• 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.

• It's amazing how fast my mental health torpedoes when I get a terrible night of sleep.

• One parenting tip that's helped me cope with big emotions: reframe the situation from "you versus me" to "us versus the problem." It's not "why did you clog the toilet and let poop water overflow over the edge," it's "how can we make it so our toilet doesn't get clogged with an entire roll of toilet paper anymore?" Ask me how I came up with that specific scenario!

• Focus remains a challenge for me. I would love nothing more than to be able to set a schedule and stick to it, but when I go to sit down and honor the schedule, my body does everything in its power to stop me in my tracks. I can't tell why... maybe there's something more wrong with me, maybe I'm not disciplined enough. Maybe it's something else.

• Much of my 2024 experience involved adding a new entry to the list of questions that cycle in my inner monologue: "are these feelings just a part of the human experience, or is there a way to better way to process and cope with these feelings?"

• There's a quote by Yohji Yamamoto that goes, "Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy, copy. And at the end of the copy, you will find yourself." I wrote that down nearly two decades ago, and it's only in the last few months that I've started to understand what it means.

• My inability to manage tasks is what likely led to me getting sick going into my anniversary trip to New York. Everything is a choice, and sometimes, you gotta be okay with the consequences of the choices you make. I decided to spend an entire afternoon shopping and playing pull tabs at our old neighborhood bar with my wife instead of building graphics for a show I worked on. Then I had to stay up until 11pm building those graphics. Was it worth it? ...absolutely.

• If you ever want to see a masterclass in problem solving, go sit in the booth during a live television broadcast.

• Of all the terrifying places on earth, the one which still frightens me the most is sleeping in an unfamiliar bed.

• I'd like to further explore the intersection of fear and confidence.

• I spent a few days in New York, and it was fascinating to see the role that selfishness plays in that culture. In the midwest, cooperativeness is a necessity... if you were a dick to your neighbor in the summer, he might not wanna lend you firewood when you're freezing to death in the winter. In New York, everyone's selfishness stands in as a proxy for respect. People are curt not out of hostility, but as if to say "I won't take up any more of your time than I need to."

• I've known my wife for nearly 14 years now, and it took all this time to feel like I understand her. And now that I do, I love her even more, and I'm so lucky to have been married to her for a decade.

• I watched the entire "Mr. McMahon" docu-series on Netflix in a couple days (thanks Covid lol), and there was a moment in there where Shawn Michaels was talking about the kickback they were receiving from parents in the late 90s. His philosophy at the time was "if you don't like it, be a parent and ban your kids from watching it." Now that he has kids, he's realizing that you can't exactly do that. We can't shelter our kids from the realities of our society. There's so much good and so much bad that we are exposed to in our lives, and it's our job as parents not to shelter our kids from it, but help them learn how to navigate it.

• That being said: I loved the attitude era. I loved the campy stories of irreverent punks beating up their bosses, sticking up for themselves, meting out their own brand of vigilante justice. It is (and was) also super messed up. It can be both of those things.

• In the past, starting something new meant I should make huge, sweeping changes to my entire life. New job? That must also mean new exercise routine, new meal habits, and new hobbies. 36 year old Tim realizes that I can only bite off so much, and it would be more sustainable to focus on doing well at my new job, and then taking on new challenges once I am settled in.

• I like to think that if the famous writers throughout history had the same tech as us, they'd have their own RSS feeds and publish their own thoughts frequently on their blogs.

• There was a moment last week where I was grilling wings and watching my wife try to get our new moped running, my son argue about being outside (it was gorgeous out and I made him get off of Minecraft to enjoy it lol), and my daughter raise hell with the neighbor kids. I was listening to a new album, and reflecting on how much fun I had at work learning new stuff all week. That's when it dawned on me: "I've made it."

• I don't think my parents and teachers growing up were wrong to focus on teaching us skills we need to survive in this world. I just wish they'd also have taught us how to enjoy things, too.

• Dreamworks is more than capable of serving as stiff competition to the Disney empire. The Wild Robot was really good! I wish there were more studios cranking out enjoyable, emotionally-charged stories catered toward a family audience in animated form.

• RuPaul often says, "if you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love someone else?" I find it difficult to love myself. All the techniques I've used to address my debilitating impostor syndrome involve some variant of tough love, and believe it or not: that never really helped me much. What's working for me currently is talking to myself the way I talk to my kids. Be positive. Focus on what you can change. Be humble and admit when you need help. And be there for others when they need you, too.

• I've struggled most of my life with feeling art. I look at a painting and can only see it at a purely technical level, as if knowing why an artist used a specific brand of acrylic paint explains the motivation behind the work. I've typically been more fascinated with how people do things rather than what message they're trying to convey. All this to say: I watched Jumanji again for the first time in years last week. I've seen that movie at least two dozen times, and I was legitimately spooked by it. Mid-20s Tim would watch that movie and think "I wonder how they pulled off that stampede shot inside the house?" Early-30s Tim would watch that movie and think, "were people in the 60s so into themselves that they didn't notice a child wandering into an active construction site and retrieving a treasure chest that was there in plain sight?" This time, I just felt myself as each of the characters. How it would feel to lose my parents in a car accident. How it would feel as a busy aunt who suddenly has to deal with two children. How it would feel to be a hunter whose only motivation is to murder the person who rolled the dice.

• I was raised to understand that love is showing someone how to avoid mistakes. As I reflect on that, I'd amend that belief to say that love is helping someone learn from their own mistakes and being there for them with firm support when they do screw up.

• Alexi Pappas once said, "Whenever you’re chasing a big dream, you’re supposed to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time, and crappy or not great a third of the time, and if you feel roughly in those ratios, it means you are in fact chasing a dream." I've been slowly working my way back into running shape, and I can confirm that I feel that way in those ratios.

• Running at 5:30a means I get to wander through my neighborhood and see everyone’s festive and spooky Halloween decorations instead of everyone’s political signs.

• One of the hardest aspects of being a software engineer is that the implementation details of your job change all the time. Did you know that in Ruby, if you pass variables into a method with the same name as the method is expecting (like a_method(property_1: property_1, foo: foo)), you can shorthand it to be like a_method(property_1:, foo:)? I learned that this week!

• If art is finding a way to express what is rattling around in your head to others, then maybe writing code is actually my artistic expression.

• When it comes to empathy, I've never struggled with the "getting into someone's mind" part. What I've struggle with is accepting that the other person's point of view is valid. And I'm still working on that.

“Mom, look at THIS!” said her son (age 6) producing a balled-up fist in the air. Then, as if peeling a banana, he pulled out a tiny middle finger. There it was. In the upright and locked position.

“THIS” was none other than the oh-so-satisfying one finger salute.

🖕

“So, what did you do to him?!?” I asked my Jacksonville neighbor Louise between chuckles.

“I wanted to laugh. But, I remained calm. Validated his frustration at not getting a third popsicle. And explained why THIS wasn’t a good expression of anger.”

Louise then shared her belief that kids need to be a little weird and wild at home. That it’s okay for them to get their “crazy out” at home so they can be (slightly higher) functioning individuals out in the world. Kids, she said, need to trust that they will be safe and loved no matter what. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t discipline, she just doesn’t lose her cool over it.

Sounds like some Dr. Becky-style parenting skills in action here.

Lauren goes on to explain how crucial it is for us to have a space where we can retreat to and be ourselves.

When my daughter stomps her foot and growls at me like a cartoon character when I ask her to brush her teeth, I can’t help but chuckle and say, “you know kid, I wanna do that all the time, too.”

When my son screams in my face because I make him, uh, get dressed in his Halloween costume to go to his school’s Halloween party, I can’t help but chuckle and say, “I get it, man. It sucks to be told what to do.”

One thing that’s been massively helpful in keeping my anxiety and depression in check is to give myself space to be myself. The full version of myself who doesn’t have to censor his out-there thought process for fear of being misunderstood and ridiculed.

My journal is my number one place for this freedom. This blog is my second.

I just finished up my second week in a job. I emphasize the word “job” because I haven’t really had a job in nearly fifteen years. Being in charge of a business is totally different than working for a business.

Working for a business requires conformity by definition. You can’t be cowboying off and doing you own thing if you want to build a system with repeatable success. I get it.

One way I hope to grow at my new job is to figure out how to maintain my individuality and uniqueness while making meaningful contributions to the collective effort.

In other words: how can I be happy and “myself” being the guy rowing an oar in the bottom of the boat rather than being the guy who pounds on the timpani?

Fifteen or 20 years ago, this would not have even been a conversation,” said Ms. Lorre, who has often discussed the benefits of silent walks, most recently on her podcast and on TikTok. But silent walking feels relevant right now because many of us have become tethered to our devices, she added.

The question then becomes: “How do we counteract that?” Ms. Lorre said.

Walking is a well-established balm for the mind and body. Research has shown that walking for as little as 10 extra minutes a day may lead to a longer life. And a 2020 study in The Journal of Environmental Psychology found that a 30-minute walk in an urban park reduced the amount of time that people dwelled on negative thoughts. Walking has also been shown to improve creativity and help fend off depression.

A few months ago, I started turning my walking habit into a silent walking habit.

Sure, some days I’ll throw on an album or podcast, but more often than not, I’m finding myself putting my headphones in, reaching the end of my street, and then pocketing them.

It takes some practice to know what to do with your thoughts, which is a surprising effect of living a digital life. Most thoughts are ephemeral, dismissed as effortlessly as it entered.

Some thoughts are journalible. That’s easy to quickly pull out your phone, wrote them down, and reflect on it later.

Some are scary. Negative. Nasty. Those ones are tough to let go of, but if you acknowledge the thought and permit out to exist, the endorphins will eventually help you move on from it.

I could not encourage you more to get out for a 15 minute silent walk today. Make space for it. You’ll be glad you did.

I finished this video and felt the same way I felt reading Hope and Help for your Nerves: seen.

When I talk to myself, there are times that I say unpleasant things to myself. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years trying to completely silence those thoughts.

When I started listening to them and welcoming them, my depression and anxiety improved almost immediately.

If you feel like you say mean crap to yourself and are looking for a way to stop, start with the advice that Karen Faith gives in this TEDx talk. It’s pretty much spot on, with what I’ve experienced.

The other day, I was sitting in a McDonald’s play place with my kids and my nephew and niece. Every other parent there was sitting on their phone, no doubt trying to enjoy a short reprieve from their responsibilities as a parent.

The urge to pull out my phone was strong, believe me. But instead, I just watched all the kids play together. I felt content, proud of my choice, curious about what’s happening in the world around me.

I get the same feeling when I opt for an apple at night instead of a fistful of boring candy that my kids scooped up from a parade.

And I think the desire to chase that feeling is the biggest gift I received from my experiment with the Light Phone.

I don’t think I’ve shared many of my newsletter posts on here before, but I wanted to make sure I shared this one to button up the Light Phone experiment.

It’s been a really great month from a mental health perspective, by the way. I think I’ve finally got my head back on straight, and more importantly, I have some good tools for those moments where I start to backslide a bit.

One of the biggest contributions to my positive headspace? Not being on my phone so much.

Despite the wealth of research and clinical insight that psychologists have accumulated over the past century, there is still no unified theory of how, when, or why therapy works. Instead, the field's knowledge is scattered across hundreds of particular "schools of therapy" that largely talk past each other, despite their many common elements.

Among other issues, this makes it frustratingly hard to know what to look for in a therapy or therapist, or what strategies to use when undertaking one's own self-improvement.

To address this problem, psychotherapy researchers have been working to distill the principles of change found across many therapeutic approaches. Partly building on their work, and partly bringing my own philosophical lens to it, I've proposed that we can go a step further and articulate two fundamental assumptions implicitly shared by every effective therapy:

1. that therapy’s core aim is to help people exercise more agency over their lives;
2. that people exercise agency primarily through the pursuit and application of working knowledge.

This was one of those articles I had to read through a couple of times so I could breathe it all in.

As someone trying to do the hard work myself, I can say that it took knowledge from multiple different sources to begin to grasp the concepts that I needed to get through my own struggles.

This appears to be a fairly standard human experience. My daughter is going into third grade now, and it's fascinating to see what her math assignments look like. It's a lot easier to get a grasp on addition when you are given a bevy of different tricks and techniques to ultimately internalize the concept.

Can't wait for Dr. Gorlin's book to come out!

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.

Leave it to Cal Newport to show up in my algorithm and give terminology to part of the struggle I’ve faced for several years now: deep procrastination.

Deep procrastination is when you’re physically unable to work up the motivation to do work that needs to be done. Even with external pressures like deadlines, your body is unable to find the drive to do the thing.

This is different from depression because deep procrastinators were still able to feel joy in other areas of their lives, but not work.

He also mentions dopamine sickness, an effect from being constantly rewarded by quick hits of dopamine for an extended period of time.

If you are dopamine sick, you are unable to focus for long periods of time because your brain is literally wired for short term wins, not for deep, difficult thinking.

His solutions to both of these problems are infuriatingly simple: use an organizational system to handle doing these tasks, make hard tasks easier, use time boxing, remember your vision for your life and aim your work toward that.

In the video, Cal says, “we appreciate hard things when we know why we’re doing them.” It reminds of the episode of Bluey called “Ragdoll” where Bandit agrees to buy the kids ice cream only if they are able to physically put his body into the car to drive them to the ice cream place.

After a series of mighty struggles, Bluey is finally able to take a lick of an ice cream cone and is instantly greeted with a moment of euphoria, made possible only after all that hard work.

There are several pieces of content that I’ve consumed today which are all colliding into one potential blog post about how I’m deciding to be done with my crippling anxiety. Maybe after this video, I’ll pull out my laptop and start some deeper writing.

I am a big fan of Deena Kastor. She’s an Olympic bronze medalist and former U.S. record holder for the marathon.

Deena shared her approach for injecting joy into miserable situations in her TEDx talk, which is certainly something I can empathize with as a former marathoner myself.

Doing wind sprints up the hill behind Coffman Union doesn’t sound like much fun, but when you’re doing it with others and trying to make each other laugh while you do it, it’s an experience you’ll never forget.