When you put in the effort to save the thing that no one else is willing to work on, you’re doing it because you hope that your effort will be recognized. You’re hoping that when the project pulls through because of your effort everyone will cheer for the person who did it.

Just remember – if they cared about the outcome enough to cheer for the person who saved it, they’d put in the effort themselves. Work on the things you’d cheer for yourself, and don’t chase the esteem of others. People who can’t lift a finger can’t clap.

Most people don’t want to eat their favorite meal as their only meal. But what’s the ratio? How much variety do you need to spice up your favorites?

You can say “Having a cheeseburger now and then makes you appreciate steak more” (assuming, of course, that you prefer steak to cheeseburgers). But there’s diminishing marginal returns there, right? What’s the optimal burger-to-steak ratio in your life?

Being thirsty makes you appreciate water, too. But is being dehydrated more pain than a refreshing drink is pleasure?

Some of the best and most interesting philosophy is done within the pages of really good speculative fiction. Exploring the “what if” realms and how we might react to them, when done well, requires an incredible mind. I doubt my mind is up for the task, but I’ve been struck by an idea, and I’m going to mess around with it some. Wish me luck.

All my front teeth are fake. When I was young I used to fight a lot, and a few times I got them really banged up and never fixed them. As a result of both the damage and subsequent negligence, they got significantly worse and were a real eyesore.

When I talked, I was careful never to open my mouth much because of how awful they looked. I never smiled fully in pictures. I knew everyone would notice.

One day, finally, I got an expensive dental procedure done and had them reconstructed. It was arduous, but the end result was great. I finally had a nice-looking smile and was really happy to show it off. I went to a gathering of my friends and walked in with a big, toothy grin. I cheerfully called out hello to everyone as I walked in the room. Their response?

“Oh, hey Johnny. What’s up?”

That’s it. I stared at the room, smiling from ear to ear like an idiot, said smile becoming increasingly forced with each passing second. Eventually, someone said, “What’s wrong with you?”

I grinned some more, but my eyes didn’t have it. I said, “Really? Nothing?”

They all shrugged. Finally, I couldn’t take it and just yelled, “I fixed my teeth!”

And the universal response was: “There was something wrong with your teeth?”

These were people I’d known for years. So, there are a few lessons here. Maybe I was just really good at hiding my chompers. But probably not – what was more likely was that people really, really don’t notice stuff about you. It’s called “spotlight bias” – we think we’re the center of attention and everyone is scrutinizing us but in reality, we mostly slide in and out of other people’s attention without much real notice. A few people might pay attention (a girl walked into that gathering later and immediately said “Hey, you fixed your teeth!” which turned out to be my first clue that she liked me), but they’re the exception.

The other lesson though is this – fix the stuff that bothers you. Don’t carry burdens you don’t have to. You don’t have to fix everything, but once it’s clear that a problem is actually making you change your life for the worse to route around it, dig it out.

I’ve recently learned of a concept in the Finnish culture that I love so very much. They have a word, sisu, which is one of those great words that doesn’t translate perfectly into English. It means “grit, bravery, and determination to continue to work and do the right thing even in the face of long-term adversity.” It’s not “take your licks,” because it’s active. It’s not “grit your teeth and finish the race” because it’s long-term. And it includes an element of bravery because the long road is uncertain – but you do it anyway.

Sisu isn’t focused on a single task. Sisu is a lifestyle value. There is something in the human spirit that is worth preserving. There’s a philosophical thought experiment that goes something like this: “If you could step into a box that created a simulated perfect existence of constant pleasure and happiness with no effort on your part, would you go into the box?” You’d know it wasn’t real, but that wouldn’t affect your perception of it. If the ultimate goal of life is human happiness and flourishing, why not go into the box? People struggle with this question. It’s hard to honestly say you wouldn’t do it, hard to even come up with a reason why you shouldn’t, but something about it irks us. There’s something disturbing about the concept, isn’t there?

Part of me always thought it was just signaling, people saying “oh, I’d never use the box, it’s better to be real,” when they were really just saying that because they knew the box was hypothetical and they’d like to score status points with their peers by sounding high-minded. I used to think that if the box were real, those people would jump into it in a heartbeat.

Maybe some of them would. Heck, maybe I would. Pain, agony, loss, despair, loneliness, regret, grief, fear – these are all real things. Real things in my life, my mind, my heart. If something could take all of that away, isn’t that a good thing?

But something about it bothers me. Makes me wonder.

When I see people who have completely given themselves over to substance abuse – people who have gone into the bottle or the needle and never come back out – I get it. I don’t like it, I don’t want to do it, but believe me, I get it. Because that’s the box. I get it in the same way I understand people who are terminally ill who want assisted suicide. It’s different facets of the same concept. Sometimes a person looks at the hand they’ve been dealt, and decides that the “happiness machine,” in whatever form it takes, is a better offer than trying to make a go of life without it.

People struggle to come up with counter-arguments. Sit down with a terminally ill person in constant pain, or a completely destitute heroin addict, and try to convince them to step out of the box. The two tracks people usually take are to either reference loved ones (“think of everyone else who cares about you/who you’re hurting/etc.”) or a higher power, trying to reach out via religion. Sometimes these things work, but you can surely imagine plenty of situations where they simply wouldn’t apply. And what then? What do you tell that person that says, “No thanks, I’d rather just push in this needle and die, because that’s the happier outcome?”

There is something in the human spirit worth preserving. Maybe I feel that way because evolution naturally programs us to want to survive, and my belief that continued survival outside of the happiness machine is worthy of pursuit is simply a manifestation of that evolutionary programming. Or maybe there really is something deep within us that’s actually more important than our happiness. Maybe there is something at the end of that long road that is worth all the grief and despair you endure to get there, all the effort of the journey and the wear on your bones. Maybe the choice isn’t between happiness and sadness, and thinking of life in that way is what causes us to find our happiness machines and crawl into them, because happiness is obviously preferable to sadness. Maybe instead, we simply sometimes have to choose between happiness and sisu, and we choose the latter because it is good to survive. Because it’s good to endure, and take another step, and let your soul grow a little longer.

I often see and hear discussions about when young people should have their “life plan” set. Sometimes young people feel like they don’t know what they’re doing. They feel lost, and that makes them feel like they’re “falling behind.”

This isn’t just young people, of course. Everyone feels that way sometimes. I certainly do.

So here’s advice to everyone who feels that way: no plan will ever be good enough. No goal will be realistic, or guaranteed to make you happy if you achieve it. You will never have it all figured out to the degree where you no longer have to make active decisions in your life.

Because that’s what we’re all hoping for. We’re hoping to make a plan so good and goals so insightful that once they’re made, we can just “follow the plan” for the rest of our lives and get everything we want just laid out in front of us.

Some of the unhappiest people I know are people who made (what felt like at the time) exactly that kind of plan, and then didn’t get the perfect results ten or twenty years later. They not only feel lost, they feel cheated. They “did everything right” and still didn’t get what they felt they deserved.

The correct answer isn’t to say “It’s okay that I don’t have my plan yet.” The correct answer is to say “There will never be a plan.”

Instead of setting goals or making plans, live by values. You can make the values anything that’s important to you, but if you make a set and stick by them, your life will generally go in the direction you want. You can change your values, too – one of your values should be how, when, and why you do that.

A value that says “This is the set of characteristics I will value in those with whom I form close relationships” will do more for you than a plan that says “I will be married by 27.” A value that says “I will always seek to improve my skills in this category” will do more for you than a plan that says “I’ll make partner by 35.”

If you feel lost, it isn’t because you don’t have a plan. It’s because you don’t know what your values are. Or maybe you have an inkling, but you’re not living them as strongly as you should. Here’s the good news: that’s not something you have to wait for. You can do that today.

“It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sommbitch or another.” – Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly

I’m not a huge fan of statues. Of any kind of monument, really. Oh look, let’s all stand around and look at this big thing someone built, which serves no practical purpose, except to remind us that somebody built it. It’s their keepsake writ large, hauled into the present by the past, and it keeps us from making our own way. It’s like a huge rock dropped in a river, forcing the river to change its course by its very presence.

I think there’s a distinction here between “art that lasts long enough that it becomes like that” and “things that are built just to be monuments.” Sometimes you paint a picture, and people either really like it or a strange series of events make it a historical oddity (or both) and it becomes monumental. That just is what it is.

Cultures throughout history have moved big rocks around in order to say “We were here, we changed the Earth, remember that we did so – that we were like gods, able to shape our creation because we were above it.” It’s in humanity’s nature to do that. I don’t think you can avoid it. But I also don’t stand in awe of it. Because I have my own rocks to move.

Most of them will be small. Maybe some will be large if there’s a reason to move them. Some will just be the tools I used for a time and then flung into the ocean because I don’t need to remember them.

Everything good in life is one or more lesser things mixed together.

I’m one of those people who mixes my food. All of it. I dip my french fries in my ice cream. When I get a plate of dinner, it all gets mixed together. All my Thanksgiving leftovers go in one container.

I mix Skittles and M&Ms.

The point is, I think most good things enhance each other. Most of the time, if I encounter something I enjoy, I’ll immediately start thinking of ways I could mix it with other things I enjoy. If I’m reading a good book, I’ll think “Ooh, I’m going to take this with me when I go camping this weekend.” If I spot a movie I want to go see, I think about friends I enjoy spending time with who might want to see it with me. If I have a successful project at work, I like to talk about it with my children so we share in each other’s triumphs.

And it goes without saying that I like to turn experiences of all kinds into blog posts.

The point is, you do this too, even if you don’t think you do. Oh, you don’t mix your corn and mashed potatoes? But your mashed potatoes are already a combination of things: potatoes, butter, salt, a little milk maybe, etc. You’re not just eating carbon atoms – it’s mash-ups all the way down.

So mix a few things together! Find some new and exciting combinations of joys you never encountered before. Ten different things can be combined in hundreds of thousands of ways. That means if you can find even ten things that make you happy, you can have a new joyful experience every day for the rest of your life.

Would you like to learn an interesting bit of magic? It’s a way to improve the value of even the most mundane thing without changing anything at all about it. Watch the trick:

You walk up to a young relative with two different pieces of candy. You show them both to the child, and then tell them that they get the one on the left; they don’t get a choice. They’ll frown, I guarantee it. They didn’t even know they were going to get any candy ten seconds earlier, and they’re still getting a piece of candy they like, but they’ll frown all the same. Now, when you see the frown, say: “I changed my mind. You can pick which piece you want.”

Poof, magic!

They’ll beam with joy. They might even pick the piece you originally offered! But because they chose it, it will triple in the happiness it brings.

Agency itself brings joy. You can use this to your advantage in all sorts of situations. Need to motivate some employees to do an unpleasant task? Give them a choice between two unpleasant tasks and whichever one they pick, they’ll be thrilled not to be doing the other one. I’ll give my kids a list of seven chores and then say “You can pick any one of these you want and you don’t have to do that one at all! You can skip it and I’ll do it!” They’re thrilled. And instead of having miserable kids grumping their way through seven chores, I have happy kids frolicking their way through six. That’s a solid deal by any measure.

Humans love freedom. It’s in our bones. Even a small measure of it helps the medicine go down, so to speak. So let people choose, whenever you can.

I am not an artist.

To clarify: I guess writing is art and I do that a lot, but I’m not a visual artist. I don’t draw, paint, sculpt, etc. My children, especially my oldest daughter, do this a lot. So did my father. So do many of my other family members. But I don’t even doodle.

Now that we’ve established that I don’t know anything about art, here’s my opinion on it (ha!).

I think there is a key and crucial distinction between “art” and, for lack of a better word, “illustration.”

Art is communication. Art is expression. Art is the ability to take the million-year-old part of our brain that learned to recognize shapes in clouds and faces in bushes and speak to it directly, to try to find some way to communicate ideas or emotions in a language so old and so deep that it transcends our modern minds’ ability to even hear the tones, let alone understand the words. I think it’s wonderful.

But I also think that there’s a growing sentiment against “AI Art” being used for… well, anything, just because it isn’t that.

AI Art isn’t art. I’m comfortable with that assessment and position. But just because all illustration is currently art doesn’t mean it has to be, any more than all copy has to be “writing” just because it currently is (or recently was, anyway).

“Writing” is done by humans, too. It’s inventive, communicative. But an AI can make the copy for a Burger King ad because that doesn’t have to be “writing.” And likewise, the image in that ad doesn’t have to be “art.”