Empires are built from within, not from without. When the world is filled with danger and uncertainty, you shouldn’t be looking to that same world for rescue. You need to put your own house in order first.

Take the smallest possible sphere of influence you can manage, and begin there. Often, this simply means your own mind, body, and soul. Be healthy, be ready, and be disciplined. From there, you can move to things like your job, your (literal) house, or your family. If all that is in place, you can work on your community or the institutions important in your life.

But that means looking within, first, always. If you don’t have enough money, then look for ways to earn more and spend less, not ways to borrow or beg. If a particular kind of hurt befalls you, then look for ways to insulate yourself from that hurt, not for ways to attack the source.

We sometimes play offense when we should be playing defense. We try to score a point when we’re losing ten every day because our own house isn’t in order. The world is full of danger and doubt and always will be, but your life doesn’t have to be.

When your house is in order (and this is a relative term, as you’ll never be perfect or complete), the next step is not to endanger that order by going out on the offensive. You don’t build a position of power to attack from it; you build a position of power to benefit from it. So the next step is to use your vantage point to find like-minded souls. Look for others with houses in order whose values you share. Bond with them. Form families and clans. Grow love and fellowship together.

If you wish to raise children, this is how to do it. Even if you don’t plan on having any, this is how you form a connection that will surround your life with meaning and joy. It comes from this, and only this.

Start with making your house into one that you would bond with. Be someone worthy of that connection, and the connections will come. To thine own house, be true.

What do we owe to future generations that have not yet been born?

We can’t know the future. We can’t know, for certain, what will benefit people in a hundred years, let alone a thousand. If we look at people a hundred or a thousand years ago, we certainly wouldn’t want them to cement our modern paths too much, would we? We want to have room to advance our knowledge on our own.

But still – certain broad strokes are pretty safe. We’re probably doing fine if, at minimum, we don’t arbitrarily reduce the resources or choices of future humans.

Consider: maybe in the future, the British Empire rises again and does all sorts of evil stuff. And maybe that would have been prevented if we made the ocean levels rise so much that the United Kingdom is swallowed by the ocean. While that’s… possible, it’s certainly far-fetched enough that we can say it’s probably better if we don’t start sinking populated islands any time soon.

If you plant a tree and it turns out that whoever lives on your property in a hundred years doesn’t want it, they can cut it down – and have the wood, too. But if it turns out they’d like the shade, shade in which I will never sit, they can’t come back in time a hundred years and plant the tree.

So make small choices like that, when you can. Improve resources, improve choices. And enjoy the shade that’s here now, thanking people who can no longer hear you.

Your view of the world is so incredibly narrow, skewed, and flawed. That’s not a criticism of you specifically; it simply cannot be otherwise.

Firsthand knowledge is one of the few ways to get any real information. And your ability to absorb firsthand knowledge is limited to such a minuscule fraction of the world that you simply can’t comprehend the sheer breadth of what you don’t know.

A coworker of mine, who lives in India, told me today about how pharmaceutical interventions faced an uphill battle there based on a plethora of factors including the fact that white is the color associated with death and mourning (as opposed to black, as if often is in Western countries), which meant that, among other things, people were freaked out by being asked to swallow white pills. And I get it! If a doctor handed you a black pill, it might freak you out a little.

(Side note: in the Western world we often think of “white” as something like colorless, neutral, default, etc. But it’s not – you have to color those pills white the same as you’d have to color them red or green. In fact, it takes a lot of effort to make most things white. Paper and cloth don’t just come that way.)

Anyway, I found this fascinating, as I always do when I hear about ways of thinking that aren’t my own. Because it came to me from another source, I can’t be certain of the truth of the information. Any of the horsemen of falsehood could be playing with what I hear. It could even just be a convenient falsehood.

And that’s all the more reason to go out and wander around yourself. Gather as much firsthand knowledge as you can. It will never be enough, but it can help you filter the secondhand information better. The more personal experience you have, the more you’ve seen the grass and dreams of the world, the better equipped you are to contextualize the information you hear from others.

Wander forth, and be unfooled.

No matter how strong that one rung might be, a one-rung ladder isn’t very useful. Imagine trying to climb anything with only that one rung!

And imagine what would happen if that rung were to break – or heck, even get a little slippery. On a normal ladder you can shift your weight around, rely on other rungs, or even skip the faulty one entirely and still make the climb. But with just one rung? You’re not going anywhere but down.

In your life, your mental health is a constant climb. Sit around and do nothing, ever, and it will erode. Keeping yourself mentally fit requires activity of all kinds. And the more rungs on your ladder, the better.

Some people invest what seems like ALL of themselves into one thing, one “rung.” Maybe they’re 100% driven by their job, so much so that it becomes their identity. Or maybe they’re so absorbed in their romantic relationship that they seem to have no identity outside of it. It could be any number of things, but that’s not a secure way to climb.

Consider what happens when someone loses their job if they’ve completely wrapped their lives up inside it, versus a person with many other things going on in their lives. The person with a well-rounded life can lean on hobbies, family, relationships, professional associations, lots of things to keep their attitude up while they replace that one slice. But for a person for whom that’s the whole pie? It’s a much darker time.

A person whose romantic relationship is one of many things going on in their life can react to slight turbulence in that relationship very easily – they have other people to talk to, ways to decompress, and a better attitude overall. But for someone whose entire identity is as “such-and-such’s spouse,” even a minor disagreement can send them into a spiral.

Think about the things that are important to you. If you want to preserve them as healthy sources of joy, then diversify! Be more than just one thing – the ladder works best with many rungs.

I used to really, really love rain. Now it raises my blood pressure. The difference is that now I’m a homeowner who has had more than one rain-related disaster in my home.

The ability to run around in the rain, enjoying the chaos, is an ability borne from invincibility. And there is only one true form of invincibility – having nothing to lose.

As long as you have something, you have something to fear. I’m not saying it’s automatically preferable to have nothing, but maybe just understand that every last thing you get in life you buy with a little bit of vulnerability. The more you have, the higher your tower? The farther you have to look down.

My oldest likes her marshmallows burnt – totally charred on the outside, practically liquid in the center. My middle child likes them mostly fresh out of the bag, maybe just barely warmed up, if that. My youngest likes them like I do – patiently toasted to a golden brown, soft on the inside and with that slight crunch on the outside.

You cannot possibly do this wrong. If you build a fire with your children and sit around it with sticks and a bag of marshmallows, everyone will be happy.

This is true of so many things. Details don’t matter – gather your loved ones and put some joyous thing in the middle that everyone can experience in their own way. Let those ways take shape. Let the fellowship surround it all.

This is life, joyously lived.

One of my “social flaws” is that I always want to invite everyone to everything. If I’m doing something with one or two friends, my natural instinct is to call every person I know and see if they also want in. I hate the thought of sharing a story later about a fun thing I did and having that person go “Oh, you should have called me!”

Realistically, as adults, most of the time people can’t spontaneously join those kinds of adventures anymore. My friends all have careers, families, and their own hobbies.

But still, every once in a while… once in a blue moon, you can get that whole crowd together for something fun. And when you get that chance, do it. Those are some of the best times, and they come more and more rarely as the years pass.

So if you’re doing something fun, call me. I’ll do my best.

May you be thankful for much, and have much to be thankful for. Spread it around a little, too.

“This is the best boat ever,” says boat enthusiast.

There are often two broad categories of products: things designed for “the masses” and things designed for someone who is really, really into that core thing to begin with. Many times, you’re getting advice about category A from someone in category B, and that can throw you.

Imagine you want to get a grill. You don’t have one and don’t do much grilling, but you’d like to have a barbecue over the summer, maybe cook a few burgers here and there. So you ask your friend for advice because that friend is a huge barbecue person and grilling enthusiast who is very involved in that hobby.

As far as information density is concerned, that’s a great choice! But soon you find yourself overwhelmed as your friend tries to give you a decade’s worth of hobbyist advice and steer you towards the sorts of grilling setups that make people like that drool. But you just wanted a grill, not a forty-thousand-dollar barbecue restaurant in your backyard.

“Mass market” stuff exists for a reason. Maybe you’ll really enjoy it and you’ll become one of those hobbyists for whatever it is, but maybe you won’t. So don’t feel like you have to over-indulge on the first day. It’s fine to just cook a burger.

Many times in your life you’ve been nervous about something you had to do. You were anxious about an upcoming test, deadline, or date. You were worried that you weren’t going to be able to pull it off, whatever it was. And you tried telling yourself that it would be okay, that you’d overcome – but the affirmations didn’t make you less nervous.

And then the moment came, and you were fine. Better than fine. You rocked it, and it felt like it was barely a challenge.

Until the next time. Until the next time, when the anxiety returned and your affirmations fell on your own deaf ears. But you kept telling yourself it was going to be fine, until one day.

Until one day, it worked. You’d finally been fine enough times that your brain believed itself when you said you were going to be totally okay.

If your affirmations don’t work yet, it just means you haven’t reached that point – yet. But you will. Keep telling yourself.