Why is our favorite toy always gravity?

Think of all the different things kids – and adults, for that matter – do that basically boil down to playing with gravity. Swings. Sledding. Roller coasters. Jumping off of stuff into piles of other stuff. Slides. It’s all just different ways of falling down in a fun way!

Adults go skydiving, even. Bungee jumping. We never give up on gravity just being fun to mess around with.

People say that mankind has always wanted to fly, that we were jealous of gods and birds alike and that’s why we invented planes and space shuttles. I don’t think that’s right. Flying is fine, but I don’t think that’s what we were after, in our heart of hearts.

We were always just looking for cooler ways to fall.

I’m not saying this is a hard rule, but I’ve never met someone who didn’t draw their satisfaction from one of three sources: their family, their community, and/or their profession.

We’re social creatures. We want the respect and esteem of people we value. That can be your family, of course. It can be your professional peers. And it can be many forms of “community” – your neighborhood, the community surrounding your hobbies, etc.

But it always comes down to people, and it always comes down to adding value personally to one or more of those groups of people.

The sorts of deeply unhappy or unsatisfied people I know tend to be people who either don’t invest in at least one of those three groups or have mistakenly attached themselves to a “false group.” If you don’t have any close family, any communities you care about, and don’t have a profession you take pride in, then chances are you aren’t very happy. But you can also be unhappy if you think you have one of those things when you actually don’t.

People who don’t have one of those groups can find false, parasitical ones in lots of places. In the same way that a healthy two-person relationship involves both parties sharing an accurate view of the context of that relationship and equal effort towards maintaining it, a healthy involvement in a group involves the flow of respect going both ways. Admiration is valuable if it’s from people we admire. Your family is a source of comfort and satisfaction if you all love each other, but if they’re all rotten to you then being with them won’t fill your cup.

So people can easily find themselves in communities that they think care about them, but in fact, do nothing but take, take, take. It’s especially easy online. These people then find themselves unhappy, but like many people, try to solve that unhappiness by investing more in their social groups. Except these social groups are parasitical, and so it’s a terrible spiral.

If you’re unhappy in a deep and enduring way, ask yourself these (probably difficult) questions. What social groups do you care the most about? And if you disappeared off the face of the Earth today, would anyone in that group even know? Would they care? Would they sing songs of you, toast your successes? Would value in that group be diminished?

I know a lot of people who would get “no” as an honest answer, but they don’t realize it. They can’t figure out why they feel unfulfilled, but it’s because a false community has taken the place where a real community should go. They’ve attached their self-worth to political movements or celebrities or fandoms or whatever else, and those things have made it difficult or even impossible to fill the space in their life with the real connection that humans just inherently need.

The world is full of traps we can lay for ourselves. People – real people – are who pull you out.

When you want to do something, you need the talent to do it and the materials to do it with. If you want to build a house, you need wood, nails, and so on – but you also need your skills. If you want to write a song, you need a piano or guitar or whatever, maybe some paper or a recording device. But you can’t do it without the spark within you.

Raw materials can be left behind. A pile of wood or a piano can be inherited. But your talent dies with you. So while you’re here, spend more time using your talent than tracking down raw materials. The world can find more wood, but it can’t find more you once you’re gone.

People really forget what “average” means. “Not exceptional” isn’t an insult, and it certainly isn’t something to worry about.

It’s also not a benchmark. It’s the middle ground, which means about half of all examples are to the left of it. So if your kid doesn’t speak the average number of words by the average age – don’t worry about it. And if your report card is “above average,” don’t get a big head, either.

You have to define your own targets objectively, not just based on relativity to others. That way lies madness.

Did you know that you don’t have to do daunting tasks all at once? You can sneak up on them.

We’ve probably all heard the wisdom that you should break large tasks down into smaller chunks; it’s much more manageable to write in blocks, for example, than to try to crank out a hundred-page essay in one sitting (and the end result is usually better, too). But we tend to think that advice only applies to large projects. But with large projects, it’s obvious to the point of silliness – some projects are so big you couldn’t do otherwise.

But you can break small projects down, and that’s the real cheat code. If there are just three dishes in your sink, you don’t have to wash all of them at once. You can wash one dish every time you walk through the kitchen. You can wash one dish per hour. You can even “just wash one dish,” and then decide later when to wash the next one.

Seem absurd? Who cares? It’s your life, arrange things in the way that gets you to the destination you want, not in service of a path someone else thinks you should take to get there.

Improving your ability to do a particular kind of work doesn’t always come from doing the work itself. You need separate time to specifically focus on improvement.

When you’re doing the work, especially if you’re doing it because you have to, you often avoid the very behaviors that are most conducive to improving. For example, if your job is carpentry, you’re probably building things for your clients – so you’re not experimenting, taking extra time to try new techniques, and so on. You’re just building what you need to build.

So you might be getting faster and the work might be getting easier, but you’re not breaking new ground. You’re not “leveling up.”

If you want to do that, you need to do more than just the work itself. In fact, you specifically need to step away from the work. You need to spend some time in study and reflection. You need to spend some time just playing. You need to spend some time with other craftspeople. All of these things will improve your talent, even though they aren’t helping you get any work done in the immediate sense.

We can get so caught up in the work that we lose sight of this. When everything is deadlines and hustle we can easily forget about improving and learning. But where’s the fun in that?

It’s not that “what you say and do” matters more than “who you really are.” It’s that what you say and do is who you really are. They’re not separate. And the former informs the latter much more than the reverse.

It’s in some people’s nature to need to grind and hustle whenever there’s a problem. They can’t take five minutes to breathe as long as something is unsolved. For other people, any stress at all immediately leads to the need for a vacation.

I’ve tried both methods, and both methods stressed me out. So far, what’s worked for me is doing neither: just creating a rhythm of work/rest that ignores the extraneous levels of calm or chaos.

That’s the barrier against the storm – creating a system that ignores it.

I deeply fear confirmation bias. It feels like the easiest trick to fall for and I don’t like the idea that I probably fall for it all the time.

It’s not just singular confirmation bias that I fear. “Singular” as in “relating to a specific topic.” I fear a form of confirmation bias where I get into the habit of a particular style of thinking and never challenge whether it’s correct.

Sometimes I’ll consider some particular topic that someone’s brought up and I’ll reach a conclusion about it pretty quickly. Then I’ll catch myself – “Wait, am I pretty confident about this because I’m experienced and this topic closely relates to something I have expertise on, or did I just jump to a conclusion without foundation?”

Sometimes it’s the former! But probably not as often as I think. So I like to take the time to practice thinking the other way. I’ll defend positions I don’t hold, even if it’s just to myself for a while. It’s a good way to keep my brain limber.

At least, I’m pretty sure it is.

One of the features of being an adult is that you can find that you don’t have as much time as you’d like for hobbies or other kinds of “pointless fun.” (I put that in quotes because it’s obviously not pointless, but I mean fun unconnected to productivity in other ways; working out is fun but it serves some other purpose too, while board games are just fun for fun’s sake.)

It’s just how it is, and there’s nothing wrong with discharging your other responsibilities before letting loose. But firstly, a little reframing: Don’t live your life just to have those few moments of fun. Most of your life should be fun, and if it isn’t, then you need to either do different things or think different thoughts. If you find your day-to-day responsibilities to your career, family, etc. absolutely onerous then that’s a problem that needs to be addressed, and not by simply running to the golf course the very instant you can.

But let’s assume away all of that for a moment. Let’s assume you’re like me and you find your work and family responsibilities to be sources of comfort and satisfaction and you don’t use hobbies to escape them, but rather as additional sources of additional kinds of enjoyment. It’s still true that you will often not have as much time as you want for them. When that happens, how do your organize?

You see, my “big rocks” like family, career, home maintenance, writing, etc. organize themselves pretty easily by their nature. But if I have a free Saturday, how do I prioritize whether I want to go to a movie, go camping, play a game, or read a book?

My nature is to create systems. It’s borderline compulsive, in fact. But I don’t want to have my fun hobbies systematized to the point where they’re additional chores. My father once told me that the surest way to make yourself hate a hobby was to turn it into a job. I want my hobbies to be carefree but at the same time, I want to make sure they happen.

“If you have to ‘make sure’ they happen, then do you really want to do them?” I hear you, but there’s more than one of me at work here. Sometimes you have to fight against parts of your nature, even to do things that (most of you) wants to do. My natural inclination might be to spend my limited free time being a lump on the couch, but I won’t be happy I did that after.

Anyway, I’m going to see friends tonight. And when all is said and done, I’m always glad for that.