I’m fascinated by the ways we interact with ourselves. So much so that I’ve explored concepts of what it’s like to consider yourself multiple people on the same team, how to identify and defeat your own internal enemies, and how to consider yourself your own boss (and to treat yourself like a multi-person company).

But I’ve got a new one – you are your own landlord. You are your own tenant. You are renting your body from yourself.

And you have to pay the rent.

Here’s the upshot of this: your existence has maintenance costs. Every second you exist costs some amount of money. You are constantly using up calories, taking up space, and consuming resources. Those things aren’t free.

Now, a simple economic concept: in order for a voluntary trade to happen, both parties have to be better off. In order for me to willingly give you two dollars for a cup of coffee, you have to be better off with two more dollars and one fewer cup of coffee, and I have to be better off with one more cup of coffee and two fewer dollars. So generally, voluntary trades made without coercion improve the lives of both parties.

Now, the same is generally true when you rent out the capabilities of your body and mind to someone else. You give someone else 40 hours of your existence, and they give you a thousand bucks. They’re better off with 40 extra hours of your time and a thousand fewer dollars, and you’re better off with a thousand more dollars and 40 fewer hours.

So great, voluntary trades improve lives. Now imagine that you were both halves of that equation.

You can sit around, idly consuming resources for no real benefit. Or you can find ways to trade with yourself.

Consider: would you be better off if you had two fewer hours of watching television, but a hundred more dollars? Yes – in both directions. So make that trade; pick up a little side hustle, sell something online, etc.

Pay the rent you owe yourself. Be both halves of the trade, and be better off twice.

Recently, I saw an ad for a service that purports to enhance child safety by intrusively scanning the activity of children on electronic devices. The specific story in the ad: the software flagged something a teen was writing, then the people secretly monitoring the alerts looked at what the kid was writing and they determined it to be a suicide note. They immediately called the police, who showed up at the kid’s house and involuntarily committed him. The story then concludes with a rep from the company proudly saying “we saved a life tonight.”

Rage.

It’s no surprise to you that I write, often as a way to work things out. Some of what I write ends up public, but plenty of it doesn’t. I did the same as a teenager. I wrote to vent, to manage my thoughts, as an outlet. If one day I was doing just that and cops showed up at my door because someone was secretly monitoring what I was writing and they decided that I needed to be committed, that would have been my supervillain origin story. When people would read in the history books about the atrocities I had committed, they would get to that story and go, “oh, okay, we get it.”

I have been involuntarily committed. It isn’t fun. It certainly isn’t a thing that heals you. What it does is teach you not to tell people anything. It teaches you to be afraid of sharing because it teaches you not that people will listen to you and support you, but that people will intervene.

“Okay,” you say. “But what were they supposed to do if they thought the kid was writing a suicide note? Nothing?” I’m so glad you asked. Well first, how about… calling the kid’s parents? Instead of the police? I mean imagine that Mr. and Mrs. Smith are sitting in the living room, they think Bobby is upstairs doing his homework, and suddenly the SWAT team bursts in and puts their kid in a straightjacket. You don’t think maybe there’s an intermediate step between “do nothing” and “dial 911?”

Cops are traditionally super duper bad as crisis intervention too, by the way. It’s not what they do. So in the middle of any mental health crisis of any kind, don’t call the cops.

But let’s go a step further. It’s not just that the service shouldn’t have called the cops in this instance. It’s that the service shouldn’t exist.

Everyone wants to know how to react to “warning signs.” You want to balance giving people their autonomy and independence versus reacting to potential emergencies. Or maybe you don’t care about balancing that, you just want to make sure you’re always ready to react. I’m telling you, it’s way too late.

Anything you do in response to a “warning sign” will be bad. It will be incorrect, not what the person needs, too heavy-handed, too intrusive, and do more harm than good. Sometimes in life you will have to do that, but it always represents a failure.

Because what you should have been doing is having those conversations their entire lives. By the time a kid is showing “warning signs,” things are really wrong. There are layers of pain and armor and your ham-fisted attempts will be too little, too late. You need to be having conversations about mental health all the time. You need to be building those bridges every day. “But my kid seems perfectly well-adjusted!” Great! I’m glad! But if you wait until they don’t seem that way, you’ve borked it up.

Best case scenario, the maintenance of a healthy bond helps prevent any emergencies while simultaneously strengthening your connection to your loved ones. Actually, potentially even better: your kid is fine because you’re an awesome and attentive parent, but some other kid is having a rough time and doesn’t feel like they can talk to theirs. So they confide in their friends instead, and one of those friends is your kid, and your kid says, “Hey, you should come over to my house. You can be safe for a while there, and my mom/dad is really cool about this stuff. They’ll listen without being judgy and they’ll keep it to themselves.”

The way to help your children isn’t to put them under 24/7 automated observation so you can safely ignore them until they get into the “red zone,” and get involuntarily committed by said automated observers. Like, duh. You don’t want an automated service to be snooping on your kid’s journaling, looking for red-flag keywords to call the cops over.

You want your kid to write because it helps them, and then voluntarily ask you to read it because that helps them, too. Make sure you build that open door every day.

Imagine you have a short-term financial emergency. You’re cash-strapped and some bills are due. So you decide to sell your car.

Now in some instances, selling off assets is a perfectly reasonable response to a financial emergency. If you have a beautiful piece of art that you enjoy, it still might make sense to convert that into liquidity when the times are tough. It might even make sense to downsize your car – if you have an expensive vehicle and can sell it for enough money to buy a more sensible one with cash left over, that could be a good move.

But just selling your car outright is probably not the best idea. Your car is, among other things, a capital asset. It generates money – or at least, it can.

Don’t burn the furniture to stay warm. Be willing to do anything it takes to survive, but don’t rush to the most extreme versions. The last things you should ever cut from your life are the things that generate resources.

At the beginning of this year, I lost my father. As tends to happen in these circumstances, various people in my life did various things as gestures of sympathy and support. My amazing bosses did something very unusual – they sent me a tree.

More accurately, they sent me a sort of tree “kit.” It had a little acorn sapling about an inch high, a pot, a bag of nutrient-rich soil, instructions, etc. I liked it significantly more than flowers; in fact, it might be the best of these kinds of gestures I’ve ever heard of. When you look at things that are linked in memory to a loved one you’ve lost, they’re often static – old pictures, objects they possessed, etc. But it’s hard to be sad while looking at a tree, and having a project to focus on is helpful. It was very good.

So I planted this little tree and put it next to a window. I watered it every day and told my kids about it. They loved watering the “Pop-Pop Tree” and they loved what it represented; a symbol that life springs eternal, and that we can leave the world better than when we entered it.

My bosses didn’t know this, but my father and I planted a tree together when I was about seven. It was a big fun project for us. In the yard of my parents’ house, that tree is still there. It’s enormous now. It outlived my father; it will probably outlive me. So this felt good, it felt right.

After a few weeks, the thing had grown well up out of the pot. A tall thin stem, a few leaves, etc. It seemed to have grown to the extent of what the limited space of the pot would allow, and the instructions included said that about this time it should be transferred outside. (Yes, I needed instructions for a tree. I do not have a green thumb, and this was the first time since I was seven that I had planted anything at all.)

My children and I made a whole ritual of it. We found a suitable spot in the yard and dug it up. We gathered stones to surround the spot, and churned up the soil, and transferred the mass of dirt and roots and the little sapling from the pot to the ground. We told stories about my father, their Pop-Pop. The sun set.

For the next month or two, we continued to water it, though the normal rains of the season lessened the need. It continued to grow, bit by bit. Until it didn’t. Until disaster.

One morning I went outside to find that the little sapling had broken. There was nothing left but a slight twig in the ground, and the little stem and its leaves lay next to it. A million things could have happened – sharp winds, a stray rabbit taking a bite, perhaps it even looked insufficiently like a tree yet to the lawncare company. Whatever happened, the tree was gone.

I didn’t expect to be as upset about it as I was, but I was pretty distraught. My children noticed immediately and consoled me, but I wanted it to be something they could learn from. I told them that these things happen – to trees and to people. But we can keep up hope, because even though this tree didn’t make it, there will always be another. There will always be another tree, and there will always be more people to love and who will love you. We can miss them very very much, but the world turns, and that is good.

I’m glad I said the words, and I’m glad my children heard them. But my heart was very sad. My children were kind; my son in particular said “I’m sorry about your tree” about a hundred times a day while hugging me. But just as when my father passed, the days will keep pushing into you whether you’re ready for them or not.

And then.

One morning I looked into the yard, and there was a new tree in the circle of stones. The stem had broken, but the seed was still there. The roots were intact; nothing had dug them up. So the plant still lived, and as living plants do, it grew. What truly amazed me was how different it looked now – a heartier base, thicker and shorter, with many more leaves than before. It was growing in the wild now, against the elements, not in a pot in my kitchen where it never knew wind or strife. It was stronger.

There truly was another tree. Life is not so easily beaten.

My father was like that. I remember when the doctors sat us down as a family and told us we had to prepare our goodbyes and get our affairs in order because Dad had at most six months to live. That was about twenty years before his death. Things knocked him down plenty of times, but he was a fighter. He was resilient. Like the tree.

I’ve put some chicken wire around it now – even the most resilient of us can use some help from family – but it’s already stronger and taller than the first version. I have no idea if it will make it through its first winter. I have no idea if, like that tree my father and I planted together more than three decades ago, it will one day be taller than I am and outlive the humans that once looked down upon it. I don’t need to know those things.

What I do know, is that there will always be another tree, and there will always be people to love, and who will love you.

It’s interesting how different people group experiences that don’t generate strong feelings one way or the other.

Let’s say you watch a movie. You enjoyed it, but don’t have any desire to watch it again. Certainly no desire to buy it. If it were on at somebody’s house you wouldn’t complain or leave the room, but you also wouldn’t request it or suggest it, especially when compared to the many other movies in existence you could choose from.

Some people would take that to mean you hated it!

For a lot of people, that’s because they’re not comfortable with how to treat things in the neutral space. Often they feel guilty suggesting something that isn’t 100% A+ super fantastic in the other person’s mind.

Someone once invited me out to dinner at a particular restaurant. I accepted and had a lovely time with a friend. They later asked me what I thought of that particular restaurant and I answered similarly to the movie description, above: “I like it, not a place I’d pick but certainly a place I have no problem going to.”

They responded as if they’d just run over my cat. “I’m so sorry! I’d have never made you go there if I knew you didn’t like it!”

First: you didn’t make me go anywhere. I’m an adult, and can voice my opinions as needed. If I didn’t want to go there, I’d have made an alternate suggestion. You couldn’t make me go somewhere if you wanted to.

Second: did I say I didn’t like it? In fact, I said I did like it! I just said I didn’t love it, but that’s okay. I’m comfortable in the space between. Especially because that’s where people are! You can’t expect to only do things that are exactly the perfect, favorite things of yours and still expect to connect with other people. I don’t need it to always be my favorite restaurant, my favorite movie, my favorite game. That’s a comfortable space to live in. It has good people in it.

I am going to give you an incredibly powerful tool for brainstorming, mentality, and creativity. I call it the “Ten-Minute Yes.”

Here’s the problem that everyone has: we reject things. Instantly, without thought, and without useful awareness. Someone gives you a suggestion or you become aware of an option and your brain says “no” almost on autopilot. Your gut instinct is sometimes good, but that doesn’t mean it’s especially informative. So when you reject things too quickly, you cut off avenues of creativity.

Here’s the solution: the next time someone suggests something to you when you’re feeling stuck, or the next time your search for a solution hits a potential option, don’t reject it – even if you feel like you know it’s wrong. Instead, set a timer for ten minutes.

During that ten minutes, live in a world of make-believe where you not only don’t reject that idea, you have fully and 100% embraced it as the solution you will choose.

When the ten minutes is up, you can go back to the real world. But for that ten minutes, don’t say “if.” Just look at “how.”

Want an example? You’re looking for a new job, but every job listing you see looks bad to you, so you’re getting frustrated. A friend jokes, “run away and join the circus.”

Set the timer! For just ten minutes, say “Okay, I’ve committed to joining a circus. Now – what will I do in the circus? Will I be a performer or one of the supporting team members? Which circus is the best? How will I apply – let me look up their website. Oh neat, they actually have a career page…”

When the timer goes off, you’re probably not going to join the circus (though you might, who knows?). But you will have generated a dozen useful ideas for your progress. Giving yourself permission for this temporary engagement frees your mind from a commitment and allows for positive play. That, in turn, lets the creative juices flow.

When the ten minutes is over, if you don’t join the circus – you’ll know why. Because you actually explored the idea, you’ll have more insight into what features of the potential solution didn’t meet your needs. That gives you direction and allows you to shape your future searches for solutions in a meaningful way.

So if you’re looking for a solution to anything and you’re feeling stuck, give this a try. The most you have to lose is ten minutes – but you have a lot to gain!

No one promised you roses.

You are entitled to the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself. The happiness is in the pursuit, of course. It isn’t at the end. If you think it’s at the end, you’ll never get it.

Some things cannot be caught, only chased. But as long as you chase it, you have it. When you think you’ve caught it, it’s gone.

Do not be quick to dismiss effort as a chore, as an unwelcome barrier between you and your goal. The effort is the goal; it always was. You didn’t always know it.

Some games can’t ever be won, you just keep trying to beat your old high score. You are entitled to play again and again. You aren’t entitled to a single point. But as long as you play, the points will come.

Be grateful for every drop of sweat.

The point of thinking well isn’t to think endlessly. It’s to prepare a fertile ground in which good things can be planted. But once planted, those crops must be tended – which requires a very different kind of mental discipline.

Thinking well is about finding concepts with value. Once you’ve found one, the goal shifts – you must now implement that concept. You must turn it into action in your life, or else the thinking part didn’t yield any benefit. You have to close the trap around it.

Converting concept into action can mean a lot of things, but if you aren’t taking some action then you’re just thinking for the sake of thinking. That isn’t the point. Building a better mousetrap has no point if it never catches mice.

The more complex your information ecosystem starts to become, the more you start to need a central place that all of that information leads to. But this can create some significant friction!

It’s an old trope; the physical “inbox” sitting on a desk with stratified layers of paper, towering enormously over the desk, with the bottom third dating back decades. It’s a cliche for a reason – when you bottleneck all of your information into a central place, it slows the flow of that information down.

A command center has to be more than just the information graveyard, a place where it goes to die. It has to be a processing center that, at minimum, acts on information at the same speed it receives it.

This alone takes time. If you’re collecting information from multiple spheres of your life, it’s not going to be an instantaneous process to move it where it needs to be in order to take appropriate action. There are plenty of ways to do this sort of thing and I won’t pretend my way is the best for everyone. But the most elemental mistake you can make is assuming that your system doesn’t need its own slot in your schedule for maintainence. It does.

I believe in experimental experiences. In other words, do things to try things! New things are good. At a certain point, you’re good at all the stuff you already do.

But because I like to think about my own experiences, I like to mull over how I know if I enjoyed something or not.

Good company makes things very enjoyable. But to that extent, if I’m with good company, am I biased towards the action itself? Let’s say I’d never ridden a roller coaster before. I decide to ride one with some of my dearest and most hilarious loved ones. We have a wonderful time. Later, it would be reasonable for me to ask if I actually enjoyed riding roller coasters!

The same is true in reverse, of course. I love camping, but if I had to go a whole weekend with someone I found really unbearable, that might sour the experience for me. And if it were the first time I went, I might judge camping a bit too harshly.

Good company is just one confounding factor – everything from my hydration level to how much sleep I’ve gotten recently can affect my perception of things.

Of course… if that’s true, is that bad? I mean, is the “problem” here that if I have good baseline physical and mental conditions and good company, I might “falsely” just enjoy everything I do, forever?

Maybe I’m onto something here.