Caffeine isn't a smart choice after 3pm. It takes an hour to fully hit, then 7 hours to get out of your system. That means that you don't have a chance of sleeping til 11pm.
If you want to get up early you need to destroy all obstacles in your environment. If you have a partner, they need to get up early and sleep early with you. You need to stop drinking caffeine at 1pm and be in bed by 10pm. You need blackout curtains, no noise, no phones, nada when you sleep. And you need to get up when your alarm rings and exercise first thing.
At least, that's what I think it takes for me. There was a time I managed to get up at 4am on a consistent basis, and what it took was that – controlling my environment.
Willpower doesn't mean shit if you can't get your sleep in.
I want to escape everything. My life, my work, everything around me.
Thank god my wife is going to Germany for 6 weeks in March. Every day that passes I am getting more bored and annoyed at her. She has so much shit she needs to sort out, from her childhood, from her past, and I feel like I'm the punching bag for all of it.
I need a new industry as well. Crypto no longer interests me. I see all its flaws, all its waste, all its negatives, and its positives don't interest me at all. Almost any other part of the tech sector seems more attractive as a career option. Waste or sewer management software, agritech, telcos, banks... shit, I even have a part of me that would be happy with a 9-5 job. I suppose so long as I had a backup income stream that allowed me to have a fuck-you attitude to fixed hours, standup meetings, and the like.
I am tired of living in a condo with a bunch of rich middle-aged to old people, the latter of which seem to love complaining.
I am tired of looking at the same old things every day.
I want to leave, explore, go into somewhere quiet, retreat, listen to me and only me.
Just had my last talk (in a while) with my therapist. She suggested that L (one of my best friends) staying over brought up a “shadow” in my relationship that made B (my wife) jealous. L has gotten tons of tinder matches since arriving in Brazil – over 100 in his first 2 days.
Most likely, B sees that there's a part of me that wants this as well – wants the excitement of talking to many women, the chance to present myself a different way for all of them, wants the freedom that comes from not committing to any of them – if I have a problem with one, just go talk to another. So when she sees another girl flirt with me, or when I fail to affirm our relationship in public, she's been getting more jealous.
The other thing is, I think I have been getting more attractive, and as a result she feels more threatened. I'm losing weight, working out more, getting better at Portuguese, and as a result am talking to more women and having more women start conversations with me.
My jealousy could also be driving hers. I am kind of expecting her to develop closer male friendships when she's in Germany without me. I don't expect her to cheat sexually, but it would seem normal to me that she seeks a little more male energy in my absence. Likewise I expect myself to seek more female energy too when she's gone – to talk to other girls more. Not to have sex, but just to get a female connection.
What would I do if I had all the money and attention I wanted?
I think I would go minimalist. I don't want a big house. I want maybe:
– Excellent mattress
– Great local gym
– Good, organic, fresh and healthy food (but not any fancy shit, just good quality potatoes and apples and leafy greens and steak and the like)
– An apartment with good quality construction – good mould prevention, good plumbing, good ventilation, good lighting, good wiring. Not fancy, just simple and well-made.
As for experiences:
– Work out every day with fit, strong people
– Have great, energizing sex most days with my partner
– Go for a long walk everyday in a nice natural location
– Read a lot
But maybe I could do with less than that. Maybe I would want to devote myself to something hard and risky. Like fighting human trafficking. If I didn't have a reputation to maintain, if I didn't worry about money... what would be the point of going on living? Why not take on the hardest challenge I can?
Thank fuck I have a prenup. God bless Brazil. To have it as a standard, common option for marriage – total seperation of assets.
It makes no sense to me to split all my assets with any woman including my wife. Or any man for that matter. The only person I would ever be happy having a legal right over my property would be my kid(s) if I ever have them.
Never a wife.
The idea of voluntarily signing up to lose 50% of your assets in one of the most common outcomes of a marriage (divorce) is crazy!
Total seperation of assets makes everything easier and fairer. When I take a business risk, my wife isn't involved. When I take on debt, she doesn't have to pay it. If she decides to fuck her life up, I'll probably be sad and/or help her, but if she fucks it up in a way that gives me reason to break up with her (e.g. cheating or getting some expensive drug addiction), then I can leave her scot-free.
Even if I have kids I'll always have a prenup.
Relationships are way too fickle to stake your life on.
No psychedelics for 2 years is a weird feeling. One foot in both waters. The normies and the hippies. The psychonauts and the squares.
I told my family I'm thinking of doing ayahuasca again. They got all worried – especially my mum... I heard it in her voice. It seems real strange to me that she's worried about ayahuasca, a natural brew that's existed for thousands of years, yet pushed me to get an experimental vaccine. Regardless... she watches a lot of news, so she probably has seen those negative stories, like the guy who killed his shaman, or the people who've been to ceremonies with bad shamans who want to hurt/assault them.
Ayahuasca was honestly very good with me though, always positive stuff. And I had a very strong sense in 2020 that I needed to explore it more. So why has it become such a point of resistance for me?
I admit I am afraid my heart will play up during the ceremony. That I'll have the chest pains worse than ever and maybe die. Yet... the beauty of psychedelics is that they showed me that this life I think I'm in, what I consider “base reality”, isn't even reality at all. It's a filtered, protected, helmet version of what reality really is. Death would not be the worse outcome or even a bad outcome.
I feel like the worst outcome would be coming back with a profound loss of meaning, more profound than I currently have, and/or some type of psychological pain and/or physical injury that really restricts me. Or coming back with nothing at all.
What do I know really though?
I think I need to do ayahuasca before the year ends. After my wife comes back from Germany. With psychologist preparation. It's my one big hope for finding direction and healing my heart.
Some days I wish I never did psychedelics, because in some ways, life seems simpler when you don't face up to the mystery. In other ways, I am intensely happy I did them, because they showed me the freedom and beauty of the universe.
Moxie can write!
I found him via his web3 piece, but this one about career advice for young people is excellent... regarding how you should choose a job carefully, because it'll shape you, and how you should avoid certain things (like first class plane tickets), since you'll end up like the people who enjoy those things (like the unhealthy middle-aged pasty guys that fly first class.)
His main point is: observe the older people working in any job you're considering. That will be the future you.
So for me... do I want to be a programmer? Do I want to be an entrepreneur? I sure as hell don't want to get fat or socially inept.
I like the way he ends it. Earn the minimum money necessary to prevent starvation then go and do something great/unrelated to consumption with the rest of your time.
How should I spend my time? I mean.. surely, my company wouldn't care too much about a lack of productivity if I went off and quieted down my contributions, worked 4 days a week, etc... while also charging very little?
I don't need a fancy apartment. I don't need much furniture. A good bed, a nice gym... I'm not even sure I need those. What could I do if I reduced my expenses to near zero as possible? I live in a country that's quite cheap...
Why am I sitting at my computer at 2am? What decisions brought me here?
Maybe red light is a bad choice. It is good for night yeah – not harsh – but is that really true? In a way, it's just making me angry. Wound up. Frustrated. Red light isn't natural. It means pay attention, something's wrong. It makes you hungry. It makes you angry. It makes you want to fuck. Code red. Red alert. In the red.
What types of things use red light? Fire engines... strip clubs... my wife's weird electro-shock gym. It's quite an active color.
Apparently green light could induce sleep. And green's a bit more natural, creative, happy... yet... maybe also jealous, poisonous....
Maybe the solution for night work is just a super dim, incandescent light ;)
How can I regain a passion for crypto again? I seem to have lost it, around the same time I quit gambling.
To be fair, a lot of elements of crypto are like gambling. Trying an experimental dApp is a bet. Buying a bit of some new cryptocurrency is a bet. Trying a new smart contract is a bet. Crypto trading in general is mostly betting.
And gambling with crypto is a shit ton of fun – or rather, it feels like a shit ton of fun. It's addictive. if truth be told it's not fun, the pain of the losses outweighs the fun of the gains. The only thing that offsets the pain of the losses in gambling with crypto is that often the base assets (e.g. BTC, LTC) gain in value.
Anyway. My decision to never lay another bet in my life again, meant that I had to exit the majority of my crypto positions. For all new crypto investments, I must have a thesis, a reason for investing, more than pure hype and speculation. I must not simply bet on the luck of short-term movements.
So how do I get that spark back? I am not making money from crypto. Perhaps if I did, it would be fun again. If I used a loaning service or the like.
Perhaps I could build useful services for crypto. Or a take on already successful fiat products. YouNeedABudget. GoFuckingDoIt. Stickk.
Or perhaps I need to embrace that this technology is no longer anywhere near as exciting as it used to be for me.
Some tasks look a lot bigger than they are when they're on a calendar. Or, more boring than they are.
Take this task: Write a summary to help devs comply with B (BaaS provider)'s new API connection requirements
It's super simple. There's legit 2 things involved in that, mTLS connection and using scopes.
I just need to outline what mTLS is, link to somewhere about how to implement it, and outline the scope field and what scopes we'll be needing. Ok, I suppose the latter will require some effort, but still I can cross out most functions.
I don't even need to make a Confluence doc necessarily.
Following up with customer verification issues: what does that even involve? Looking through dev JIRA to see if there's anyone working on BR stuff? Looking for keywords sign up, verify, verification, etc? Then posting a Slack message clarifying the issues, going to admin and checking for any more affected users? Then linking?
None of this shit is hard.
Reviewing a site bug document? That's literally just reading. Just reading man. If it's hard for you just imagine how it is for someone who does this full time.
Applying for electronic tax number? Surely plenty have done it before. Everyone says it's easy. So go fucking do it. Stop waiting.