February 19, 2023
News
My dad’s friend came over to my apartment and spent a long time looking through all of my books. That was nice. He complimented my book collection a few times. I gave him two books he seemed especially interested in.
I have been trying to read more. Recently, when I sit down to read, I immediately switch to another book when I get a bit bored of the one I am reading. So I have a stack of five books in the living room that I am I switching between. I’ve enjoyed this so far, we’ll see after a few weeks if I keep this up.
People say that psychedelic drugs are not addictive but now I am thinking I could do it every weekend. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I definitely have a high-stress disposition, and this is magnified by my career choice. That’s one thing I realized last weekend, it’s always been told to me that my family has heart problems; but I think the actual truth is that my family has stress problems. Considering my problems with stress and my father’s problems with stress, it is not wholly surprising to me that his father died of a heart attack at 45. They say stress kills.
Culture
My friend showed me an amazing band. The name is Arch Echo. It’s just instrumental stuff. It’s great. I don’t really get excited about a lot of music. I almost am getting excited about this band. Other than that I just listen to hiphop while I do exercises in my room. I don’t really listen to music hardly at all, which is kinda weird since I have played music my whole life. Well I don’t know if you could say I still play. Prince apparently never listened to music.
Ilana and I split the harry potter game. The new one for Ps5. I always go back and forth on my feelings on video games. I guess I go back and forth always about a lot of things. I like the harry potter game. It’s silly, but it’s good. Comprehensive. All Harry Potter stuff is a lot of fun… the movies, the books, the game. The PS2 game I remember was pretty good. But we also split the new NHL video game and that’s way better than Harry Potter. I think that’s my favorite sports game now. I’ve also been playing the baseball video game. Here’s my official ranking — 1) NHL 2) NBA 3) MLB 4) FIFA 5) Madden.
I need to get Ilana to teach me to play golf this Spring. She was on the state champion golf team in high school. Golf seems like a really nice time. I would know, I spent two years working at a golf course, watching people have a really nice time playing golf.
Business
Lord don’t get me started on business right now. I’ve been working round the clock this week. The only time I got this week to work on my side projects was a few hours this afternoon. I spent Saturday reading to destress from the busy week of work. But I was mostly reading business books, so I don’t know how well that worked. The particularly stressful book I am reading is “Principles for Dealing With the Changing World Order” by Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio is apparently one of the most successful investors ever, and he’s writing about how China is going to become the dominant world power and the US will have something like an economic meltdown in the near future. It’s very convincing so far, but that doesn’t mean too much coming from me because this is the only information I have ever really gotten on the topic. I could probably read a book arguing the opposite thing and that would convince me equally. At the least it is very interesting, his proof for his theory, if you want to call it that, involves deriving patterns in the economic histories of all of the major political powers in the history of the world. So he derives patterns then uses those patterns to try to explain what has happened with the US economy in the recent (1940s-now) past and what he thinks will happen in the near future. It can be quite dry though and requires a good bit of deep thinking, which isn’t necessarily too fun when that thinking is always paired with a small bit of other thinking that says, do I really need to be doing this deep thinking right now, will knowing this information every really help me in life? But I keep reading because it is interesting, many times skipping through the deep thinking parts.
Opinion
I think stress is the consistent thing in my life that has always been there and has continued to be there. I love stress, I use it to my advantage, but it also cripples me far too often. I love working, probably more than anyone I know. Yet, I am always trying to come up with ways to shorten the amount of time I have to work as much as possible. The downsides from the stress often don’t outweigh the good of working.
But this is the journey I’m on and the fundamental problem I need to solve if I want to have a prosperous and fulfilled life. That fundamental problem being… how can I do great work stress-free? I have clearly and totally solved the first part of the problem. I know that I have done great work and am fully capable of doing great work. From the first day we step into preschool this is what society teaches us to do. The second part is what I struggle with and what I have been shifting my focus towards trying to learn. My teachers have been all around me, many of my friends are fantastic about this. Specifically I have been blown away by how Ilana manages to study computer programming for an hour per day yet always makes time to have fun during the day and never seems stressed out by her studies or her job. So my teachers are plentiful. And since I have named this problem and have the desire to reduce my stress, I can trust that eventually I’ll succeed and I will be able to do great work, stress free. This makes me feel better about my career and my potential for longevity within it. This in turn makes me feel better about spending money, treating the people most important to me and relieving myself of the mental burden of penny pinching.