I remember one day in 7th grade, there was a story going around in the car line outside the band hall that there was a senior at the high school who had just gotten a Razor flip phone. Obviously, this was a big potatoes rumor.

“Can’t those like connect to the internet?”

“They cost like $700.”

Just a bunch of hyped up 7th graders who were still under a landline-influenced-world, musing about the evolution of technology.

We’ve all got some version of this anecdote, pending you’re not 15 right now.

I remember another “woah-the-future-is-going-to-be-krrraaaazyy-moment”:

Me to another middle schooler, probably in social studies: “I heard in the future, we’ll have phones that you can see the other person’s face through while you talk to them.”

Yeah, no duh Andrew. This was all so novel to me though! I had a PS2, talked to my friends on an AT&T landline, had never sent a text message, and social networks were totally out of my field of vision. Most of what I experienced technologically was what most other people were experiencing too. There weren’t these massive leaps yet that could easily test our comprehension. A landline turned into a small flip phone in your pocket. That’s cool, but it’s not revolutionary.

But the Razor was this first thing that really felt like it was new territory.

Then Xbox live: “I can play COD in Amory, MS while someone else is in Irvine, CA?”

Then Facebook: “I can write messages one someone else’s wall and we can all have this social experience?”

Then the video iPod: “I can watch The Office on this thing?”

Then the iPhone.

Each of those leaps felt like something huge. “Things are different now” kind of huge.

There was wonder. People gasped when Steve Jobs came out on stage and unveiled a new product.

But, wonder is under siege.

When the Apple Vision Pro came out, if you're like me, you probably had some feeling like, "Wait, I thought this already existed or something…”

Since we’re now in this era where our relationships with technology are so baked in and wonder is hard to come by — and even the lowest common denominator of our current innovation is 1000× 10 years ago — we forget that it’s almost always been novel and revolutionary. When we get to a certain cruising altitude with what is widely available, we assume it’s always been there — or it’s always been that good. It hasn’t!

I used ChatGPT so much now for basic searching of information that it’s commonly lost on me how profound that experience is. Some of you reading this are thinking, “Yeahhh, ChatGPT… What’s the big deal?” I don’t blame you, especially if you don’t use it, but look at the two examples below and you tell me you don’t see the profundity.

Example 1: ChatGPT explains Heavy Industry in Space in the voice of Shaquille O’Neal. Read that whole thing.

Example 2: Google Search for Heavy Industry in Space. boooooo.

So.. the half-life of wonder.

Because of the leap from the Razor to ChatGPT and being this close to Mars — and not just ChatGPT, but now Sora — we’re in danger of loosing the wonder that these leaps should impress on us.

My friends, wonder is abundant in the progress and innovation of the world.

While I focus on technology in this essay, the real danger that becoming unimpressed by these leaps brings is that it trickles into the rest of life.

To not be in wonder at what humanity is up to with things like text to video generation (Sora) and launching reusable rockets into space, is to look at an old Sycamore tree and feel as if you’ve seen all Sycamore trees before.

That’s a 254 year old tree. Such wonder.

Hope you find something wonderful today.

Do you ever get close to something that’s essential about life and living, or is so beautiful, that just when you notice it you get kind of sad?

This happened to me yesterday when I was talking to a good friend who’s a generous and thoughtful human being.

First, a little background:

He also happens to understand philosophy. You know, like the-hell-is-going-on-around-here-and-who’s-thought-about-and-written-about-that-before-and-what-sense-can-we-actually-make-out-of-any-of-it kind of philosophy.

We caught up for a few minutes about our lives — pleasant. Nice. For instance, I learned he’s dating someone new and it’s going well. He learned that my soup was getting cold while I was trying to get the kids down for bedtime. Bedtime is tedious — its own razor’s edge. Which he now knows, too.

Being on familiar ground, we started talking about our religious faith. We’re both Christians, he being a Catholic and me being a Presbyterian. When I tell you that it couldn’t possibly be more exciting to discuss religion, I mean it. Because our conversations tend to be the kind that transcends the shallow end of a thing.

So, we’re discussing this tension we both feel where often what we are doing with our lives and with our time doesn’t really seem to matter in light of a loving God, being fully first and in all things and people. The are whole universes in you.

If you’ve ever rubbed elbows with a government service you know what I’m talking about: “Why am I standing in this DMV line when the beauty of God/the universe is in me and I in it?” kind of thoughts. What do these things matter if I’m not living every moment in the awareness that this is all fundamentally fragile and beautiful and can can alter my complete existence for the better if I would just give in and let my soul be touched?

So my friend called this, “the razor’s edge of nihilism.” The point where you see through everything else and see the thing that is most beautiful and most real about your life or about the objective function of the World.

Razor’s edge because the line is so fine that it either feels euphoric or painful.

Nihilism because it’s quite easy to want to do a Hollywood shirt rip because you feel it so deeply that once you realize standing in that DMV line doesn’t matter, you begin to consider what other things feel like “nihil”, “nothing”. Those are hard thoughts.

Batista on the razor’s edge of nihilism

Basically, the whole world (84% as of 2010) is religious in some fashion but nobody really seems to like talking about it. Why is that? It’s pretty sanitized and institutionalized — to introduce the ize’s — and there’s not a lot of adventure or heart there. But as far as things all human beings have in common with one another, the choice to be religious is like the top one. Yet it’s the weirdest and most most awkward thing we kind of get into, not to mention the fact that we can be pretty mean and violent about it.

But when I talk to my friend, it’s absolutely exciting. He asks me what my spiritual practice has been like. Pretty wonky and hard to follow for the most part — the actual practice (prayer/meditation) — but I’ve had a closeness to God recently, through my church in part, that I haven’t felt in years! To me, this is funny timing. In the last 15+ years, the most populous countries in the world are becoming less religious, principally among the richest.

To us both, faith and following is actually getting more exciting as the world is less interested.

That is driven by the razor’s edge. The reality that in any moment, love, generosity, friendship, or hope can come through and make you into more than you can ever make yourself into. It’s what is possible that can be just as beautiful as what is beautiful.

Visakan Veerasamy, my favorite follow on X/Twitter recently, has this book I’m reading called Friendly Ambitious Nerd. In one part, he says:

“Do we allow life to surprise us?”
“Because everything we think we know is a tiny fragment of the world.”

Do I posture myself so that I skate up to the razor’s edge of nihilism as often as possible, see it’s beauty and the fragility of “nihil” and then still stand strong in the DMV line, seeing the beauty in it too?

That’s the question.

It is not nothing.
It is everything.

The last time I bought sponges, they were rectangles.

Two days ago I brought sponges and they were a kind of wavey-rectangle.

The time between these two purchases was probably no more than 2 months. The three-pack of Scotch-Brite I bought last time lasted about that long (too long?). Nothing about their being a rectangle struck me as any more or less efficient at being a sponge.

This particular change is pretty inconsequential. There’s a dishwasher in my house, so I’m not even all that affected by the sponge industry. But I’m fascinated by the anatomy of change, to borrow a partial phrase from E.B. White (his was an essay titled The Anatomy of Decline).

Who I was when I bought the three-pack of Scotch-Brite two months ago is roughly the same version of who I am today. Yet, had my dishwasher broken I’d suddenly be someone in a real position to understand something new about why the sponge changed and how it works.

Not to get too in the weeds, but I find it entirely possible that a world exists where the makeup of the sponge could have changed in a way that affects how I wash my cast-iron skillet vs. how I wash an 8-cup pot.

And this, I think, is why it catches my attention.

One day they’re rectangles, then two months of my life go by — Christmas, New Years, flying with one kid solo for the first time, friend’s parents dying, Dry January, 6 nights in a row of building magnet-tile-towers with my son before bed — and all of a sudden the design of the standard kitchen sponge has changed. And I was totally in the dark that this was happening.

Progress is a multiplier that flips the way things were on their head - fast. It instills doom in some and heavy doses of optimism in others.

Let’s pivot to technology with this in mind. Take algorithm updates as a measure of how quickly things change and the rate at which that compounding change can leave you without your shirt. Or make you feel dumb in a meeting where this is your domain but you’re just a clueless as anyone else.

In 2018, Google made over 3,200 updates to the search algorithm. Not all of these are major version updates; most were maintenance updates in the and some were major updates.

Can you imagine having to keep up with even 5 major updates to the thing that is the heart of your business’s organic reach?

One day you’re an SEO expert, the next you’re a novice all over again.

That’s the doomer-ish view.

Dall-E’s visual of Google algorithm updates per year. Nonsensical, but awesome.

The optimistic view is that this rate of change is ultimately leading to something that will be so good that it will make SEO feel like a one-man blacksmith in antiquity compared to the robotics-blacksmithing that will be generative-AI search.

I’d argue here that the SEO expert becoming a blacksmith isn’t a bad thing. They were never going to work 24/7 to get the kind of results that businesses will be able to see with the next suite of SEO tools that use AI. They can instead focus on creative writing for a business’s authentic voice or some other human-led thing that we can’t even see right now or doesn’t have a name/discipline. Side-note: I see a world where philosophers become integral to the direction of any significant company.

Just like the blacksmith in antiquity was never going to build the B-2 bomber or the Cybertruck, he now can potentially pivot his time to building things on an individual level that have more intrigue and are for beauty’s sake instead of for industry.

I’m not convinced this will play out this way — I just offer it as a possibility that I see if we are freed up by the ubiquity of AI rather than oppressed by it.

Even those who are the most in-tune with the rate of change and progress in AI and new hardware, like Sora, the Apple Vision Pro, or the Cybertruck, will have their own sponge-design moments.

Twitter tweet

I was in line at a thrift store the other day and a woman who was most likely in here 90s was commenting on the new Square reader behind the counter. The woman working behind the counter was glad to indulge and started highlighting the amazing features like product categories. Product categories.

Couldn’t help but think about the absurdity that these women are amazed with a marginally better version of tech that’s been around since 2017 while AGI is creeping in everywhere.

We all have this rectangle-to-wavey-sponge transition happening to us. At any given time, we have multiple versions happening at the same time.

Buckle up :)

Remember when the internet felt like it was for you, and not at you?

I remember signing up for Facebook at my friend Madison’s house.

The complete novelty of throwing your real life onto the internet where jokes (kinda pre-meme), random thoughts, writing on peoples’ ‘walls’ and ‘pokes’ were all about having more fun, quicker, because even if you couldn’t be in the same room with those people, this got you there.

The internet stopped behaving this way a long time ago.

There were glory days of Web 2.0 where social was fun. Where the currency wasn’t attention, but sharing.

You could watch videos on stupidvideos.com with your friends — being in the same room was even more fun — like Evil Penguin 2. Or number 48 on the most watched list, BMX Jump which just has the caption, “Don't try this at home. I have know idea why this guy is doing.”

Why is he doing I wonder?

This was an internet for you.

You could enjoy its spoils and participate in it. Of course, it had wild stuff like Chatroulette and Omegle, but that’s kinda beside the point.

it’s truly roulette

If 85% of the internet was this kind of stuff (the lulz), 15% of it was trying to sell stuff to you.

It wouldn’t have occurred to me that the internet was an advertising platform waiting in the wings when I opened my computer back then.

Stuff was bought on eBay, but that was also still part of the joke of it all somehow. Or where you could get fake Steven Gerrard Liverpool jerseys for $12 + $8 shipping.

This internet doesn’t exist anymore. It’s on its head.

The internet we have - the Fast Internet - is not for you.

It is at you.

At least 85% is selling you stuff.

Through algorithmic optimization beamed from on-high, you now enjoy ads selling you solutions to problems you don’t have, or that isn’t a big deal, instead of watching Farting Preacher or posting on your friends’ walls.

You now get ads for courses on how to grow your brand (to which you think, “Am I supposed to be having a brand right now?”). Or ads on how you can increase your top-of-funnel warm leads by 900% with this proven method (to which you think “I don’t have a funnel even a little bit”).

Or why you should subscribe to Better Help.

It’s not all that bad I guess. But, how much crap are you wading through every day to find one little gem? One laugh. One thoughtful post. One thing interesting. Even if you do, your brain is probably toast.

It is, at the very least, a bummer that this Fast Internet is at us, instead of for us.

It changes the way we do post on social media when we come around to it — instead of just watching the viral folks on our For You pages.

We know what the algorithm likes and we’re conditioned to think about that first.

It is, at the very least, a bummer.

I don’t know exactly what it would be yet, but I’d love to see a Slow Internet emerge from all of this.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and am finding people, on X/Twitter at least, who are also thinking about it.

That encourages me.

This switch — the new difference — would be going back to people in different communities online posting and sharing for one another again, instead of just for the algorithm.

Blogs about their ideas, videos, or art that they’re experimenting with, learning from, or just having fun with.

Let me point something out that seems obvious to me.

You may think: “So what?”

To this, I would concede, “I’m not sure yet. Or maybe ever.”

It’s just fun to think about.

How to waste time:

Place any primary importance on what others think of you.

How not to waste time:

Be aware of who you really are and spend time every day doing and creating things around that.

I used to wear more interesting clothes. In my early 20s, this was one of the more obvious ways I expressed who I was. Not so much right now. I feel more blended in.

I’m a dad now. I spend time thinking about boring stuff that I find actually interesting. Like the differences in salted & unsalted butter. I generally spend very little time considering what clothes I put on my body. Instead, I opt for the same pair of REI pants I’ve worn, mostly everyday, for the last year and a half.

This is catching up with me. There’s something about a fit and I’m missing it.

Style is rather inconvenient and curating one takes creativity. Creativity takes courage. And blending in is much easier than courage.

Creating a style I liked used to bring me confidence. I knew it was me, completely, and that provided a hedge against blending in and being like everyone else. It was an act of not caring about what other people thought about me.

My sophomore year of college, I dyed my hair blonde! I think I made a bet with someone over a round of golf and that was what was on the line. I lost and I followed through.

I don’t think I’d make that bet right now and I certainly wouldn’t follow through.

Why does it feel so unnatural and “something you do when you’re in your 20s” to live like this when you get older? I think this style of decision making in fact probably one that belongs in your 20s, but there’s a version of this kind of risky behavior that I could do right now, and that’s what feels unnatural to me.

I don’t like that it feels unnatural.

Here’s why I think it feels unnatural, though: The stakes get raised much higher when you’re out of your college/early post-college years. Or, at least, we’re just more aware of what people say the stakes are.

Careers, reputations, job titles, LinkedIn clout, hustlepreneurs, yada yada yada. It’s all a bit stiff.

It’s just people playing along to their group’s song. It’s not all bad, but it lacks some necessary beauty and creativity.

I think though, if you can find ways to reject this, or at least resist it, and continue your own way by wearing the clothes you want to wear or dying your hair blonde, as it were, you eventually get somewhere as yourself, not as just a “Product Manager” or even just a “Dad”. But with you as both of those things and like 15 more.

Reduction to any one thing is irresponsible to you and the people you’re in relationship/community with.

Single points of failure break the system and end the game.

Wear what you want to wear.

Stand out.

Be many things.

Know the 2 or 3 things about you that don’t change.

Blend in when you need to blend in.

Raise the right stakes. Lower the wrong ones.

Just find your unique way to play the game.

Some quick thoughts/curiosities on the future of products and apps:

1. I’m very curious to know if we'll move - and how quickly - into a world where all of our products/apps are in one dashboard.

Rabbit’s r1 seems like an attempt at this.

Giving you one device or one dashboard where you can explore and search for what you want without leaving it out of necessity to take the next action - only leave when you want (maybe to watch/read longer form content) - seems like a gift to us all.

How many tabs do you have open right now?

Probably enough to support a small village.

This could kill those tabs for good.

2. Seems crazy on the surface that we're using dozens of applications every day to take a few core actions.

I don't necessarily see one company providing this service, if we do end up consolidating. It's not about using one product (the killer app), just easily using all you products in one interface.

Personal computing used to happen locally. You could read/write on your device. There’s something very useful and honoring about that.

It’s like playing a Halo offline on an Xbox with your friends vs. playing it online, solo, with strangers: It’s almost like it was built and designed specifically for your pleasure.

3. This might only come with very personalized AGI.

Again, going back to Rabbit’s r1. It’s a companion device that can take actions for you, give you information, and help you explore your curiosities in one place.

Remember the 2009 Best Buy commercial phrase for desktop computers, “All in one”?

That’s essentially a useless phrase now as it relates to personal computers, for most of the world. Most of the world uses a phone that is the dimensions of that Best Buy audience’s CD disk in their Dell tower at the time.

An AI companion (not the romantic kind) that has one interface that you can learn in, take small actions in, and choose to leave it when you want.

Think about all you can do/learn/explore in one chat with ChatGPT right now while keeping it neatly in that feed.

Perplexity does an even better job with this. It’s pretty stunning. When you search for something, you’re met with a neatly package UI that cites resources in content blocks at the top of the page.

Right below that, there’s a section of text description or answers on that topic.

You also get related videos YouTube videos that you can watch right from the app.

This should not be lost on us: It’s insane. And wonderful.

We’re used to searching for something on one page, going to the next page for the result, scrolling until we see the most non-click bait SEO garbage that actually seems related to us, and then getting into reading what we originally searched for. Google’s AI Summaries at the top of the SERP are helping with this, but it has a ways to go.

No wonder we’re all slowly being cut by a thousand tabs.

4. What effect does this have, if it comes?

Without knowing a lot, it seems like this would be very disruptive.

A few questions:

• Does Search Engine Optimization drastically change beyond the typical algorithm update?

• Would it be bad at delivering content we’d want to read, like blogs, and just deliver dull text blocks of information?

• If it does deliver people’s blogs and YouTube videos, how does that traffic get sorted, counted, and rewarded to the creator?

• Would that cause ads to be devalued if website traffic isn’t as much of a factor?

• Does it eliminate ads altogether?

Who knows. My guess is, it won’t impact very many people until it impacts everyone.

My attention is much more productive, the less I spend time online. Over Christmas, I finished Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.

It was a fun read and I was struck by how much slacking off and fooling around he did. He seemed to almost exclusively follow his curiosity. I can’t recall the story exactly, but he once left his dinner at a diner to go to a paint store after an old painter told him he could mix two colors to get one that Feynman was almost certain wasn’t possible. He brought the paint back to the diner and tried mixing it like the painter said he did.

It seems like he never shrugged much off as uninteresting, or even chance. It was all interesting. There was enough time to go to the paint store and see if this old painter new something about colors that he, a physicist, didn’t yet know.

1. Observe things about the world

2. See patterns in things

3. Write about those patters and observations

4. Form ideas about how the world works

5. Delight in all of it

This observation - that there is enough time - is a fundamental ambition in 2024. It not only needs a list of daily habits in order to do it, but a list of things to not do in order to not waste the time.

I call the list of things to do “Laws of Motion” and the list of things not to do “Disturbances. Or, chaos.”

Laws of Motion

• love

• live well

• be active

• work

Disturbances. Or, chaos.

• twitter

• inconsistency

• the self (anger, ego)

• fear.

Kenilworth Stadium, home to Luton Town FC. Smallest ever PL stadium that holds 10,000 fans.

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday.

• Read time: few good minutes

• Meme theme: 1 meme. Parks and Rec

See you out there.

Luton Town FC, newly promoted to the English top flight for the first time since the 1991-92 season, lost their opening game this weekend, 4-1. Imagine this…

For 32 years, they’ve been at various levels of the English professional system - all levels but the top.

For the last 10 of those years, they were promoted 4 times. That might not sound good, but promotion is nearly impossible, especially falling as far as Luton did.  

The lower you are in the league system, the more money the club loses across the board. The more players leave your club to try and keep their careers alive and play at higher levels. At a certain point, your existence is about survival and not getting further relegated. It’s definitely not expected that you’ll gain promotion again immediately, but who knows if ever. Being out of the top flight for 32 years is like a death sentence.

Now, imagine this….

Let’s say that the big box stores like Lowes, ACE, Home Depot, Tractor Supply, True Value, Harbor Freight, etc., are all in a top tier of stores (the Premier League) that enjoy serious benefits which are a boon to their business. Without them, they’d face hard times: serious layoffs, store closures, and everyone’s favorite bailout.

Because they’re in this top tier they get the highest level of exposure from the league’s marketing department. They’re in every print advertisement - because you know they still print ads. They’re right there in the league’s graphics that jolt across the screen of Good Morning America.

Their store managers are invited to the best conferences - that have the best spreads - which give them exclusive insight and rights to carry new products in their stores before anyone else.

These benefits are akin to getting Joan’s book of the month sticker if you know your Parks and Rec.

Now, what if there were a lower league below this top (premier) league and it was called the Championship? Funny name for league number 2, but that’s the way it is.

You’ve got your Town Hardware stores, your Feed and Supply stores, perhaps a Pawn Shop or two, and, heck, your local Bait and Tackle stores.

At the end of each season - or, 4 quarters (sorry to mix business and football and futbol) - the two big box stores that have the two lowest sales numbers at the end Q4 out of the teams in the top league, are relegated down to the Championship.

And for their part, the two teams in the Championship who had the highest sales at the end of Q4 are promoted to the top league, the Premier League.

They now enjoy the benefits of the top league, and they now represent the top league at the conventions, in their marketing, and in all the other ways the big box stores used to. Tiny Fuzzy’s Bait and Tackle is now right there on your GMA screen, talking live worms and bringing the charm that the Lowe’s of the world so often lack.

The big box stores that are relegated are left to figure out how to scrape their way back up to the top after having to completely change their mindset and cut costs to survive. Humbly they leave behind their marketing budgets, their convention spreads, and their prestige. Time to roll up the sleeves - or pull out the power drills - and try and A) prevent further relegation and B) get promoted back to where they ‘should’ be.

Home Depot goes down and Fuzzy’s Bait and Tackle goes up.

Interesting stuff, right? That’s basically what the premier league is like.

The Fuzzy’s Bait and Tackles of the world can do so well - under such meek circumstances for so long - that they one day find themselves in the same league as Lowe’s and very abruptly forced to compete at that level.

To be promoted to the Premier League, especially as a team like Luton, must be one of the more euphoric feelings in sports. To have to then play 38 matches, all with the single goal of staying up (not getting relegated) must be pretty dysphoric.

Because after all, if Luton is Fuzzy’s and Lowe’s is Manchester City, then Fuzzy’s 11 best employees are valued at £56.4 million while Lowe’s (basically owned by the Saudi Royal Family) 11 best employees are valued at £910 million. That’s a big difference in the kind of power drills you can carry in your store.

I say Godspeed, Luton Town.

And Godspeed Fuzzy’s Bait and Tackle.

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

Still reading Brave New World

Watching

Watch this tour of Luton’s stadium. Super hipster. Super good.

Cool thing to check out

My friend Will told me about this website called ReListen the other day. It’s amazing. So far, I’ve only listened to the Dead, but have found it fascinating that you can listen to their studio stuff - audio from the whole process - for free.

I’ll never wrap my mind around how impressive the internet is.

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andrew

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday.

• Read time: beside the point.

• Meme theme: None. Only text. You have been forewarned.

See you out there.

A note about today’s post:

The labor of writing is for the writer. Should the writer choose to share that writing, what is produced is taken and interpreted by the reader. There can be a relationship between the writer and the reader where the reader benefits from the writer doing a key thing in the practice:

Writing for one.

Should I choose to spend week after week writing to you, I would need to take into consideration the knowns, and more challenging, the unknowns, for each of you. Rather, I prefer to do my absolute best to write for one: myself. That should get me to producing my best writing, or at least the writing I enjoy producing, and that hopefully, you enjoy reading.

Today’s is such a post. What I have written about here has made sense to me as I wrote it. I needed to write it to reflect on the observations I’ve made about it.

That is the point.

I do hope you enjoy it, or can at least make sense of it, but that is not the only goal necessarily.

“I have long been interested in motor-car design, or the lack of it, and this for two reasons. First, I used to like motoring. Second, I am fascinated by the anatomy of decline, by the spectacle of people passively accepting a degenerating process that is against their own interests.”

E.B. White, One Man’s Meat

Over the course of this summer, I estimate that I’ve ridden my bike several hundred miles in commuting alone.

Most every day, I’ve taken it into town, at least once, in a trip of about 2 miles each way to work from a coffee shop or the library. I often will bring home this or that thing that, upon realizing it is needed (or more often thought of as needed), I’ll pick it up and put it in the remaining room in my backpack.

There is a process each day of choosing which of the two bikes I own to take. Everything I need has a certain place in the house that has found, over time, more of an efficient storage method that makes it a bit more enjoyable the next day to pick up and go out. That doesn’t require it to be faster getting out of the door, but it does mean things have their place.

There’s a helmet, a cycling cap, and either a pair of Vans or cycling shoes with cleats on the bottom, depending on which bike I take.

A pair of white Apple wired headphones connect from my phone in my pocket up and through the buckled straps of my pack, finally looping through the ear holes of my helmet strap and into my ears.

A wallet typically goes in the brain of my pack, but sometimes it will go in the back pocket of the two different pairs of shorts I wear each day: either a black pair of Guess jeans shorts from Goodwill (now forming a sizeable hole in a particular spot, not that one) or a new green pair of shorts that I do not know the name of that Sadie, my wife, got me from a thrift store.

My way into town is largely car-less, involving a wonderful .3 mile stretch of greenway. Although it is short, it is appreciated.

There are a total of 3, but perhaps 4, hills into town depending on which way I take. If I go to a different coffee shop that’s off the highway next to our house, it is rather flat but does involve riding on the sidewalk which I find to be pleasant but inconsistent with norms. It does not involve the greenway. This coffee shop is preferable and is a place I feel known, making sidewalk riding conceivable.

Going the car-less way, I see many of my neighbors, their names I do not know, and say good morning to most of them. I try to make eye contact, acknowledging that we are both in this together.

I pass many squirrels and rabbits along the way. Birds moving this and that way. An assortment of thoughts about these animals come to mind some days - like, Where did they sleep last night? or How long have they been up? or Do they think ‘ahead’? - and other days I just ride, listening to a podcast.

Nothing, essentially, is wrong with the car.

It is a tool created to move and transport across space and time. It has design, intention, creativity, and perhaps even character.

Cumulatively, my car plus your car, plus their car, a real effect is happened upon yours and mine and their neighborhoods. Emissions aside, because there is a vast amount of space in this country and because I can get to you in 15 minutes, being 10 miles or more away, there is less of a reason for your house to be near my house. There is less of a chance then, to notice this and that bird, that neighbor, the opportunity to stop and ask another cyclist if they need help putting their chain back on, or the conversation with a stranger.

And so perhaps I know you less and you know me less. And when the time comes for that to matter, well then the car matters.

These have been my recent observations on The Anatomy of Decline, through riding my bike.

The infrastructure, tools, reality, and conventions we come to accept, whether out of necessity, desire, or foolishness sometimes need to be seen from a different angle.

And sometimes while wearing a helmet.

My car has been a useful tool for me and will continue to be, I am certain. I do now have a counter point of view which is that I have taken many more minutes and at this point potentially a few hours, to travel by bike rather than by car.

It has increased my vitality, a hedge against all that previous decline. A chance each day to gather the things I believe I will need, in an intentional order, and slowly make my way into a place that welcomes me and give me near infinite places to park.

A machine that has no horn of which I should use to transfer the dark thoughts of my heart into the bumper of my neighbor. Instead, I frustratingly capitulate my stature as a cyclist to their right-of-way as a motorist, and my decline again starts over.

And so I ride.

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

I am reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Watching

Karel Sabbe is one of my favorite runners. He philosophically combines incredible endurance with a beautiful appreciation of moving through the mountains. This is an incredible film about his attempt to set the FKT (Fastest Known Time) on the Via Alpina trail in Europe.

Cool thing to check out

Tim Ferris’s “5 Bullet Friday” newsletter.

Doing

Training for running again. I’ve chosen a run to do this fall in the mountains near to my house that I’ll be training for over the next 8 weeks or so.

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andrew

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday.

• Read time: depends on your speed of read

Also, I said I was gonna give something away. That thing is 5 tacos. If you share this link with a friend and they subscribe to Deep Loafe, I’ll send you taco money. It’s real money, it just buys tacos.

See you out there.

At the YMCA in Black Mountain, North Carolina, surrounded by all those good mountains, living among them all those good people, and all those good, new houses, there sits, inside of the men’s locker room, a sauna.

A room inside a room, inside of a large building. Three layers removed from “outside”, I’m sitting there in temperatures around 125 degrees, trying to pay attention to my breath.

The first few breaths come in and I notice them. Or I think I noticed them. Which, to me, seems different than noticing them.

I heard Yuval Noah Harari recently talk about doing this exercise for two hours, every day. In the beginning, you attend to your breath. It’s not long before your mind is visited by passive thoughts about whether you moved the wet clothes to the dryer, what assignment is due on you at work or in school, or if you’re lucky, as things get deeper, whether you are a good friend to your friends.

The sauna is dark. I’m sitting on the top ledge of slatted wood next to one other man. He leaves after about 10 minutes, which was enough time for me to keep my eyes closed and see if I could peak through all of the thinking and find where my breath was again.

I notice him get up and leave. If I was able to just pay attention to my breath, I wouldn’t have noticed. I made this observation there in the sauna. So how many thoughts removed from noticing my breathing is that?

What I did begin to notice, which brought a huge smile to my face, is that I was present exactly where I was. Nowhere else could I possibly be - physically anyways - than sitting on the top ledge of the sauna at the Black Mountain YMCA, alone and sweating.

This was significant revelation to me. It’s been on my mind in recent years how often my mind drifts toward trying to live in some conceived future that does not exist yet.

In that future, I make up stories about the things I have but don’t want or want but don’t have. I have conversations with people under perfect conditions that I might be unwilling or afraid to have in the present (I always win those or sound smart). I’m at peace in this future.

But that future doesn’t exist. It is only made-up stories.

Not sure about you, but living in the present is quite challenging. And I quite enjoy my present. I have people whom I love that are telling me that every day. I have a bike to ride into my small town in the mountains to do work that I enjoy and that’s quite flexible (almost the total opposite of my reality 6 months ago, which I spent so much time trying to live 6 months ahead). I watch Buzz Lightyear with my son on the couch on slow mornings.

It’s challenging for a few reasons:

• Suffering & pain

• Life can be uncoordinated

• There’s an insane amount of choices to be made every day

  • What to eat for meals

  • What to stream

  • What app do you even choose to stream on?

    • Opening YouTube seems simple but there are immediately 10 choices to make by way of recommendations

  • What to do between the hours of 7-11pm after kids go to sleep

• Life can be boring

  • This doesn’t mean dull, but it does mean boring

    • Yuval Noah Harari again: “… the way to peace passes through boredom.”

• The more you take on in life - relationships, kids, job, religion, friendship - the less control you have

  • Not having total control over your life is challenging

  • It’s smart, but it’s challenging

I imagine you have your own reasons that don’t show up hear. And of course, you do, because you are living your own very experience here that I cannot articulate because I am not you. Add that to the challenging list: “People don’t fully understand me.”

Lastly, I submit that I have so often tried to live in the future in recent years because living in the present brings a certain level of discomfort - pain even. Only in the present, with all of our thinking, associations, failures, and mismanaged time, do we understand anything necessary about ourselves.

The future is a comfortable place where we always win conversations, get the perfect jobs, have more money, and do the things we just can’t do here in the present because the conditions are less like a “perfect Saturday” and more like a fun hurricane.

Living now, here in the sauna, requires me to actively think about who and what I am, instead of being passively pricked by non-thoughts - all those places I think I need to go or do next, switching the laundry, and sending this or that email to get the right work lined up.

With courage, there is a submission to the present that cannot control what happens in the future. To be in the sauna, and only be in the sauna, is to acknowledge that opening the door of that room to go into the other room, and opening that door to go into the next, bigger room, and then opening that door to going outside, is to have a courageously loose grip on what happens after walking through all of those doors.

That is good. That is living.

It turns out, getting comfortable with living, presently, brings a lot more satisfaction and joy than trying to live ahead in the future. There’s nowhere else to be except on the couch watching Buzz Lightyear with my son.

If you’ve been here long, you’ve noticed I often reference Wendell Berry, a farmer and writer in Kentucky. I’ll finish today’s post by referencing him once more.

For those religiously inclined, there is often a component of “eternal life” associated with core belief. This can be a perfect setup for not living in the here and now. It entices one to let minds live far away in the clouds, rather than right here.

Wendell writes my favorite definition of what Heaven is. Bolded text is mine.

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It’s quite weird. But the last half of the book I’ve been very into it.

Watching

Cool thing to check out

Nownownow. Don’t know if you have your own website, but if you I would say to make one. Within that, there’s something called a “Now Page”. Different from “About” it’s related to what you’re doing in life right now. Here’s mine: andrewginn.fun/now.

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andrew

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday.

• Listen time: 22 minutes

• Meme theme: nada

See you out there.

“If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.”

Forgive my delay. I’ve been in the woods for the last 5 days on a backpacking trip with a few wise friends and 4 high school senior guys about to launch into college. What a rich time.

Lots of our time was spent helping them reflect on, and reflecting on ourselves, who they (we) are, and where they (we) are going in life. And lots of time spent on the trail in the Grayson Highlands.

To the coasting mind, this seems like an obvious answer: “My name is _ and I am going to college.”

During one night of a particularly torrent rain, lying alone in my tent, I was looking through my downloaded podcasts on Spotify waiting it out and I came back to this commencement speech that David Foster Wallace gave in 2005 called, “This is Water.”

It is beautiful and so fun to listen to. It addresses this insanely hard and rigirous way of thinking: how to think about the most obvious things in our lives - the givens - like a fish thinks about water.

Watch this. Question it. Send me an email and tell me what think.

Also…

Next week is issue 20. I’m gonna give away something away (maybe a 🌮) if you send Deep Loafe to a friend to subscribies.

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for listening.

Andrew

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday.

• Read time: pretty short I would say

• Meme theme: Nathan for You

See you out there.

“Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.”

– Isaac Asimov

Why does it feel like something is different this time with the debut of the new social platform from Meta, Threads?

Structurally, it seems not really any different to me than Twitter. There are fewer features than Twitter even, but you post text, you post images, you post videos. You can post gifs, but not from within the platform yet. And there are a bunch of other things it’s not currently doing that you might expect, like a chronological feed or a following-only feed.

Also, just briefly here before I continue: It just struck me that the word “bunch” just means things clumped together, not a lot of them necessarily. Maybe you already knew that though.

So back to Threads. If it’s missing these obvious features that Twitter already has, and Twitter already exists, why did 80 million people download it in the first 48 hours? Cha(d)t-GPT, the previously fastest-downloaded app ever, took a month to get to 100 million downloads (slow much?). Twitter has just over 350 million monthly active users - or MAUs as they say in the biz - and it’s been around for over 15 years.

*Of course, downloads and holding onto active users is a different thing, so that remains to be seen.

BUT, nonetheless, that’s incredible adoption all for a product that doesn’t really do anything different from Twitter when you poke it and even has limited features at this point.

Want to know my take? Probably you do since you’re reading this newsletter, but I’m going to say it anyway:

Here are a few examples of this. People are generally more positive than I’m used to seeing on the internet and acknowledging that themselves.

Basically, it’s like there was a hard reset - the blowing on the N-64 cartridge, the flushing of your PS-1 disc in the toilet to clean it, the unplugging of the Roku - and now we’re starting back over with funnies and positive content.

People even seem to be liking Mark Zuckerberg now because of this Threads launch. Weird.

This is still social media, so I won’t pretend to think it’s the perfect town square and won’t devolve. But, for whatever weird bending of the universe that’s happening for it to be going this well, I’m fascinated.

So get out there people. Reintroduce yourself to what the social internet can be at its best. Stitch your ideas into a tapestry as strong as a thousand Carharts.

I’m with Isaac Asimov on this one: laughs are the way.

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

Not all the way through this yet, but enjoying this collection of smart things from Morgan Housel.

Smart Things Smart People Said

A few lines I came across recently that I liked…

collabfund.com/blog/smart-things-smart-people-said

Watching

Nathan For You. Here’s a taste if you aren’t familiar - probably the most iconic segment.

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andrew

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday.

• Read time: a brief thought in time today

See you out there.

used DALL-E to generate a techno Moby Dick cover

The opening of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

source.

I think this is the most brilliant opening to a book. And I think it’s a good warning.

Before the latency of living catches up to us, we must be doing something about making the most of it.

There’s only today. There’s just the time to do, or stop doing, the thing you’ve been thinking about doing or stopping doing. Just today to ask the question, love, forgive, admit, and honor our higher things.

Get out to the proverbial sea, else you find yourself (and myself) “grim about the mouth” and “bringing up the rear of every funeral” you meet.

What’s the last thing you did that didn’t make sense to the preceding decisions you’d made before that?

When was the last time you got out to sea?

Reply to this and tell me. I’d love to hear. Or, if you have no idea what I’m saying here, reply and tell me that too because sometimes I wonder.

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

I’ve been reading and enjoying Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Podcast

I’ve referenced Tim Urban in a previous post. I think he’s so much fun to read/listen to. Listening to people like him talk about the future makes me fascinated by the future. Others make it scary. Trying to subcribe to not scary.

#264 – Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity

(00:00) - Introduction (00:18) - The big and the small (08:08) - Aliens (16:22) - The pencil problem (23:07) - Food abundance (25:11) - Extinction of human civilization (30:30) - Future politics of Mars (37:29) - SpaceX (43:29) - Elon Musk (1:08:57) - Nuclear power (1:13:23) - The higher mind (1:18:07) - Echo chambers and idea labs (1:21:19) - How our brain processes film and music (1:24:33) - Neuralink (1:32:47) - Future of physical interactions (1:36:58) - AI (1:44:18) - Free speech (1:48:21) - How to read more (1:55:03) - Spaced repetition (1:59:06) - Procrastination (2:25:58) - Goals for the future (2:31:16) - Meaning of life

open.spotify.com/episode/78n0InNmjIQoWnfqZDGmun?si=fb5b392d132b484d

Doing

Garden’s coming along, people! Starting to eat things out of it - peppers & soon squash and beans. Rabbits have gnawed down my lettuce supply.

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andre

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday.

• Read time: depends on your speed of read

• Meme theme: Parks and Rec (started again recently)

See you out there.

When I started working at a summer camp in the mountains of North Carolina during college, I was the counselor with the flannel Coleman sleeping bag and Adidas Sambas for hiking shoes.

this picture doesn’t perfectly illustrate my point, but i used it anyways

Many of my co-counselors who’d either been on staff before or were campers, had more camping and hiking-specific gear. You know, not indoor soccer shoes but perhaps a fine Merrell hiking shoe. Instead of a 9-pound (or 4.17 kg) Coleman bag, they had a middle-of-the-road Kelty bag coming in at 4 pounds (or 1.81437 kg). Or better yet, an Eno.

By any measure of, ‘Does this guy know what he’s doing?’, to the question of ‘Is this guy ready to go camping and hiking?’, the answer would be no.

I’m from Mississippi. Which, in its own right, does not automatically negate one’s ability to travel and camp on durable surfaces (Principle #2 of Leave No Trace watch thru :39 seconds). However, it also does not necessarily prepare one to know what the outdoor industry might say is the proper gear to begin camping and hiking.

And here is, what is my main point of this week’s post:

Symbolic Consumption.

_{see my thread with ChatGPT on getting to this thought}

We both know the person who has 5 of the right kind of gear and equipment for their hobbies, and we are the person who has 5 of the right kind of gear and equipment for their hobbies.

source on GIPHY

From my own life, I think a few things are at play here that stop me from getting started on the things I want to get started doing:

• There’s an infinite amount of content to be consumed on anything I’m interested in doing or learning

• That content is oftentimes very well produced (beautiful to watch) and mostly free

  • wanna get into golf? Watch Erik Anders Lang

  • better yet, Want to just want to get into golf? Watch Erik Anders Lang

• If I am to spend money on a thing, I want that thing to meet a respectable Venn Diagram of affordability, style, and how long it will last so I spend more time searching than doing

• And lastly, perhaps most importantly: There are dozens of reasons, every. single. day. to delay getting started on doing something, especially if that thing is new, and just keep symbolically consuming it

One of my all-time favorite critiques of this phenomenon is this New Yorker article called, “How to Read ‘Infitite Jest’” - read this, it’s hilarious.

How to Read “Infinite Jest”

Take a selfie with book “accidentally” in background. Post on social media.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/05/how-to-read-infinite-jest

I’m going somewhere with this.

Over the last month, me and Sadie have been working on starting a business. Originally, we wanted to start an ice cream sandwich shop from a bike. After some research, we found that’s quite challenging to do (you know, health codes and inspections, refrigeration of dairy, and such).

So, idea #2: A mobile used bookstore, from a bike.

We’ve long been interested in having a used bookstore. Total dream, but it’s long been near the top of our minds. But, we’ve managed to create and ride some momentum in our lives recently and decided to cash that in on this idea.

Plus, as most things tend to be, it’s not been as complex as we thought it would be (nor as simple). We’ve started the business for about $500 and a fun amount of time that we’ve spent getting it up and going.

So, here’s the second, and last, thought for today’s post:

Minimum Viable Product.

_{By Teemu - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65494330}

There is, I believe, across all activities we aim to begin or interests we intend to explore, a Minimum Viable Product that we need to get started.

And that’s the whole aim, or should be I think: getting started.

Our bookstore, Book and Bloom: We have hopes of being fully mobile by bike. Right now? We’re iterating and figuring out exactly how to transport everything to and from our house to our little town.

In the meantime, we found a few ways to just get started so we can get feedback - meaning Feedback, like the kind that comes when you put yourself out into the world - and work towards what we hope it is in full, which is not what is at the beginning.

There is, of course, downside to crossing over from Symbolic Consumption and into Minimum Viable Product:

And yet, should you fall and catch fire, you are someone who knows how to begin.

Find your Coleman sleeping bag and go camping. Grab your wired Apple headphones and go on a run (these are cool now, anyways). Make that curry dish you’ve been dreaming of even if you don’t have the fennel seeds, or know what turmeric is (i don’t), or know that there’s an R snuck into the word turmeric!

@parksandrec/GIPHY

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

Fully Alive, by Dawna Markova. Holy smokes.

Music

Jimi Hendrix, genius behind the song. Stevie Ray Vaughan, chef’s kiss.

Little Wing

Stevie Ray Vaughan · Song · 1984

Welp, have a great week. Wonder. Wander. Thanks for reading.

Andrew

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday!

See you out there.

The Rent Comes Due

From John Steinbeck’s novel, Tortilla Flat

Pilon hated waste. “This very thing has been bothering me. Why don’t you rent the other house,” he suggested.

Danny’s feet crashed down on the floor. “Pilon,” he cried. “Why didn’t I think of it?” The idea grew more familiar. “But who will rent it, Pilon?”

“I will rent it,” said Pilon. “I will pay ten dollars a month in rent.”

“Fifteen,” Danny insisted. “It’s a good house. It is worth fifteen.”

Pilon agreed, grumbling. But he would have agreed to much more, for he saw the elevation that came to a man who lived in his own house; and Pilon longed to feel that elevation.

“It is agreed, then,” Danny concluded. “You will rent my house. Oh, I will be a good landlord, Pilon. I will not bother you.”

Pilon, except for his year in the army, had never possessed fifteen dollars in his life. But, he thought, it would be a month before the rent was due, and who could tell what might happen in a month. (emphasis mine)

Another week, another rent due.

I have had a few things percolating in my head this week - specifically at the end of the week - to write about. Including, how I think we all think someone else is caught up in an MLM - or, an ILM (influencer level marketing) - why finding and doing things that are fun, regularly, is such an important hedge, and Minimum Viable Product.

None of them came to any real solidity that I found worth writing about.

Instead, I put off today’s newsletter because of many reasons. Prominently, I went to Denny’s with Sadie and the kids this morning for Father’s Day (sue me, Huddle House). I went on two bike rides. I watched Parks and Rec. for a bit with Sadie. And hung out with the kids this evening and we made chicken nuggets.

So what’s Deep Loafe ‘about’ this week then? I typically think that’s sort of in your court to decide. I try to express, as clear as makes sense to me, what is on my mind. But once those 0s and 1s leave my computer screen, you’re there, wherever there is, to discover its aboutness for yourself. The way it ought to be.

But seriously, today Deep Loafe is about this:

In the excerpt between Danny and Pilon above, I am Danny and I am Pilon.

I make agreements with myself - the multiple angles that my self takes in a given week - that I’ll write and send these loafes.

And then the rent comes due.

And the best we can really do is the best we can really do. Consistently showing up to life among all the notifications and meetings, among the pure ambition to live fully, among the hope to see your beautiful things, and among the rational normalities of the every day - well, that’s the dance, isn’t it?

Having rent due means you’re living. You’ve got pots and pans. A Christmas ham is in the fridge. You’ve got roommates. The porch is there to be sat on.

Goodness, go and pay for it with nickles and dimes and Venmo balances. Whatever it takes. Pay the rent.

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

Reading Rainn Wilson’s new book, Soul Boom. Quite enjoying it!

Watching

Zoinks. Loving the Tour de F(orce)rance documentary. Just might learn French.

Doing

Still writing that Daily Blog of 30 thoughts for 30 days. Today was day 8.

Daily Blog | The Universe of the Etc.

Each day I aim to write a short entry on my living of that day. This could be an observation, something I did, a question I considered, or something I received.

andrewginn.fun/daily-blog

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andrew

@theoffice on GIPHY

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday.

• Read time: a short one this week, with a hook.

• Meme theme: The Office

See you out there.

So there I am, lying in bed a few months ago just minding my own business and waiting to go to sleep, when a sudden instance of my mortality struck me: I am turning 30 this year (yesterday).

I wasn’t actually sure, so I confirmed with my wife Sadie in the form of a question: “Am I turning 30 this year?” said I. Said she but a simple, Yes.

And so one’s eyes close. The curtain begins to draw on the stage of 20s Andrew.

This decade was, for the most part, mostly a living-in-the-moment kinda deal. It was a blast. It had hard stuff. The decade I worked on a fruit and vegetable farm out of college. The decade I fell in love and got married in. The decade I had kids in. The decade I really saw people — friends — my age die for the first time.

The decade I bought a motorcycle on Craigslist that I rode like 4 times in. The decade I went to New York City more often in like a year and a half time period than I got a haircut in.

This decade, the one that ended in a pandemic, soon closes with the mystery of what the 30s will mean akin to wondering whether Movie Pass will really make it this time.

@theoffice on GIPHY

This last week and a half in particular has brought a lot of thought and reflection. Our son turned 3 last weekend and I think seeing that - his youth, his total disregard for anything but the absoluteness of his present moment - really got me in my head about how much of my life is lived thinking about next Tuesday. Thinking things I need to do or want to accomplish by then. Thinking about that next job I’ll pick up that will really solidify our finances. Or, what’s the hack I haven’t thought about yet to squeeze the most out of it all with the least amount of effort?

I’ve written about this tension a decent amount. The tension between wanting to be someone who is aware of the now but gets stuck living in some unrealized future.

Physically, it seems possible to me (based on a podcast — mark 4:15:50 - 4:18:31 — I listened to) that no moment really exists but this one. The one that I’m typing in. The one I’m uncertain in. The one I’m laughing in. The one I’m cold in, or amazed in, or loved in.

So, why not live there? Why not be there?

Lots of reasons friends, and that’s where the good work is.

I considered writing 30 thoughts on turning 30 for this week’s newsletter. Instead, I wrote what I wrote.

And — here’s that hook I was talking about — I am choosing to write 1/30 thoughts today, and a subsequent thought for the next 29 days.

Not to worry; I’m not going to spam your inbox every day with these thoughts. If you want to read them you can head over to my website (andrewginn.fun) which is where they’ll show up each day under the Daily Blog.

Here’s that thought. 1/30:

People are eager to speak and tell things about themselves — and deep things like, “I’m ready to have kids” — if you bother yourself to hear it.

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Just a poem this week from the good man, Wendell Berry.

I have thought considerably these last few days of the line, “Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head.”

MANIFESTO: THE MAD FARMER LIBERATION FRONT

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andrew

@thelonelyisland on GIPHY

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday. Happy June.

• Read time: you’ll see

• Meme theme: I Think You Should Leave

See you out there.

I started this newsletter because, for a long time, the order of my thoughts has been frantic. Or maybe scattered - thin - is a better visual. I wanted some way to work out this desire to move towards slower things and give less power to pure thinking and evaluating. I wanted to pay attention instead. To, as Walt Whitman so nicely says, “…loafe and invite my soul.”

One of my main concerns in recent years has been whether I can know, and how I can know, if I am living in the center of life (spiritually, I would call this the heart of God, a la Kahlil Gribran) or if I’m moving about in the margins, jumping from thin and whispy nothings that don’t seem to anchor to much of a center.

I wonder if I’m wandering towards the center - able to make statements like “I am…” or “I believe…” or “I want to…” - or whether I’m distracted by things like hyper-concern for my career, Linked-In presentation value, and a focus on being pissed off that I’m thinking about those two things as much as I am.

These have been very strong, and very present thoughts. The striking thing about them is that there’s a pervasive self-concern that continues to reinforce the thoughts. Inherently, they are not negative, but my exercise of them has felt negative, rather than thinking that inspires an evolution of thinking or the self in noticeable ways.

So, this newsletter. Welp, it’s an attempt to frack these thoughts. If I inject writing into the thinking, weekly, hopefully, there’s an extraction of a resource. One that can be traded or used in situations to keep me in the center of life instead of chasing the things that traditionally push me back out to the margins.

Not sure if that metaphor fully works, but it does in my head.

@thelonelyisland on GIPHY

And here’s where the concept of “loafe” comes in, and where largely, up until last week, I’ve forgotten about it.

Instead of doing more to find the center of life, I originally set out to do less. I set out to wander about as if eyes facing out into the world would be a better teacher than a mind engaged in the allure of fixing the ‘problem’ of having the perfect job, or what to do about health insurance, or whether there’s any point in saving for college for my kids because what will AGI do to college in like 15 years? And on a smaller scale, do I text my friends enough?

All of that to say, last week I found a slice of loafe. I had nothing to do, no next move, and instead of mowing the yard, or moving this trinket from one end of the house to the other, or making a cup of coffee, or going on a run, I went and sat on a bench downtown. I rode my bike to a street in my downtown where people often walk by.

I’d imagined doing this for months. For months I’d thought it would be nice to just go and sit while the sun shines and people walk around or drive by. No phone, no book, no nothing. Just loafe. When I wrote about resistance a few weeks ago, this is precisely how it shows up in my life.

And here’s the brilliant thing that happened:

Nothing.

I didn’t see anything particularly important - just people walking and shopping. Nothing particularly useful was learned - I just sat with a clear mind and nowhere to go. And that made all of the difference.

That, dear friends, is why I started this newsletter and called it Deep Loafe. I know good and well that 99% of the time I will live frantically and with some obscene pace that’s trying to get to a place I don’t even know I want to go.

Instead, I want to slow it all down as often as I can. I want to be awake enough to laugh with my kids. To sit on the front porch with my wife. To weed in the garden for 5 minutes and not have that mean anything about the trajectory of the bush bean’s success. Just weed the garden for 5 minutes.

Just. Loafe.

a little more inspiration from Whitman

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

Another poem. I’m poem-happy this week.

Quote I’m thinking a lot about

“Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form

When within thee the universe is folded?”

― Baha'u'llah

Question I’m asking

When was the last time I went a day without purchasing something?

Recipe

When I sent out the feedback machine a few weeks ago, a friend told me they wanted to see some recipe suggestions. I’m no chef, but here’s a Chat-GPT-cultivated lemon garlic chicken pasta dish I cooked.

Lemon Garlic Chicken Pasta - A ShareGPT conversation

This is a conversation between a human and a GPT-3 chatbot. The human first asks: I want to make an interesting pasta dish tonight. What would you suggest? The GPT-3 chatbot then responds:

If you like Deep Loafe and wanted to tell a friend to subs, I wouldn’t be mad.

Welp have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andrew

@succession on giphy

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday. Hopefully, you are resting. Whatever that looks like to you.

• Read time: depends on your speed of read

• Meme theme: Succession (rolling it back because tonight’s the finale 😢 )

See you out there.

We’re all storytellers. As it happens, most of us don’t live the sensationalized version of what entertainment says life looks like, so the stories we tell largely come from pretty normal circumstances.

Good storytellers weave non-fiction and fiction together like an episode of The Bachelor. We live “inspired by true events.”

I don’t know about you, but I find myself licensing this blend of the sensational with the real in my storytelling a lot. Not in major ways often, but in these minor ways that can end up creating an image of myself, for myself, that doesn’t exactly match up with reality. At least not always.

Did you ever know the kid in school who started lots of sentences with things like, “My dad can…” or “My dad is…”? It was always followed up by something that didn’t seem overly absurd - or at least was a real thing - but never did quite feel believable.

Chances are, there was some element of truth, perceived or real, that the kid saw in his dad. “My dad can bench press 500lbs.” It was probably 250lbs. He thought that whatever his dad did or was, was real. And that’s the story he told.

This continues into adulthood, but we start telling these stories about ourselves.

“I mostly only eat vegetables and rice and chicken each night.”

“I’m a pretty on-time person.”

“I work out a lot.”

I think most of us who say things like that are telling a blended story, because no one is always eating that well, or is always on time, or always works out.

But, when we go out into the wild of life - in a world that requires you to be able to describe yourself in a bio (this concept that has gone from a book to 240 characters) - we need to have who and what we are packaged up really neat and tidy.

I noticed this recently when a friend asked me what I write about. I struggle every time to answer this question and I think it’s because I don’t really have an answer right now. I’m still figuring it out. I know in my bones what it is I’m trying to write about - observing my life and then examining it - but I don’t exactly know what it is. Or, at least I don’t have an answer short enough to respect other people’s desire to actually hear me talk about it at any length.

This time, I sort of mumbled some things that gave my inner dialogue enough time to come up with the story version of the actual answer. Here’s roughly what came out:

Here’s the thing. I did that like one time. From now on, unchecked, the Truth in my Mind tells me, “Oh, this is how you write. This is your process. Congratulations on having a process.” Beware of sentences that start with “I typically…”

The Truth in Reality is that I do start thinking about it by Wednesday, but I procrastinate by saying, “Oh don’t you remember? You need these next few days to observe life - yes, do some observing - and then you’ll write about it on Saturday, or maybe even Sunday morning or afternoon.”

The Truth in my Mind and the Truth in Reality do actually have some kind of semblance or even alignment, but they’re not symbiotic. I think this is worth paying attention to.

The great writer and journalist, Joan Didion, published a collection of her non-fiction in 2006 and titled it We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.

That’s always stuck with me. I think it fits perfectly with this need we have - this way we communicate - to understand ourselves and tell others who we believe we are through our stories.

Like so many of my books, I own it but I have not read it. This is because I tell myself, and others, the story that “I am a reader. Yeah, I really like to read.”

And that’s true! I do like to read. In fact, I love to read and I’ve read other Joan Didion books, but I go through heavy phases where I read a few books in a few months and then don’t read another again for 6 months.

Here are a few more stories that I’ve been telling recently that have a relationship between the Mind Truth and the Truth in Reality:

“I’m a hard worker.”

“I run/train a lot.”

“If I had more time I would ___.”

These are true, but not always. They are stories I tell others and I tell them because that’s a lot easier than saying, “I’m a hard worker, but it really depends on what the work is, who I’m doing it for, and what else I’d rather be doing that day.”

My guess is you have stories that you tell that are woven with the fictionalized and non-fictionalized versions.

I think that’s okay.

I also think it’s important to find the thick part of that story and bring as much life to it as much as you can.

They help you live.

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Readies

Love this essay. Comes back around to mind every few months.

“The Idea Top in Your Mind” by Paul Graham

Watching

Remember Promotion and Relegation from last week? Well, there’s this club, Luton Town FC. They haven’t been in the Premier League since 1992 and after they won promotion in the playoff final yesterday (worth $100+ million), they’re goin’ up! And in the most dramatic way. 3 minutes of glory await you below.

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andre

Everton fans celebrate being almost the worst team in the English Premier League in 2022 (AP Photos)

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sabaath. Only 2 episodes of Succession left :/

• Meme theme: no memes, just one important video at the bottom of the page. Look for the headline that says “Important video at the bottom of the page.”

See you out there.

It’s that time of the year when the English Premier League wraps up. Things are a bit delayed because of the World Cup, but Manchester City has just won and lifted the trophy. It impresses on me, again, just how much joy soccer brings me.

A brief thought.

To start: Promotion and Relegation. 

This is a vital aspect of why I love the Premier League. It exists in soccer in most areas of the world (notably absent from the U.S.). At the beginning of the season, the best team can, in theory, perform so poorly that they are relegated to a lower league. On the other side, teams in lower leagues can win promotion to a higher league.

Sounds oversimplified when you put it like that. But, we don’t have this in America. Imagine if the Yankees did so poorly that they got relegated/demoted to Double-A baseball. Or, the Knicks go 4-78 and get sent to the NBA G-League. This has massive cultural and financial significance. The latter part - finance - is why I would venture to guess promotion and relegation won’t find their way into American sports.

Promotion and relegation are huge reasons the Premier League (and many other global soccer leagues) stands out: There’s something to play for because there’s something significant to lose.

Being relegated costs your club a cool 100 million+ pounds, and being promoted wins your club 100 million+ pounds.

Teams who’ve been in the top league for 72 straight years can spend two straight seasons trying to stay up. Or, a team can go from the 3rd tier to winning the Premier League in 7 seasons, overcoming 5000-1 odds as Leicester City did in 2015/16 (maybe the greatest sports story of all time?). Ahh, and importantly, money is central to all of it.

When Leicester City won in ‘15/’16, their starting 11 was worth 52 million pounds, compared to Manchester City’s 411 million pounds. Money is big, but foxes are bigger.

And so it goes that with just two games left in the season Leicester City is on the brink of being relegated from the Premier League. That’s costly.

Infographic: Leicester City Displace Football's Financial Elite

This chart shows the total cost of Premier League squads in September 2015.

www.statista.com/chart/4784/leicester-city-displace-footballs-financial-elite

You can probably tell by now that I’m writing from the hip today and that none of this is very planned out. Good on you. You’d happen to be correct.

I went on an overnight bikepacking trip in the mountains with some friends on Friday and Saturday and here we are at 1:46pm Eastern on Sunday afternoon and I’m grasping at straws.

But, stay with me. It’s that point of the class where right as you’re wondering if you can pay any more attention, the teacher rolls out the 300lb tv that is ratchet strapped to the rolling stand, and you are filled with hope as blood rushes to your head and you are reminded that you’re alive.

The reason I bring up soccer today is to show you this video below. Stop what you’re doing and watch it. You’ll witness a group of human beings willing themselves into a collective vision of their place in the world through the art of soccer/football. Don’t roll your eyes at that anthropomorphization. I watched this in a coffee shop on Friday and could hardly hold back tears.

When you have something to lose - in this case being promoted or relegated - you have something to pay attention to. Having something to lose means we’re near to the heart of living.

Live on friends.

Important Video at the Bottom of the Page

Stuff I’ve Been Into

Watching

Kevin Kelly’s lecture series made during the pandemic. This one’s on “Black Swans.” I enjoyed it as it sort of opened up a perspective for me that if we are able to get good at predicting our “unknown unknowns,” we can significantly improve our reality.

Doing

Sadie and I have a group we meet with on Sunday mornings at church for the last few months that has been a gift. We’ve slowly been discussing Marcus Borg’s book Heart of Christianity. I find great value in gathering with other adults to discuss our living of faith and Christian life, and the hopes and mysteries that accompany it.

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for reading.

Andrew