Behaviors you want to change need to be understood and addressed in the context of their past, present, and future.

Each incidence of a behavior you don’t like has a past cause. Something led to that behavior, and you won’t be able to change that behavior by maintaining the same causal chain and then hoping to make a sudden swerve at the last minute. If every time you go into the casino you gamble away your paycheck, then you need to not go into the casino in the first place. Of course, going into the casino is a behavior too – so what leads to it? Go back as far as you need to in order to find a behavior you’re strong enough to change.

In the present, you need an emergency triage system. Something more severe – something to realign your mind if you’ve slipped. A replacement behavior. This is why “sponsors” are effective for people struggling with addiction: Calling a trusted person is a good replacement behavior.

And you need to be able to recognize the future for what it is – a series of effects of the choices you make now. Bad decisions are often coupled with short-sightedness; you behave badly now because you aren’t clear about where your actions are leading. If you can’t see the consequences in the long term, it’s easier to choose poorly today.

When you look at all of these things in one great causal chain, it becomes easier to begin to alter its trajectory.

May your days be merry and bright, my friends.

I’ve had one of the best Christmas seasons ever. Joy with my family, again and again. Moments remembered and experienced and shared. Stories told.

May your joy be never-ending, my friends.

When I was in kindergarten, our assignment in art class on some particular day was to “draw something beautiful.” Pretty standard stuff for that age. I drew (to the best of my meager ability) an angel.

This wouldn’t be notable in any way except for the fact that I got in some trouble for it. The teachers were touchy about religious stuff in school, and suggested that I draw something else. I was pretty stubborn and didn’t want to draw something else, and apparently, I put up enough of a stink about it that my father got called.

He came to the school for the ensuing parent-teacher conference and made it quite clear that he was not in agreement with the school’s position. The teachers said they were worried about making other kids uncomfortable if they either weren’t religious or maybe had other religious beliefs, which my father – rightly – pointed out was absolutely absurd. One kid drawing an angel for himself wasn’t an affront to any other five-year-old’s beliefs. Since I couldn’t name a single other thing anyone else drew, it was absurd to imagine that anyone else would even know what I’d scrawled on a piece of paper unless someone raised a whole stink about it.

The point my father was making, which was correct then and is correct now, is that your own self-expression is never impolite. No one else is forced to even look at your stuff, let alone grapple with the deeper implications of it. There is plenty out there that can be considered taboo; stuff you don’t throw at others unless they’ve agreed to step into that sphere with you. But taboo cannot exist between you and the page.

When you draw something, write something, even say something in no one’s company but your own, that’s nothing more than an external hard drive to your mind. It’s no one’s business, even if you’re doing it somewhere that someone else could conceivably be exposed to it. It still isn’t an attack, and is never harmful to others.

There was this joke that went around when I was younger (maybe it still goes around, who knows) about a person who goes to McDonalds and orders this big meal, like a Big Mac, fries, apple pie, chicken nuggets, “…and a Diet Coke.” The joke is that ha ha, this person is suddenly concerned about health when it comes to the drink, after ordering all that garbage? Ha ha ha.

Even back then, I thought the joke was silly. Like sure, maybe Big Macs aren’t the healthiest thing in the world. But you know what’s worse for you than a Big Mac and a Diet Coke? A Big Mac and a regular Coke.

I worked out today. I also ate a cookie. And you could laugh and say “Why bother working out if you’re just going to eat a cookie?” Because look, I was going to eat that cookie either way. Cookie + exercise is definitely better.

Sometimes people make marginal improvements. Maybe a diet Coke is the first step. Next, they’ll get smaller-size fries. Then they’ll skip the apple pie. And soon they’re making themselves healthier meals entirely. Or maybe just making a few small improvements is good by itself, even if those decisions don’t necessarily lead to larger ones!

When people take marginal steps towards something better, don’t give them crap about it. Or at least, give them a little less, you know?

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.