It’s easy to get a little tired and stop wanting more out of the status quo.

It’s important to accurately see why the status quo exists – what value it creates for which parties to allow it to persist – but that doesn’t require defending it or assuming it’s the best that can be.

There are always $20 bills on the sidewalk.

There’s a danger in seeing so much revolutionary opportunity that you get bitter at every bit of the status quo. It all seems like insane, irrational madness. None of it makes sense. None of it is as good as your ideas. All of it needs to change.

Maybe.

Don’t lose that stubborn belief that everything can always be better. But if it starts to make you a cynic, a pessimist, or an unhappy person, it’s not doing you any good. Pessimists don’t innovate.

The ideal combination is discontent optimism.

 

The latest issue.

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Been doing some convos every few weeks with friends about Bitcoin. Since we chat anyway, I hit record and share them. Here’s one from yesterday evening.

I’ve been in a writing groove since late last night. I stayed up until almost midnight (crazy for this old man) and woke up at six to write. I hammered out a lot of stuff.

The downside of writing grooves on longer content like that is it leaves me in a lurch for my daily blog post. The 1.5 articles I wrote aren’t ready to publish, but they sapped all my writing juice. So here I am writing about how I wrote so much I have nothing left to write today.

But I still wrote today!

Common wisdom is difficult wisdom.

Focus your attention on the things within your sphere of control or influence.

Some of the best and hardest advice to heed.

An interesting partner to this wisdom is this:

Have confidence in firsthand knowledge, and less with every degree of separation.

Just as you have a sphere of influence – things within your power to affect or alter – you have a sphere of knowledge – things within your power to perceive directly.

Never have I been more aware of the dangers of allowing second, third, and umpteenth hand knowledge to impact my worldview, my mood, or my sense of optimism or autonomy. We live in a world awash with information. Most of it is bad. I don’t mean bad as in true news that I dislike. I mean bad as in the information is inaccurate, if not wholly fabricated or misrepresented.

In fact, it’s gotten to the point that the more “official” weight information has – from well-funded media organizations or “verified” sources – the less likely it is to be directly provable, and the more likely it is to be false.

If I allow what I know about the world to be shaped by the sea of indirect information, I will know very little truth and feel very powerless. If I allow my perception to be shaped by what I directly observe, and add small dashes of indirect info with decreasing weight and probability the further removed, I will feel happier and more successfully navigate reality.

Where are these throngs of people irate over Starbucks holiday cups? I have never experience a single one first, second, or third-hand through real human contact. I have no experience of them in my reality. Yet if I believe the official stories, the world is full of them, and they are breeding conflict and discord. If I choose to believe the story told by strangers with a proven track record of lies, my life gets worse as does my view of the world. If I choose to believe my own eyes and experience and friends and acquaintances, the official storytellers look like useless hype men and fools at best.

Be wary of wandering outside your sphere of knowledge. Be curious, seek, explore, but do not treat indirect visions of the world utterly incongruent with your own observations as deserving of equal weight. Think probabilities. Think incentives. How likely is this source to be accurate given what they stand to lose or gain by you believing them? How immediately useful is this knowledge in improving your life or navigation of the world?

It sounds paranoid, but it brings the opposite. When you reserve most of your confidence for facts evident in your own experience, you are less paranoid. Every crazy story from distant sources brings less stress. You have a more solid hold on what you do know, and a looser grip on things farther afield that may or may not be true.

Some days just getting out my daily blog post takes everything I’ve got.

Some days the universe is screaming with every bit of energy it has that a blog post is not in the cards today.

Those are the days when I hit publish and tell the universe who’s boss.

You’re not controlled when

You think something false, but when

You think others do

Another fun conversation with “The Four Numpties” about the world of Bitcoin.

The promise and pitfalls of mega-visions for an industry.

Read it and all issues here. Subscribers only.

The Placebo Effect is the most promising area of medicine and one of the most neglected.

Placebos work consistently for some percentage of people, in every imaginable form of pretend therapy, pretend surgery, and pretend prescription. They are more reliably effective than most “real” treatments. Oh, for almost no cost and without the side effects.

Everyone takes the effect for granted, but rarely is it pursued beyond, “If you think you’re being treated your condition improves.”

Surely this evidence of the mind-body connection is the most important possible part of health! Understanding the effect, and how to improve and direct the mind to effect the body, should be the number one most fascinating and most researched part of medical science!

Instead, chemical combinations with much less reliable effect and with myriad unknown and deleterious unintended effects are studied ad nauseam, compared against placebo (which they usually fail to outperform), and then all the head-scratching is about why the chemical didn’t work instead of why the placebo did.

The most fertile, broadly applicable, reliable, affordable, safe, and sophisticated form of treatment the world has ever encountered gets short shrift. It is one of the most fascinating mysteries, sure to lead down rabbit holes that alter and improve our understanding of the most fundamental aspects of reality, yet hardly any “experts” seems curious about it. (A decent definition of an “Expert” is someone who has killed their curiosity with credentials).

In fact, when a positive result is discovered to be caused by Placebo, it is treated as a lesser citizen. “Oh that’s not legitimate, it was all only placebo effect.” Only Placebo? Only an improvement in health brought about by belief? Only healing through mindset shift; ideas generating direct physical results?

The most present and accessible form of treatment resides in the mind of every individual. We have no idea how much it can do, how for it can go, and how we might be able to enhance the power of our minds to improve our bodies.

What could be more exciting to a health researcher or practitioner than that?

It’s exciting and troubling to know that human perception is limited to an almost inconsequential fraction of reality.

Light visible to humans is a narrow band of all light. Sound audible to humans is a tiny range of frequencies. And so for all the senses. We are surrounded by more magnetic, electrical, gravitational, and other fields than we can imagine. At all times. Everything is a sea of energy and we capture just a drop here and there.

The earth has a frequency. So does every plant and animal. The atmosphere is full of charged particles and ultraviolet rays.

For everything than we can see, there is infinitely more that we can’t. We are bathed in reality and blind to 99.99% of it.

If that doesn’t get you hyped for adventure I don’t know what will!

Sometimes I have a cigar for breakfast.

Just to remind myself that my life is my own and the distinction between weekend and weekday, work and play, relaxation and focus, is entirely up to me.

I have a pretty normal, productive routine. But sometimes I act it out without thinking. Just go with the motions. Can forget that it’s designed and chosen by me. To refresh my sense of agency, I try to mix it up sometimes. Stay up late doing work. Read a book in the middle of the day.

Sometimes the purpose and power of self-imposed rules is forgotten, until they are bent or broken.

I want to be efficient, but I don’t want to live on autopilot.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I appreciate peace and quiet. Most of the time, I like having few things to think about and few things going on.

I also get bored easily and I like adventure.

In search of it, it’s easy to say yes to everything, and be occupied by lots of stuff. But instead of one hero’s journey, the result is tons of spectator sideshows. The best way to get the adventure I seek is to go harder at the one or two really big things worth my energy, not to add on lots of little things.

But there are exceptions.

If I’m in a rut with my few big focus areas, sometimes a sensory shotgun can shake me out. Immersing myself in a lot of ideas and information and following random rabbit trails can dislodge me when I’m stuck on the bigger journey. Like a level in a video game you can’t get past, sometimes you need to play some light-hearted side-quests before you return with fresh focus.

Taking a day off

To relax the mind can be

So very stressful

Anything that “We” all know for certain should be questioned.

The most dangerous beliefs are those considered “settled” or “consensus”. Those are the ideas that close minds, kill curiosity, and end exploration.

Those are also the ideas that have people supporting the harassment, caging, and killing of dissenters.

It doesn’t matter whether the consensus idea is true. What matters is not shutting down those who disbelieve it, no matter how crazy they are. It’s cowardly, unbecoming, and evil to do so. It reveals a thoughtlessness and lack of imagination, curiosity, and compassion.

As Milton said,

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.