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Density propensity

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I was taking the subway home. Like I do every day after work.

I work for an organization that uses technology in ways. Well, let’s just say what I do isn’t considered legal or ethical. In a world where 100 multi-billionaires control 62% of the earth’s wealth, I could give a fuck about what’s considered legal or ethical.

I have a family to take care of, and bills to pay. I use my talents to get what I can, keep my family fed, and keep our quality of life as high as I can. No one’s getting hurt. I just skim money out of the system using my technical and social abilities. Backdoors, phishing expeditions, social engineering. These are my domains. I have a good crew. The operation that employs me pays good bonuses when I do a good job. My kids don’t wear shoes with holes in the soles. They aren’t malnourished. We’ve got mad bandwidth and they can learn whatever they want about the world.

Meanwhile, I’m taking a little here, and a little there. Rich people don’t need that much. So I shave a little bit off, carve a slice out, make a piece of the pie mine.

This world is crazy. It’s people cutting each other’s throats, just like it always has been, except now we do it in a vast ocean of zeros and ones. People don’t have to get dead in the streets and alleys like they did back in the olden days. You know what? That’s alright with me. People get paid, bank accounts get switched around here and there.

Oh shit. Mother fucker just stabbed me. I was taking the subway home.

Minding my own business. Bam. Dude comes up on me. It doesn’t hurt. Just cold. Spreading cold. That mother fucker. My monitor flashes a red warning and I hear a voice in my head. “Biological damage detected. Emergency protocol active. Hibernation mode priority one.”

I can’t see right. Can’t hear right. It’s like I’m in a tunnel going down into the dark and that mother fucker is getting smaller and smaller. Did he just kill me? What the fuck for? I wasn’t doing nothing to him. Oh shit. I’m not going to get to say goodbye to Brianne and Jonas and little baby Paco. This really sucks. What the fuck?

“Tomas. Tomas, can you hear me?”

I realize that yes, I can hear someone talking to me.

“That you Jonesy?”

“No shit it’s me. How you feelin?” I feel someone touching me. Holy shit. Either I’m not dead, or Jonesy and I are both dead and made it across to the after.

I think about it. Run a systems check without realizing that I’ve engaged it. The voice says, “Systems no longer critical. Running full diagnostic. Please stand-by.”

“Brianne called us when you were late.” Jonesy. “She was upset. ‘He’s never late. Never.’ That’s what she said when I took the call. ‘Something’s wrong Jonesy. I know you got him chipped. Go get him! If you don’t I’m gonna kill you.’” They really like each other. She’d never threaten him if she didn’t think something was seriously fucked.

“You know I like her Tomas. You got a good woman. Man, if you wasn’t with her, I’d get with her. You know that shit is true.”

I do know that shit is true. I seen those two looking at each other. If she didn’t love me so much, and we didn’t have them two kids, she’d get with him. I might even be alright with it. If I wasn’t around. Shit, life is short. Too short not to have some love.

I cough. Try to speak. My throat. It’s so dry. Feels like it’s full of sand.

“You found that motherfucker that stabbed me?” I welcome my voice, despite the discomfort it causes me.

“Relax Tomas. Just take it easy. He got you right in the liver. We had to call in a favor with OmegaCorp. They printed you a new liver while you was bleeding out. Hey man! Carlos came down and donated two liters of his blood to keep you from dying man. That Carlos. I know what I said about him last month, but that vato is alright. I take back all that shit I said. You owe him man.”

I think about what I’m hearing. Open my eyes. Look at him through the heads up display. He looks tired. “Jonesy, man. I’m glad it was you. Hey man. I got questions. Was this about the Princeps Corps job?” Jonesy shakes his head.

“No man. This shit is payback for that Russian thing we did last year.”

I close my eyes. Think back. Mother fucker. That guy on the subway looked like he was related to Pavel.  I open my eyes. “You’re talking about the Lisin thing?” Jonesy nods. “I thought so.”

That mother fucker and all those Russian mother fuckers. I have a family to feed. They’re worth more than 15 billion nuEuros. It isn’t enough that we’re on the brink of an environment that won’t sustain human existence. It’s not enough that we fought a world war that extinguished 80% of the planetary population just two decades ago. No, we’re still stabbing each other with metal alloys over fractions of fractions.

“I’m calling in my favors Jonesy. I want all the processing cores I’ve saved. Upload me into the mesh network. There’s hell to pay.”

He hesitates. I can see it in his eyes and I know what’s coming.

“Jonesy. She’s waiting for me to call. She wants to bring them to see you.”

I harden my resolve. Some people just have a density propensity. I’m not one of those. Not me. From now on, I’m a ghost in the machine, and I’m going to ramp up the income redistribution to a whole new level.

Fuck my freshly printed replacement liver. I was just taking the subway home. Mother fucker should have minded his own damn business. Don’t care who he works for. He’s freshly slaughtered meat now.

Is it legal? I don’t care. Is it ethical? Couldn’t give a shit. I have a family to take care of. I’ve told you what that means to me a million times Jonesy. Now it’s your turn. Cause there’s hell to pay and I’m the devil.

Mapping life

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“Life without a design is erratic. As soon as one is in place, principles become necessary. I think you’ll concede that nothing is more shameful than uncertain and wavering conduct, and beating a cowardly retreat. This will happen in all our affairs unless we remove the faults that seize and detain our spirits, preventing them from pushing forward and making an all-out effort.” –Seneca, Moral Letters
Always have a plan. I plan using mind maps. The plans don’t always work out. That’s okay. The framework was there, and I knew what it was that I was trying to achieve. Below is an excerpt from my short book, [easyazon_link identifier=”1496124162″ locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”penfist-20″]Kick Ass: Take Control of Your Life[/easyazon_link].

“Getting where you want to go can be accomplished in any number of ways, but I find that one of the best is to create a visualization. The simplest way to set goals is to start by picking the dreams you want to achieve and visualizing them. I use mind mapping software for this purpose.   Concept-mapping and mind-mapping software are used to create diagrams of relationships between concepts, ideas or other pieces of information. It has been suggested that the mind mapping technique can improve learning/ study efficiency up to 15% over conventional note taking.

It is more than worth a few hours of your time to develop a mind map. You can use a mind map for anything. There are a variety of free tools for creating mind maps. I use Freemind, which is available for several computing platforms. As the name suggests, Freemind is completely free of charge. It produces output that looks like the images below, but it can be formatted to your own needs. With such visualization tools, you can map out your life in just a few minutes or hours, depending on how much detail you want to visualize. Road maps don’t need to be pretty although you can spend time making them that way. A road map should be functional and should tell you the basics of what you want out of life.”

If you’ve never used a mind mapping tool, why not take a second to try one out? You might find that a map of where you are and where you want to be is a useful tool.

More than a selfie

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“You are not your body and hair-style, but your capacity for choosing well. If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.” —Epictetus, Discourses, 3.1.39b– 40a

Every little choice adds up. It may not seem like there is a huge difference whether you spend the next half hour watching TV or going outside to find something beautiful to photograph. Twenty years from now you won’t remember the TV show. If you took the picture and framed it to hang on the wall, chances are that you will have an anchor point in time that draws you right back into whatever moment it was that you captured two decades ago. Those little anchor points are what determine whether your life has real meaning.

If you ask 100 people what gives their life meaning you will likely get 100 answers. In order to create meaning in your life, a sense of purpose is key. Meaning doesn’t just happen. It is created through narratives. You are in control of the narrative of your life, and that control is represented in thousands of choices that your brain makes every day. What you put in your mouth and what you put in your head determine who you become, and what the arc of your existence looks like.

Modern life tends to present too many choices, most of which are like fast food. They taste great but ultimately leave you feeling unsatisfied because the content isn’t healthy. It isn’t healthy because it generates no meaningful sense of purpose. The online game World of Warcraft is an example. The game allows you to create characters who inhabit a fantasy universe that is fun to explore and full of interesting creatures you can kill or be killed by. The game has its own economy and system for ranking players. Creating an avatar is fun. Entering a massive world full of other people who are exploring it along with you using their own avatars is fun. You even have a sense of purpose at first. Your avatar grows in power and gains skills. You can buy magic armor and weapons to aid you in completing quests throughout the game’s imaginary world. The problem with World of Warcraft is that the more you give, the more it takes. To get your avatar to the highest level possible takes an investment of hundreds if not thousands of hours of your life, as well as paying the fees to continue playing month after month. Let’s say you have the time, funds and motivation to climb the game’s ladder all the way to the top. What now? Your reward is that you’ve sunk hundreds to thousands of hours into becoming…what exactly?

You’ve solved no problems in your real world life. You’ve solved no one else’s problems in your real world life. The return on investment is that you are able to defeat powerful imaginary foes in an imaginary world. You may have made friends in the game, but most likely, you’ve never met them in the real world. That means you can’t hug them or share a cup of coffee, or go to an art gallery together. Fantasy can be a healthy escape, but in a modern implementation such as World of Warcraft it is more likely to become a debilitating distraction. Type ‘World of Warcraft addiction’ into Google and browse through the 4 million plus results.

Modern choices trade real meaning for instant gratification. Look around you next time you are in a restaurant. Chances are that many of the people you see will be looking into tiny glass screens instead of interacting with the real world. They are making a choice. Choosing a simulated world where everything is poised and posed over one the one that engages all five senses. One day maybe the simulated worlds we humans and our machines construct will have more depth than the real one, but that time has not arrived. If you are choosing the artificial worlds available in 2017, you are missing a great deal.

Life’s meaning cannot be boiled down to a single meme, or even all the memes you will be exposed to on Facebook during a year. Those memes are not beautiful choices. They distill complex real-world issues into easy to digest bites of information that will ultimately cause brain indigestion.

If you live an existence connected to the Internet, you live in the information age. Unfortunately, a great deal of the information that pops up each time you log on masquerades as something it is not: valuable to finding meaning.

The words you are reading right now are a narrative. There are armies of people motivated by different beliefs churning out millions of narratives at every minute of every hour of every day in the world I inhabit as I type out these words. Most of those narratives will not stand the test of time. They are the equivalent of your current haircut. Haircuts don’t age well. Ten years from now you will probably wonder why you wasted all that time. Choose well, because there are beautiful choices hiding in plain sight. Most of them involve getting out of bed and having an adventure. In real life, with people you can physically touch. That’s the essence of being human.

Next time you have dinner, power off your phone and look into the eyes of each person around the table. Tell them what you want to become and listen when they tell you what they dream of becoming. You’re not a Kardashian, and that’s a good thing. All those choices add up.

Circle of control

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“We control our reasoned choice and all acts that depend on that moral will. What’s not under our control are the body and any of its parts, our possessions, parents, siblings, children, or country—anything with which we might associate.” —Epictetus, Discourses

I am in my mid-40s at the time I am writing this. My body is failing. That’s not to say the expiration date is near, but merely that I am hyperaware of the amount of wear and tear I have put on the machine. Military service in two different branches and a mobile lifestyle have taken a toll. I do not control my body’s reaction to this excessive wear and tear, but I do control my mind, and how it responds.

Our mind is the only thing, ultimately, that we do have control over, if we are fortunate enough to have a healthy brain. The lesson for myself, and anyone who chooses to read these words, is this: stop worrying about externality. Make choices that will keep your brain as healthy as possible. Let go of things you have zero influence over. News. Elections. The health of your national currency. What someone else thinks of you. It’s all quite irrelevant.

If you choose to engage with people on social media, remember that you don’t control what they think, and should therefore not become invested in those who have a different opinion than you. Express yourself, move on, and let go.

It was very icy this morning when I left the house, and even though I have all wheel drive, I found myself unable to make turns. Instead, I was sliding in straight lines across sheets of ice. I could easily have wrecked my expensive automobile. I realized that I couldn’t control the ice, or the way my car responded to it. Instead of getting upset, I crept home as slowly and carefully as I could. I made it safely, and for that I am grateful.

If I hadn’t, and had wrecked my car, I would focused on seeing the positives. My automobile has been great in the five years I’ve had it, but I am not attached to it. It’s just a tool that gets me where I want to go. My body is the exact same thing. A tool that gets my mind where I’d like it to go. In the realization of this, I am cognizant that I should try to take care of my car and my body, but that eventually, they will both fail me.

In the mean time, I’m focused on what’s really important – the choices I’m making, the habits I am forming, and the ideas I am exploring. Those are the only things that will matter when my existence is drawing to its close.

My circle of control is what’s happening inside my head. That’s the place that matters most, and what I do there will influence everything else. The same applies to you.

Be ruthless to the things that don’t matter

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“How many have laid waste to your life when you weren’t aware of what you were losing, how much was wasted in pointless grief, foolish joy, greedy desire, and social amusements — how little of your own was left to you. You will realize you are dying before your time!”

— Seneca, On the Brevity of Life

Learning to say no has been a real journey for me. I was programmed at an early age to please others. That’s the easy way. I choose the harder way. I’ve been practicing saying no for several decades. It gets easier as I practice.

I’m going into 2017 with several goals in mind. One of them, and this one runs across years and decades, is to become a bit more thoughtful. I want to grow my mental real estate. Practicing saying no is a huge part of that. There are so many distractions. So many people who would love to waste my time, energy, and finances with ‘stuff’ that I will ultimately find unfulfilling and of little value. I might enjoy some of the things I’m offered in the moment, and that’s not a sin. However, if I reach the end of my life only to realize that I haven’t used my time wisely, I believe that I will die an unforgiven sinner. I believe I’ll have regrets at the end. When it’s too late to change the story.

There are 8,760 hours in this year. Some of them are already gone. I’ve spent some of them thinking about finishing my debut novel, a few pecking at the keys and searching for the words. I’m spent some of them thinking about my health. I’ve spent a lot of them reading about the way the Stoics approached life. I’m committed to the things that matter this year. Personal mental growth, storytelling, and being a thoughtful partner are my top three priorities.

I’m not arrogant enough to believe I matter that much to very many people. I’m not sure I’d want the burdens that go along with celebrity. However, if you choose to join me for a few moments or hours during the coming year, either as a reader, friend or casual stranger who arrives by accident of circumstance, I hope you’ll take the time to stop what you’re doing and give the idea that ruthlessness can be a good thing some of your mental real estate.

Learning how to say no is a critical skill. Learning the value of your time, which is actually the currency of your life, is paramount to making the journey worthwhile. It is your life and I hope you will live it like you matter. Wishing you a thoughtful and joyous 2017.

Be ruthless to the things that don’t matter.

Self-control and externality

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“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

To my friends who may be worried about the future. You have more power than you know. The incoming orange president has only the power you are willing to give him. Be not afraid but rather draw your tribe closer around you and remember that whatever happens you are the only one in charge of your mind. Donald J. Trump once said that “what separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.” He’s exactly right, even if he isn’t approaching life from a stoic point of view.

You are in charge of yourself and that’s enough to make of life exactly what you want to make of it. No one but you is in control of your own operating system.

The world you inhabit isn’t about anyone you don’t choose to include in it. This may sound complicated, but it is only as complicated as you make it. Even if you’re incarcerated, you are in control of your mind, and that’s the part of you where reality happens.

The ancient Greeks who came up with the philosophy of Stoicism didn’t know as much as we do about the nature of the universe. They might have known more than we 21st century denizens know about living the good life. They believed in understanding and then facing the obstacles life threw at them. Epictetus, one of the most prominent Stoics, was born a slave. He believed that everything good in our lives starts within ourselves. In his way of seeing the world, nothing external can make us feel anything, and it is only what we tell ourselves about the world around us that results in our emotional reactions.

For my readers, many of whom are also my friends, I give you these principles to contemplate:

  1. Acknowledge that all emotions come from within
  2. Find someone you respect, and use them to stay honest
  3. Understand that failure is the path to growth and later triumphs
  4. Read with purpose
  5. Learn to be brutally honest, starting with yourself
  6. Understand what you spend most of your time doing, and understand what value is returned
  7. Use that knowledge to avoid procrastination
  8. Be present in the present
  9. Remember that time is the most valuable finite resource you have

Source of this list

In 2017, I intend to write weekly on this website about the Stoic philosophy, and what I’m learning from exploring it. I hope you will join me. Let’s grow together as we explore the wisdom of the past to exert the self-control that is fundamental to growth and success in life.