There is something sneaky people can do: they can extract a bunch of resources from a lot of people, and make it so that no one tries to stop them. They can do it in broad daylight. How?

Simple: you just don’t take more from any one person than the cost to that person of caring enough to stop you.

Think about it like this: Imagine I stole, through electronic hacking of bank accounts, one dollar from every person in America. For me personally, that would be a tremendous boon! I’d get hundreds of millions of dollars; surely more than the cost of doing the hacking. But each individual person would only have lost a dollar – many people wouldn’t even notice their bank account changing by a figure so little, and few others would care to put in any effort to get it back. In fact, it would be irrational to try to get it back. You’d spend more than a dollar’s worth of effort before you’d even begun to make progress.

Now of course, there are some flaws in this plan. For one, it’s illegal – which means there are systems of people who are paid to care about it beyond their own lost dollar. The nature of a legal system is that even if it cost double to catch and persecute me what I’d actually stolen, they’d still do it – because they have to. The whole system depends on people’s faith that they will.

But this sort of thing isn’t always illegal.

Imagine a slightly different scenario: imagine that the bank takes one dollar out of every account they manage. Tens of millions of dollars. Then, imagine they immediately apologize and let everyone know they did it – that it was a “software error” and you can get your dollar back by simply clicking a link that will be sent to your email tomorrow and filling out the form it takes you to, verifying your prior account balance and new account balance in order to confirm the incorrect transfer had taken place.

How many people do you think wouldn’t do it? (For reference, here’s a fun little fact: billions of dollars in tax return money go unclaimed every year.)

A huge number of people would just never click that link. The bank would get a huge amount of basically free money. So why don’t they do this?

A few reasons. One, reputation does matter. You can get away with that once, but twice starts to look really fishy and people will just start using banks that don’t do that stuff. And there are government agencies that investigate this sort of thing to see if it really was a software error or if you’re pulling a fast one. But even in a one-time event that was a genuine error, there’s another factor: enterprising individuals can consolidate the care. These are usually called “class action lawsuits,” and they happen in exactly these situations. A law firm will realize that there’s millions of dollars worth of “caring” somewhere, but it’s spread across so many people that none of them will act. So these people will take it upon themselves to act on everyone’s behalf, trying to get anyone who might have been involved to agree with as little effort as possible. That’s why you may have gotten an email in the past saying something like “Did you shop at X store any time over this three-year period? Click this button and you might get some money!” And then there’s nothing else required. Their goal is to keep the effort you have to put in to join the bandwagon under the limit of how much you care about what happened, so you’ll actually do it.

Okay, where am I going with this?

Well, people playing this game – trying to distribute what they take across many people and concentrating it into the hands of a few so that no one cares enough to object – is the source of a lot of ills, both to society at large and to you personally. For example, a huge percentage of the taxes you pay go to things you’d rather not pay for, but each individual one of those things might only be raising your tax bill by a few cents. As a result, you object – but not enough to do anything. So whoever gets your tax money is raking it in, but they’re mostly playing this game. And the only people who do object are the opponents in that same game – not people who want you to get your money back, but people who think they should get it, and think that they can get it if they concentrate enough caring toward their side.

In large companies, sometimes you have to do something dumb and obtrusive, but not so dumb and obtrusive that you’re willing to quit over it. And you have to do that dumb, obtrusive thing because someone managed to get themselves into position as Head of The Dumb, Obtrusive thing and it’s a sweet gig for them, even though it harms everyone else. They get so much benefit that they’re heavily incentivized to keep convincing the senior leadership to invest in it (in fact, that might be the majority of their time), and no other employee suffers enough individually to waste time trying to fight it.

No matter where you go, people just call this “the cost of doing business” and move on – either because they’re rationally bored by it, or because they’re the perpetrators and they want you to be rationally bored by it.

What’s the point of me pointing out a problem to you that I’ve also just described as requiring you to act irrationally – against your own interests – to solve?

Well, here’s my advice. Sometimes – not all the time, but on occasion – be irrational. Make a stand over a dollar or over ten minutes. Spend a hundred bucks and ten hours to win it back, out of spite. Out of rebellion. Because you’re a human, because you have a soul, and because sometimes you should just pick a fight – just to remind people that you can. That you can’t always be predicted. That you won’t always hand over that dollar or minute or whatever they’re asking for. Sometimes you’d rather burn it all than see it go into the hands of the people who play this game.

Let the people who want to steal one piece of candy out of every dish be just a little afraid that a few of them might be poisoned.

Don’t do it always – that way lies madness and ruin. But every once in a while. Every once in a while, make the cost of doing business dealing with you.

Sometimes, everything is fine – but an inch in any direction is a thousand-foot fall. You’re fine as long as nothing changes. This is an illusion; you’re not fine at all.

You can try to build a bridge to a safer location while carefully balancing on one foot. But sometimes, the smarter thing to do is just jump. Embrace the disaster, get it over with, and climb back up to a better spot.

No matter what anyone says, it’s definitely possible to change the past. It’s just that without a considerable amount of effort, those changes are usually for the worse.

Consider: You’ve just had a lovely meal at a great restaurant. You go to sleep that evening quite satisfied with your day. The next morning, you catch a news story about how the head chef at that restaurant was arrested for doing something untoward to the food before serving it to guests. You feel sick to your stomach, maybe even vomiting. Your previous evening is ruined, despite it happening in the past.

Sure, the actual events didn’t change. But your past changed considerably. And that’s what matters – after all, ‘the past’ is just a concept anyway. It doesn’t actually exist anywhere but in your own mind, as context for your current life. That’s why, under normal circumstances, “don’t try to change the past” is good advice. There’s nothing to change, so it’s just wasted effort.

But if you view the past this way, suddenly you realize that you can change it. You can’t change the events, but you can change the context and the framing – and thus change your present. You can’t undo a prior disaster, but by reframing it instead as a moment of growth and learning that gave you new wisdom, suddenly you’ve changed the only version of ‘the past’ that matters – the one in your mind.

It can be hard to leave. There’s a strong inclination to linger; to keep one foot in the old country. But it’s hard to move forward without both of your feet.

Sometimes, it’s just best to hit the road and not look back.

I’m going to be geekier than usual today and talk a little bit about board games. Well, that’s not what I’m really going to be talking about, but that’s where we’re going to start.

I’m a hobbyist board gamer, which means I own more games than most people will ever play. (It’s a whole thing if you don’t believe me.) There’s a common issue that lots of people in this hobby face, which is the realization that how many board games you own doesn’t necessarily correlate to how many board games you play.

See, buying a board game is easy. Assembling several adult friends into a common physical space for a few hours is much harder. In the best of circumstances, for many adults (especially ones like me with jobs, kids, etc.) it isn’t going to happen more than a few times a month. What often happens is that people in this hobby go through a period where they’re really more collectors of games than players of them. They get a game that they think seems neat, but some part of their subconscious is imagining that what’s actually in that box is three friends with a free evening.

At some point, if you’re honest with yourself, you just admit that many of the games you so eagerly purchased just aren’t ever going to get played. (The insider term for this is the “shelf of shame.”) When you have limited time and bandwidth, you often want to play the games that give you the most joy. The core of your collection becomes more important, and the peripherals less so.

Okay, so where am I going with this?

Well, all things take up some kind of “space” not only in your home, but in your life. You might think that a board game you’ve already bought doesn’t really demand much from you, so why bother selling it or giving it away just because there’s a 99% chance you won’t play it? But that’s not really the way human brains work. Everything in your life takes some emotional energy to maintain. Some more than others, but everything. I moved a massive collection of books across three different relocations before I got sick of carrying all those boxes and realized that in three different pack/unpack cycles, I hadn’t opened the vast majority of those books. Owning them was costing me something. I felt emotionally burdened – even guilted – by them. I didn’t want to re-read them (I’d already read them!); I wanted people to know I had read them.

I didn’t want books; I wanted erudite friends who would discuss the topics within. That was burdensome. So I gave them away – and you know what, giving them away started more conversations about those topics than having them on my shelf ever did.

You only have room in your life, your calendar, your home, your brain, and your heart for so many things. You have a limited amount of emotional connection to spread across everything in your life. And sometimes you will find yourself spending that limited energy on things that are not cycling it back to you in a healthy way.

You might think it doesn’t hurt you to keep a collection of movies you never watch, books you never read, a bike you don’t ride, people you consider friends but who never call, or an unrequited love that you never talk about. But those are all manifestations of the same thing: you pouring out energy into a void.

When I take my favorite game off the shelf and play it with some of my close friends or my children, I put it back in a few hours feeling very satisfied. I put energy into that game in the form of thinking about it idly on occasion or in the form of being excited for the next play, but it gives me energy back in the form of great evenings and experiences with people I care about. That’s a good relationship. That’s an energy cycle that maintains itself and renews me.

This same measurement applies to literally everything in your life. Nothing in your life gets a free ride – every person, place, and thing is a relationship that you’re maintaining with some amount of your limited emotional energy. If that relationship isn’t giving you energy back, then it’s just a parasite. It’s killing you, and it isn’t even trying.

Make room in your life for those relationships that make room for you. The friend who calls deserves your friendship. The book that gives you joy to read for the 8th time deserves to stay on your shelf. And the game that gives you regular evenings of enjoyment deserves to stay in your collection.

But the rest? Don’t leave those things trailing behind you, tethered by unwarranted hope until they become weights that keep you from moving towards the actual joys in your life. You don’t have room for it.

When I was about 5 years old, I got my first Lego set. I absolutely loved them and collected them all the way up until my late teens when I moved out of my parents’ house. I didn’t really outgrow them, I just outgrew having the sort of life where it was feasible to own an enormous tub of plastic bits like that. So I gave them to some younger cousins (who were also probably around 5) so they’d have the joy I did.

By all accounts, they did have that joy – and added to it as well as the collection grew. Years go by, and my own kids have now been bitten by the Lego bug. They have a small collection and I add to it whenever they’ve done some particular thing worthy of reward. I mentioned this to the family, and get this – my aunt still has the giant collection I had gifted her sons!

They’re grown now, of course, and were more than happy to bequeath this hoard back to my household, returned after all these years to be enjoyed anew. My kids went berserk when they saw the haul. (I should have waited until Christmas; I could have given them nothing else and they’d have been thrilled.)

It was so fun to tumble back into a very specific kind of enormously enjoyable brain activity with my children, who were clearly experiencing exactly what I was. There’s just something about the ability to dump your imagination onto the floor in physical form, and then reshape it with your hands and eyes and a different part of your brain until it’s taken on a new life, and then let it back into your imagination in a wholly new way.

In many ways, it’s why I think digital creation tools are so wonderful for fostering artistic expression – it’s not the ease of use, per se. It’s the ease of unmaking, the infinitely resettable nature that frees you from all consequences of trying out new ideas over and over. You never waste anything – no clay is lost, no canvas ruined. No matter what you want to try, freedom.

Those opportunities aren’t everywhere, but they do exist. When you have that kind of freedom, trust me. Put your arms deep into that bucket, grab two handfuls of whatever you find, and go berserk.

How far can you walk into the woods?

Halfway. After that, you’re walking out.

Sometimes you don’t know how big the woods are, though. Doesn’t change the truth of it, but you don’t actually know when you’ve crossed that point. Only at the very end, when you’re out on the other side, do you get to know in retrospect where that halfway point was.

Now the real question is: does it feel different, to be walking in versus walking out?

Or are we always just walking through?

Imagine that you’re working on something in your garage, and a tool slips. You get a deep cut on your hand, so you wash it out and bandage it.

You don’t know what kind of problem you have. Not yet. You’ll find out the next day.

So the next day comes and you change the bandage. Now you’ll find out what kind of problem you have, and it will be one of two types.

In one scenario, you change the bandage and the wound looks better. It’s already starting to scab over and heal a bit, and it’s smaller than it was the day before. Your hand is still injured, but you’ve learned what kind of problem you have – the kind that will go away on its own in a little while.

In the other scenario, you change the bandage and the wound looks worse. It’s red, inflamed, and maybe starting to seep. The veins around it are red and the skin around it is black. It hurts to move and it’s warm to the touch; sure signs of infection. Now you’ve learned that you have the other kind of problem. This is the kind of problem that won’t go away on its own. This is the kind that will get worse and worse until it takes your arm or even kills you unless you take active steps to prevent it.

All problems are one of these two kinds. Often you need at least two data points to know, but just as often that’s all you need. Look at the same problem a few days apart. Did it get better? Will it?

If not, you need to act now. If waiting isn’t the solution, then waiting is your greatest enemy. Either time will solve the issue, or time is what’s killing you. You need to know – and once you do know, you can’t lie to yourself.

That’s the deepest cut.

We all have patterns we repeat in our lives, for better or worse. We’re most acutely aware of the bad cycles when we’re at their lowest points, of course. That’s when we want to break them, but also when we’re least capable of doing so.

Take a few moments today and ask yourself – what cycles are you still in, but on the high side? What will your current actions lead to? If it’s not something you want, then the time to break that cycle isn’t then. It’s now.

Recently I had a sizable improvement in my life in an area that I’d been working to improve for some time. My work paid off and I got the thing I was after. And almost immediately, I found myself thinking about the “next thing” instead of taking even a few moments to be satisfied.

I’m glad I caught myself, but it made me wonder how many other times I might not have. Look, there’s nothing wrong with some ambition. A drive to change and a desire to better both yourself and your circumstances is healthy. But you can get tied up in that desire to have, have, have. Make sure, if you want something, it’s because you’re choosing to aim your ambition in a healthy direction – not because you’ve been lassoed and are being dragged towards it by a desire you don’t control.