and deciding that we’d spend every single lunch playing Super Smash Bros. for the N64.

It saddens me to admit that for the last few years, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to do stuff like that. Being silly feels challenging, even when it involves playing a game at the playground with my kids. If I’m being honest, it sometimes feels like I’m not worthy of feeling joy or happiness.

Deena shared how she used to hate her Sunday morning long runs because, well, have you ever had to get up at 4am to run 15 miles with a group of people who are physiologically already faster than you?³

She later realized that by giving into the dread, she was admitting defeat even before taking the first step of the run.

After she decided to put on her favorite outfit, eat her favorite breakfast, and find other ways to inject joy into the situation, those long runs became her favorite part of her job. And it made her realize that she could infuse joy into all areas of her life, which ultimately made her life more filled with joy.

Another video on my Watch Later list was from Cal Newport about dopamine sickness.

Cal invents a lot of terms, but I do not want him to stop because these terms seem to always click with me.

One of those terms is “dopamine sickness”, which is when your brain is unable to focus for long periods of time because you’ve spent so much time feeding it quick hits of dopamine whenever you’re bored.

He also coined “deep procrastination”, which is when you are physically unable to do your job, even when you’re under deadlines or other types of pressure.

I said in my original link to this video that his solutions to these problems are “infuriatingly simple”, because to be honest, all of the advice that I’m seeing in all of these pieces is blindingly obvious with the gift of hindsight.

It all seems to boil down to “be an adult.”

And I define “being an adult” as “have a vision for what it is you want to do, and then focus all your efforts on achieving that vision.”

So between those three pieces of media, I feel like I’ve got a good strategy for finally making solid progress on my anxiety and depression issues.

First, I need to be crystal clear on my vision. Who do I want to be? What do I want to do?

When I’m clear on that, I need to figure out what aspects of that vision give me fear. Then, I need to find trusted advisors to help me devise a game plan to address those fears. And when some of those fears inevitably materialize, I need to have confidence that I’ll be able to work through them.

I need to be more rigid about building systems for myself and sticking to them. There are an endless amount of productivity hacks out there, but I need to start simple: time box my calendar at the beginning of the week and hold to those boxes. Include all the boxes necessary to feel like I’m making progress both personally and professionally.

Whenever I get frustrated about a problem, I need to infuse joy into the situation. I need to simplify the problem and take the tiniest of steps towards solving it.

Finally, I need to be more intentional about how I use technology. Intention is tough to define without a vision, which is why I need that vision first. Getting rid of my iPhone is probably a helpful step in defining that direction.

I believe those are the steps I need to take in order to start seeing a decrease in my general anxiety levels and an increase in my happiness with life levels.

Last night, I posted an article here called “Everyone needs to grow up.”

I shared it because I’ve personally felt drawn to “childish” things lately, and I’m personally trying to make sense of it… How do you find a balance between serious adult responsibilities (raising a family, managing a team, etc.) and needing a break from that?

A good friend saw that post and sent me this article, which acts as a great counterpoint. (He may be the only reader of this blog, honestly.)

I’m of the opinion that the only way to be an adult is to be willing to meet people where they are and care for them in the way they want to be cared for. It is about setting healthy boundaries; it is about knowing who you are and what you, yourself, can do and can handle. It is about planning for the long-term.

The concept of knowing who I am is absolutely top of mind lately. My wife and I have been considering our own individual values and discussing how those mesh, mostly as a way to understand what we want to instill in our children, but also to figure out who we are as individuals.

One thing I’ve realized while undergoing this thought experiment is that I feel like I’ve spent a lot of my life suppressing who I am as a way to maintain neutrality and not rock the boat.

An example: I really like using “big words”. I find it hard sometimes to express my thoughts, and it makes me happy when I find a new word which poignantly expresses a thought. But then I often avoid using those words because I don’t want to be seen as aloof or pretentious.

Anyway, I think some people are really in tune with who they are and are unafraid to show that to the world. Being an adult, for me, is finding a way to be comfortable with who I am and not ashamed of it.

I don’t think people are adult babies now, at least not offline. Although I do think it’s maybe harder than ever to be an adult. The traditional markers of transitioning through life-stages are evaporating; basically all that’s left to guide you are bills and literature. The structures that created our modern idea of adulthood have collapsed — which is to say governments aren’t subsidizing things like homeownership like they did after the Second World War — and it’s easy to feel adrift.

Boy, ain’t that the truth. We have a playbook for life all the way up through high school. From there, it’s a boot out of the nest, and it is up to us individually to figure out how to adult.

In an age where so much agency has been taken away from young adults, when they face futures saddled with debt, unable to access the basic material trappings of adulthood... a retreat into the dubious comforts of a pseudo-childhood will have its pull.

I’m not going to lie and pretend that I didn’t take two hours today with my wife and spend it at the mall browsing through the merchandise at Box Lunch and Hot Topic.

This article makes so many good points about infantilism and it hits at a particularly poignant moment in my life where I’m actually trying to figure out who I am and what I want to be when I grow up.

There is no reassurance and no final verdict. There might be a next life, there might be a remade world in which none of this matters, but it is also quite possible that such places will have no need for art or philosophy, though I do find it hard to imagine a fleshly paradise without dancing. For us, right here, there’s only the work and the living, and making space for it, or not.

A real bummer for you this evening, and for that, I apologize.

I think a big part of growing up and dealing with anxiety and depression is figuring out how to deal with these simple, indifferent truths.

And I guess this evening, it’s hitting me a little harder than I’d like to admit to you, dear anonymous reader.

But I guess in some ways, it makes me happy to know I’ve made a few people’s lives a little less stressful this week through my work, and I’m planning on spending my next few days (through this 18” snow storm we’re expected to have) with my wife and kids, which also makes me a little more happy too.