Raptitude.com

I’m pretty sure the best answer to every problem can be encapsulated in one simple dictum.

You can use this dictum to meet all your problems, regardless of what they are, and create the best possible outcomes.

You’re not going to like it. It has different forms, but here’s one:

Do what has to be done, when it has to be done, and do it that way every time.

This is truly infuriating advice. The mind sputters and objects.

The night before you travel somewhere, order your favorite pizza, eat some of it for dinner, and seal the rest in a bag and put it in the freezer.

A week later, when you get home unexpectedly late, wiped out and ravenous, you’ll open your fridge to find only eggs, pickles, and condiments. Then, you’ll remember that your favorite pizza is right there in the freezer! 

In that moment, notice that alongside the joy of unexpected pizza, you also will feel love for – and will feel loved by — your past self.

A regular version of this is FlyLady’s recommendation that you shine your kitchen sink before you go to bed. This small, easy ritual has a disproportionate benefit on your morning. The version of you that wakes up and makes coffee next to that shiny sink will not only have a better day, but will feel respected and cared for.

It might seem like these actions are a kind of zero-sum, one-to-one exchange: you lose something now to gain something later. Your future self receives a gift, but it can only gain what your past self has given up.

I keep reading books from the 19th century and earlier, fiction and nonfiction, because I envy something about the lives of the people in them.

I don’t think I’d want to trade places. I’m too accustomed to hot showers and modern dentistry. But people back then seemed to live with a certain straightforwardness we no longer have. They could more easily just do a thing, more easily pick a course of action and see it through.

Now I think I know why: regardless of their class, those people had relatively few options in every area of life. There were fewer things they could do, fewer things they wanted to do, and fewer things to think about. Naturally, whenever they made a choice, they acted on it with more care and conviction, with relatively little to distract them from it.

I’m obsessed with the idea that a guy who wears jeans and drives a Jeep today is basically the same creature that wore animal skins and lived on hand-caught river fish 20,000 years ago.

Those beings had the same basic physical and emotional needs, but had to meet them with very few tools and amenities.

I’ve previously described my favorite illustration of this point: imagine a group of prehistoric hunter-gathers, who didn’t even have textiles yet, discovering a modern landfill. It would be an unimaginable sea of blessings: tools, materials, clothing, food, and ideas galore. The hundreds of circling seagulls alone would be a such a blessing they’d tell the story for generations. They’d build the first city there and write the great blessing-pile into their scriptures.

Modern people are accustomed to such an abundance of even better blessings that the hunter-gatherer’s great blessing-pile is actually our refuse — an embarrassing heap of dirty, relatively hard-to-use stuff that we bury in the ground.

I remember a surreal moment about twenty years ago, which felt like the beginning of something bad, and it was.

I was at a bowling alley with some friends, and a few people in our group were talking about Facebook. I knew what it was but had no interest in it. Then one of them turned to me and said, “There’s lots of pictures of you on Facebook!”

This kind of stunned me and I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t joined this website but somehow I was one of its features.

A year later all of us were using it. It was exciting at first, because it seemed to give us more access to the people in our lives. We could post photos, make plans, and stay connected to a wider circle of people.

I should note for younger readers that the term “people” at that time only referred to real, physical beings: persons with bodies that walked and drove around and did things. Having friends largely meant physically traveling to the same apartment, bowling alley, restaurant, or movie theater, positioning our bodies amongst each other in this physical space, and interacting using our faces and voices and hearts. The part of your life that consisted of this type of physical activity was called social life.

Social media was meant to facilitate this thing called social life. Facebook’s original purpose was to keep you in touch with people who would otherwise fall out of your social circle, namely people you went to school with.

The human being is an enjoyment-seeking creature. There’s a reason people are always trying to restrain themselves from excessive eating, drinking, scrolling, and shopping. It’s perfectly normal to pursue these and other pleasures even to the point of serious problems and early death.

Even though we are born enjoyment-mongers, we tend to overlook the greatest and most reliable source of enjoyment, which is our ability to consciously enjoy the stuff that happens anyway. We barely even talk about it.

For example, you probably sit down in a chair or on a couch ten or fifteen times a day. You can easily enjoy each of these instances of sitting down, if you make a point of it. It can feel great to relax into any decent chair. But how many times do you sit down without relishing it even a bit?

The pleasure of relaxing into a chair isn’t as intense as the pleasure of chocolate-coated hazelnuts or rapid-fire video memes. But it’s still more than worthwhile, and it’s free. You don’t have to go out of your way to access this source of pleasure, and it doesn’t gradually kill you or make you depressed. (I suspect it does the opposite.)

There should be a German compound word for the emotion you feel when you encounter a famous thing and realize you’d never actually seen it until that moment. (Ikonerwachen?)

I had seen a thousand images of the Sydney Opera House before my gaze landed on it unexpectedly as I was crossing the harbour bridge in 2010. I knew its iconic look from movies, travel websites, clipart collections, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego — but only at that moment did I realize I’d never seen it before.

This happened again with the planet Saturn. From Mauna Kea in Hawaii, I saw the ringed planet in perfect focus through a large reflecting telescope, and it was spectacular. Voyager 1 photographs and textbook diagrams did not prepare my heart to see a real, physical object, hanging there before my eyes in empty space.

My cat refuses all medicine because she doesn’t understand the benefits. Nothing can make her see that having bitter liquid squirted into her mouth will prevent her from getting intestinal worms.

So I have to force the matter by wrapping her in a towel like a burrito, so that she can’t fight back. I’m sure she sees it as pointless cruelty.

Because of her erroneous views and suspicious nature, I have to trick her to make this happen. To get a cat who rejects modern medicine into a towel-burrito, experts say to lay the towel flat on the floor for a day or two, occasionally leaving a treat in the middle. The cat will soon start loitering around the towel, eventually laying on it, waiting for it to produce its magic bounty. Then you spring the trap.

A longtime reader emails me every five years or so, to say that he still thinks of me every morning when he makes his bed. Back in 2009 I wrote a post about the psychological benefit of immediately making your bed when you wake up. (It’s an easy little mission that gets you shaping your day right away – a foolproof first move to carpe your diem.)

There’s a different reader I think of on a daily basis, one who invited me to visit him at his home in Norway. While I was there, he gave me an AeroPress coffeemaker and showed me his brewing method. After spilling hot coffee grounds all over his kitchen on my first attempt, I got the hang of it. I still think of him for a moment every single morning, when I stir the grounds with the bamboo stick he gave me.

When I’m at the car wash, I always think of my dad, because he once said, “Nothing gets clean without the foamy brush.” I always use the foamy brush and my car always comes out looking great. It’s a bit of my dad’s insight living on in me, among many other bits.