This Annual Review is coming in 3:3:3s
3 lessons, 3 favorites, and 3 predictions for the ever-expanding explosion that is our universe i 2023
At the beginning of last year, I felt a good kind of overwhelm brought on by an abundance of opportunity and impending change.
New jobs, new Jiu Jitsu, new projects and intentions for this newsletter, and a new kid on the way.
In an effort to consolidate it all into something more manageable, I designated 2022’s theme for me as “Synthesis.”
Things were going alright until the birth of my daughter’s arrival blew everything up. Guess I hadn’t consolidated as efficiently as I’d thought. Soon I was busy, busy, busy, and buried under an avalanche of diapers, dream feeds, and dermatitis meds. So I ended up with lots to say about the last 365 days when it finally came time to sit down and reflect. Longer version available upon request, but because I like you, I thought I’d just give you the highlights:
3 Lessons
1. Following the book doesn’t make you a great parent. Nor does it mean you get to give unsolicited advice.
My first son was beyond easy to sleep train. We followed the 12 Weeks to 12 Months method and nailed it at about 8 or 9. Buoyed by the sense of accomplishment (and delirium from going that long without a full night’s rest), my wife and I were like annoying new ex-smokers. I would outline the method to other parents at parties, convinced that this was the one easy solution that everybody else had missed.
“Oh, you say your child’s a bad sleeper, and the book didn’t work? Well, did you try… following what it says?”
As a newly-minted sleep expert, I was convinced my life would be back to normal within three months of my daughter’s birth.
It’s a thin book, and while I still think it’s worth trying and practicing rigorously, there’s no chapter about what to do when your child develops eczema. This not-uncommon skin condition causes insane itchiness and swelling. Talking gently and putting your baby down doesn’t cut it when she’s rubbing her face raw on the sheets.
So nowadays, I try to listen sympathetically to the gripes of beleaguered parents.
2. Work with your context, not against it.
In Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi, the titular hero attempts to help out some farmers by stemming the floods which happen to their fields every rainy season. At first, he tries to build higher and stronger flood walls, but it doesn’t work. The river just washes away whatever he puts up in its way. One day, after staring for a long time at the ruined crops before him, Musashi finally realizes what he must do.
Instead of stacking more stones, he digs.
The next time the floodwaters come, they are directed into a network of channels across the land. Not only has Musashi prevented the destruction of that year’s harvest, but he’s also irrigated the fields and turned what was once considered useless land into prized farming territory.
I wish I’d realized this sooner in the year.
3. Sometimes, the best memories come from when things go wrong.
My father spent most of his life in Canada, so when I told him Tahoe would be hit with some severe snow, he scoffed. Each morning, we were greeted by a new winter wonderland that made the whole trip all the more… interesting. There were several “comedy of errors” moments that made me think I was living my own A Christmas Story:
Braking with my boot in the beautiful white powder while sledding sent a huge spray of freezing wetness right into my son seated in front of me (he refused to wear a hat and hadn’t fully zipped up his jacket). That was our second and last run for the entire trip.
Burnt holiday lunch
Late-night hunt for baby formula, which resulted in us getting the wrong formula but a very righteous Carvel ice cream cake
The question of whether to stay one more day was settled when we awoke to a total power outage, complete with no Wi-Fi and dropping indoor temperatures.
Inclement weather conditions caused the ride home to take 2x longer. About an hour and a half from our destination, the baby started screaming uncontrollably. Out of options, I pull up “1 hour Baby Shark Youtube Compilation” on my phone and tell my dad to stick it in her face. This immediately quiets her down until grandpa decides the screen couldn’t possibly be good for her and takes it away. I’m not sure I know which is worse: 1:30:00 of Baby Shark Youtubes or my father humming and interpretive-dancing Baby Shark to a screaming baby, but I’m 100% certain my daughter does.
3 Favorites
1. Picture
2. Music
This year saw me listening to a lot of Lo-Fi stuff, which makes sense since lyrics interfere with my creative work. I started a few years ago, but it feels like 2022 is when it exploded everywhere. I see more and more channels pop up everyday, covering everything from anime to jazz to cyberpunk-dystopian-whatever you wanna call it. I like Lofi, it helps me focus and study. But I also worry about what it does to the state of music, since so much of it is essentially elevator music that sounds good: Pleasant, unobtrusive, but not challenging or particularly moving either, which I guess is the point. I suspect few people bother to look up the individual tracks or their creators. Lo Fi is kind of consumed as these hours-long streaming sets, music to put you in a trance so you can be productive. Perhaps most worrying is that Lo Fi feels like the most easily-automated music, so by choosing it over other genres, we're not even giving AI that much of a challenge when it comes to replacing our musicians. Either way, it definitely beats pure binaural beats, which always felt too clinical and boring for me to stick with for too long.
When I wasn't listening to that I was trying to pound out copy to video game soundtracks (Akuma and Oro's themes from Street Fighter V were my go-tos). But I also managed to take time to listen to some Logic, The Black Keys, and also delved into the lovely vinyl collection of the SF Public Library's Main Branch (There's nothing quite like hearing Otis Redding perform live over time and space).
3. Courses
Even though I never quite finished Leo Gura's "Life Purpose" course, I found it quite useful in focusing me around my values. I discovered Leo late last year and remember a few of his videos had a very profound effect. Something about his delivery of the concept that we are all God, which I'd heard before from philosophers like Alan Watts, had me floating through my days for about a week. I can remember just being blissed out and thinking, "I probably shouldn't be operating heavy machinery in this state," as I drove around San Francisco!
Of course, Deng Ming-Dao's courses have been hugely insightful and a delight to unpack each week
Lastly, I've been an ongoing student of Scott Park Phillips' monthly Tao Te Ching course. One of the best things about it is how rigorous he is at sticking to precise meanings and interpreting the various intents that have made its way through the various versions of the text. Each month we analyze a new chapter of the work, and then meditate on the passage throughout the month. To say that it has changed my notions of Taoism and what it is would be an understatement.
Honorable mention: The Tools by Phil Stutz and
3 Predictions
1. Twitter’s going to get big again.
Sure, it’s a dumpster fire right now but isn’t that how all Musk’s ventures start out? If it’s one thing I’ve learned since 2016, it’s that getting talked about is more important than what’s being said. There are a few reasons for this:
There must be a second act. New and old media works by turning facts into narrative, and the current model incentivizes them to tell that story over days, weeks, or even months. Take Ukraine… first the president was the most corrupt leader ever. Then Russia invaded and he became a hero. Then we started questioning where all the aid was going. Now we’re wondering if it’s too much aid when America has its own battles to fight. And whether Zelensky and Biden aren’t siphoning some of that aid off in case they’re not as willing to fight to the last man as Z seems and anywhere there are elections coming up… Point being, no matter how salacious the Musk fail party gets, short of total nervous meltdown, people are going to stop paying attention unless the narrative changes emotional tone. We’re already starting to ask, “what’s the next plot beat and when’s it happening?” Answer: As soon as the remodel is complete and Musk decides to stage another one of his Tesla shows. Still don’t believe me? Remember how Trump was a total circus clown candidate at the beginning of the primaries and by the end you had Meghan Kelly apologizing to him on Fox News, Dave Chapelle telling SNL to give him a chance, and even Shaq on ESPN decided it was necessary to interrupt sports-talk to cry over his win? I’m not saying Trump or Musk should be praised or holding them up as moral examples of anything, I’m just not denying that 21st century media caters to extreme personalities who can entertain, and in that regard, Twitter is the most entertaining of social media topics at the moment.
Major updates are coming. Writing is still the fastest way to get info out there, and 280 characters or less is still the best way to consume it. So Twitter will always have that going for it. But in case you really do prefer shorter audio-visual content, consider that Tik Tok is slowly getting banned across several states, and Zuck has all but left Instagram to fend for itself why he tries to jack everyone into the M(et)atrix. Plus, it’s only a matter of time before they get the new features up and running.
Employee cruelty, so what? Sure, demanding devs work late nights and weekends and not feeding them, auctioning off all that Eames furniture, cutting 75% of the staff seems pretty rough. But remember we’re sinking deeper into a recession now. As a veteran of the ad industry, I can tell you that no matter how special the last place you worked says you are during a boom, every employer wonders the same thing when times get lean: are you here to work or just coasting for the bennies? What better way to demonstrate your initiative and passion for a cause than to point to a globally-recognized problem you helped fix for little sleep, less pay, and no free food? I’m sure vets of Napoleon’s La Grande Armée, famous for its forced marches, scavenging off the land, and near-invincible fighting prowess, were able to find mercenary work even after they lost Waterloo and their boss was getting slowly Epsteined with arsenic on St. Helena. Somewhere in your interview I’m sure your future manager will quip, “We also believe in making a difference, but unlike Elon, we want you to see your family, too–Ha! Ha!” And anyway, if you really cared about how labor gets treated, you’d stop using any smart devices made with Congo-mined cobalt (which is all of them).
It’s the go-to tool for lazy journalists. And it will be automated into A.I. once they are replaced. I have yet to read the following in a news article, “While [so-and-so] could not be reached for comment, he did say this on TikTok while attempting the latest lip-sync dance move popularized by black teenagers.”
2. As times get tougher, the soma gets better, and being creative gets harder.
It’s clear that the oft-predicted recession of the last 5 years is finally here and if it’s one thing anyone who studies empires will tell you, it’s that you need bread and circuses to keep one going. While most of us moderns like to imagine ourselves as being far more enlightened and sophisticated than the Romans of 2,000 years ago, Aldous Huxley had no problem drawing the comparison in his dystopian novel published during the Great Depression, Brave New World. In it, New Londoners pop a variety of colored pills to modulate their mood and maintain social order.
A society ruled by science, Huxley suggests, wouldn’t need anything so crude as chariot races and gladiator butchery, not when you can reproduce the same biochemistry with drugs. How would you know if things were really bad outside if you could no longer trust your feelings? If the soma was could enough, would you even care?
Despite big pharma’s best efforts, the future never went as all in on pills as Brave New World did, but squint and you can see a disturbing resemblance. With marijuana fully legal in most states and in Canada, psychedelics not too far behind, and narcotics like Oxycontin, Fentanyl more readily available than ever before, it would seem that one of the corollaries of a society more tolerant of drug use is one that is also more drug-dependent.
Now before the activists out there start hammering me on the efficacy and benefits of long-term drug consumption, I understand not all drugs are bad, that many aren’t truly addictive in the physiological sense, and that many substances, if used properly, can lead to profound growth and positivity. (You know, kind of like music, the drug consumed aurally which is now set to grow massively as the song streaming/podcast/audiobook wars heat up again as WFHers no longer have to hide their listening preferences or DJ together with their coworkers.) Not denying any of this. Just saying that there will be more opportunities to use and abuse with the end result that you are even further distracted than you once were.
And it’s not just what we think of as drugs either. As we sink deeper into another recession, more unemployment means more time to binge, which means more streaming networks, more ads, more music, and more snacks. All of this is already coming online, with Netflix and HBO MAX slated to come out with lower-cost options featuring commercials and more content (HBO may even change its name to Warner MAX with rights to the entire cinema giants’ studio vaults).
Considering that your average Chinese villager never got to see more than 50 theatrical productions in an entire year, this is a lot of entertainment. The question is whether it’s what you really want to spend your time on this planet doing. If it is, then enjoy the infinite jest. Otherwise, I suggest you do your damnedest to set some guidelines as to what will or will not be worth partaking.
3. Science is going to cede ground to magic.
I’ve been digging into the creative processes for a lot of creative professionals lately and one recurring theme I find is how comfortable many of the greats are with the occult. Aside from being a transcendental meditation enthusiast, David Lynch’s descriptions of his creative process are deeply supernatural. In Big Fish, his description of a universal field of consciousness accessed through trance is clearly no metaphor.
The Beatles put Aleister Crowley on their album cover.
Grant Morrison once put the instructions to a sex magick ritual in one of his comics in an effort to stave off cancellation which appears to have worked.
60’s ad legend and Marshall McLuhan popularizer/pal, Howard Gossage, once called advertising what it was when he wrote an essay titled, “Black, White, or Pango Peach Magic”.
Similarly, it’s no secret that famed director Alejandro Jodorowsky based much of his work on the Tarot and medieval hermeticism, but did you know that he now teaches “Psychomagic” aka Shamanic psychotherapy?
The more I delved, the less surprised I became. Psychotherapy itself has roots in exorcism, Victorian spiritualism, and Catholic confession, practices common to pre-modern society. Roots that are slowly being explored, expanded and further incorporated into therapeutic practices. Take the star of Jonah Hill’s latest documentary, Stutz: Phil Stutz began as a conventional psychotherapist who realized that his training would not be enough to help people manifest the changes in their lives they truly wanted. After decades of real-world practice, we now have The Tools, a series of visualization exercises which bare striking similarities to those of esoteric Buddhism or medieval invocations. Only instead of invoking deities or angels, we might be told to picture a cloud of pain, or stand with our shadow.
Brought on by desperation in the face of toughening times, our growing disillusionment with rational materialism, and scientists themselves entertaining wackier ideas like Simulation Theory, I see more and more people trying out techniques and systems once considered kooky, off-limits, and “magical” to average folk of a generation earlier. When it comes to visual aesthetics, popular culture already reflects this with its incorporation of symbols from numerology, Kabbalah, Eastern mysticism, gnosticism, and other esoteric practices (the all-seeing eye being the most common example, appearing most recently on Kyrie Irving’s skin art).
Contrary to the apocalyptic scenario strict Enlightenment atheists and religious fundamentalists might have you believe, I see this as neither progression nor regression from how humans have long approached reality. As Buddhist Arhat and MD, Daniel Ingram, said in a podcast:
“For most of human history what you were doing when you crowned a king was magical, period. What you were doing when you called on god to defend your army… Even now we still have rituals. When you swear in a President that’s magical. The stars that sheriffs wear. The colors that people wear. The words they use. The notion that any of these things would ever have been separate is the weirdest of modern delusions.”
I’ve long considered these practices ways in which pre-modern society harnessed the placebo effect–that strange boost in effectiveness people get merely from believing a medication or method will work–and other parts of existence which science has not and may never fully comprehend.
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So that’s what I’m thinking about for the year ahead. If you would like to unpack, explore, and make actionable the best of what’s been discussed here, then please subscribe.
After a year of synthesizing my disparate interests into something more focused for 2023, it’s time to deliver something deeper, more insightful, more applicable to everyday life.
This will be the year we put what we’ve learned to good use.
2023 will be dedicated to effectiveness.
Until then, keep rolling, and have an incredible year.