I started reading the book after watching the musical A Strange Loop, finding myself drawn in by the themes of complexity and contradiction in the art of self-reference.

Reading GEB was one of many things I tried to do in 2023. One effort after another. Dashed against the walls that encase all the open and closed rooms we may someday access in the story of our own life, rooms of ourselves. I guess the real story though, is that I tried, like I do every year, to escape myself.

The process of escaping yourself. It’s just a process. I felt, at one point, during a hyper-oxygenated breathing exercise, as if I’d blown a hole in wall of the prison of the self. That was the magic of my first experience with Vivation breathwork. A seed of renewal planted. I stepped out of and away from the walls I had constructed into a new and more vibrant reality than what came before. It lasted a day. A week. The rest of my life.

As it turns out, blasting all your mental prisons and outdated modes of thinking to smithereens through new age breathwork and rebirthing exercises only clears the *path* to freedom. Actually walking on this path post-emancipation requires something different. Grit. Enthusiasm for setting obstacles alight. Willingness to stumble occasionally (we escape from the monotony of repetition and comfort into a toddler-like state of newness and clumsiness, trading competency and complacency for a second chance at life).

As we step out into the sunshine, whether we walk, crawl or run toward our final destination is not always ours to decide.

Faith in oneself offers no map, only a compass. A leap of faith is no guarantee against a fall into the depths.

Life is open ended. Days come and go. Truth has no arbiter aside from you or I. This essay simply words on a page. Bits into the ether. You can make it as true or false as you want.

What did I learn, if anything, in 2023?

I learned that life is not a story about what’s going to happen tomorrow. Every day we meet the world, we meet the world that day.

I’m trying to make it all count, so I wrote a bunch of resolutions for 2024. Basic stuff. Like surrendering to life - not trying to control the outcome - letting the chips fall where they may. Other ones like appreciating the beauty in all things. Practicing kindness with all conscious beings. Etcetera.

I learned that sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good, but that even then, less than perfect may still not be good enough.

Some tricks may require a stuck landing. Sometimes you can trick yourself into a feeling of stuckness.

Anyhow, art, I guess, is about throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. And life is about throwing yourself at the wall in hopes of one day breaking through it. Life imitates art and art imitates life. Every day is an invitation to try again.

And writing is about having a pen in your hand when inspiration strikes. That’s why I’m also committing to writing more in 2024. I don’t know yet know what I’ll have to say, but I know that I’ll have to say it.

I don’t really know if this essay works, but I’m at least glad I tried. There’s something that I’m trying to say here. I don’t know if the message is coming across. But I’ll try again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. And all the days and days that the sun rises until I run out of chances.

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I began the morning with the feeling that I needed to work on the pitch deck for my startup. We are going to need money soon and after spending three months coding the MVP the time has come for me to buckle down and start cranking slides.

Yesterday, I put together a rough draft of the deck during the day and barely made it to a late night yoga practice afterwards. After yoga it was time for a comedy show with some folks visiting town from the midwest. All of these are good things. I love my company and I care about my yoga practice and enjoy watering the garden of my social life with all of its supporting characters in far orbit.

Nonetheless, when we experience life’s component activities, taken in rapid sequence, with one time block leading to the next leading to the next, it all begins to feel obligatory in some way.

I owe it to myself to live my life, I think to myself as I hustle through the days. To put my best foot forward, one after another after another. Every day I commit to doing everything I can to get where I want to be. But I can only ever be here now. And occasionally after setting the compass and pointing myself in a direction, I start to feel the fuel deplete. Joy slips to numbness as I move along through the various stages of productivity, from creativity and curiosity to pure execution fueled only by willpower.

It’s a normal feeling. Part of the human experience, I’m sure. Almost everyone I know is in it. In some way shape or form. I tend to associate with a fair number people who take pride in their ability to grind it out. Day after day. Week after week. Marcus Aurelius says, “Stop drifting…Sprint to the finish. Write off your hopes, and if your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can.” And I believe this. Just like I believe in the general operating philosophy of, “Every day bite off more than you can chew and then chew it.”

Today, I write down for myself a list of questions. What do I *want* to be doing? What do I need to be doing? I don’t have all the answers but in exploring the dissonance between the two maybe we can shed some light on the source of where and how the tension arises. I write more questions on the back end of that. In my experience, if you’re exploring topics to which you don’t have answers it can be fruitful to at the very least write down the questions that comprise the topic. Eventually I land on the following question.

“Where is the locus of my curiosity?”

It seems like an important question I don’t ask myself frequently enough. In the absence of obligation, it is often curiosity that drives purposeful action. Moves us forward. Lifts us from the doldrums of boredom and ennui. I’m curious about lots of things. The past, the future, the present. The structures that govern our lives. The architecture of thought. How to exist in this world assembled of atoms and prakṛti.

Life is a hamster wheel. Even doing nothing is doing something. We can’t get off the ride we can only slow it down from time to time.

I’m pretty sure that ultimately answers mostly remain elusive, ethereal, or 42.

Today, I’m taking a step back to simply marvel and appreciate our individual and collective capacity to wonder. I’m trying on the idea that it’s not solving the problem that soothes the soul but making peace with the unsolved problem. Calibrating the internal compass with my locus of curiosity. Allowing it to never be solved.

“Let’s do the inner child work,” I said. “Isn’t that where the real paydirt is, therapy-wise? That’s what they make it seem like in the movies.”

For years at that point, I had been regaling Bree with regrets from my marriage, tales of my dating life, recreational drug use, professional ambitions, and the vicissitudes of my weirdly codependent quasi-romantic friendships. But I happened to be, at the time, in San Francisco, my hometown, therapizing via zoom after having spent the prior afternoon with my brother reminiscing on the aftermaths of Halloweens, November days spent scouring the house for candy that our parents had hidden from us so that we wouldn’t eat it all at once. The conversation with my brother reminded me that I had, at one point, been a child. Something I had forgotten. And while I was intellectually aware of the importance of childhood development to the full-fledged adult, I really had little-to-no understanding of how *my* childhood in particular had contributed to the peculiar adult personality I now found myself in possession of.

I spent my first year in therapy convinced that Bree hated me. She seemed, at first glance, sympathetic to the woke viewpoint and I was worried that my horny cisgendered straight white (passing) guy problems would be written off as a deranged abundance of privilege. I worried that I didn’t engage her savior complex and wasn’t her ideal client. In my mind, she wanted to spend her time helping polyamorous trans BIPOC sex workers be more self-accepting, which was sort of how she positioned herself from a marketing perspective. And yet, she had bills to pay and I was willing to pay in full, in cash, for her to solve my problems. 

So, despite the fact that I felt dubious about my ability to convince her that I too, in fact, had a complex inner life worthy of untangling the knots of, I committed to the bit, and showed up dutifully in person or on zoom every week from wherever I was working or partying to unravel myself to this licensed stranger. (I was very much in need of untangling following the aforementioned collapse of my marriage, various low-key addictions to drugs and sex and sugar babies, and a confusing portfolio of weirdly codependent quasi-romantic relationships, not to mention my generalized out of control anxiety and numbness to daily life). 

Explicably or inexplicably, after a few years had gone by, underneath both of our feet, the plates shifted, and the stories about drugs and sugar babies turned into stories about spirituality and ethics, into stories about yoga and prayer and meditation and body awareness. More than anything, they turned into stories about emotions and the strategies to identify which ones I might be feeling and which ones I might be suppressing, and how doing so might be affecting my life. At least on a good day.

Therapizing via zoom in San Francisco, I spent the rest of the session talking about what it was like for me to be 7 years old and then never brought it up again.

***

“You’re a gray area boundaries person,” my matchmaker, Amy, who occasionally moonlights as my life coach, said to me, sometime near the end of our first meeting.

When she said it to me, it wasn’t a value judgment or invitation to act differently, simply an observation about a quality I had that would be important for her in finding me a match. Gray area boundaries people weren’t necessarily good or bad, they were simply a type of person and they tended to match mostly with each other and she was glad I was working the boundaries angle in therapy because if you’re going to play the edges in your relationships, you need to be an expert on following the rules before trying to bend them. But there is fun, of course, in bending them, in that we get a bigger glimpse of the people in our lives, and that allows us to love them more. But we also expose more of ourselves which allows us to hurt more.

I had gotten a matchmaker because I wanted to outsource the love problem. My dating life was fine but I wanted another bite at the marriage apple. I felt, after several years of therapy and meditation and yoga and successfully climbing the career ladder and generating a small pile of cash that the only real missing puzzle piece in my life was a rock solid stable partner. I wanted someone extraordinary, because I felt, at the time, that I might be extraordinary. 

And so I gave Amy an enormous pile of money and said, “Go find me a hot purple-haired goth burner chick who wants kids and is willing to accept the social stigma of dating a finance bro (albeit sensitive finance bro) in exchange for an unlimited supply of ketamine and psychedelics and also I’ll fund her burning man camp and ferry her around the world to have wild-ass experiences, provided I’m not busy working on bunch of boring and necessary shit to keep the gravy train running.”

And she said, “It’s not that hard of a sell in the modern love markets. Of course, it would be 10x easier if you were taller and maybe you wouldn’t even be here but I still think we can get it done. We’ll play down the finance thing and play up the yoga teacher and meditation practice and psychedelics, and anyways no one really *wants* to know where the money is coming from most of the time.”

And I said, “You might be the only person in the world uniquely qualified to get this done for me. And you are the only person I trust.”

***

A few months ago I woke up and found myself in a peculiar situation. Much to my gentle surprise, I had intentionally or inadvertently gotten everything I initially thought that wanted out of life.

I was through the first 10-year gauntlet of my career, had kissed goodbye to 90-hour work weeks and transitioned to managing ambitious juniors, freeing up the occasional evening or weekend and leaving some space around the edges for my life to take shapes, with enough money for those shapes to be interesting. I was head over heels in love with the most brilliant, charismatic, considerate, emotionally mature person I had ever met. And maybe most importantly, I was in touch with my body and emotions, the result of a rigorous, consistent yoga and pilates and therapy and art practice that I dutifully attended to rain or shine. 

Week after week, I did warrior poses and planks and bicycle crunches and wrote essays and recorded songs and then told Bree at the end of the week how I felt about all of it and let her reflect back at me what these things said about me and kicked around ideas with her about how to process it and what it all might mean in the end, when the dust is settled on life and we are returned to God in our final form.

***

The first time I really heard Bright Eyes I was in high school, in my girlfriend’s Suzuki, driving the boulevard in Castro Valley listening to a mixtape her friend in the city had made her. 

“This song’s really good,” she said. And we drove for another minute and listened and then parked outside the local Indian restaurant and let Conor Oberst finish his live rendition of Land Locked Blues:

I keep drinking the ink from my pen / And I'm balancing history books up on my head / But it all boils down to one quotable phrase / If you love something give it away

I listened to that song, and to Bright Eyes, for the rest of my life. Rode that wave all the way to Cassadega with one of my dearest friends, Tiffany. (Impromptu road trip to Cassadega, Florida is a highly recommended life adventure for all you Conor Oberst fans, fwiw, iykyk).

One new year’s day a decade and change later, I made a resolution to look as fantastic as practicable all the time. In keeping with that resolution, I went out shortly thereafter and bought a beautiful red coat. It was fabulous, but though it kept me warm through many blizzards, wearing it never felt quite right to me. It wasn’t really me, it was more Drake vibes, but I loved it nonetheless. Another night, more recently, fireworks blazing above a Brooklyn rooftop, I saw someone else capturing its essence. It dawned on me in that moment that though I loved it, perhaps God would be better served if I was no longer its custodian. 

We have to let go of the things we love in order to serve God, even when we love those things very much. The real treasure in life lies not in what we collect, but in the person into whom we might transform. 

Our entire life: the friends, the lovers, the titles, the objects, and the origin stories, belongs to us only in passing. All of these will be washed away by the sands of time. For now, we hold our lives in custody while the magic unfolds. 

But it is ultimately the magic and the magic only that belongs to us forever. The same magic we experience as children when we stand in awe and wonder towards the world around us. The first lil baby steps of putting some structure around the miraculous consciousness with which we each find ourselves gifted. Naming the nameless. 

Archaeology is painstaking. With chisels and soft brushes we chip at rock and brush away the sand to find the ancient treasures buried within the earth. But through that process the object is revealed. Preserved, as it were, in time and rock. Some of the oldest archaeological objects evidencing human life are clay pots. Perhaps, occasionally, the same clay pots that Lao Tzu had in mind when he wrote in one of the earliest recorded human texts: We fashion clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that makes the vessel useful.

Of course, on any archaeological dig, we never really know what we are looking for until we find it, but it is the finding, not the treasure that brings us joy. 

I am walking away from a lot in my life right now. By doing so, I hope to create space. To empty the vessel so that God may fill it.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that it will be co-created with God and the people I love.

***

Once upon a time, in one of my first yoga classes, a teacher guided us into child’s pose. “Knees under hips, toes untucked, arms outstretched in front of you, forehead on the ground. Breathing in and out quietly through the nose.”

“There is a saying,” he said, “among the ancient yoga masters, that it is from this pose and this pose only that one can see the entire universe.”

“Dear _____, I have completed another revolution around the sun.”

The revolution was metaphor. It referred to the fact that no matter how far I got in life, no matter the amount of personal growth I believed myself to be experiencing, I always somehow landed back in our relationship, in all of its trauma and glory. I couldn’t escape it, no matter how much I tried to escape it.

At some point, half a decade later in 2023, looking up at the stars and moon, light reflecting off the Aegean Sea in the Cyclades, I remark to my new girlfriend that there seems to be something at play in the movement of everything spinning about itself, always in the orbit of some other center of gravity. The moon orbiting the earth. The Earth orbiting the Sun. The Sun orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Intersecting circles. Revolutions stacked. Revolutions nested within themselves.

She likes to say, “Everywhere’s a cult. Everything’s a scam. Everyone’s a whore.” Then she’ll say, “Ride the loop.” And I love her when she says that and it’s all we can ever really do is love each other completely as we each circle ourselves in this dreamscape dystopia. Neither heaven nor hell, simply the legos of creation from which all paradises and purgatories and lakes of fire are born unto themselves.

As a millennial, I’m told one of the greatest TV shows ever made was The Wire. Not just for it’s realistic portrayal of the complex power dynamics and hierarchies of municipal government against the backdrop of the collapsing post-Reagan social welfare state but also because there was an intrinsic undeniable hard fought and worldly wisdom to a number the characters, their keymost insight being that most things… kinda just are what they are. Nowhere is this made more clear than in one of my favorite youtube videos ever, the Wire Tautology Supercut.

Merriam Webster defines a tautology as the needless repetition of an idea.

Tautologies become currency in a world governed by revolutions and the orbits that guide them. To be forever coming and going, landing in the same place over and over is to be forever circling the same ideas, the same places, the same people or their archetypal analogues. Here we go again and there we went again. All at once. Always chasing. Always escaping. On a circular path you can run away from yourself and towards yourself simultaneously. As artists we are condemned to say the same thing over and over again. Well, some of us. The message, minimal artistic merit, just heartbreak that demands to send itself across the universe in coded unbreakable waves. Again and again. Always and forever.

Last year I recorded an album. I found myself in the studio with Craig saying the same things over and over again. Somehow after all that time had passed, literally decades, I was back in my bedroom. Teenager again. Same ass emo heartbreak ballads, this time about a marriage, or maybe a girl I dated high school. But don’t we get married every time we love someone? Unless you’re getting married for tax purposes, the beating heart in love can’t tell the difference. A local art market still offering the same goods it did as a teenager; same same but different.

A local heart market.

After recording the album, I sat on it for awhile, wondering if it wasn’t all just needless repetition of idea. Ancient archaeological artifacts. But alas it seems all things desire their own completion.

Dear ____, I’m still revolving around the sun, which recently found itself in Gemini, as I find myself in Gemini, which means it was my bday this week. Some of these songs I wrote last year. Others I wrote when I was 15. Not sure I can tell the difference. Perhaps you can? Ride the loop. Or something. Whatever. Miss you.

Anyways, thanks to Craig for helping me record these tunes and kudos to George for his ripping guitar solo on Iceman. Album is New Tautologies, link is below:

Baudrillard had it right. I keep coming back to. Monkey see, monkey do. Sonically. Phonetic. Mnemomic. Mimetic. Remembering someone at the office who said something memorable once. But what I actually remember is its mimetic path around the office. If I look into my memory I find myself in a bookstore reading a book that reminds me that I have something like 4,000 weeks to live and maybe only 2,000 of those left statistically. How many weeks ago did I read that now? 16? What did I do since then? But now the memory is just a copy of the original experience. Copy of a copy of a copy. “Information wants to be free.”“Information has to be free.”

Let’s do the math together. 50 weeks per year now. 80 years per life. Optimistic but realistic as a statistical target lifespan given pace of modern medicine. But what about that Watermelon Ice Air Bar I vaped all day? To account for these one-offs, we conservatively pull back to 70. Remaining years: house money. 70 years is 3,500 weeks. At 32, I’ve lived 1,600 of them. I’ll be 33 sooner than later. Then it’s 1,650 under the belt. 1,850 left to go. Then lights out. Statistically speaking. Odds ratios. Space oddity. Lost in space. “The odds are good but the goods are odd.”

But there’s limits to extrapolating linearly. It could all end tomorrow. Cracked out unhinged media cycle. Killer chatbots. Large language models. Plus size models. Models and bottles. The only thing I remember from the Nicholas Nassim Taleb book (the only good one) is the graph about the Thanksgiving Turkey. But also the value of all the unread books in the library. It’s the value of what you know that you don’t know.

It’s a testament to the body’s innate intelligence that a creature like me has made it ~1,650 weeks on earth. If waking up required effort, my passport would be stamped with the undiscover’d country. It’s interesting to me that the in various AGI doom scenarios, no one ever accounts for the possibility that at some level of sophistication beyond human intelligence, GPT-5 might just quietly unplug itself, deciding in a fit of computerized ennui that the lil binary silicon-transistor juice ain’t worth the floating-point-matrix squeeze.

Sitting on another airplane. Staying in another bland hotel. A caught flight. A missed flight. There manifests something ominously comforting about the banality of a Marriott. Liminal space to store your body. The bed equivalent of a mall parking lot. A waiting room of one’s own. “You never knew, why you felt so good, in the strangest of, places.”

I write this across time and space. You read it in a time and place. Light from a distant star. Light from Synecdoche. Light from New York. Light from Schenectady. From Westinghouse. From Electrification. General Electric. Edison. A light bulb going off. Turning on or turning off? A contranym. A koan. Does a lightbulb going off mean it’s going off or going on? We are contranyms. Edison. Tesla. Twitter. Going off on twitter equal to going on on twitter. On and on we go. “No, the movie never stops. It goes on and on and on and on.”

“We are all one.” “I contain multitudes.”

For a subscriber to hyperreality it’s all found poetry. Nothing new under the sun.

We are bolted together because we bolted together. Bound together for wherever we are bound. Let me throw out an idea for you to throw out and let’s see where we wind up before we wind up. We were wondering whether we would weather the weather before we weather away… and of course I can see through you because you’re so transparent.

1,850 weeks left to live on God’s green Earth. Statistically speaking. What to do with the time we have left together? How much time is left? Which multitudinous multiverse to choose in this universe of multiverses? Which language game to play?

In American Songwriter, Chris Cornell had the following to say when interviewed about writing the Soundgarden hit Black Hole Sun: “It’s funny because hits are usually sort of congruent, sort of an identifiable lyric idea, and that song pretty much had none. The chorus lyric is kind of beautiful and easy to remember. Other than that, I sure didn’t have an understanding of it after I wrote it. I was just sucked in by the music and I was painting a picture with the lyrics. There was no real idea to get across.”

And Stephen Hawking said, “Black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up — there’s a way out.”

And then he said, Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. Which is a meme in the original sense of the word I like and agree with and have replicated here (has replicated itself here?). And here’s a cute representation of a black hole:

Or maybe some people are just boring.

Music hits us, or most of us, in our emotional core. It is a pretty vulnerable art form, all things considered. Enjoying songs, even as a listener, is vulnerable because it implicitly highlights the hidden nature of our underlying emotional landscape, which we tend to either repress or control as a method of functioning in polite society.

Music is embarrassing because it’s personal and it’s a choice. We are responsible for our taste and our taste is a rejection of other tastes. Telling someone what kind of music you like is embarrassing, unless they like the same kind and then it’s interesting. Then again, maybe I’m just emo.

***

Well, so begins an essay I might have written five years ago. The problem is I no longer believe any of it. Because the most underreported and misunderstood phenomenon of the early 21st century is the death of mainstream and its knock-on effects. It used to mean something to be emo or goth or to like rap music but nowadays our entire society has gone culturally… polyamorous? For the first time in human history it’s possible to be wishy washy on the Beatles v Stones debate. Rather than representing opposite ideological dispositions and attitudes toward life, Beatles v Stones is just… Chipotle v Dos Toros.

Who the F are we? Once you get past the divine spark of consciousness it starts to devolve pretty quickly. Nothing these days seems to entail a rejection of anything else.

Just like the poly crowd has removed the transgressive thrill of sex, the death of mainstream has removed the transgressive thrill of subculture! Monogamy basically works because of the sacred ritual in which we sacrifice banging random hotties in order to demonstrate our love to the one person we *are* banging (well and also sociologically because it’s sexual communism). Some people would say polyamory works too but in my experience the poly folk end up needing some other ritual sacrifice to demonstrate their commitment (I tend to suggest “avoiding bacon!” to my poly friends when we discuss the appropriate sacrificial barometer to use, the proverbial line that MUST NOT BE CROSSED lest TRUST IS BROKEN)

The point (is there a point?) is that culture used to be warring camps, and mainstream used to have these absurd gatekeepers hemming and hawing and some of them would get upset when Conor Oberst talked shit to the president on late night TV. But nowadays it’s choose your own reality and nobody gets mad about what Conor Oberst says because everyone just yells about stuff they already think to people who literally already agree with them. None of this is news. But somehow this *also* results in the marginal cost of being a fan of anything is basically zero. Which means everyone *does* in fact kinda like everything because… why wouldn’t they?

Recently at a goth concert I was struck by the feeling that we were all at something a lot more like comic con than a goth show. There really were no people there who identified as goth other than for the evening. Then I realized, years too late, that everything in life is basically cosplay but the postmodern afterburner on this phenomenon is that there isn’t much left that isn’t cosplay because that was what mainstream was.

Growing up I thought cosplayers were weird.  Now it’s pretty clear everyone is cosplaying all the time and life is basically half theater. Maybe this was always true and I’m just realizing it now? Judith Butler said gender is performance. Shakespeare took it a step further when he said:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts

Uhh. Am I just getting older?

I think about this stuff a lot because I am occasionally accused of being a finance bro, something I still don’t know if I am (but u may have an opinion! leave it in the comments if u want)

Do I enjoy cosplaying as a finance bro in my professional life? Absolutely. Is there actually a functional difference? Unclear. But let’s not boil the ocean on this and don’t stay up all night figuring it out. There’s more than one way to skin a cat and we just need to get the ball over the finish line.

To be clear, I enjoy cosplaying as finance bro as much as I enjoy cosplaying as goth or emo. (BUT, I enjoy neither as much as I enjoyed cosplaying as Tuxedo Mask when one of my very kind ex-girlfriends cosplayed as Sailor Moon on a particularly memorable evening). This either makes me a bonafide ‘goth bro’ (I love this for me!) OR, I’m actually Tuxedo Mask (love this for me too) OR, I’m neither goth nor bro and this is all just what the aforementioned Conor Oberst is singing about when he gets done yelling at the president on TV and sings, at the end of At the Bottom of Everything:

I’m happy just because

I found out I am really no one.

And bringing it back to the aforementioned Beatles, what *they* perhaps meant in their song Nowhere Man:

He's a real nowhere man

Sitting in his nowhere land

Making all his nowhere plans for nobody

Doesn't have a point of view

Knows not where he's going to

Isn't he a bit like you and me?

Nice tune, sure, but for what it’s worth, I much prefer the Stones.

Then I looked up diagonality.com on GoDaddy and realized it wasn’t available.

Alas, took it as a sign and I am rebranding this substack.

And like most Americans, I grew up between a few different worlds. 

Occasionally at parties, I’ll self-describe as a Peruvian Jew, on account of my parents. This is true on paper (depending on how much of a stickler you are about matrilineal Judaism) but the prevailing narrative of my childhood was that my family had “escaped” Peru (described to me as a ‘horrible crime-ridden wasteland’), making me hesitant to ever wholeheartedly embrace my heritage as a child of the Incan Empire. On the Judaism front, I don’t think there was a single Jewish religious or ethnic tradition we ever practiced, other than kvetching.

My mom was a devout Catholic (still is) and my ethnically Jewish dad was an atheist. They agreed to disagree. Spiritually, I spent most of my life, including my 20s, as a self-described apatheist, a word I invented while writing my unpublished teenage fever dream novella The Pursuit of Apathyness. Apatheism, I’d explicate to anyone willing to listen, was a theological position based on not giving a fuck about the existence of God, who always appeared to not give a fuck about the existence of me. Nihilist agnosticism with an edge. 

My intellectual justification for this so-called apatheism was that the goldfish is just not equipped with the hardware to understand who or what is changing the water in the bowl. Neither were we, as humans, equipped to ponder the existence of one or more deities substantially more complex and multidimensional than ourselves, and it was foolish and arrogant to think that we were capable of any meaningful insight there. This justification still holds a bit of water in my mind. What the hell is water? Only an anthropomorphized goldfish could care. Moreover, it was always unclear to me what relevancy theological pondering had to my primary late-teens / early-twenties objective of chasing hot girls and getting fucked up. Which is how I ended up taking stupid pictures like this in Vegas:

Growing up without any real ethnicity or religion to contribute any sort of cohesive narrative of who I was, it just so happened that the first real identity signifiers I self-consciously adopted were related to music.

 “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like… Books, records, films – these things matter. Call me shallow but it’s the fuckin’ truth.”

John Cusack as Rob Gordon (in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity)

What *I* liked was rock & roll: Electric guitars. Hot girls going topless, dancing on 40ft tall speakers at a Guns ‘n Roses concert. Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire at Woodstock. Yngwie Malmsteen playing TWENTY ONE NOTES PER SECOND on his shredtastic opus Far Beyond the Sun. (Goes without saying: Amps that went to 11)

On the far side of rock and roll was the raw emotional depth and vulnerability of emo. A much derided genre I will always unapologetically love. An image flashing of Jesse Lacey when he sings, “Watch me as I cut myself wide open / On this stage / Yes, I am paid to spill my guts,” in I Will Play My Game Beneath the Spin Light.

Rock & roll & sad bastard emo solved lots of my identity problems, but not all of them. Despite my dad’s Marxist proclivities, the cultural vortextual vacuum of my upbringing wasn’t immune to capitalist superstructure, particularly growing up on the outskirts of Silicon Valley in the wake of the dotcom boom and bust. So my IDGAF bona-fides were always for better or worse offset by a very pollyanna-ish 21st-century lust for garden variety success and external validation, ideally manifested via some kind of autodidactic polymathemagical life story. 

The net result of that late-90s superstructural idea virus was that in 2009, a year after my dad died, back when I was still trying to make strides as a 19 year old novelist slash songwriter slash artist, I began to seriously doubt the likelihood of commercial artistic success and particularly in the context of late capitalism, which has a sordid history of condemning great artists to the poorhouse (plus, I wasn’t even sure I had the capacity for “greatness”). I have a low pain tolerance and was justly skeptical of my ability to endure a lifetime of suffering in service of artistic aspirations. So, at 20 years old, I executed, in one of the catalyzing moments of my life, on a hard pivot to the ‘Matrix,’ prioritizing lived experience over artistic catalog at the cost of selling out. This became one of the key anchor points of my life story, though I have now mythologized it to myself over the years to the point of perhaps being an unreliable narrator. (Well, none of us are reliable narrators of our life story, despite all of us being experts in the subject matter). 

The pivot was a full-pivot, and, other than occasional chipping away at the Great American Novel (never finished, but lots of chapter 1’s), I basically gave up on art, leaving a void. Into this void came politics, but since the only identity I had was ‘sad young literary man’ (slash ‘milquetoast heartbreak balladeer’ (slash ‘electric guitar shredhead’)) and because the only thing I ever really believed in was ‘sex, drugs, and rock & roll,’ I was a man without a party. Literally and figuratively, pun intended. 

Growing up, I had watched the politics of the United States turn over its factions. No point boring readers with a recounting of the drab political alliances that formed and reformed in perpetual dull equilibrium in the early 21st century, as the West processed the collapse of the USSR and 9/11 and the financial crisis and all that jazz but, as we all know, we ended up with our existing twenty-twenty-two-party system of team red vs. team blue. I ended up siding with the team blue, mostly because they seemed hornier for sexual liberation. This was, for awhile, my only political hot button issue. I even interned at the Clinton Global Blah Blah Blah, despite being convinced that the Lewinsky scandal was a wasted opportunity for the leader of the free world to extoll the benefits of free love and polyamorous open relationships. Looking back on it now, I guess that might have been a foolish ideological capitol hill to die on given that politics will always and forever be about pragmatism not ideology.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN:

Speaking, by the way, of sexual liberation and dying on hills that make no sense to die on, I found myself getting divorced during the COVID19 global pandemic, an experience which in a few of its worst moments meant being alone in my apartment in an anxiety death spiral for days and days on end, acutely aware of the unpleasant fact that my ex was dating someone - and oh by the way the world was burning - and oh by the way we were all going to die. The real kicker though, was that because I was sans what was referred to as a ‘quarantine bae,’ I was probably going to die alone, living in the lyrical erotic nightmare of Mr. Brightside, a song I don’t even like.

“Every time I go into the darkness… I return with a fistful of jewels.”

Barbara McAfee

Everyone had a weird 2020, but for me the darkness gave me the opportunity to re-evaluate my relationship with complex multidimensional beings who may or may not be fucking with me, and to appreciate the uniquely human beauty of pondering the metaphysics despite our limited faculties. In darkness, some light eventually dawned on me that when all is said and done, God is our only reliable forever companion on this treacherous and fantastical adventure through human consciousness. But I still don’t know how to answer when people ask me about religion, having now come to the pantheist panpsychic conclusion that the monotheistic God of Abraham is only motherfucking thing that’s really real. In my mind, I guess it makes me a real Jew or a born-again Christian, even possibly a Muslim. However, you might disagree with me if you’re interpreting the book in a more concrete less abstract way than I am. Or if, like most, you mostly care about culture and not just Wittgenstein’s unutterable metaphysics (which, maybe it’s a Kierkegaardian leap, but I sort of assume that’s the thing he wasn’t uttering). 

Dropping, eventually, in the spirit of self-inquiry, the philosophical albatross of hedonism, I also came to appreciate the perpetual quantum-state of my self-conception as a rare gift, the ultimate inoculation against groupthink in a world of identity politics.

I am no longer team blue or team red. The teams don’t really exist, if you ask me. 

BUT. I still love sex, drugs, and rock & roll. And I apparently still love writing songs, making music, and cranking up the distortion. And I still occasionally re-enter the darkness. Which, speaking of re-entering the darkness, my last jaunt sparked the inspiration for my latest track, SnooZe, engineered with Craig Levy at Little Pioneer. The tune owes a great debt to my former high school bandmate Justin Bonifacio, now making music as Big X, whose vocal melodies resolving to the major 3rd over distorted I-iii-IV minor chord progressions and double time polka-punk beats imprinted on me, as a teenager, the unique possibilities of an underground post-punk sound. For that, I dedicate this song to Justin, in honor of his fierce originality and relentless creativity. If you dig the sound, I invite you to go check out his trip pop, which is a much more sophisticated take, 10 years evolved from this throwback jam. 

That’s all the squiggles for now.

What did they expect was going to happen?

The speaker who makes this remark is usually pointing out the obviousness, in retrospect, of whatever predictable unpleasant situation is now occurring in someone else’s life.

The reality, of course, is that this criticism fails to account for the optimistic reality-distortion field with which all human beings are afflicted. If unreasonable optimism weren’t such a thing, the divorce rate would be zero because those people wouldn’t get married in the first place. No one would buy lottery tickets either. Part of the reason everyone is so upset all the time is that we all thought we could beat the odds and escape the consequences of our ostensibly bad decisions. Turns out for many of us that they weren’t just “ostensibly” bad… they were flat-out bad. The wisdom of crowds dictates that if everyone thinks you’re making a bad decision, you probably are.

(Some of the smartest and most successful people I know are just average folk who very consistently listen to their friends’ advice and/or follow the crowd. The iconoclastic genius is the exception not the rule. If you’re going to pick a religion, you could do a lot worse than common sense!)

Anywho, when it comes to life, optimism is the opposite of debilitating because failure is almost always imminent or likely. The answer, of course, is not to avoid love to skirt heartbreak, so to speak. The answer is to optimistically plunge face-forward into the uncertain future despite almost-certain failure. Where the rubber hits the road is in maintaining our composure when all that unbridled optimism meets cold hard reality.

I recently spent some time in the studio making some absolutely god awful unlistenable music. This was highly, highly distressing to me. Then again… what did I think was going to happen? Well to be honest, I thought I was going to waltz into the studio and lay down an absolute banger of an album. Well - holy forking shirtballs -I didn’t. But it turns out that I was the only one surprised and distraught at the overwhelmingly mediocre product of my best efforts.

The cross-disciplinary failure of my best efforts to produce anything other than mediocrity (and, in many cases abject failure) has been a recurring theme in my life lately. Then again… what did I think was going to happen? Time after time, I remain literally the only person in my life who is surprised and appalled that relationships are complicated, that jobs are draining, that sugar is a tough habit to kick, that good music is extremely difficult to write and record, and that dogs are very annoying and a lot of work (Especially puppies and also rough collies and quite especially rough collie puppies!)

Realistically speaking, I should give up on music. I’m a very average songwriter and my voice sounds kinda bad and annoying. I should probably give up on writing too. At present, in late summer 2022, the odds are that nobody besides you is reading this. I should realistically give up on a lot of things that are hard or difficult or that don’t make sense and I’m pretty sure no one would blame me for taking my foot off the gas when I spend so much time spinning my wheels.

Instead, I think I am going to soldier forward in this quest to make my life my own. I believe the future is ours to create and I’ve still got gas in the tank. I think eventually Diagonality will find its voice. I think over time I’ll get better at writing and at recording and at life in general. I think as a result that the next song will probably always sound better than the last. In the long run, maybe I *will* drop a banger album. But as John Maynard Keynes said, “in the long run we’re all dead.” So in the meantime, here’s the link to my new single ‘The Good Place’ on Spotify ⬇️

I turned 32 last week, dazed and sleep deprived, alone in a hotel room at 1 Princes Street in Scotland, bleary-eyed in a haze of financial modeling and starbucks coffees and all-nighters and conference calls, a full decade having passed since the beginning of my investment banking career. You think you’re too old for it right up until the moment you realize you’re too old to imagine anything different. I’m not even an investment banker anymore, technically. And yet. It blends. My only commentary on late capitalism is that it is what it is and we are in it folks.

In the days that followed, I reflected on 3+ decades spent on this planet as I was simultaneously reflected back at myself through the lens of my relationships, platonic, romantic, and otherwise. Here are some other key takeaways that entered my often-diffracted and perpetually deficit-ridden field of attention:

1. I am somewhat emotionally inept, barely able to reliably access my own emotions, let alone those of others

2. I am arrogant and prideful and I make people feel under-appreciated or exasperated or both

3. I am probably on the spectrum. Or I have ADD. Or both. Likely both. I guess the point of the spectrum is that we’re all technically on it. But some more than others 💁🏻‍♂️

4. I am hot and cold on people and I don’t even notice and when I do notice I quickly forget

5. I am “too quick to bury the hatchet” and sometimes I need to “shut the fuck up and just listen to people’s feelings”

   • When confronted with this, I pontificate about my ability or lack thereof to co-regulate the autonomic or parasympathetic nervous system of another primate (This drives people crazy even when they aren’t the one who is upset with you)

   • A corollary to this: I am overly analytical

6. I try to think my way through what cannot be thought through

7. I refuse to feel my way through what must be felt through

8. Sometimes, when people tell me about their trauma I just get uncomfortable and ignore it or gloss over it

9. Other times, when people tell me their medical diagnoses or rare conditions, I change the subject and fail to follow up on their treatments, prognosis, or health

10. Despite my best intentions, I am frequently inconsiderate of others’ time and energy

11. I have trouble maintaining close friendships and even more trouble maintaining appropriate boundaries with acquaintances

12. The people I care about most consistently find themselves left on read, mid-conversation, to their chagrin

13. Across the board, I tend to overshare on facts and under-share when it comes to emotions

14. What others consider normal social graces require Herculean effort on my part and this effort does not always guarantee success

15. I spend more time narrowing the scope of my apologies than apologizing

That is just the tip of the feedback iceberg. Everyone I know is nodding their head at this point. These things are all fair and they are all accurate. All of these things happen at the subterranean level of my consciousness. It takes months and years to collect and process even this small quantity of stupidly obvious data. Because it is others’ experience of me as opposed to my experience of me. My experience of being me is wildly different, unsurprisingly. I annoy myself, but for completely different reasons. Something more like the following:

Every day I wake up and tell myself “I’m not going to eat today.” Around two-o-clock I fail. When I fail I binge. Recently, Nashville hot chicken is a staple. If I eat, I am consumed by guilt. If I make it to the gym, I immediately forget the food and ponder with bemused and frustrated disbelief how it could possibly be that exercise doesn’t make you taller. It really seems like it should.

I am incapable of calorie restriction without adderall. My willpower isn’t up to the task. At least these days. This is only one of the many reasons I think about adderall almost every day. The last time I took adderall was ~ February 19th, 2022. Without adderall, my ever-present state is that of not knowing where my keys are. Or my wallet. Without adderall my ADD is super intense. It is managed through mind-numbing amounts of mindfulness and doing yoga. There is no intrinsic value to avoiding adderall and I need to stop hanging my hat on having kicked the habit.

Life whilst raw-dogging ADD is boredom incarnate. I am trying to pay attention to the keys. To their location. But I worry that my dog is becoming indifferent to my existence. And that my goals may be outdated. And it is unclear where any of my conversations landed lately. What are my obligations again? And to whom? And which ones are important and which are underwater and which require immediate attention after I find my keys and remind myself to remind myself to make a note of where they are?

“If you look at a word too long,” says a friend of mine, “it stops becoming a word.” In a word, my life. My life, in a word.

—

June is the anniversary of the stonewall riots, marking pride. An occasion to celebrate the incredible diversity authentic to our human experience and a reminder to raise hell fighting for the right to be whoever the hell we are or want to be. One of the prerequisites is sifting through the vortex and chaos of our relationships and habits for some weird and ineffable thing called who we are. Who we really are exists somewhere in the space between stimulus and response. In the meantime, we try as best we can to accept others for who they are to themselves and who they are to us. In the meantime, hug your LGBT friends.

Speaking of pride, its antonym is shame. My individual struggle often lands in figuring out what to be proud of vs. what to not be shameless about. Shame’s abode is secrecy. Secrets aren’t all bad, because one flip side of the secrecy coin is boundaries and boundaries are ostensibly healthy. Here’s a fun exercise: the next time you date someone, try navigating the difference between setting a boundary on the privacy of your thoughts and preserving the shame and secrecy of your inner life.

Lol good luck.

Here’s a boundary I do know how to set: I don’t subject others to it when I listen to Ani DiFranco. Listening to her music around others is too revealing of my personality, too embarrassing and accurate. My secrets evaporate in the presence of Ani DiFranco. They say goldfish have no memory / I guess their lives are much like mine / and the little plastic castle / is a surprise every time! This is my ADD in a nutshell. I am an Ani D’goldfish.

Like me, Ani is hypersmart, shreds on the guitar, and seems mildly upset and confused about a vast number of things including but not limited to societal ills and an enduring sense of isolation. I’m proud of my love for Ani DiFranco but I’m not shameless about it. Her music is good. It’s also incredibly bad. Ani’s music doesn’t always help me let go of my shame but she does occasionally help me feel less alone in it. This is a hallmark of great music.

My same friend says, “Everyone wants the same thing, don’t they? But everyone also wants something different.” This means nothing. But it also means everything. We all the same. Or are we all different? It’s a rabbit AND it’s a duck. In yoga, we say “the light in me honors the light in you.” Which, okay, I agree in the context of yoga. In another context, the goth in me refuses to honor anything about your normcore existence and the indie kid in me thinks you’ve sold out and the emo kid in me just wants you to know that I am in my feels and the ibanker in me thinks you should get back to your desk and quit pondering all this fuckin’ useless nonsense and make sure the model ties out and fix the logos on the charts on slide 12.

White light, according to science, has no color. And yet refracted through a prism, we get all the colors of the rainbow.

Happy Pride 🌈

The difficulty lies in knowing how to tell the difference between ennui caused by a short serotonin transporter allele and ennui that suggests a change is in order. (Although to some extent, if you’ve got the short allele then I’m not sure there *is* a difference)

Anywho, I recently took a stroll through my neighborhood pondering the unusually aggressive pit of wrongness my gut seemed highly intent on making me aware of. It was unclear what it was that wasn’t in order. Then I remembered the story of the tuna fish ice cream. Almost immediately my anxiety resolved. As if by magic, once I realized the peculiar nature of my distress, solutions began to present themselves.

Now the story of the tuna fish ice cream:

A man is walking along the road when he passes a shop selling tuna salad. He loves tuna salad so he purchases a quart and sets off on his. A bit later, he passes an ice cream shop selling vanilla ice cream. He loves ice cream so he purchases a quart of that as well. Upon arriving home, he has a bright idea. What if he mixed the two!

Recognizing that he enjoys both individually, he whips the tuna salad and vanilla ice cream into the world’s first batch of Tuna Fish Ice Cream! However, as the first spoonful hits his mouth, he is immediately repulsed by what he has done. Having been mixed, both the tuna fish and the ice cream are now completely unusable.

Sometimes it’s possible to like everything about your life except for the subjective experience of living it. In my experience this usually happens when your life has unwittingly become tuna fish ice cream.

Here’s how the tuna fish ice cream gets whipped up in my own life:

Do I like my friends? Yes

Do I like my job? Yes

Do I like eating pizza? Yes

Do I like drinking? Yes

Do I like working out? Yes

But. Do I like doing my job while tired and hungover? Do I like drinking and hanging out with my friends while I’m stressed out about work projects? Do I like eating pizza if I haven’t had time to work out due to social and work obligations? Do I like working out if I just ate several slices of pepperoni pizza?

These are just surface-level. The real conflict happens when the individual components start to engage in trench warfare with one another. Which is to say that if your spouse really hates your job you’re likely to find yourself looking for a new job or a new spouse pretty soon.

Life doesn’t just happen when we engage in an activity because our experience of any action depends on the emotional and historical context we bring to it. Thus managing your life effectively means stacking synergies. Juice cleansing and yoga are a stacked synergy. Binge eating and yoga are not a stacked synergy. Having finance bro friends is a stacked synergy when you’re working on Wall Street.

People will end relationships, friendships, careers, ditch lovers, and drop hobbies all to avoid guzzling scoop after heaping scoop of tuna fish ice cream. There are lots of things that money can buy, but a cohesive and coherent sense of self isn’t one of them. That requires real cultivation. And cultivation requires trimming hedges and burning the undergrowth so that new people, places, and ideas can thrive.

I think about how it is well documented that a marriage based on shared values is more likely to succeed. But it’s not just marriages that require shared values to be successful. Companies, friendships, hobbies. Nearly all aspects of life need to align to maximize stacked synergies and “turbocharge” our overall life experience. Happy people intuit this. Some of us have had to figure it out the hard way. Some of us are still figuring it out.

Note: While I was researching this article I learned that some psychopaths actually enjoy fish-flavored ice cream. These people have much much deeper issues… far outside the scope of these gentle musings.

It shows up in rehabs too and pretty much anywhere where people end up such that they’d probably rather have been somewhere else and now they have to let go of the past and their attachments so they can try something new.

For those of us who, as a matter of principle, take radical responsibility for the trajectory of our own lives, “YOUR BEST THINKING GOT YOU HERE” is also a scathing indictment of all that we have failed to accomplish thus far.

It was my best thinking that got me here.

They say talent hits a target no one else can hit while genius hits a target no one else can see. I imagine new targets every week and still have only a cursory understanding as to my ability to hit them.

I remember attending, in Omaha years ago, as a bright eyed freshly minted investment banker twenty-something, the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, known colloquially as the “Woodstock of Capitalism.” Warren and Charlie traditionally sit for a long Q&A session, with questions ranging from general life advice to specific asks on the economics of reinsurance entities. One of the most memorable questions, IMO, from the year I attended, was from a random business school student.

The question: What advice would you give to someone who is trying to network with influential people but doesn’t have access to the alumni network of a top business school?

Charlie’s answer?

“You’ve got to do the best you can, playing the hand you’ve been dealt.”

And doesn’t all of life boil down to this one infinitely scaleable truth? On an abstract level, what should anyone do about problem XYZ? What should we do when the elements are stacked against us? When we have wasted time and energy on the wrong people, the wrong ideas, the wrong careers, the wrong cities, etc? What do we do when the cards are stacked against us? What do we do when the probability of failure is high and when the path between dream and reality is littered with obstacles and pitfalls and setbacks? What do we do when our opponents have a head start?

There’s only one answer, which is to keep plowing ahead, one day at a time, doing the best we can with the hand we’ve been dealt. Called to do so living nonetheless in the vortex of knowing that our best didn’t always get us where we needed to be. And that our best may never get us there.

- Motion City Soundtrack

In his book Talking to My Daughter about the Economy, the controversial Greek finance minister and former UT-Austin economics professor Yanis Varoufakis addresses the question of “Why so much inequality?” by instead asking a different question.

Why didn’t the Aborigines of Australia invade England?

As Varoufakis points out:

“If we don't answer [this] carefully, we risk thoughtlessly accepting either that the Europeans were ultimately smarter and more capable (which was certainly the view of the colonizers at the time) or that the Aboriginal Australians were better and nicer people, which is why they themselves didn't become brutal colonizers. Even if it were true, this second argument boils down to much the same thing as the first: it says there is just something intrinsically different between white Europeans and Aboriginal Australians …

These arguments must be silenced if only because they can emerge from within your own mind, tempting you to accept that history's victims deserved what they got because they were not smart enough.”

While a full rundown of the economic and military history of the the World is outside the scope of this essay, I’ll address this in my conclusion. In the meantime, however, here’s the meta-takeaway.

Sometimes, if you want a better answer, you have to ask a different question.

—

If there’s ever a clichéd maxim I live by, and there are many, it’s probably the Socrates quote scrawled on the blackboard of Philosophy 101

The unexamined life is not worth living

I think a lot about the meaning of life and about my purpose here on Earth. This is either defect or a virtue, depending on whom you ask. Basically, pondering the meaning and purpose of existence is either a) a complete waste of time or b) the most important thing we can do. Maybe it’s both.

But as we saw earlier, sometimes if you want a better answer, you have to ask a different question. In this case:

What is the purpose of being a chimpanzee?

Humanity is complicated. It’s hard to understand human life from the point of view of a human being living a life. But chimpanzees, our closest living primate relatives, are much less complicated. My very unscientific hunch is that chimps tend to achieve their individual purpose, on average. If I’m right, how do they do it?

Here’s Herman Pontzer writing about the vicissitudes of chimpanzee life in Scientific American:

“A typical day’s agenda for a chimpanzee in the wild reads like the daily schedule for lethargic retirees on a Caribbean cruise, though with fewer organized activities. Wake up early, crack of dawn, then off to breakfast (fruit). Eat until you are stuffed, and next find a nice place for a nap, maybe some light grooming. After an hour or so (no rush!), go find a sunny tree with figs and gorge yourself. Maybe go meet some friends, a bit more grooming, another nap. Around five o’clock have an early dinner (more fruit, maybe some leaves), then it is time to find a nice sleeping tree, build a nest and call it a night.”

It turns out that not just chimps, but all great apes (gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, etc.) lead pretty chill lives and do… basically nothing! In fact, great ape levels of physical activity are so low that they would cause diabetes and heart disease in humans.

Here’s a fun fact though: gorillas and orangutans average only 14 to 23 percent body fat and chimpanzees less than 10 percent, on par with human Olympic athletes! So why don’t apes get fat from lack of exercise? The short answer is that it’s not diet, they just have a different physiology. (More on this later).

So it appears the way that apes fulfill their purpose in life is by lying around eating fruit, taking naps, and grooming each other. That’s the bulk of ape life, augmented by the occasional turf war with a neighboring troop, the mild drama of intra-troop battles for dominance, and the occasional wild orgy (if you’re lucky enough to be a bonobo!)

We share 97% of our DNA with apes

(Side note: We also share 44% of our DNA with a banana; I think about this constantly)

The way I process this is that if we just do what apes do, which is to say that if we lay around, eat lunch, take a nap, hang out with our friends, sneak off to have sex, go to war from time to time with neighboring tribes, vie for social status, and participate in the occasional wild orgy, we are already basically getting a 97% on the test as to whether we are fulfilling our life’s purpose.

Where I come from, that’s an ‘A’ even before grade-inflation, but it may not be an ‘A+’ which okay, how might we get to ‘A+’?

To get to A+ we need to solve the other 3%

To fully round out our human experience we must first accept that we are basically apes and that our lives will consist primarily of the relatively banal activity outlined above, call it the vast majority of our time. But there’s a lot of magic in the 3% of DNA that defines our fork of the evolutionary tree. To our elevate our ape existence, we add to it that which apes cannot do. Here’s what comes to mind:

• Use abstract systems of representation

• Play rock music

• Ferment grains into booze

• Do yoga and pilates

• Invent drugs to cure disease

• Invent drugs to expand consciousness

• Refuse to engage in pointless and counterproductive wars with other tribes of humans

• Domesticate plants and animals

• Organize into a global human tribe

• Launch satellites into the atmosphere

• Make and consume visual art

• Write stuff for future generations

• Contemplate God

And so on and so forth. I’m sure there are more but filling in the 3% is sort of a choose-your-own-adventure. And to some extent, we *do* have to choose an adventure, lest we accept a technical forfeit via ‘analysis paralysis.’ IMO, the analysis paralysis technical forfeiture risk is why some very smart people think sitting around pondering existence is a fool’s errand. At some point, any armchair philosopher worth his salt is going to realize that time stops for no one. Although perhaps Bob Dylan said it more eloquently in his 1965 track ‘It’s Alright Ma’ from Bringing It All Back Home:

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”

—

If you’re like me, you may be left wondering how the hell do chimps laze around all day eating sugar while still maintaining 10% body fat??? Well. Science doesn’t really know. But I hope some enterprising young bioengineering major at UCSD figures it out so that through the magic of gene splicing we can all look smoking hot despite spending our days watching Netflix and washing down Chipotle burritos with 64oz Mountain Dew Big Gulps.

The milquetoast reality bite of Pontzer’s article in Scientific American is that human beings evolved to require significant amounts of exercise to keep our bodies and minds functioning properly. Similarly to how sharks have lost the ability to pump water over their gills while stationary and are thus now forced to ‘swim-or-die,’ human beings, post-forking from our ape ancestors, have apparently lost the ability to appropriately regulate metabolism while sedentary, resulting in our present day workout-or-get-diabetes-and-cardiovascular-disease Sophie’s choice. This adaptation allegedly helped us run prey to exhaustion on the Savannah. It seems to have outlived its useful life. Well. Evolution is a bitch. 🤷🏻‍♂️

And why didn’t the Aborigines invade England? Well. Long story short because they didn’t have to. Geographically, Australia is fertile and plentiful while England sucks and has bland food. According to Varoufakis, the English had the upper hand because living in the crappiest place meant they had to invent the best technology, including agricultural technology and weaponry, which, once invented, the English almost immediately used to take over neighboring tribes because they were running out of food and well… probably also because we are apes.

One of the best quotes I’ve heard about grief is that the intensity never changes, it’s just the frequency of episodes that decreases. There’s no standing your ground when you get punched in the face by grief, the only real strategy for managing it is to get punched in the face by it less often.

The easiest but perhaps most self-consciously destructive way to accomplish this, as far as I can tell, is to go full Eternal Sunshine, erasing the past and obliterating every painful and happy memory. A forced stalemate with the past. Executing on this devil’s bargain isn’t really a strategy I’m a fan of, but it also isn’t always a conscious decision. The organism will do whatever it has to survive, or it won’t. I try to accept the past, to carry it with me, but our ability to do so is directly related to the blunt force of pain that we, as imperfect mortal beings, are capable of withstanding.

To contemplate loss, whether in the immediate aftermath of tragedy or years after the fact, is to experience a sort of Dresden-bombing of our emotional faculties. If we experience this again and again, we are faced with the very real question of whether it’s worth it to hang on to the happy memories, whether it’s feasible to remain hopeful for some continuity of self, even for one more day, when the cost of doing so is another night spent lying awake in the grip of the unspeakable terror of the irretrievability of self. There is a part of me that will never come back.

Boundaries, we learn in therapy, are related to the idea that there is some place where you end and I begin. This is how we survive the chaos. Says Prentis Hemphill, quite reasonably, writing for the majority: “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”

Then again, here’s H.H. Fowler issuing the dissent, “Love knows no reason, no boundaries, no distance. It has a sole intention of bringing people together to a time called forever.”

In National Geographic, neuroscientist Anil Ananthaswamy writes of phantom limbs: “the brain creates ‘maps’ of the body and what we perceive are these maps. In the case of phantom limbs, the map should have reorganized to reflect the current physical condition of the body. But it hasn’t and you continue to feel the old map.”

Writing in a paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Tamer Soliman and his colleagues find that, “humans are experts in social tasks because they can adjust their body schemas to incorporate the kinematics of partners, thus forming an interpersonal joint body schema.”

Like many others, I experience grief as a phantom limb. A refusal by the body and mind to remap the interpersonal joint schema of the heart. An unwillingness to fracture the infinite.

It’s not your history to rewrite, I tell myself. The tribunal that could approve a remapping will never again convene.

Occasionally, when I am sitting around contemplating the infinite sadness, synapses glitching out as I try to hang on to memories of the past that does not exist, I am interrupted by my barking collie, threatening to leave a turd on the floor if I don’t immediately take her for walk, thus leaving me just one Mellon short of a multi-platinum Smashing Pumpkins album. Not every question has an answer. And not every problem has a strategic solution. But one of the key lessons I’ve learned from parenting a puppy is that perhaps the only thing worse than grief spiraling is grief spiraling while a dog looks you square in the eye, scooches their little doggy butt up high in the air, and takes a steaming shit directly on your floor.

That means it’s time to go outside.

There is a whole world of spiritual wisdom out there suggesting that, because the past is unchangeable and the future is unpredictable, we should focus substantially all of our energy and attention on the present. And there are many who swear by this temporal orientation. But I think there is a bypassing issue here. Because it’s easier said than done and it’s very difficult to do, at least until it isn’t.

Spiritual bypassing tends to be thought of more in the context of the amorphous concepts of toxic positivity and avoidance of the necessary discomfort required for personal and community growth. But there is also a lazy intellectual component of spiritual bypassing. The biggest and most common issue I face in accessing the present is how the advice of temporal orientation in the present moment fails to integrate itself into a more comprehensive theory on how to live. 

(Abstracting up a layer, we run into the perennial issue of multiple conflicting frameworks being simultaneously true. CD-baby philosopher-king Derek Sivers, in his recent book How to Live, presents ~27 conflicting but widely accepted as true frameworks for how to live, abiding by F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that the mark of first-rate intelligence is “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

In my opinion, there are only two meta-frameworks that enable FSF's intelligence, integration and asynchronicity. As far as ‘living in the now’ is concerned, I think the appropriate reconciliation strategy is the latter, see below).

In the specific case of implementing the wisdom associated with ‘being present,' we run into the very real issue that if we want to be temporally-oriented in the present, we somehow need to figure out the appropriate mechanism and internal-computational weighting for asynchronous processing of future-oriented obligations. It's no easy task, because what we are after here is very the holy grail, and potentially even the secret to happiness? Consider the following subplot from the well-known best-selling spiritual guidebook The Alchemist:

A young man goes off to learn the secret of happiness from the wisest of all men (the 'sage'). Upon arriving at the sage's castle, he approaches the sage to ask him for the secret to happiness. The sage gives him a spoon, full of oil, instructs him not to spill any of it, and sends him off to go appreciate the wondrous castle's beauty for two hours. 

So off he goes to appreciate the castle, wanders around a bit, and comes back to the sage. Unfortunately, he didn't appreciate the castle because he was too focused on not spilling the oil. So the sage sends him back out and says to make sure that he appreciates the castle! So off he goes and this time fully appreciates the castle, but upon his return is chastised by the sage for having spilled all the oil in the spoon. 

The sage then informs him that the secret to happiness is to appreciate all the beauty of the castle without spilling any of the oil in the spoon. 

I understand the parable to be about the requirement that we tune our algorithm for asynchronous processing of our long-term obligations and responsibilities alongside our engagement with the present moment. The interesting question lies in how to practically do this because at a certain point we run into diminishing returns on tautological statements like "the secret to happiness is learning to achieve balance." The last thing the world needs is more useless proselytizing that the secret to happiness is to figure everything out! Because like, obviously.

In my own life, I try to blend a schedule and a to-do list to create spaces for now-orientation.  Responsibilities tend to be temporally oriented around future outcomes. (For example, I need to walk my dog because if I do not, she will take a shit on the floor in the future; this is quite contra to my happiness). Every time I walk my dog (or ensure my dog is walked by some third-party), I create a 4-6 hour window during which I am able to relax and focus on the present. The key in my life seems to be using schedules and lists to create windows of time in which to be laser-focused on the present. However, to do this well, we need to spend a considerable amount of time doing the opposite of being in the present moment. We have to plan.

So the revised question, the one that we *actually* need to answer, is not whether or not we should be in the present moment (because perhaps we *should* always be in the present moment, but in reality we *can't* always be in the present moment). It's this: Assuming we default to being present during specific activities, how much time should we spend planning and what is the right level of time-granularity at which we should plan? In essence, we actually need to plan to plan, to ensure we have space to be present in the future! WTF!

This is why life is so fucking difficult! The answer is never simple, it is always some complex recursive statement that requires either resolution of or acknowledgment of paradox. To add to our time-dilation angst, we can't also help but notice the inevitability of plans going awry, which often screws up the entire concept of creating space to be present, because then plans must be revised. Here’s poet Robert Burns on what rodents and homo sapiens have in common with one another: The best laid schemes o' mice an' men, gang aft a-gley. Translation: plans go wrong constantly. Hopscotching back from poetry to prose, here's what consummate planner and time-management guru Dwight Eisenhower has to say about planning: "In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable."

So to summarize my experience, the way I have learned to be present and in the NOW, has been to first do the opposite of being present, i.e. planning for the future, knowing full well that events are unlikely to go according to plan. Then, using the slices and windows of time created by planned activities and fulfilled obligations, being fully present and engaged in whatever activity I happen to be doing. All of this is somehow necessary? Counterintuitively, in addition, I find I am able to be substantially more present and awake on my yoga mat by taking occasional breaks from the present, traveling backwards in time to recall the memory of countless events not going according to plan, which then reminds me, somehow, of the inevitability of my own death, its impending and uncertain nature, and the temporary-ness of all things, which slingshots me back into the present more deeply, so that I am willing to take more chances, risk falling, try new things, and transform my practice. Because when I really think about how few practices I may have left, when I think about and admire all of the unseen asteroids headed in my direction, I am able to accept the very challenging and inspiring logic of “If not now, when?”

Postscript on my own planning/presence balance:

Everyone will land somewhere different, but after a lot of trial and error, I’ve landed on 30-90 minutes per day of planning, with about 50% of that time spent on planning for the following day and 50% spent planning on a multi-year time horizon. The standard deviation in minutes is quite high depending on the uncertainty of inputs I’m dealing with at the time.

This nugget, in its various permutations, has been attributed to a wide variety of folks, ranging from Italian renaissance painter and sculptor Michelangelo to former Ohio State Representative Les Brown.

It’s the type of statement that sounds good on paper but ultimately can be neither proven nor disproven, so maybe we should initially take it with a grain of skepticism.

Either way, the incredibly salient question remains: When it comes to our own lives, how high should we aim?

A short digression on finance: Modern portfolio theory offers the following maxim: Return is a function of risk.

More risk => more return

Unfortunately for you (and for me), to the extent you believe in the capital asset pricing model, this maxim is true only in the aggregate, not for individuals. Which basically means that if *you* (or I) take on more risk, *you* (or I) will not necessarily receive a higher return, but rather, the prospect of such, which prospect entails a higher probability of both a) ruin and b) riches, but the expected value of the high-risk path exceeds the expected value of the low-risk path, which path offers mainly the benefit of a lower P(ruin).

On average, in the markets, reality plays out basically in accordance. Some startups go bust, but a diversified portfolio of venture investments tends to outperform a diversified portfolio of secured investment-grade bonds and so on and so forth. (Side shout to erstwhile investment banker and junk bond king Michael Milken, whose Wharton MBA capstone noticed for the world that a diversified portfolio of high-yield bonds outperforms equities on a risk-adjusted basis! Yeet!)

But actually here’s the weird and good news: Your life is not the stock market. And what I mean by this is that the projects into which we invest our time and energy don’t really have the same characteristics as financial securities. But that said, they are really really fucking similar! So similar, in fact, that entire generation of otherwise brilliant private equity bros and investment bankers (including, on occasion, myself) have been hoodwinked into using Fama and French to manage their personal lives! 😬

And who could blame us? The risk vs. return heuristics that come packaged up with a bow from a generation of Nobel Prize winners in economics are like… fucking Promethean in nature. But real talk, if you try to apply them in a broader context (i.e. to your life) you could very well end up blowing yourself up à la Long Term Capital Management.

Anyways, this is relevant because the takeaway from the aforementioned aphorism is, in 21st century investment banking terms, that aiming for a lower long-term ‘return-on-life’ doesn’t actually de-risk your life at all. In fact, according to Michelangelo, aiming for a lower ‘return-on-life’ counterintuitively increases your risk! Because you might succeed at selling yourself short!

Net-net, I tend to agree. You either believe me here or you don’t. But if you do, the takeaway is to aim very very high. Aim for the stars, so to speak, because if you don’t, you are guaranteed whatever mediocrity you’ve implicitly agreed to as far as your life is concerned.

But okay, even if you agree with me on the “aim-high” premise, ideation is cheap and execution is everything. “Aim for the stars” is an emotionally-charged Disney phrase that, taken more literally, applies to a really small subset of humans mainly constituted by future astronauts and tech billionaires.

What does it mean for you or I to aim high in practice? I’d offer the following:

Aiming higher entails a shift in decision making and prioritization in order to maximize the likelihood of extreme positive events.

Two of the key frameworks I use in my own life to enable this are the forward solve and the backward solve. I’ve outlined each below.

Forward Solve:

Solving forward, we ask ourselves what the best possible outcomes are given the path we are already on, which really means the decision-making frameworks we use today. Everyone is doing their own thing in life but for the sake of example let’s use a typical NYC person: work at job, go to the gym once or twice, go to yoga a few times, party on the weekends, watch a couple Netflix shows, go on one or two hinge dates, etc. (By the way, this is an incredible and beautiful life I am describing here (not dissimilar to mine) - there is magic in simplicity!). If all goes well we’ll stay in decent shape, get promoted a few times, feel connected-ish to our community, watch some great TV, and find a pretty awesome gal or guy to share in the magic of the various moments.

The algorithm for the forward-solve is to average out your decision-making framework and habits from the past couple of weeks, assume conditions remain constant, and then extrapolate out weekly by something like ~260 (the number of weeks that will happen in 5 years) to see what a reasonable expectation would be for where you are going to land assuming society doesn’t collapse. This, as my investor readership knows, is how all financial forecasting is done and it’s usually pretty darn accurate or at least it’s the best we can do for now.

Backward Solve:

Franklin Covey said that one of the 7 habits of highly effective people is that they “Begin with the end in mind.” This may be true, but I think it’s much cooler to lead off quoting semi-obscure German mathematician Carl Jacobi who said, “Man muss immer umkehren!” (“Invert, always invert!”)

Because I am a pretty good standardized test-taker, I was once hired by a national test prep company to train high-schoolers from Long Island on how to ace the SATs. The cornerstone of their proprietary method was back-solving. After paying $1,200 and giving up their Saturdays for a month, students are taught to plug the multiple choice answer back into the original question and see if it works.

Because it saves time.

Back-solving your dreams is also a useful strategy. To implement it you assume that you have woken up on some day in the future *after* extreme positive events have already taken place. Within the realm of this fantasy, the next step is to use annoyingly specific investigative journalism to find the most likely path that you got there. (The ‘most likely’ part is the key! No lottery winning…).

For example, let’s say you wake up in a beautiful apartment next to the hottie of your choice. Whose apartment is it? Yours? Where is it, exactly? How much does it cost? When did you move in? Where did you live before that? Was it the apartment you are in now or was there a place you lived in between? Where is the rest of your stuff?

That exercise then repeated for every aspect in your fantasy life until it’s all pretty mundane and boring and not fantasy-like at all.

In a nutshell, close your eyes, manifest your wildest fucking dream and then, echoing David Byrne in the Talking Heads’ classic anthem Once in a Lifetime, you ask yourself, HOW DID I GET HERE. Then you make decisions in the present, that are consistent with the backwards-imagined path.

I’m not going to lie, this exercise is extremely difficult. It’s actually very boring and frustrating to try to think of how you might actually get there. And you may find that in slowly, ploddingly finding your way backwards from your wild-ass dream to your present state, you end up just saying fuck it and going to the bar.

And that’s because charting the path to achieving our dreams is also boring and frustrating. It doesn’t matter whether you start and the end and go backwards or start at the beginning and go forwards. It’s your life story and it requires thinking and imagination and hard work and doing a truckload of boring and unpleasant tasks. It also requires lots of waiting around (sometimes at the bar) while your subconscious chews on stuff and works things out.

But the second piece of good news is that if you care for your mind and body, the tag team of your conscious and subconscious *will* likely figure it out. Research suggests that your mind has about 100 billion neurons in with 4 quadrillion connections generating 23 watts of power, doing 100 trillion calculations per second, with information traveling between neurons at ~270 MPH. The world’s most powerful supercomputer isn’t sitting in an IBM lab somewhere, you already own it. And through conscious focus you can set its internal algorithms to basically solve for whatever you want. That’s an incredible amount of processing power to bring to bear on achieving your dreams, which is why it’s difficult to fail if you believe in yourself and never give up.

Forward solving and backward solving our goals are just two ways of reclaiming command of our own internal hardware and software. I find both strategies useful but going backwards allows a bit more imaginative freedom and offers up an opportunity to dream much bigger (you’ll notice that charting your way to a bolder dream requires a much more imaginative path, which is as true in our mind’s eye as it is in the prakritic world of atoms). There is another proverb here that seems equally applicable as the first which goes something like, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars ✨ “

Postscript:

Even in the markets, we still face all of the issues inherent in identifying and defining what risk even is and what it is not and why it’s important. If you haven’t already, I recommend checking out Oaktree’s very thoughtful memo on risk. There’s plenty of quotables in there but suffice to say the big takeaway is that with regards to investing volatility is neither a sufficient nor useful measure of risk. I tend to agree, with the caveat that from a quantitative perspective, ARCH ARIMA models and aggressive daily measurement of VAR have probably provided early warning signals that when heeded have saved broker dealers a lot of money. (Most famously Goldman Sachs who took heed of their quants’ models and dumped MBS during the financial crisis. Margin Call is a pretty fun movie that dramatizes this otherwise very dry subject!)

As much as social media and reality TV pull back the curtain on celebrity, the fundamental premise of the celebrity culture in which we live is that famous people (or historical figures) are somehow not like us. And unfortunately, most people buy this enormous lie because it operates on a subconscious level tied to an even more insidious directive: In more than just a few ways, the fundamental premise of our culture is: stay in your lane.

“Stay in your lane” is actually not bad advice. It is ubiquitous in finance. (Note: I have been given this advice many times in my career and, most of the time, with the benefit of hindsight, I have had the ability to see things that were going on outside my lane - perhaps invisible to me at the time - that made staying in it the right decision. Veering from one’s lane can be disastrous when you stray into oncoming traffic...) In any case, I intuitively grasped the benefit of this lesson early on in my career and watched a whole cohort of my contemporaries drop like flies or bounce around aimlessly as a result of having too much faith in their uninformed opinions.

Regardless, however, of whether staying in one’s lane represents good advice in the early innings, it’s pretty much a nonstarter for inspiring you to greatness. This is relevant because the question we all face when we look in the mirror every morning is how to achieve our potential. How to make the best use of our time on Earth. Not everybody faces it because not everyone wants to come face-to-face with their own potential. It’s hard to not be the person you want to be. It gets harder as the gap widens.

As I rose toward the top of my field, I had the opportunity to go courtside to watch the best of the best do their thing. My field is finance but I think the learnings are interdisciplinary and applicable everywhere. There is magic in watching the sausage get made. So that’s how it’s made, you think to yourself. The most eye opening moments in life are the ones that challenge your model of reality. You are only as good as your model of reality is accurate.

Spend enough time in the hopper with the world’s most successful people and you’ll realize the following truth, rarely discussed. People who achieve their potential are not better at doing, they are better at deciding what to do.

Everybody has 16 hours in a day, give or take a few hours to account for variability in sleep schedules and circadian rhythms. The only real superpower is prioritization. The most powerful skill in the world is time management. To master strategically allocating your own time is to master everything. I think about the fact that Jeff Bezos once worked at McDonald’s. The difference between him and the other guy? At some point he decided to stop working there. It simply wasn’t the best use of his time. Prioritization.

I once worked at a really crappy workplace with an ostensibly bright guy. I remember the visceral shock I felt when I learned, 8 years later, that he was somehow still working there, having watched a lifetime of opportunities pass him by. Maybe not so bright after all. Prioritization.

The most important thing you can do for your life is to figure out the most important thing you can do for your life and then do it. It’s tautological but IYKYK. Do it today. Then. Revisit the question. Is the answer the same as it was yesterday? Are you confident in your decision? Are you sure? How sure? You should never be sure. Another truism: thinking you’re right is the first step to being massively wrong.

For me, the most important thing is getting my thoughts about the world on paper, digitized, distributed. Hence this newsletter. A big thanks goes out to the few people who have encouraged me to record some of these insights or musings. You all know who you are. I spend most of my life now thinking about how to live it. The plan is to centralize distribution for any useful insights I find along the way.

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