a dimly lit bar, overpriced beer, and some birthday reflections

I like dimly lit bars.

This one is dimly lit, but in that dimly lit way where you can tell that they intentionally tried to light it dimly. It’s tasteful, though. It doesn’t feel organic, but it still is nice. A manufactured vibe is not always a bad thing, as long as it is a good vibe that has been manufactured.

A birthday, in my slowly but surely advancing years, is a good opportunity for reflection. On this particular birthday, I am in the same town, in the same bar, in the same seat (I think) I was in exactly a year ago today. I may even be drinking the same Japanese import beer. This is the kind of Groundhog Day moment that really hits the hammer into the nail of what should be the prizewinning pumpkin of existential crises.

This is not to say that I dislike this bar, or this town, or anything like that. But the older I get, the progressively more relatable every Bill Murray character feels.

The calmness I feel in this moment is the most obvious way I notice that some time has in fact passed. In past years, this would be a situation ripe for a downward spiral into “who am I and what am I doing”, but I don’t feel this way at the moment.

Given 365 days of life to reflect on, I’m going to attempt to crystallize four specific(ish) lessons I feel like I have picked up over the past year. If you were hoping for a cool adventure story about bedouins or something, feel free to close this newsletter and go back to deleting promotional emails from some sunglasses website you never signed up for. If you’re down to see me preach at myself, here we go:

Lesson One: It matters more that you do something than what the something is.

Some people appear to have everything together. While I’m certain there are exceptions to any declarative blanket statement I make, I would actually counter that most of those people are more just charging through life without so much worrying. What appears to some as certainty about everything, if it’s not just an act, is often born of a lack of self-examination, not of some divine intelligence.

The world is big, and not always what you think. It would be hard for me to imagine that anyone who experiences a real granular spectrum of different opinions and lifestyles could still believe with 100% certainty that their actions are the right ones. So I would say they either don’t know, or don’t care. This is not necessarily a bad thing, if you ask me. Examination is useful, but over-examination can paralyze action.

I like to see something on the horizon. Stagnation is my greatest enemy, and it takes a lot of forms, like a shape-changing siren, luring me onto the waylaying rocks of inaction. If I feel like I’m moving forward towards some sort of goal, it is a million times easier to weather through the sometimes less-than-enjoyable realities of daily life, and keep my boat pointed towards a brighter future.

I have changed that horizon however, moved it around, sometimes drastically, and most people I know, especially older ones, have done the same. If you can see the path forward 20 years in advance, it’s probably not your own path you are seeing, but someone else’s.

Given this, moving forward is the way, the key to progress. Becoming stronger and better and more organized and all the other good adjectives. I want to sail my proverbial ship towards a light in the distance, and the goal is the act of sailing towards that light itself, even while not really knowing what it is. That horizon will help me to ignore the siren songs of the foggy areas we all are bound to sometimes pass through.

Lesson Two: We are all in perpetual debt, but not to who we think.

Credit cards exist currently as a scam to generate profit from the poor. If you change my mind, I’ll buy you one thousand beers. Good luck.

Debt is a word with a nasty connotation, and it’s well deserved, frankly, but debt can also be a good thing, depending on what the nature of the debt is and who it is owed to. Many debts are not monetary.

For example, here are several debts I don’t mind, and I will never repay. The first of these debts is to my parents, without whom I would not be here to complain about the ridiculous price of this $9 draft beer. How can you repay the debt of life itself? It’s simple, you can’t. And you shouldn’t try to do so with the goal of completion. We still of course will try to repay this debt, but it is good to do it with the certainty that the task will never be done. I cannot repay the gift of life, but I can remember that life exists for me due to factors I had no control over. Life doesn’t always feel like a gift, sadly, but in the moments that it does, there is one place I can direct my gratitude.

My second major un-repayable debt is to society itself. Society is another simple word for a very complex thing, and I will be the last to say that one definition is best, but we do have a duty of some kind I feel. I am constantly updating the terms and details of this debt, but I can always feel that it’s there. Trees were planted for us before we were born, and it is our duty to continue to plant them for times we will not see.

Many debts previously existed in capacities that repayment was never completed and in some cases never expected, and for many years that was actually more the norm of society. The somewhat soulless monetary system we have now loves to promote claims to divine historical precedence, but it actually has very little. I think things work a bit better if individuals are all a little bit in debt to each other personally, in some form or another, because then we have a vested interest in everyone else succeeding.

Lesson Three: Bravery is an action, not a trait.

That’s a banger of a quote worthy of some influential uncle-type character in a late 2000s superhero movie. Cheesiness aside, I do believe it. Anyone can be brave. Rejection is hugely easy to fear, but not very productive to fear either. Failure is part of life, and to avoid it is to avoid life itself. Seeking failure is a bit silly, and I have also seen philosophies geared around that, which if you ask me, is a bit of a clumsy overcorrection.

My goal is primarily to succeed, but to have that goal with little to no fear of failure along the way. It’s easy to forget how liberating it feels to be brave, how freeing it is to act without fear. It’s also easy (at least for me) to assume that because you have acted bravely in the past, you are acting bravely now, even if you’re not. Bravery is never a permanent state of being, but a conscious choice that we have to continue to make if we want to see the world we dream of living in.

Lesson Four: Willpower should be the last resort.

A friend of mine said this. I can’t remember if another friend of his said it to him first, that detail has eluded me. I love it.

Most of us have some level of willpower, but it should not act as a catch-all. If anything at all isn’t going to plan (and when is everything going to plan?), your willpower has to be more and more spread around to different areas. Each time it’s diluted it loses strength, like soap if you keep adding water to it. At some point it just doesn’t really work anymore, and we only have so much of it to use before we have to go to the willpower store to buy more. Not a perfect analogy, but you get the idea.

I want my life to be built around the worst version of myself. If you build an environment around you in a way to catch you on your worst day ever, then you have a functional level of security in place to ensure that the things you’re trying to do will actually work. Operating completely without this would be like trying to quit smoking in a tobacco factory. You could do it, but it’s just a bit stupid and it probably isn’t going to work. Quitting smoking in a place where cigarettes are illegal, however, is much easier and much smarter.

If you want to see long-lasting change, you can’t just change your mind, you also need to change your environment to fit your mind’s new goal. Everyone can be a help when everything in their life is going right, and everyone can be an hindrance if things go wrong enough (including yourself). Build a world around you smarter than your worst day.

Final Thoughts

I think letting the years dull you is mostly a choice. I am certainly more tired than I was at age 17, that train is headed down the hill and it probably ain’t turning around. However, we still have control over the way in which we age and the tendencies in ourselves we cultivate. We can be cool old people who play games and crack jokes and love to be alive, or we can be yelling at kids for having fun too loudly. We get to pick.

It’s hard to go against your world though, so if you want to cultivate particular tendencies, there are particular people, places, and lifestyles that will make that easier or harder to do, in varying ways. That I’ve found actually quite hard to see until you change all of those variables and experience how much easier some traits and actions become depending on them.

How I feel about life is always a bit of a moving target, but it’s gotten a lot easier to hit the bullseye of happiness the less I care about what I think other people think. I don’t have many of the answers, but I think if I play my cards right, the next few years will be better ones. Some of that will be on the universe as well.

So, happy birthday to me, happy birthday to you, whenever it is. Happy almost Christmas. I’m going to finish my stupid expensive import beer because apparently in my old(er) age, quality is important to me, and go find some other chaos to get involved in before this night and this year are done. I’d like to start my next year of existence from an interesting moment. My best to all of you out there. Here’s hoping for another few years.