Everyone’s a Genius in a Bull Market

For most of my adult life I lived paycheck to paycheck, which never bothered me because I was always either content or hopeful that I was somehow going to be financially stable in the future.  I wasn’t truly impoverished, I never starved, but there were long periods of time when I didn’t have a proper home and thus slept in my car or on the beach, would shower at my friends’ apartments, and shaved in the college restrooms before anyone arrived on campus.  I have clear memories of going grocery shopping knowing exactly how much money I had available to spend.  I would do the math in my head as I weighed vegetables on scales and added up the canned food in the shopping basket.  I remember that I couldn’t afford to buy organic ground beef.   Yet I wasn't bothered by having little money because at the time I was enjoying my life.  My lack of savings never prevented me from reading, writing, being outdoors, having friends, and occasionally backpacking.  And because I was always actively learning, stimulated, and engaged in the world, I never lost confidence in myself nor faith that my paycheck to paycheck lifestyle was temporary.  I had potential, Goddamnit.  An added advantage was that I’ve always been good about looking at the bigger picture, and when I would compare my situation to those in severe poverty across the nation, world, and throughout history, I recognized that I had no grounds to complain since my "poverty" was merely superficial and largely by choice, not entrenched and generational.  But like many others, I racked up credit card debt which I struggled to pay off, and then repeated this cycle every few years. 

As I grew older I realized that my quixotic ambitions of being an activist, writer, and artist were not manifesting due to my lack of discipline.  I moved from San Francisco to west Sonoma County – a most excellent decision which allowed me to improve my relationship with the natural world.  (I severed this connection twice by moving away from Sebastopol, but returned on both occasions.)  I fell into a pattern of working day jobs, being outdoors, reading, writing, completing various art projects, traveling, and having a strong social and family life.  For a period of time I was almost flourishing, but still living paycheck to paycheck.  I  later got a better job, but struggled to save money.  I came to the conclusion that I needed to put my dream of being a paid writer and artist aside, and work more hours.  So for three years I worked two full-time jobs.  During this time I gave more consideration toward income because for the first time in my life, I began to accumulate savings.  I began to learn about investing.  I realized that one of the only practical ways for me to extricate myself from the paycheck to paycheck lifestyle and achieve financial freedom was through investing.  The only way someone like me was going to achieve any semblance of the “American Dream” was if they hustled.

My lifestyle of non-stop work in order to save and invest was a double-edge sword.  The upside was that I was working toward financial freedom so that I would eventually have the time to get back to my writing.  Or so I told myself, for once you drop artistic projects for three-years, picking them again is easier said than done (I have developed an exacerbated form of writer’s block, something that I call writers Prefecture.)  The downside was that I was drowning in work (I fell asleep standing up more than once) at two jobs that I didn’t care for.  Even after I reduced my work hours after two-years, there was never one day I woke up and was excited to go to work.  I understand that no one has that luxury, but still my dedication to my jobs was destroying my inner-being.  I remember early one morning I was the only person in the neighborhood walking to my car to go to work.  Coffee in hand, I thought, “Look at me, I’m one of the responsible people.”  Then I corrected myself, “No. I’m a schmuck, and I’ve been suckered.”  Every day I would go to work for eight hours, which would translate to $200 in my paycheck.  I would regularly think to myself that there’s got to be something else I could do for eight hours that I actually enjoyed that could generate income.  (It didn’t have to be $200 a day.  I'd happily clean up trash on the coast for $100 a day).  One of my shifts was 7am to 3:30pm five days a week, assisting surgeons inside of a windowless, fluorescent operating room.  I would walk into work well-rested, in prime mental shape, with a "full tank," and from me my employer would extract my energy and attention reserves for the day.  While at work the only place I wanted to be was home, doing my personal work.  And when I arrived back home I was too drained to devote any significant vigor to my projects. (My wife would joke: “When you’re at work you want to be home, and when you’re at home you want to go back to work.”  No.)  I'd often come back home, take a nap, then go on a run, eat dinner, take a shower, do something minimally productive or counterproductive, and then go to sleep in order to go back to work the next day.  It was as if I were working to make money in order to pay bills in order to keep on working to pay bills.  In my role as a medical technician at both my jobs I was completely expendable.  Furthermore, the depressing amount of medical waste produced from surgical cases wasn’t inspiring me to be a part of that system. 

So it was during this period of incessant work that I started investing.  Sometimes when I walked around the hospital I would see elderly employees trapped in a job they disliked.  I would have a knee jerk reaction of throwing another $100 into my investment account.  (I was always dumbfounded by the senior citizens who returned back to work after retirement.  I wondered: did they run out of money, did they really like their former jobs that much,  or did they fail to nourish a hobby or passion in their adult life which they would prefer to pursue in their retirement?)  In the decontamination unit or on my breaks I would watch investment videos.  I tried to not let this detract from my interest in current affairs, history, and the natural world.  I felt that individuals must be firing on multiple fronts if they were to stand any chance of resisting impending authoritarian threats and making it out of the rat race.  I had to stay informed, get my monetary house in order, stay healthy, enjoy the outdoors, read, write, and minimize my bad habits.  I was always skeptical of government and corporate policies, so my conspiratorial mindset required that I learn both the mainstream narratives and also keep in touch with the counter-perspectives that were being increasingly censored.  It has yet to be seen if my sacrifice has paid off.  I've neglected and put personal projects on the back burner in exchange for making money.  (Fortunately, I don’t feel like I’ve abandoned every project.  And because I’ve always been disciplined about keeping notes whether it’s in my notepad or in my phone, I’ve always been able to jot down ideas and develop my stories here and there, never allowing them to vanish from my vision board).  It’s going to take some time to catch up with everything on the back burner and adhere to a schedule in which I am habitually constructive, but I’m going try to start off small and take things a step at a time.  (Indeed, even this blog entry is an attempt at tackling the litany of things on my project list and in my mind, and is in itself an exercise in journaling and doing what I am somewhat good at: listening to a presentation and transcribing the important parts).  But working incessantly and investing did allow me attain financial freedom, at least temporarily, which affords me one of the most valuable abstract commodities in the world: time.  

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels

In my youth, as a form of rebellion, I never looked up to the wealthy.   When I decided that I wanted to extricate myself from my paycheck to paycheck lifestyle, I began to listen to what they had to stay.  If I wanted to become a successful investor, I need to at least listen to what the people who have been doing that for a living have to say.   As with anyone I listen to, I might not agree with all their perspectives, but that doesn’t negate the legitimacy of their message nor preclude my option to learn selectively from their strategies.  Below I have included three videos that I enjoyed watching a some point over the last year and have transcribed a portion that I thought valuable. 

This first video is from Jake Ducey’s I Love Prosperity program.  He interviewed Rick Rule and asked him what one needs to do nowadays in order to hustle your way out of the rat race.  

Rick Rule:

Four things, Jake.  No, five things. 

1.  Invest in yourself. Organize yourself around a product or service that delivers real utility to somebody else. You don’t have own your own business, you can be an employee in somebody else’s business, but you need to invest in yourself to the point where you’re absolutely indispensable to your customer.   That’s the first thing.   When people who work at McDonald’s say they’re not getting a living wage – it’s true, it’s not a living wage.  And so you need to develop a skillset that allows you to deliver utility to the market so that you can earn a living wage.  So the first thing that you have to do is put yourself in the mindset that says you make money by delivering utility to other people. That’s the very first thing to do.  In order to get value you give value.   And if you’re in a circumstance right now where you can’t do that you have to change your circumstance because the circumstance ain’t gonna change for you. You get value by giving value. That’s the most important thing.

2.  You have to save. And this is a contradiction of what I said earlier. The idea that you save and you get paid 125 basis points on your savings, while you’re purchasing power goes down by 550 basis points a year is counterintuitive.  Except that if you have cash or if you have liquid assets – if you have a liquidity squeeze, if the broad equity markets fall by 50 or 60%, if we have the same lack of trust in financial institutions that we experienced in 2008 – the liquid assets that you have when nobody else has liquid assets will give you both the tools and hopefully the courage to take advantage of the situation rather than being taken advantage of.  Understand the negative real yield you got with your savings is an options premium. It gives you the ability to act when other people can’t act.  

3.  Have part of your savings in liquid assets that don’t depreciate alongside fiat assets. That’s a fancy way of saying own some physical gold and silver. What’s nice about physical gold and silver is it you don’t have to own too much.  If you have a circumstance where the fear goes to hell in a hand basket, the upside is that your physical gold and silver means that a small insurance premium – which is to say a small holding in the physical gold and silver – offsets a very large deterioration in the purchasing power of your fiat currency. So absolutely save part of your wealth in gold and silver

4.  If you can afford it, with a small amount of your money, speculate. Give yourself the ability, if you can afford to lose it, to participate in asset classes that are so deeply out of favor that when they return to favor you can enjoy tenfold or fifteen fold internal rates of return.  Don’t employ this strategy with money that you can’t afford to lose half of, but by all means if you can afford to speculate – don’t speculate in the flavor of the month, if pot stocks are hot stay as far away from them as you possibly can. Speculate on out of favor, disaggregated circumstances that have legitimate 10, 15, 20x potentials, with a small amount of your net worth. I’ve had circumstances in my life where a 5% investment in an asset class doubled my net worth. 

5.  Stay positive. Too many people look at the circumstance and say there’s no way out.  I can’t get ahead because of Biden. I can’t get ahead because of the World Economic Forum. I can’t get ahead because of the Socialists. That’s all bullshit. In any set of circumstances somebody who pays attention to rule number one, which is deliver value for other people will come out ahead.  We will come through this circumstance 10 years from now, 15 years from now, or some point in time, stronger then we are now.  Don’t use the malaise in front of us as an excuse for doing nothing. Do something. Prepare Positively. I believe, as an example, that the broader equity index’s in the United States, the S&P 500… At four different times in my career the S&P has fallen by 40 or 50 percent. It was extremely unpleasant to go through that period of time, but when you look at a chart of the S&P 500 going back sixty years you almost can’t see those 50% declines. So, I believe as a society that the ultimate direction that we face is higher, much higher. I just believe that we’re gonna have a real test like we had in the 1970s getting from here to there.

So let’s do them again.

Generate utility, that’s number one. Focus on making yourself more valuable to your customer, irrespective of your circumstance.  Save despite the fact that the current return on liquid assets is zero, consider it either as insurance or an option premium. Save part of your liquid assets in gold and silver – and pray to God they don’t go up – understanding that the set of circumstances that you were afraid of will likely make them go much, much higher than other people think.  Think of it as an insurance class. If you can afford to, speculate.  And if you speculate don’t just speculate with your money, speculate with your time, choose your speculations very well.  And finally, be positive, don’t be paralyzed. Be positive, be proactive, don’t be a victim.

This next video and transcription is from Stanberry Research.  Host Daniela Cambone interviews Jim Rogers (who has the dubious distinction of co-founding an investment fund with the diabolical George Soros), who explains the value of keeping your eyes open.

Daniella Cambone: 

I want to end, and I wanted to share something with you that I’ve never shared with you before.  We were at a show together in Las Vegas a few years ago – I want to say about five or six years ago. You were a keynote speaker there. And I remember I was walking back to the hotel, I was behind you and I didn’t want to bother you because you were so taking in that moment. And here is Jim Rogers walking the strip in his suit, and his signature bowtie, you had your hands behind your back, and you were looking at the lights, looking at the people around you. And that image has remained in my mind. I just always wanted to know in that moment, what is Jim Rogers thinking?

Jim Rogers:

Well at that time and always I have learned, for whatever reason, try to look and watch and see. Most people go to Las Vegas and say, “Oh my gosh, look at that,” but I have learned no matter where I am – whether it’s Paris, Brooklyn, anywhere – to try to just look and observe. You may not see anything, but if you see something and if you are being attentive – you have your antennas open so that you can see – who knows what you’re going to see. You might see something that is significant, or you might see some change. The most important thing that I look for is change. You don’t see it very often, but when you do, Daniela, you should think about it and go back and do research.  So I know that when I go to a place like Las Vegas, especially to a show, I’m trying to look and observe and see what’s going on.  Most of the time I see nothing, but occasionally… then I go home and have to do some work.

I’m I. the process of transcribing some things I’ve had on the back burner for the past year.

Here’s one such gem:@DanielaCambone of @Stansberry beautifully lays out a fantastic question to @JimRogerBlogs, who provides an equally wonderful answer.https://t.co/k5dvrI8mD2 pic.twitter.com/DbnNM0Y0Q3

— Aaron Dames (@DividedCore) October 13, 2021

This last clip is from an episode of Nomad Capitalist.  Host and founder Andrew Henderson interviews Doug Casey.  The interview was less insightful than I recalled, but I still transcribed the memorable part about the Augean stables.

The world is much more strictly regulated and all passports today are government property that are all hooked up by computer systems so they know where you are and what you’re doing everywhere. Personal freedom is increasingly being flushed down the toilet and people asked me, well why is that?  It’s because everyone believes in democracy. And all these legislators that meet, what do they do?  They pass laws. And what do laws do?  They tell you what you must do, and must not do. So every day that passes there are more of these laws that accumulate like the bottom of the Augean stables.  And every law they pass has to be funded – so taxes go higher, or money printing goes higher, and a new agency has to be set up to enforce it. So this is what’s happening to the world at this point.   And this is one of the reasons why I’m saying that we’re going into the Great Depression.

Uruguay – Initial Impressions

A friend recently asked what are some of the differences in freedom that I’ve noticed between Uruguay and the United States.  I can sense the freedom is palpable here, the reasons for which are not easy to put your finger on, but I have been taking notes on some of the things I’ve observed.  As a caveat, it’s been a while since I’ve been to Europe (which Montevideo reminds me of), so I’m not sure if these observations would be universal to similar cultures (90% of Uruguayans are of European descent), I also could be seeing things through rose-colored glasses, and since I’ve only been here for a few days and strictly in the capital, I’m not sure if my judgement will hold true over time and in other places of the county.

Rather than going directly into the reason why I think there are more freedoms here, some build-up may be appropriate and insightful.

The first notable observation took place after we got off the plane and were waiting in the Covid screening line.  There were perhaps 150 people waiting in line, and very few (perhaps five) were on their smartphones.  Most of the people were just waiting in line, conversing with their neighbor, or just quietly thinking to themselves.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything like that.  

I’ve only gone out to get groceries and go running, but when I go out, again, few people are on their phones.  People seem incredibly good at minding their own business and seem very present.  I get the impression that everyone here is trying to improve their lives step by step.  This might be said of many in the United States, but here it seems that every single person is doing something that they believe will contribute to the betterment of their lives and they are not thrown off by mindless distractions nor are they expecting assistance from others to achieve their tasks.  

There is some poverty here, but they seem to exercise a greater degree of freedom and industriousness than the average American.  I’ve seen this once before in Serbia, but on two occasions here I’ve seen poor people riding horse-drawn carts hauling jumbo rice sacks filled with recyclable bottles they’ve collected from dumpsters and trash bins.  So the impression I get is:  if you’re poor and you need to ride a horse along the street to get ahead, by all means ride a horse.  On the beach there were a couple “homeless men” living in a fancy shack along the Rambala – wide parkway that stretches along the coast.  I caught a glimpse of their lives – eating fish and drinking maté in an in orderly open-air shack beside which there was a boat – and it I thought: “That’s Mack and the boys from Cannery Row.”  It was very Steinbeckesque.  The takeaway there was: even if you don’t have a proper home you can dig a bunker along the coast, build a shelter, and fish if that’s what you need to do.   Further along on this run I saw a guy and his girlfriend on the grass near the beach.  They had ridden on his motorcycle to get there.  This meant he went off road and across the lawn with his motorcycle.  Lord knows how many ordinances he would have violated doing something like that in California.  But little things like that seem totally acceptable and endorsed here.  There is a sense that you can do almost whatever you want  just don’t be stupid or hurt anyone.  I haven’t seen any police yet nor have I heard any sirens.  As a matter of fact, when you go onto the roads no one in their cars uses their horns.  Also, even at the parks the dogs are all playing with each other (which is not unusual), but even the dogs seem well-behaved.  I know it sounds crazy, but I haven’t even heard a dog bark yet.  The city streets are lined with trees and filled with chirping birds.

This is not to say that people are not having fun.  There are families everywhere, parents pushing strollers, all morning the laughter of kids can be heard from schoolyards.  The parks are packed, the cafes, ice cream shops, and restaurants are bustling in the day, and again when they re-open late at night (like Spain, the restaurants will re-open from roughly 7pm to 2am since people eat dinner late here.)  People are entitled to exercise personal irresponsibility as demonstrated by the number of shops that sell beer and wine to anyone and the periodic cannabis smoke wafting through the air.  When I was running I could tell that something was missing here that I couldn’t pinpoint at first, but it hit me on my way back:  I didn’t see any meth heads or heroin addicts.  I didn’t see anyone who had lost their minds as a result of drug abuse, something I would see daily in Santa Rosa.  

#Montevideo is fucking awesome.
The freedom here is palpable.

I ran along the bay today, but turned around before entering the heart of city.

I am beyond grateful that I managed to get this far, but the question remains: am I willing to do the work required to finish the job? pic.twitter.com/Yyk82G4BFO

— Aaron Dames (@DividedCore) October 4, 2021

There seems to be a lot of civility here.  People mind their own business, treat each other politely, are dressed well, and everyone from the doorman (yes, we have a doorman, Gervasio) to the carpetbaggers to the barista at McDonalds take their jobs seriously.  I like that.  I kind of feel like I’ve entered a time warp.  I could be wrong, but the way of life and values on display here are what I think many places used to be like.  I think this kind of traditional approach to life and knowledge will be useful going forward.  For those in the West who have lost their way, I think the old way is the new way.  I don’t think the people here will readily embrace the new science of the Great Reset.  Despite the fact that the vaccination rates here are high and half the people wear masks, I get the impression that they know it’s a game that they’re playing along with for now, but won’t continue to cooperate if it threatens to upend their way of life.  

After the baby comes to town, we’ll move out of Montevideo.  One of the places that I’m leaning toward is a smaller town called Colonia del Sacramento, apparently permeated by an even deeper sense of tradition and history.

Hope all is well, 

Aaron 

The Golden Door

For the past two years I have been working to attain my goal of living abroad.  I have always dreamt of living in a different part of the world, and the idea of getting a second residency has become increasingly appealing for numerous reasons.  My wife and I have been living together in the United States for over two years.  When she moved here from New Zealand she was aware of my aspirations to relocate, and at the time I was focused on trying to get us to Australia.  When those plans fell apart due to border closures, I went back to the drawing board.  After eliminating numerous places (Taiwan, Philippines, Saipan, Bali, Portugal, American Samoa, Guam, Costa Rica) from the list, one country alone met or exceeded my prerequisites for relocation: Uruguay.  Understandably, my wife is reluctant to move.  She has said that I am selfish for wanting to move.  I tell her that I cannot deny that what I am doing is utterly and entirely selfish, and for that I feel bad.  However, there is a method to my madness.  I feel this is a now or never opportunity, and I would not be moving forward with this plan if I did not believe the potential benefits of moving greatly outweighed the risks of staying. I devised an entertaining metaphor to illustrate our current circumstances, and this is what the metaphor is: 

For the past two years we have been living in a house.  The house is manageable, but I would like for us to have the option of leaving if so desired.  To that end, I have regularly worked on the construction of a golden door that leads from the house to a magical garden.  The golden door is so magnificent, and the garden which it leads to is so glorious, that even under normal circumstances any sane person would want to walk through it to the garden.  But now, for reasons known and unknown, the house is filling up with smoke.  It seems there is a fire or possibly multiple fires alight in the house.  This door to the garden which I have been building for years is now complete.  The house is filling up with smoke.  Now is the time for us to walk through the door to the garden.  Granted, there is uncertainty on the other side, but there is also uncertainty in the house.  If we don’t like the garden, we can always return to the house.  This is a no brainer.   The house is on fire.  The garden is a sanctuary.  I have built the golden door. All we have to do is walk through. Please, I am begging you, let us walk through. 

This was the analogy I came up with.  The analogy can accommodate two notable caveats.  The first being: what if the garden is not as it seems?  Perhaps once you get to the garden it starts raining, and the shelter is inadequate.  That’s possible, but at least we will have tried.  This second caveat presents the more significant moral question: if the house is filling up with smoke, do you escape through the golden door, or do you stay back and try to put out the fire before it burns down the entire house? 

Image from Lonely Planet.

Sunset at Wright’s Beach and Memento Mori

Here are some pictures and a one-minute video of a beautiful December sunset and some massive waves crashing down at Wright’s Beach along the Sonoma Coast in Northern California.  With each passing sunset and sunrise and moment, I feel that I am inching closer to death.  And even though my death may still be far away, reminders of its inevitably are everywhere.  I remind myself in not a forlorn or morbid fashion, but with a sense of urgency that the clock is ticking and that there is no time to waste on petty, material, superficial lifestyle choices and slaving away at jobs you are disinterested in and thus neglecting that which you truly care and are passionate about.  I thank my lucky stars that I am fortunate enough to have the freedom and resources to do what I need to do in order to become who I want to become, but the other end of this bargain is that I must put in the hard work required to achieve my dreams.   To me, the ultimate failure in life is to be lying on one’s deathbed in regret of all the substantial things one wanted to do and could have done had you only had the drive and determination to see them through. (In my case, lying in my bed this morning, imagining myself as an old man in the state of regret, I was thinking: “I would regret not writing all those stories that I wanted to write, and now it is too late.”   At that point I leapt out of bed and got to work.

In the Out of Your Mind lecture series Alan Watts covers the concept of Memento mori in at least two chapters, one titled ‘Willing to Die,’ and the other titled ‘The Aversion on Death.’  I’ve included both in the YouTube video below and have transcribed some of each lecture here. 

You can’t hang onto yourself, you don’t have to try to not to hang on to yourself.  It can’t be done, and that is salvation.  Memento mori: be mindful of death.  Gurdjieff says in one of his books that the most important thing for anyone to realize is that you and every person you see will soon be dead.  See it sounds so gloomy to us because we have devised a culture fundamentally resisting death. 

                                                                                                                              -Alan Watts, Willing to Die

We all know we’re going to die, but it’s sufficiently far off that we can put it out of our minds.  And anybody who does put it into our minds in the ordinary way is taken to be a skeleton at the banquet, a Cassandra, and gloomy.  So that the old fashion preacher of bygone days who preached about death, and those monks who kept skulls on their desk and all that sort of thing is regarded as very morbid.  Why, in the baroque times there was a fashion for a while of making tombstones with marvelous sculptures with skeletons and bones all over them.  And on the Via Veneto in Rome there is a Capuchin church where down in the crypt there are chapels where the altar furnishing and everything are made entirely from the bones of departed monks.  Then we have among Tibetan and Buddhists graveyard meditations, and they have trumpets in Tibetan Buddhism made of human thigh bones, and they have cups…ritual cups made of the domes of human skulls.  And we say all that is very morbid. 

                                                                                                                                -Alan Watts, The Aversion to Death

Shaun Gladwall, Orbital Vanitas, 2017

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628

  Hans Baldung, Three Ages of Man and Death, 1540-1543

 Suzanne Anker, Vanitas (in a Petri Dish),2016

Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007

Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins, Rome

Part of my work space, filled with Memento Mori from the natural world.

Sunset at Wright's Beach slideshow:

The day’s end is upon us
The lonely night awaits
The drums of death are beating
To the rhythm of your fate 

-Walter Lloyd Waterson

There once was a world
Filled with beautiful girls
Old castles and marvelous things

Like bridges and songs
Blue skies and white swans
Rivers and mountains and seas

There were churches and bells
Heavens and Hells
Men who would die to be free

Yet these men were slain
And the world did sway
Away from a beautiful peace

And just like before
The demons of war
Emerged like a fatal disease

So the bridges and songs
Were forgotten and bombed
And Hell on Earth did man see

-Walter Lloyd Waterson

2020 Calendar (PDF) and Planning Ahead

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.

                                                                                                                  -Lenin

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction.  In fact, it always both flames up and smolders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view. 

                                                                                                                  -Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina

Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind is bearing me across the sky.

                                                                                                                   -Indian Proverb

In about five years, I expect to have my mid-life crisis.  Half my life will be over (while I may live past eighty*, I don’t expect that I’ll be getting much done at that age), and I’ll have little to show for it (I sometimes tell myself that I should be operating as though I have only five years left to live, so I need to work harder to accomplishment the goals that will matter most by the time I die.  I tell myself that if life were a race then I’m the guy who fell down and must get up and now run faster than everyone in order to catch up).  I like to aim high, knowing that I’ll land somewhere in the middle.  I like to have a plan A, plan B, and plan C, and usually none of them work out.    I always try to keep and objective view of things so as to not become ungrateful, because I know that even on my worst days many people would kill to be in my situation.   I try to tread lightly, because if you’re not part of the solution you can at least try to avoid being part of the problem.  I try to be mindful of my death, because I don’t want to leave behind a worthless legacy. Doing anything substantial takes time and sacrifice, and I often opt for the easier path by spending my free time doing something I find personally enjoyable (usually outside) than putting my nose to the grindstone and whittling away at large and challenging projects, therefore nothing substantial ever gets done and then I’ve suddenly got to go to work. My jobs contribute to the slow-kill of my soul because, while I don’t mind working (I’m often times on auto-pilot and work like a dolphin sleeps – with half my brain focused and the other half scheming, brainstorming, and developing plans in Aaron-land), I wish I could be doing something more meaningful, and I don’t want to end up like my older co-workers whom I see working into their old age simply because they need the money (this has led me to investing so that at the very least, I can try to be financially successfully by their age.).  One of the things I have going for me is that I am good at looking at calendars and developing plans around future dates.  I may not always stick to those plans, but at least I have an idea of what’s coming up and what I should be striving to achieve.   So I always keep a printable calendar on me (along with a pocket notepad so I almost never forget to write down a valuable thought. Indeed, many of the nuggets of wisdom from this entry were notepad thoughts) so that I can mark what’s happening when.   Below's a screenshot of the calendar (from Anny Studio) and here's a link to the downloadable PDF version of it, just in case you wanted to do the same.  (Also inserted below are some screen shots of the crazy 'ToDo’ lists I keep on me, along with some other papers such as the Geologic Time Scale.  This is onto of all the notes I dictate to myself and keep in my phone.)

Calendar from Anny Studio

*Eighty years is nearing the age in one's life where one has lived through 1,000 full moons.  It's best to assume that you'll probably never get there, so make sure you embrace the full moons you do see.  Like the seasons, like whale migrations, solar and lunar ecplises, and the chances one gets to plant a new crop or garden each year, there are only so many times one has to experience these things before the last chance arrives and then it's curtains for you and me.