Tag Archives: Values

Hard Cares

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What do you care about?

Go ahead and rattle off your initial list – the people you know, doing a good job at work, making a positive difference in the world, etc.

Then dig deeper.

What are your high-risk cares? What do you care about internally but never share because you might be judged for it? What are your unusual cares?

Once you go beyond the the easy-breezy cares, what are the harder cares that require more investment or risk?

Here are some of mine:

  • I care about the long-term future of humanity and where it’s heading.
  • I care about politics. I respect and admire good leadership and intelligent decision making. I find the opposite deplorable.
  • I feel a connection with people who are feeling alone right now, not getting their needs met, wondering if they’ll ever find someone to share their life with or if they’ll even pull out of the slump they’re in. I care about helping them. I like playing the role of being a stable, positive presence in their life, someone who will keep encouraging them with limitless patience.
  • I care about the people who are in hospitals right now, many dying from COVID, especially those wishing they had more time to live. Sometimes I imagine what it’s like to not be able to breath.
  • I care about my relationship with this reality. This is a wondrous dimension of existence. I want to keep this relationship rooted in trust. I want to keep making this relationship stronger as I grow older.
  • I care about my wife. I want her to have a fabulous life full of delightful experiences, playful adventures, warm cuddles, sensual pleasures, inspiring challenges, and cherished memories. I love seeing her stretch herself as we grow together. I love that we are each other’s best friends.
  • I care about death. I want its presence to keep reminding me to live fully and not to settle for partial matches. I like that it keeps me aware of the potential pain of regret, sometimes with gentle reminders and sometimes with powerful ones.
  • I care about animals, especially those in the factory farming system that suffer daily in ways that would be unimaginable to humans. I would love to see humanity graduate to a more caring relationship with animals.
  • I care about technology. Its evolution fascinates me. I love seeing how my relationship with tech has evolved since the 1970s. It’s fun to think about how it will continue to evolve and what possibilities are just over the horizon.
  • I care about my character. I want to look within myself and like and appreciate what I see. I want to delve into the darkest regions of myself and replace shame, fear, and guilt with love, forgiveness, appreciation, and warmth. I want to live as a fully integrated being, not as a collection of parts arguing amongst themselves.
  • I care about my relationship with time. I want it to be my friend and ally, not my enemy. I want to look forward to my later years with positive anticipation and pre-appreciation, not with worry or angst. I want to look in the mirror and smile as I watch myself getting older.

Some of these cares led to major changes in how I live my life or how I run my business.

Hard cares are very motivating, but they’re difficult invitations to accept. It’s challenging to move beyond the easy-breezy cares and to admit that they just aren’t giving you enough motivational juice.

When I imagine doing things that other people seem to care about, like showing up to a corporate job each day, they just seem demotivating and pointless… like why would I want to waste my precious life on that, even for one day?

But I can easily get myself to spend days on end delving into esoteric aspects of personal growth that few people who like corporate jobs would understand or care about, but these explorations matter to me.

If I want to experience a life that flows with lots of motivational juice, I have to pursue and explore what I truly care about, not what society expects me to care about. This includes accepting that my cares are good and that they’re mine to explore and understand.

One care that’s been fascinating me a lot lately is my relationship with aging. I turn 50 in a few months, so knowing that I’m about to enter a new decade of my life is pushing this idea to the front of my mind. Society in general has a tremendously negative relationship with aging. I want to create a vastly more positive relationship with this aspect of life.

My hard cares are mostly relationships with different aspects of life. I care about making those relationships healthy, positive, and rich in appreciation. When I spot a relationship that isn’t working, I ask myself if I truly care about that relationship, and then I think about what changes I’ll need to make to invest in long-term improvement.

Investing in hard cares, especially by defining them as relationships, works very well.

I found it difficult to care about money, but I was able to care about my relationship with money. I didn’t want that relationship to be full of stress and angst. I wanted it to be full of abundance, playfulness, trust, creativity, and fun. I still don’t care much about money, but I love that I’ve been able to create this kind of relationship with money. I appreciate the relationship way more than the money itself.

I found it difficult to care about business, but I definitely care about my relationship with my business. I want this relationship to be rich in exploration, variety, connection, purpose, positive ripples, creative flow, and inspiration. I also want my relationship with my business to be light, playful, and flexible, not so heavy and controlling. I never want to feel trapped by my business. I want to feel engaged and uplifted. The desire to have this kind of relationship led to some careful decisions, including avoiding many “opportunities” that could easily turn the experience into a stressful trap. I love my business, and I want to keep that relationship happy and healthy for many more years.

I encourage you to take a hard look at the relationships with parts of your life that aren’t working so well. Describe the current relationship based on how you feel about it. Then describe how you’d like that relationship to be. Recognize that these are your hard cares, and to get aligned with them, you’ll need to make some hard decisions.

Be willing to say no to relationships that aren’t working for you. Elevate your hard cares from “nice to haves” to the level of “must haves.”

Many years ago I tolerated partial matches in my professional and personal life. I treated my hard cares as soft cares. That was very unsatisfying.

It was tough to go against the social grain and to demand better relationships from life. It was hard to admit the truth that these relationships really do matter a lot to me, and I’m not willing to sacrifice what I want to live up to someone else’s expectations.

It was hard to say, “No, I’m not just going to suck it up and suppress my feelings.”

It was hard to leave… again and again… till I got these relationships right.

But oh it was so worth it.

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Secure Attachment and Investment

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In psychology there are three general ways to relate to other people, depending on how you interpret and manage emotional risk.

  • You can avoid deep emotional investments in people (avoidant attachment).
  • You can try to control other people (anxious attachment).
  • You can intelligently bond with people and invest in secure relationships (secure attachment).

You can generalize these dispositions to consider how you relate to different areas of life. Are you hiding? Are you over-controlling? Or are you securely investing?

There’s really a spectrum here for different aspects of life and for relating with different types of people, so in practice there are a lot more than just three options.

Your root relationship is your relationship with reality itself. That’s the most important one to get right because it’s the one from which all other relationships flow. All of your relationships are a part of your reality, so if your base relationship with reality is shaky, that will negatively affect all the others. This relationship is so important that I created the full 60-day Submersion course to help you explore, improve, and invest deeply in this core relationship to make it stronger and healthier. Do you feel grounded and secure in this life? That answer needs to be a yes.

Another relationship that’s critical to get right is your relationship with yourself. This is what the 65-lesson Stature course delves into in tremendous detail. It’s the deepest and most thorough self-exploration course that I’m aware of. The purpose is to help you face the full-spectrum truth about yourself and and to develop a healthy and empowering lifelong relationship with all aspects of yourself, including your inner critic, your inner child, and more.

From here you can consider relationships with people and with other aspects of life.

Our next deep dive (for the first quarter of 2021) will be about creative productivity. This new course will help you develop a healthy and secure relationship with your own creative flow. This doesn’t just mean doing creative work like writing or game development. It means managing the creative flow of your entire life as well. What kind of life are you creating? Do you like the direction your life is going? Are you over-steering or under-steering? How can you intelligently manage this flow on each time scale, hour by hour, year by year, and decade by decade, especially with an increasing rate of change?

For many years I’ve enjoyed a secure and healthy relationship with my creative flow, but I didn’t always have that kind of relationship. I had to work through issues like procrastination, selecting projects for the wrong reasons, seeing too many projects die on the vine, feeling too anxious about certain modes of expression (public speaking, being live on camera), overplaying the importance of money, etc.

I continue to invest in improving this relationship, which is really a collection of many different relationships. This year I discovered more depth and nuance in my relationship with creative output through the 365-day blogging challenge. If I wasn’t securely bonded in this relationship, it could have been a difficult year requiring a lot of discipline. But I was exploring a relationship that was already very healthy and positive, so I found the overall experience to be beautiful, warm, and relaxing.

Setting and maintaining healthy boundaries connects with these ideas as well. We can’t deeply invest our time and energy in relationships with everyone and everything. Do you know which relationships you want to deepen and which relationships you’d prefer to avoid? Do you know where you want to plant your social and emotional flag? Is that flag securely planted where you want it to be?

I especially love the depth of exploration that comes from secure bonding, so I can really invest long-term.

One of my personal flags is securely planted in a vegan lifestyle and vegan ethics. I’ve invested almost 24 years of my life in this path, and I want to keep investing for the rest of my life. I love being vegan, and my relationship with veganism keeps growing stronger and deeper. Next year I want to deepen this relationship even more by investing in a full year of a raw foods lifestyle.

I also really enjoy the secure bonding I have in my relationship with Rachelle. Lockdowns and social restrictions seem almost trivial when I get to spend each day with her. I never tire of spending time with her. Day after day I always look forward to even more time with her – hours, days, weeks, months, and years ahead. I love investing in our relationship.

Here’s the key that I struggled with for a long time: the notion of settling. I got stuck for so long by trying to settle for less than I really wanted.

The problem with settling for a partial match is that you don’t feel good enough about the relationship to full invest in it. Some part of you always holds back. The thought of investing may even give you a queasy feeling.

That was me in my first business. I liked many aspects of game development, but I too often felt like I was falling short when it came to contributing, making a difference, and really caring about people as much as I could. There was a certain coldness to the work, and I wanted to invest in more warmth. It was always going to be a partial match for me, so I could never unlock 100% of my desire to invest. Some part of me was always going to have doubts, wondering if maybe I should be doing something else.

My first marriage followed a different trajectory. I did feel very invested in it in the early years, but eventually incompatibilities grew, and it became clear that each of us wanted to invest in different directions. Looking back I do feel good about investing in that relationship while it lasted. I also see that it was best for us to move on when we could no longer truly invest in building a life together going forward.

What I love about my life today is that I feel securely bonded with people and aspects of life with which I’m can really invest long-term.

I can also see where I’m not investing as a sign that I may be dealing with a partial match, in which case the solution isn’t to settle but rather to find a full match where I can really invest.

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How to Commit to a 365-Day Challenge

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One way to pick a good 365-day challenge is to think about what would permanently transform your relationship with some aspect of life if you live that one year of your life a bit differently.

Even though you’re just doing some specific action or behavior each day, keeping that up for a full year will change you, often in ways you don’t expect. When you complete even one 365-day challenge, your life will never be the same again. Even if you only do one of these in your entire life, it changes you forever. You won’t be the same person on Day 365 that you were on Day 1. You also won’t be the same person on Day 3650, even if you stopped after 365.

Doing a 365-day exercise challenge in 1997 permanently changed my relationship with exercise. This year’s daily blogging challenge permanently changed my relationship with creative expressiveness and writing from inspiration.

You also gain a lifetime memory that no one can take away from you. If you do anything daily for a year, you’ll always be the person who followed through and didn’t quit. That’s a powerful reference experience you can always lean on in future years. It changes your self-concept.

I’ve only run one marathon in my life, 20 years ago. That one achievement permanently changed my relationship with running, exercise, and my own sense of potential. Every 365-day challenge is at least as transformational.

It takes a pretty strong why to commit to a 365-day challenge and complete it. Knowing that the payoff goes well beyond that year, even if you stop after a year, is good framing to finish the full year. It’s helpful to know that you’ll still be reaping benefits from the exploration 10 years later, 20 years later, and beyond. It’s not just about that one year.

This realization also makes the cost of quitting exceptionally high – too high to even consider once you’ve invested beyond a certain point. One bad decision during one moment of weakness, and you’re killing off decades’ worth of benefits. You’re doling out an extremely harsh punishment on your future self, which is dreadfully cruel – a lifetime of regret, always wondering how your life might be different if only you’d followed through. Even 20 years later, you’ll still look back and regret the moment you quit. So there is no quitting; that just isn’t an option.

I like to frame the challenge in such a way that the pain of quitting is so real to me that there’s no way I’ll ever seriously consider it after I’ve begun – unless I feel that the challenge has become unsafe like there’s a significant health risk from continuing.

I also like to think of a 365-day challenge as a gift to my future self. It’s rooted in compassion, caring, and hopefulness. I want my future self to have an even better life than I do now. I want him to have knowledge and experience that I currently lack. I want him to have amazing memories that I don’t yet possess. I want him to be happier and healthier. I want him to enjoy positive relationships.

This framing goes back 30 years to when I was 19 years old, sitting in jail for a few days after being arrested for a felony. My life was a mess at the time. While I was in that cell, cycling through boredom, fear, and regret, I realized that my future did not have to be like this. I was in that cell because of my past decisions. A long chain of bad decisions going back for about 18 months had led me there. I was just experiencing the consequences of causes that I’d set in motion over an extended period of time. I accepted that I was going to have to deal with the consequences of those old decisions for a while longer and that it wasn’t realistic to expect that I could turn everything around immediately. But I could turn my life around eventually by making different decisions, and that gave me hope.

Regardless of how awful my short-term outlook was, I could always be hopeful about the future if I keep leaning towards decisions that would set up my future self for a better life. So I began making different decisions, starting while in jail, and that really did change my life forever, making each decade better than the one before. I’ve been feeling happier and more appreciative as I age. The alignment between what I want, what I’m capable of, and what I’m experiencing keeps increasing.

The core of a a 365-day challenge is hope. By committing to such a challenge, you are making your hopes and dreams for the future a lot more solid and real. You’re turning hoping into doing, experiencing, enjoying, and appreciation. Always know that when you pick a good 365-day challenge and complete it, you’re going to appreciate that accomplishment for the rest of your life. You’ll be forever grateful to your past self for following through.

Can you tune into this flow of gratitude and appreciation, flowing backwards in time from your future self, streaming into your heart right now? Can you receive the energetic thank you from your future self if you listen for it? Can you also unwrap the please do this within that thank you?

If a 365-day challenge is purely on a mental level, the why isn’t there. Keep working on the framing until it burrows into your timeless soul.

A good challenge chooses me. It courts me. It teases me. It seduces me. Initially I may try to reject it or shake it off, but the idea persists till it persuades me to finally say yes. It takes time for me to fully surrender to the idea. It’s not an immediate yes. It takes a while for all parts of me to get onboard. I may even dance with the idea for years before I finally commit to it.

Before I’m really able to say yes to such a challenge, I reach the point of realizing that I cannot in good conscience say no to it. Another way of stating this is: My heart and spirit always says yes to it before my mind is fully on board. My heart and spirit say, “We have to do this.”

My mind then goes through stages of saying: “No, not this year. It’s too big of a commitment,” then “Maybe there’s a way… those are some nice benefits,” followed by, “Heart and spirit, you guys are evil! Can’t you just let this go? Why does it have to be now?” and finally, “Alright, fuck it! I surrender. I’m in. Let’s do this.”

Technically I’ve already completed my 365-day blogging challenge since I started on December 24, 2019, and 2020 is a 366-day leap year, but I always intended to blog through the end of 2020, and it’s a breezy coast to the December 31st finish line from here.

I’ve never done back-to-back one-year challenges, but I’m going to do that this time with a 365-day raw foods challenge for 2021, starting on January 1st and going through December 31st, 2021. So as one challenge ends, another begins.

This is also in addition to lots of 30-day challenges that I do with other Conscious Growth Club members. We start a new one on the first of each month, each time with a different theme like productivity, fitness, sleep optimization, decluttering, sill building, etc. I don’t do all of those, but I probably do about half of them each year as well.

I remember when I used to see 30-day challenges as a huge deal, like an enormous weight to lift. But once you’ve done a 365-day challenge, the 30 days ones seem so much lighter – no big deal at all.

For 2021 I’m doing a one-year raw foods challenge, meaning that I’m going to make eating raw vegan food my baseline diet for the year. I want to know what it’s like to be a raw foodist for a solid year, experiencing this lifestyle through all four seasons.

I know that my future will be permanently different if I do a one-year deep dive into raw foods. Even if I don’t continue beyond that year, that year will benefit my future self in many other ways. So it’s not a discipline challenge. It’s a gift. The framing of this challenge is rooted in hope and gratitude.

I have less than 4 months left to go in my 40s since I turn 50 in April 2021. My 40s have been the best decade of my life thus far, thanks in large part to personal growth investments made during my 20s and 30s that keep paying dividends (such as going vegan when I was 25 years old and beginning a wonderful relationship with Rachelle when I was 38).

I want the next decade of my life to be my best ever. The setup for this includes planting seeds for better health, relationships, happiness, creative flow, and more while still in my 40s. One of those gifts is to give my future self a cleaner and healthier body and mind who knows what it’s like to be a raw foodist for a solid year. I want my 50s to be the healthiest and most physically, mentally, and emotionally vibrant decade of my life.

I share this much detail, so you can better understand the depth of framing that goes into a 365-day challenge. When you extend the roots of your why deeply enough, you can feel certain that you’re going to finish the year without quitting. And then you can truly experience that year as a gift as you live through it.

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Can You Trust a Life of Fun?

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During my late teens, each time I got caught shoplifting and had to deal with the consequences, my mind would dwell on what I could have done differently. I went over and over different actions I could have taken to avoid the arrest.

This helped me get better at shoplifting. Each arrest or near-arrest made me refine my techniques. I learned to shoplift more valuable items and at lower risk.

I started out stealing candy bars and cassette tapes. Several months later I was stealing video games and small electronics like telephone-answering machines – remember those? Then I progressed to larger items like TVs, cutlery sets, and appliances worth hundreds of dollars.

I could walk into a retail store and walk out with $300 to $700 worth of merchandise. And these weren’t small items. My main limit was how much I could physically carry in my arms.

It may seem hard to believe that someone could walk into a department store and steal a 27″ television – the big, heavy, and boxy kind before the days of flat panel displays. I could barely carry it myself.

I could do this kind of stealing without my heart skipping a beat. It became somewhat routine after a while… till I finally got arrested for felony grand theft and almost went to prison for it. Then I finally realized it was time to straighten myself out.

Before I’d done any shoplifting, I would have thought it impossible to do these bigger thefts at all. You might be wondering that as well. Someone can just walk into a department store, steal a bunch of large items, and walk out with them? Yes, during store hours in plain daylight. I personally did that dozens of times about 30 years ago.

What about anti-theft sensors? Security cameras? Plain clothes security guards?

There are counter-measures for all of those, and most of the ones that worked 30 years ago would still work today.

Every mistake I made back then led me to develop better counter-measures. Setting off a blaring sensor device while trying to steal a Sega Genesis game cartridge encouraged me to learn how to defeat anti-theft sensors. Getting caught by a guard who saw me made me more aware of that risk, and I adapted my methods. Getting caught another time due to being seen on a security camera led to a reevaluation of how to avoid that problem, which led to a whole new method that was exceedingly hard for a camera to catch.

Consequently, although I did get caught and arrested a bunch of times, I never got caught for the same type of mistake twice.

I was also caught more than I was arrested. By developing more sophisticated techniques, I was able to weasel my way out of a capture to avoid an arrest. Any point in the chain could have a weakness, and you just need to turn one weak link to your advantage to break the chain of events that lead to arrest. You can even break the chain after getting arrested; a couple of times I was arrested but not convicted.

I recall that a two-stage shoplifting technique I had developed served me well. I specifically designed it to reduce my risk. In some situations, I could divide the act of shoplifting into one step of preparing to steal and a second step of actually stealing, and those steps could even be done days apart. Once I was caught during the first stage, which didn’t include the actual theft. The guards were certain that I’d stolen something when they grabbed me leaving the store and pulled me into the security office. But they were left confused, embarrassed, and angry when they searched me and came up empty handed because I had no merchandise on me. They knew I’d done something very much akin to shoplifting, but they had no proof. They knew I was lying about it too, and they absolutely didn’t buy my explanations, nor did they take kindly to my feigned anger at them for their “mistake.” But it still worked. Just to be extra safe though, I never went back to that store again. Today that whole chain of stores is out of business.

When I first started on that path, I couldn’t have perceived where I’d end up a year to 18 months later. It was really just a series of small progressions and refinements, motivated by the pain of mistakes and the thrill of doing illegal stuff. Each time I grasped for slightly better methods that reduced risk and increased gains. I also pursued it because it was fun, at least for my teenage brain at the time.

When I think about the progression of little refinements, no single refinement seems like such a big deal. I was really just reacting and adapting to events.

But when I consider how far things went over the course of 12-18 months, I wouldn’t have believed those distant outcomes to be possible when I first started shoplifting. I couldn’t fathom ever reaching that point. It would have seemed like way too much of a stretch and way too scary. No way would I ever take it that far.

And yet I somehow did, one little step at a time, with the biggest improvements happening in response to getting caught.

Here are some key lessons I learned from this progression, which doesn’t have to be applied in an illegal or self-destructive way. You can apply this a lot more positively and productively to your life.

First, this all started with following the fun. There was an inner motivation to stretch and tackle an interesting challenge that seemed fun, even if it was also illegal. Later in life I learned to use this heartset for other worthwhile personal growth pursuits. I looked around for something that seemed fun and emotionally engaging.

Second, anything fun eventually becomes boring if you keep doing it in the same way. So if you follow the fun, that will encourage you to keep escalating in some manner. The path of fun is also the path of escalation. Such paths can be dangerous or beneficial – or both.

Look for a path that eventually escalates into territory that seems impossible for you but also impressive when you think about other people taking it that far. Can you see beyond the edge of possibility space and into the impossibility space if you look further down the road? Imagine where you might end up if you just keep escalating again and again.

Does the impossibility space scare you? If it doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not worth pursuing.

Consider that fear points to future fun that you’re currently incapable of accessing and enjoying. A good progression eventually looks scary. If you look far enough ahead, you’ll see “impossible” actions that you’re convinced you’ll never take.

This points to needing a healthy relationship with fear. It’s important to see fear as an invitation, not as a barrier. Fear means “not yet but eventually.” Fear doesn’t mean “never.” This is a hard thing to wrap our minds around, but we can see the truth of it with our hearts a lot sooner. Your heart will say, “Yup, you could take it that far,” while your mind is still freaking out at the very notion.

See the logic in how to make the impossible eventually possible for you. Just keep following the fun. Keep escalating gradually so it stays fun and doesn’t becoming boring. When a risk becomes a non-risk, find a new risk to replace it. Focus on the risks that are in your fun zone.

You’ll fail and stumble sometimes. When you do, modify your approach to remedy that point of failure, so you’re less likely to fail that way again. Don’t worry about all possible points of failure. Accept that sometimes you’re going to fail, and you’ll have a new learning experience each time.

In the past 30 years since those shoplifting experiences, I’ve gone through much healthier and saner progressions in different areas of life. A lot of what I experience as normal today would have been squarely placed in my impossibility space 30 years ago. My work, my skills, my marriage, my home, my lifestyle, my friends – all would have been deemed impossible for me by my former self. None of this seemed accessible.

This also taught me that if I want to set meaningful long-term goals, it’s good to aim for something that extends into my current impossibility space. If I only reach for what’s possible, I’m probably not aligned with the fun zone. I’m being too safe and not taking enough risk.

It’s possible to check off a lot of smaller goals as part of the progression towards a seemingly impossible one, and this can be a lot more fun and motivating than aiming for the seemingly easier goals directly.

After I lost interest in stealing and getting arrested, I still kept following the fun, but I opted to stick with legal options. Some were still in the direction of that cat-and-mouse game with corporations, not that dissimilar from shoplifting in the emotions I experienced. Learning to count cards at blackjack and playing in the Vegas casinos when I was 21 was one example. It was totally legal, but there was still the chance of getting caught for it. It felt sneaky. There were skills to be learned. And there were ways to escalate the experience to keep it fun and engaging.

By continually following the fun, escalating it, adapting to setbacks, and progressing to something new when the whole chain became boring, uninteresting, or impractical, I eventually started moving in the direction of more positive and socially constructive progressions like writing, speaking, creating courses, and delivering workshops.

I also shifted my character a lot. Shoplifting would be out of character for me now, but I still love experiences that involve a similar emotional journey with risks to embrace and fears to face. This includes learning to make a good living without a job, overcoming fear of public speaking, going vegan, and doing lots of interesting challenges like the daily blogging challenge for this year (only two weeks left to go).

What I find especially fascinating is that even though I started out following the fun by committing crimes, this same heartset eventually turned my life towards meaningful goals, service to others, and a sense of purpose, including the development of a lot more emotional intelligence that includes caring and compassion. While I was doing the shoplifting, there’s no way I’d have considered any of those eventual gains to be within my possibility space. I wouldn’t have wanted them or cared about them either. In fact, I’d have actively shunned them.

Fun and risk seem like reckless or childish frames, right? But imagine where they might lead you over time if you keep dancing with them as I’ve suggested. Eventually a life of non-purpose gets boring. Living in the shell of a weak character gets boring. Being too undisciplined gets boring. Not caring about people gets boring. Watching life pass you by without fully engaging with it gets boring.

It’s possible to have way more fun from contribution than from crime, mainly because of how human relationships are affected. So the approach that got me into those reckless behaviors also got me out of them and onto something better. I kept following the fun. I kept leaning into escalations that kept life interesting and engaging. I kept releasing whatever become boring. I kept aiming towards new impossibility spaces, only later to find myself living inside of them.

Can you trust fun?

Maybe you think about how ludicrous it would be if you just leaned into fun experiences, like playing video games all the time. I played video games a lot 30 year ago, as much as 18 hours in a row, and that was on Nintendo, Super NES, Sega Genesis, GameBoy, or one of those archaic systems with much less sophisticated one-player games, including the kind where you have to restart from level 1 if you run out of lives. Following that type of fun led me to play more and more games and to eventually become a professionally game developer for 10 years, which was a memorable and rewarding part of my life (albeit frustrating till I figured out the business side).

I’ve had a pretty fun life overall, and it’s hard to feel regret even when I think about some of the wild and illegal stuff I did 30 years ago. I feel mostly gratitude and appreciation for those experiences and the lessons learned from them, especially since they shaped who I became.

My main regret is actually that I didn’t trust fun sooner. In many cases where I finally leaned into fun and risk, I wished I’d been able to trust it sooner and not worry so much about where it might lead. Even with the arrests and other setbacks, it’s still a lot better than being bored.

Fun is an invitation, not to do one thing forever, but to engage with life with your heart, not just with your head.

A huge risk that people tend to overlook is the risk of stagnation from being stuck in your head too much. The pursuit of fun, risk, and escalation are fantastic counter-measures.

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Proactive Boundary Management

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A recent gift from a friend included a question card deck, and one of the questions was:

What is one of the most valuable lessons you have learned in the past year?

I’d say my biggest lesson of this year was to more deeply understand the relationship between intelligent boundary management and investing in deep and meaningful connections with people.

I had understood the importance of saying a firm “no” to partial matches as they arise. It’s necessary to reserve space to say “yes” to those really aligned opportunities, and I can’t do that if I’m caught up fussing with partial matches.

It’s been helpful to see partial matches as tests that I need to pass (by intelligently declining them). I know full well that the most aligned opportunities probably won’t be visible at all till I decline any partial matches that may still be tempting me. This has helped me grow into a person who feels less and less tempted by partial matches and mismatches.

Settling for less doesn’t make me happy, and it doesn’t work well for other people either. We thrive when we keep our standards high. It’s easier to enjoy abundance when we’re very clear about what we want and why,

This year showed me how important it is to do some proactive boundary management now and then. Instead of handling issues on a case by case basis, sometimes we gain enough clarity to do a more involved house cleaning.

One of the big ones I did this year was to purge Trump supporters from my life and work. I realized that their reasons and excuses for such support didn’t matter to me. I could make this evaluation based entirely on their words and actions and impacts. If someone expressed support for the current administration, that alone was more than enough to make us mismatches. It become obvious that I was never going to feel aligned with maintaining relationships with such people, even if they wanted to stay connected.

This wasn’t particularly complicated. There are zero Trump supporters that I feel aligned with enough to feel good about investing in a relationship together, personally or professionally. At best I can tolerate them, but that isn’t good enough. I don’t want to fill my social life with people I’m tolerating.

So this was an interesting invitation of sorts. Other misalignments can be complicated or ambiguous, but this one was super clear, so I went with it and cleaned house as best I could.

Even when there were misaligned situations that I initially had to resolve reactively, I paused afterwards to reflect on why those situations arose and how I could proactively prevent similar issues by making some adjustments. One example was shared in the post about admin baiting, which hasn’t been a problem in the months since I wrote that piece.

What I didn’t expect was just how much this more proactive approach would resolve and transform some social heaviness I felt earlier in the year.

Presently I feel a special kind of lightness, ease, and flow with respect to my social life. I feel more interested in people, and I enjoy connecting with them so much more (even if it’s all online still).

I think this is largely because I feel more committed to protecting my social space against intrusion from nutters and other misalignments. I had some friends I really didn’t know as well as I thought I did, and I realized that I didn’t want to consider them friends anymore. I had lost too much respect for them. Maybe that respect was too easily granted to begin with.

Since we can’t have meaningful relationships with all of the billions of people on earth, we’re always going to be limited to a small social bubble consisting of dozens of people that we could potentially get to know very well… maybe hundreds if we really push ourselves. While we can serve a lot more people, such as through business, we can only truly invest in a much smaller number on a personal level.

I feel like I’ve freed up (or somehow generated) some extra capacity and desire to invest in people close to me. This isn’t from opening myself up to love for all or anything like that. While I can still feel a connection to all people based in unconditional love, I can’t invest my time, energy, and attention in all people, so I have to be way more selective there.

I think some people have been picking up on these energy shifts in me since I’ve been observing more positive outreach from people, especially people who’ve been going through similar house cleanings this year.

I feel this year has made me more attuned to the differences between compatible and incompatible social connections. With the most compatible connections, we energize each other. We amplify each other’s energy.

This has been a draining year for a lot of people. It’s not just COVID that’s causing that. I think it has a lot to do with the social misalignments that have been exposed by our different responses to the health and political situations in the world.

What response did you choose for dealing with exposed misalignments? How has that worked for you?

And moreover, what was your most valuable lesson of the year?

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Listening to Your Energy

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I often begin my days by asking: What wants to come through? What energy wants to be expressed?

Then I listen.

Sometimes I listen with my mind or body. Sometimes I listen with my heart. And sometimes it feels like I’m listening with my spirit.

I feel like there’s a collective idea space where thoughts and feelings are always flowing, like radio waves being constantly transmitted. When I tune into that space, I often get ideas for articles. Or I could pull out bigger ideas like for a new course or workshop.

But I don’t have to aim my internal beam-forming antenna in that direction, scanning the cloud of human needs and wants. I can also listen within. I can can scan my own personal energy field and see what wants to come through.

Then different inner voices get my attention to share their desires.

One inner voice would absolutely love to do more in-person workshops. We haven’t done one since 2016, and I was leaning towards doing one in October 2020, but that got nixed with the virus situation. I hear this voice and agree with it. It’s definitely something to look forward to when the timing is right. Zoom is great for the role it plays, and I use it every week, but there’s really no substitute for connecting face to face.

Another inner voice wants to have a more spiritual 2021. That’s the voice encouraging me to eat raw for the whole year since that way of eating makes me feel the most open, sensitive, and synchronized with life. This voice is pleased that I’m on board with the idea, so it waits patiently for me to begin at the start of the year. Meanwhile it seems to be working behind the scenes to prepare me for this shift.

I wonder if there’s some kind of energy linkage between my inner voices and the collective space of ideas. It feels like my internal energies can communicate with this larger field on their own in the background, such as to coordinate events or to arrange synchronicities. When I create certain harmonies with my inner voices, such as by agreeing with them, it feels like I grant them more privileges to take action on my behalf.

This is a mental model I sometimes use, not anything objectively provable, but it does align well with my personal experience. Do you ever feel like some energy-based or thought-based parts of you make arrangements with the rest of reality on your behalf? I’ve seen so many instances of external changes happening shortly after I make meaningful internal decisions, especially decisions that involve saying yes to some under-expressed part of myself.

One example was connecting with Rachelle. We lived 1300 miles away from each other, in different countries. I sometimes feel like our meeting was arranged, like some part of her energy and some part of my energy linked up behind the scenes and recognized our tremendous compatibility. Then they conspired to make us meet in person by removing obstacles and arranging synchronicities. Fortunately we each listened to those internal nudges that spiraled us into a beautiful connection.

I do feel there’s a sort of spiritual permission grant needed to unlock this type of experience. In my case I specifically recall inviting new connections to come into my life while I was still in my first marriage. That was also a time where I was eating a lot of raw foods, which made me extra sensitive to subtle shifts that I might not have noticed if I’d been eating cooked food. So I don’t think this is just a spiritual effect; I think it’s a physical one too.

It feels like the misaligned energies are continuing to move further away and receding into the background. Somehow the louder they scream, the fainter they sound. I feel like this is creating space for more aligned energies to flow through. It’s like how letting go of a partial match creates space for a much better match to flow through. If you’re sensitive to energy flows, you’ll feel this shifting well before you see it, and with experience you’ll trust your inner senses.

With the daily blogging challenge, 2020 was a deep dive into connecting with lots of personal growth ideas. It was also a year of boundary management and lifestyle adjustments. I feel like I had to be extra firm this year in saying “You shall not pass!” to attempted intrusions from stupidity and insanity. I think I did an excellent good job of defending and cleansing my space from such encroachments. It feels like I’ve relegated those energies to their own corral of idiocy, where they’re mostly harmless going forward, other than continuing to annoy those who care to visit. I’m content to steer clear indefinitely; it’s the smell.

Now I feel the energy shifting in a new direction, especially since the election. As I continue to listen within, another part of me says that it wants to have a caring and connected 2021. Whereas 2020 was predominantly a year of ideas, boundaries, and lifestyle adjustments, I sense that 2021 is setting itself up to be a year of people, relationships, friendships, and emotional depth.

This doesn’t feel like a personal need or desire though. I feel pretty content, satisfied, and non-needy in this area of life. It feels like I’m hearing a collective desire from the larger energy field. I can listen to that energy field directly, and the desire for more human connection and intimacy seems loud and chaotic, overflowing with unmet needs. But when I listen internally, I hear a softer and quieter part of me that wants to help with this.

I feel like the energy flow of 2020 was about testing, challenging, clarifying, releasing, and standing firm. It was a tremendous year of truth alignment.

For 2021 I sense a year of stronger love and oneness alignment, but only with very compatible people, not universally with everyone. I can’t say what form this will take, but it feels like different parts of my personal energy field are picking up on this larger signal, and so they’re offering up their own invitations on how to align with this “big energy” in motion.

I do not see 2021 as a year of healing and reconciliation. I sense that 2020 involved a split that was meant to happen, with some people going one way and some going another way. We’ve made some key energetic choices this year. We’ve said a firm yes to some types of invitations and a firm no to others, and we’ve seen other people make different choices. It’s been a polarizing year, hasn’t it?

This year I was challenged to decide whether I was going to be anti-racist or to continue clinging to the feeble non-racist label. I voted for first time ever. I made decisions that caused some people to reject me or to feel rejected by me, while other people sensed and expressed a stronger connection to me than ever (the feeling is mutual). I think it was important and necessary to go through this. It felt like a year of multiple tests, with answers that will determine the future direction of people’s lives and experiences for many years to come. Has it been that kind of year for you?

It feels like the testing part is essentially over, at least in terms of major alignment decisions. Soon it will be time to co-create something new, and now we’re in an incubation phase before that fresh energy really opens up.

I feel like I’ve released and corrected multiple misalignments this year, so I no longer need to carry those misalignments into 2021 and beyond. I don’t feel that this is for reasons of speed but for reasons of depth. It now seems possible to go deeper in certain directions where misaligned energies would create drag and friction, frustrating the most aligned people who aren’t in the mood for friction and just want to explore flow, abundance, and appreciation together. This year the misaligned have had to step aside so that certain high-alignment experiences can be made real for the people who are ready for them.

I think a key question asked of me this year was: Are you willing to put your energy where your intentions are?

And the companion question: Are you willing to withdraw your energy from the friction and drag?

Letting go of the friction and drag is especially difficult when it’s in human form… when someone you know firmly plants their flag in drag territory, and you have to let them have that experience without you. You have to choose forgiveness so you can lighten up your energy and go where you need to go next. Note that forgiveness isn’t the same as reconciliation or compromise (which could keep you stuck in the drag).

So these are some answers that come through when I ask the questions that I shared at the beginning of this post. Does any of this resonate with you?

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When You’re Right and Everyone Else Is Wrong

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What kind of relationship do you have with the judgmental and righteous part of yourself?

Some people may not know or acknowledge that you’re right, but you’re convinced of it.

On the outside you may have a calibration issue in terms of how much of your righteousness to share and express with the world. You can behave in a more humble way and keep those thoughts to yourself. Or you can promote your viewpoint and let people have their reactions.

But here I invite you to focus on your inner relationship with your righteousness. How do you relate to this part of you on the inside?

What is it like to believe that you’re right about something when large numbers of people are wrong about it?

While you could be succumbing to delusion, let’s simplify this and say for the moment that you actually have good reason to believe that you’re right. Suppose that the facts make sense. Suppose you’re a lot more educated about this topic than most.

How do you feel about these issues?

  • Sharing your true feelings openly and shamelessly
  • Being labeled as righteous, judgmental, or morally superior by other people
  • Potentially being proven wrong someday
  • Potentially being proven even more right someday
  • Having people unfriend you because they don’t agree with you
  • Acting in alignment with what you believe
  • Relating to people who feel the same as you and have come to similar conclusions but have chosen to hide their views and keep quiet about it

These aspects can all affect your relationship with this part of yourself. It’s not that difficult to end up with a strained relationship that makes you sometimes want to turn your back on truth, to keep quiet when you really ought to speak up, and to tolerate misalignments in your life that you could actually correct.

Here’s how many people might honestly assess their relationship with their righteous and judgmental side:

  • strained
  • confused
  • stunted
  • quiet
  • shy
  • timid
  • fearful
  • worried
  • sad
  • disempowered
  • voiceless
  • alone
  • bumbling
  • unsupported
  • frustrated
  • lonely
  • misunderstood
  • violated
  • compromising
  • suppressed

This points to a conflict between being right and having to deal with people who think the opposite. The facts may be on your side, but what if the social support isn’t there? That by itself isn’t a huge problem, but it may seem like one if you have a shaky relationship with the righteous part of you.

How do you actually want this relationship to be? How about:

  • powerful
  • courageous
  • bold
  • expressive
  • attractive
  • patient
  • grounding
  • confirming
  • reassuring
  • optimistic
  • stable
  • aligned
  • strong
  • ethical
  • compassionate
  • clear
  • reliable
  • trusting
  • successful

Or even:

  • happy
  • playful
  • purposeful
  • meaningful
  • inspiring
  • motivating
  • fun
  • uplifting
  • leadership
  • rewarding
  • growing
  • guidance

Do you want to suppress the righteous part of you? Give it a voice?

If you’re not clear about what kind of relationship you’d like to have here, you may end up doing an awkward dance, sometimes expressing yourself and sometimes hiding, depending on which way the social winds are blowing.

A Committed Relationship

Since this part of you isn’t going away anytime soon, you’re sort of stuck with it. So it may be wise to accept that you’re already in a long-term relationship with this part of you. Could you improve this relationship? What kind of relationship would give you better results?

Would you prefer to keep going the way you’re going? Do you want to keep doing the awkward dance? Is long-term suppression the right way to go?

If you’re right and a lot of other people think you’re wrong, what are you going to do? What you actually decide depends on how you relate to this part of yourself.

Trust

You have a lot of flexibility in how you choose to relate to this part of yourself. There’s something very powerful that happens when you make a real decision about where to take this relationship though.

For me some big shifts happened when I decided to relate to this part of me on the basis of trust. Initially that was really difficult though.

One of the first big decisions was when I started having doubts about the religious ideas I was taught growing up. I was a teenager starting to wake up to other ideas of life. But I was immersed in a very contained way of seeing the world with 12 years in a row of Catholic school. My teachers, classmates, friends, and family were all Catholic. To disagree with my religion meant disagreeing with everyone I connected with each day on a pretty fundamental level. It was sure to be an isolating path with no support from anyone. Questioning and doubting what I was taught wasn’t acceptable behavior.

So how could I relate to this part of me when I felt I was right and everyone around me was wrong? I was just a teenager. But it grew harder and harder to keep pretending that I agreed with ideas that didn’t make sense to me. I saw those ideas as unreasonable and false. I saw obvious contradictions, misalignments, and bullshit while people suggested filling in the gaps with “faith,” which really means ignorance.

At first I did the awkward dance. I extended myself a little by raising some issues. I probed here and there. I took a step forward and then backed off and surrendered when I ran into staunch resistance. I tried to preserve the peace while also aligning with truth.

I went through a wide range of emotions, including sadness and a sense of loss but also optimism about a new way of thinking. It was isolating though. No one in my life supported or encouraged me on this path.

Eventually I realized that I had to trust my own reason. I had to trust the part of me that felt that it had a stronger grasp on truth than most. I had to trust the very part of me that others would label as righteous, judgmental, arrogant, or lacking in humility. At the time that part of me could also be labeled evil, sinful, blasphemous, deviant, heretical, destructive, and all around anti-goodness. Nobody praised me for thinking for myself.

I saw the trap of self-doubt though. If I told myself that the world around me must be smarter than me, and I must be the deluded one, where was I supposed to take that? That seemed like an obvious dead-end. I’d only feel worse about the situation year after year.

So I stepped into trust, which at the time meant taking the evil exit. I let myself be the bad guy in everyone’s mind – the ultimate betrayer of all goodness. I stopped doubting myself. I stopped pretending. I let other people have their reactions. I accepted the aloneness of it.

That was 32 years ago, and I’ve been ex-Catholic ever since. I shudder to think what my life would be like if I didn’t choose to trust this part of myself. It was one of my best decisions ever – so very freeing.

How you relate to this part of yourself is a choice. You can trust it. You can suppress it. You can do an awkward dance with it.

What I like about trust is that it creates more internal harmony. It lets me act in the direction of what I think is correct. This attracts new experiences, which leads to more learning and more insights. It also attracts new people, which leads to more aligned friendships with co-explorers on similar journeys.

A big concern was that trusting this part of myself would lead to being too alone. There were short phases of that, but they didn’t last. Being more trusting of myself always flowed into more high-trust human relationships too. I wish I’d known that from the beginning.

The Benefits of a Healthy Inner Relationship

It makes sense that you’ll have a better life if you trust yourself when you strongly believe you’re right about something while lots of other people think you’re wrong. This includes trusting your reasoning, trusting your senses, trusting your intuition, trusting your feelings, and also trusting your ability to explore and adapt.

It doesn’t mean that you have to be 100% right all the time. It does mean that you’ll grow faster by leaning towards trust than you will by flailing around in self-doubt.

You don’t have to immediately bet the farm on self-trust. You can still probe and test to gather more intel. I often use 30-day challenges to do this. They’re like fact-finding missions.

A few years ago I researched fasting, for instance. I learned more about it than most people would ever want to know, mostly by reading about the experiences of people who’d done it. Then in 2016 I tested it for myself by doing a 17-day water fast, which went fine. In 2017 I did a 40-day water fast, sharing daily videos as I went. It wasn’t that difficult physically. It would have been a lot more difficult if I couldn’t bring myself to trust what I learned about it.

Because I learned such a powerful lesson when I was younger, I’ve had a relatively empowering relationship with this part of myself ever since. I learned to trust my own judgment when I felt I was right, even when I was the only one I knew who seemed to feel that way.

This helped me go vegan when none of my friends or family were vegan. Next month I’ll hit 24 years of a continuous vegan diet and lifestyle.

This helped me earn two college degrees in three semesters when I didn’t know of anyone else doing that.

This helped me start my computer games business right after college.

This helped me move from L.A. to Las Vegas, which has been a surprisingly good city for my home base.

This helped me get into blogging in 2004 and develop a successful business around it before most people even knew what blogging was.

This helped me explore an open relationship lifestyle (and not have to hide it from anyone).

This helped me shift my business model multiple times, including dumping a six-figure advertising income stream that didn’t feel aligned to me. I trusted those feelings, and I trusted that I could come up with more aligned revenue streams. This led to doing workshops, creating courses, and launching Conscious Growth Club – all way better than suckling the ads for another decade.

This helped me purge Trump supporters from my life and business. I trust my assessment that a person must be some kind of asshole or idiot to support Trump and his nonsense. I also trust the feelings of nausea that arise when I’m around such people. (This has been a great decision by the way, including openly sharing these thoughts and feelings.)

The more I trust my own judgment, the less I tolerate the clutter and nonsense of other people’s ignorance in my life. But then I also have to step into more action in the direction of what I believe is right.

If you let yourself wallow in self-doubt, might you be doing that to delay the bigger challenge of acting in alignment with truth?

Taking Action on Your Righteousness

A healthy relationship with your righteous self can empower you to take more action. With more action you gain experience and wisdom. With inaction you gain nothing.

Here’s the thing: You’re right about a great many things that you probably aren’t acting on.

You see opportunities, and you’re right about them. But then you talk yourself out of action.

You see misalignments in your life that you could correct. But then you let the status quo continue, even though the status quo isn’t working for you.

You feel misaligned with a job or a relationship, but you don’t act on those feelings, so you stay stuck.

You see people posting deplorable misinformation that could lead more people astray, and you pretend it’s okay by telling yourself that you want to keep the peace.

What if you finally trusted the part of you that knows you’re right? What if you stopped labeling it like other people do – as arrogant, judgmental, etc? What if you just labeled it as honest?

What if you could just say now and then: Fuck it! I’m right, and those people are wrong. I’m going to trust myself and act on this. If it turns out that I’m wrong, I can live with that, but I’m not wrong about this. I can’t keep pretending anymore. I have to let myself be judged for what I know to be true.

A great question to ask here is: Where is the path with a heart?

The path with a heart is the path of courage. It’s also the path of trust.

When you’re right, let yourself be righteous. Being righteous when you’re right is honest and truth-aligned. But even when you’re right, it still takes courage to act. That’s an invitation too – to develop a stronger and more intimate relationship with courage, which is inextricably linked with your relationship with truth.

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NaNoWriMo – Days 13-15

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We’re halfway through NaNoWriMo 2020, and my novel is now at 26,344 words.

Since this is the halfway point – with 50K words in 30 days being the goal – I should be at 25K words now, so I’m 1344 words ahead.

I think it was a wise decision to get ahead of the 1667 words per day pacing and then to pad that lead by a small amount each day, so I always feel like I’m ahead of schedule.

Many people get behind on their desired pacing and end up having to write 10-20K words in the last few days to catch up (or even on the final day). While I don’t think it’s such a big deal to do a marathon catch-up session at the end, I don’t think the Nano experience is quite as fun and motivating if you spend most or all of it feeling like you’re behind. I very much prefer to feel slightly ahead for the entire month.

It’s nice to just do 1700 or 1800 words and call my writing done for the day, knowing that I’m padding my lead by a modest amount each day. I can do that all month long with relative ease.

It’s especially nice to know that all I have to do is continue the same pacing I’ve been using for the first 15 days for the second 15 days, and I’ll coast across the finish line, likely reaching 50K words on Day 28 or 29.

Enjoyment

Some people talk about hitting a wall around this point. I’m presently experiencing the opposite.

Even when I hit my word target for the day and think, “I could do another 500 words right now,” I still stop. I prefer to leave something in the tank for the next day. This approach is working well. I’m feeling more motivated as I go along instead of feeling drained.

The writing is so much easier now than it was when I started, especially since I know the characters better after writing 20+ scenes with them. The dialogue feels more natural as it flows onto the screen, like real people communicating with wit, charm, humor, sass, and occasional silliness. It’s nice to be past the stiffness and shallowness of the dialogue that I began with in the first week. Now it’s easy to tell characters apart just from their speech patterns.

I didn’t know that it would be so much fun to breathe life into characters and then see how they respond to different situations. As I gradually build more detailed representations for these characters somewhere in my brain, it’s easier to discern how they’ll respond and react.

I still have to think through a lot of the plot, but now I’m able to write decent scenes just by grabbing a few characters and putting them into a fresh situation. They naturally seem to say and do things in accordance with their goals.

This is giving me the capacity to focus on other aspects of the story. I can now write scenes with more detail, nuance, and subtlety than when I first started, mainly because I don’t have to expend so much mental energy figuring out what the characters will say and do.

Sexuality

One aspect I’m wondering about is how sexual to make the story. There is a lot of sexuality in some scenes as I’m currently writing them, and I’m just running with that for now because it’s a first draft. But I am thinking ahead to whether I may end up cutting a lot of that material later.

I don’t recall ever reading any erotica (other than what people occasionally send in the form of naughty emails), and I’m not really trying to write that kind of book.

The story doesn’t have to go too much in a sexual direction, but for now there’s a certain pull with some characters and situations to take it there, and it would be weird not to let those characters have at it when they seem inclined. This is definitely a sci-fi story, but there’s an unusual romance at the core of it too.

None of the sexual aspects are vanilla, so they’re not like what you’d see in a typical R-rated movie with a sex scene or two. There are sexual situations in the book that don’t currently exist today, mainly due to the melding of sexuality and AI in the story.

One concept that Robert McKee emphasized in his Story seminar last year was to “Write the truth.” I think I grasp what he means by this. There’s an inauthentic way to have characters behave, so as to force some predetermined plot points to occur. But well-developed characters have their own authenticity to uphold.

Another way to write the truth is to share something deep and real that rings true. “Write the truth” is a call to courage – to be honest in expressing the story’s themes and not to water down the ideas. So I take that to mean that if the sexual aspects are honest expressions of the themes, then they very much belong in the story.

It feels aligned to have characters behave like real humans would, not to steer them away from sex if they’d actually be inclined to nudge things in that direction.

The competing force is thinking about selling the book to readers when it’s done. I’ve only done a little research on the book market so far, but I see a lot of potential for this story to be made into a movie someday. As it stands now, this novel would surely be an X-rated movie. At this point I don’t know if the story has to go that route to be authentically told though.

I could tone it down in future drafts to make it R or PG-13. I’m not sure if I’ll want to though. I think the story is likely to be more honest with more sexual situations intact or even expanded. The sexual situations are far from gratuitous. They naturally fit the flow of the story. And they help to raise the stakes as the story progresses.

Personally I think the story will be more fun to read if the sexual aspects are included instead of artificially censored. So my current preference is to write the book for readers who will appreciate authentic sexuality that fits the honest story without feeling like it should be more prudish.

I just don’t think it would feel as good to me to publish a story where I felt like I held back a lot just to appeal to a broader market. I don’t think I want to be that kind of writer.

However, if I can make the book appeal to a broader market without sacrificing anything that’s really important to the story, I may consider that, but my priority is to tell an interesting and meaningful story.

Instead of getting emails that say “cool story,” I’d honestly rather get emails that say, “That was hot! More please!” combined with other emails that say, “You will rot in hell for this, foul demon!”

There are plenty of vanilla books for vanilla readers. I think it would be more rewarding to write a book that scares away vanilla readers and pleases the non-vanilla ones. This isn’t due to being overly rebellious. I think honesty will suffice.

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Desperation Loyalty

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Desperation loyalty is remaining loyal to a group or identity based on neediness or clinginess, often in violation more important values. It is a place of stuckness that elevates loyalty to others above the commitment to grow.

It’s relatively easy to spot this in other people. It’s harder to spot this in ourselves.

If you pursue a strong and centered path of personal growth for many years, you will outgrow many friends and social groups along the way. That’s a normal part of a life of growth and change.

But at some point in your journey, especially early on, you may have doubts about taking the next leap because it may feel like a leap into aloneness.

The truth is that you may sometimes leap into aloneness, but these needn’t be leaps into loneliness.

Accepting an invitation to grow is an individual decision. That is your challenge to face, and some challenges in life must be faced alone. Now and then it’s important to get away from social influences to dwell in the fire of your own values and let them burn out of you what no longer feels aligned.

The antidote to desperation loyalty is inspiration loyalty. Feel the call of this fiery invitation, and give it your full attention when it demands this from you.

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Does the USA Need to Heal Now?

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In my extended social circle, some people are calling for unity and healing now that Joe Biden will be the next President. Others aren’t so sure that healing is really what’s needed.

The offer basically sounds like this:

It’s time to repair the wounded relationships between the people who supported a lying, racist sociopath path for President and those who wanted to replace him.

That’s a crappy offer. It doesn’t land well. The most airy-fairy people I know seem to be swallowing it and trying to invite people into some awkward reconciliation phase, but most seem to be declining this offer and searching for a better one, at least for now.

There’s some stress and sadness too because people aren’t sure if there is a better offer on the table right now.

The problem with this offer is that this election wasn’t really about the usual politics where otherwise good people may have different views about certain subjects. This election went into much darker territory.

Even though Biden won, which caused great relief, lots of people around the world (and in the USA too) were still shocked and dismayed to see that more than 70 million Americans cast their ballots for Trump – voting against racial justice, against global cooperation, against the environment, against human decency, against science, against health, and against so much more that people care about. How can they not see this as being so, so backwards in this day and age?

And it is truly backwards. My international friends are right in their assessment.

While some blame the media, Trump has been one of the most communicative Presidents ever. Anyone can watch his speeches or read his tweets. Even when there’s a Twitter warning label attached, you still get to see the original messages. There’s an over-abundance of primary source material for all the world to see. Fox News may add fuel the fire, but there’s more than enough coming from the White House itself, direct and unfiltered.

More people voted from Trump in this election than voted for Obama each times Obama won. Fortunately a lot more people voted overall, which pushed Biden into record territory, gaining more than 75 million votes.

So what do people of good conscience do about this?

Some people are starting with a bit of celebrating. People have been dancing and cheering in the streets in some cities. But it’s a bit of a black celebration. Even if you do celebrate, what comes next?

Do we now offer hugs and handshakes and say, “Oh well, your guy lost the election… better luck next time”?

Are we suppose to pretend that people who voted for Trump are just good people who slightly lost their way or just voted for their party or for financial reasons? And now that he’s on his way out, they should be fine in a month or two?

I think a lot of people realize that there’s no going back. The cat is out of the bag. Too many Americans scared the hell out of the world, first by voting for Trump in 2016 and then again this year. Now the world and the rest of the country want answers – why did this happen, and what will be done to prevent this from happening again?

Patching things up with delusional friends and family members isn’t going to cut it. That would only be a temporary bandage, and too many people would still be left with a feeling of lingering dread that we could be right back here again in 2024.

There are complex issues to be unwound and resolved regarding causes and solutions. I’m not going to get into that now, but at this point I will say that I think a first good step is to decline the healing offer. It’s a phony offer, tantamount to sweeping these issues under the rug. We can’t do that. This was a wake-up call, so stay woke about it.

I for one won’t be reaching out to ex-friends who went nutter and became Trump supporters. This has nothing to do with politics. And it’s not really even about values or beliefs, however delusional those beliefs may be. It’s about their behaviors and the effects of their behaviors. I hold them accountable for their actions. To offer some form of healing is just foolish at this point.

Such people didn’t wound me. They just caused me to lower my assessments of them. They violated my boundaries for friendship, and so they got tossed out of my social circle. I’m not going to invite them back in if the boundary violations would remain unresolved.

This isn’t about holding a grudge, and it’s not about forgiveness. It’s about the importance of maintaining healthy boundaries and intelligent standards. I’m not going to reach out just to be re-exposed to such people’s misaligned behaviors and fanciful conspiracy theories. They’ve shown me how low they’re willing to go, and I accept that as their choice.

It’s not even really accurate to say that I don’t trust them. I do trust them to continue behaving as they’ve been behaving. I trust that they’ll continue promoting conspiracy theories, being okay with lying, promoting racist ideas, voting in support of racist policies, and taking irresponsible actions that will result in more infections and deaths. I trust that what they’ve shown me is likely to continue in some form, and I’d rather remain aware of this instead of pretending that it isn’t there.

I will not be an enabler for such people, so I won’t invest in relationships with them. There is nothing to heal because this isn’t a wound. It’s simply part of reality to be accepted.

Truth alignment is empowering. Start by looking at the USA and acknowledge that yes, a whole lot of Americans really have gone full-tilt nutter. Let that sink in. There’s no need to resist this realization.

Even though it may seem otherwise, my relationship with such people is still rooted in compassion. That’s because I was raised as a religious nutter myself. I can look at the Trump supporting nutters today and still recognize something of myself in them. I don’t feel like it’s impossible to understand them. But that doesn’t mean I’ll let them drag me into the nutter abyss with them, and it doesn’t mean I want to invest in listening to their daily nonsense; I’ve done enough of that to last a lifetime.

When I was a religious nutter (and a different kind of nutter a bit later, like a shoplifting nutter), it didn’t serve me when non-nutters swept my nuttiness under the rug and still tried to relate to me based on our commonalities. That just empowered me to remain in nutter land. They might have thought they were being tolerant, but they were just being short-sighted and foolish. They weren’t doing what was best for me.

What really helped was when I encountered people who stood firm in non-nutter land, and they made it clear where I was standing. Their certainty (which was really truth alignment) nudged me to start having doubts, which led to reconsideration of my beliefs, which led to a whole lot of growth and transformation. This in turn eventually led to helping more people escape nutter land, people who expressed gratitude for this afterwards.

Nutters don’t need hugs and handshakes to patch things up. They need constant and unwavering reminders that they’re standing in nutter land. They need truth, not denial and pretending.

Being a Trump supporter is stupid, plain as day. The reasons people use to justify such behavior are irrelevant. Voting for Trump is a stupid action, no matter the reason. We can assess its stupidity based on the results alone, which are measurably dreadful.

Being a Trump supporter was stupid four years ago. It was stupid a week ago. And it’s stupid today. If you are a Trump supporter, your behavior is stupid, no doubt about it. You don’t have to remain in nutter land though. There is an exit door. Walk through it when you’re ready.

I’m here to support, encourage, and serve the non-nutters of the world. The only service I offer to the nutters is to doggedly remind you that you’re still in nutter land, but you must choose to leave. That’s the gateway that shifts you from unconscious growth to conscious growth.

If you choose to stay in nutter land or if you pretend you’re not there when it’s pretty damned clear that you are, then I’ll just keep reminding you how dreadfully stupid you’re being. And if you don’t banish me from your life for good – if you keep that door open just a tad – then we both know you’re eventually going to leave nutter land and come play with the smart people. It’s only a matter of time.

Personally I don’t think nutter land should be abolished. I think it serves a worthwhile purpose. Its presence can be healthy for us, especially as a reminder. The presence of nutter land raises the stakes and helps us gain clarity about what we’d like to create and experience instead. If supporting Trump is ridiculously stupid, where is the ridiculously smart path? I think it’s good to be aware that nutter land is always nipping at our heals, challenging us to dream bigger and bolder and to not get complacent.

Nutter land woke me up too during the past four years. The sheer lunacy of that last four years got me feeling more engaged in the game of life. It got me to finally register to vote for the first time ever. And I must say that it was fun casting one of the votes that kept Nevada blue. I picked a good time to start voting. It really did feel like my vote mattered. I loved being part of the team that said to the nutters, “You shall not pass!”

They also helped me see the importance of being anti-racist (not a passive non-racist), including participating in a diversity committee in an organization I belong to, which is still ongoing.

The nutters reminded me of the importance of full engagement with life. And for that I actually feel grateful. I’m still going to stand firm against their various insanities though.

So I don’t think polarization is a problem. I think it’s good and healthy. The more extreme the nutters become, the more their behavior encourages me to sculpt my character in different ways – if only to counter-balance their nuttiness. The more they assert their insanities, the more they encourage me to grow in ways I may have been overlooking.

So the healing offer is declined. There’s nothing to heal. There is a lot of work to be done, but the nutters can’t stop us from doing it. They’re just going to make everyone else stronger, more attentive, and more resolved. And many nutters will soon leave nutter land because nutter land is becoming a dreadful place to stay.

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