∆ DEATH

1. This will all be over in the blink of an eye. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that: for a spontaneous process, ^ΔSuniverse >0, the entropy of the universe increases. Before you know it you will be old and weak and, eventually, dead. That is if you’re lucky enough to get to experience old age. None of us knows how long we have or when it will all end. All we know is that we are all headed towards increased entropy and decay and, in a long enough timeline, a survival rate of zero.

2. Seneca said, ‘Treat each day as a separate life’. If you think about it, if you dig deep and contemplate your life and your impending death: there is really no other way to live. You will never be lovelier than you are now. You will never be here again.

3. Do not resist fear. Life is hard, there is so much to worry about, so many regrets from the past to ruminate on, so much uncertainty when it comes to the future. It’s so much easier to escape from all the monkey chatter in your head by turning to distractions like social media, youtube, and your choice of run of the mill TV shows. Resist the urge to distract yourself by scrolling TikTok reels or YouTube clips or your Instagram feed. Put down your phone. Instead dig deep into the uncomfortable, into the pain and suffering of being alive, and move forward with the things that matter in your life. Bird by bird, movement by movement, decision by decision. Move forward with relationships, projects, exercise, with reading and learning — with everything that matters the most to you. Find the signal amid the noise. Find a way. Make it happen. You will soon be dead, make the most of the time you have: face your fears, your anxiety, your loneliness. Don’t escape to trivial distractions to avoid the pain of being alive, instead learn to sail the shitstorms of life. Dig deeper into your own suffering. Befriend your demons and your pain.

∆ DELTA

1. Someone once said, ‘If you’re not disgusted with your six-month-previous-self, you’re not evolving fast enough’. The consistency bias tells us that: you consistently think your past self(s) resemble your present self in terms of behavior and attitudes (Safer 2002)*. We cope in the present by reconstructing the past. The narrative(s) we write, the stories of ourselves, are different ways of us trying to keep a consistent self image. But change is inevitable, everything is ephemeral, and it’s our response-ability to make change for the better rather than for the worse. The world is wicked, and random things will happen, you can’t control the future, and it will change you — or rather you need to (and will) change and improve more than you think and perceive.

2. Change is the only constant there is, and small incremental changes, applied daily and consistently will have a huge effect on outcomes in the long run. This holds true for habits in all spheres of life whether in finance or health. But it’s perhaps the most tangible in finance where we are (as a group) notoriously bad at visualizing exponential growth. Shit accumulates, and small consistent investments, can yield bigger than expected returns in the longterm.

3. You can’t predict the future, there will be black swans and other unexpected events. In the macro scale there will be some advances that will be greater than you could of foreseen, likewise there will be certain areas where forms of justice that seemed unshakably strong will fall apart while you aren’t looking (like women’s reproductive rights that have eroded steadily in the United States of America). The same goes for the micro scale: the health and wealth that you take for granted can change at a moments notice. Try not to fall victim to failure of vision — i.e. lacking the vision to predict how some seemingly unlikely future outcomes can turn out otherwise.

∆ NON SERVIAM

1. Refusing to serve — NON SERVIAM — is a great reminder not to allow yourself to fall victim to authority. The dogma that comes with religion, governments, the workplace, and social hierarchies are all structures created for enforcing obedience and servitude. Question everything. Serve no one. Own your body, your life, your decisions. If you learn to accept your own death, if you truly are ready to depart at any moment if and when needed, there is no one you’ll have to answer to ever — the tyrant is powerless against the person who doesn’t fear dying.

2. Refuse to serve any one, not even the authority of yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. Your own biases and feelings and fears can often be your own worst enemy. Learn how to not believe everything you feel or think. Don’t buy into any story you construct of who you were or who you are or who you will be. Any narrative you construct about yourself is bound to be fraught with errors and inconsistencies — take them all with a grain of salt.

3. You are not your disasters or your triumphs. Discard external validation and how others perceive you. You are not your bank account, your job, or your past. Not serving false metrics, or the historical notion of a god, nor the expectation of others. But then, how to live? By killing all and any notions of yourself (in the metaphorical sense), and instead inventing and re-inventing yourself each day. As mentioned, treat each day as a separate life, the day is the only coherent single unit of time that is at your disposal before losing consciousness and falling asleep. It’s the unit of time that matters the most. You can plan and set goals far out in the future, but in the end what you do with your day is what matters. How you fill it with your thoughts and actions, with the quality of your experience, with tiny incremental movements towards creating the self and the life you want. Paradoxically by killing yourself each day, by not serving your past and/or other presumptions, you unlock the potential of living the life you want and can be proud of.

– – – – – – – – ∆ – – – – – – – –

Footnotes

• DEATH
  • One.
    • ‘In a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero‘ is a reference to a quote from the book Fight Club (1996) by Chuck Palahniuk.
  • Two.
    • ‘You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.’ is a quote from the movie Troy (2004).
  • Three.
    • ‘Bird by bird’ is a reference to the book with the same title (1994) by Anne Lamott.
    • No one has perhaps written better on suffering and its value than Viktor Frankl in “Man’s Search for Meaning” (1946):
      • ‘Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand. When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.’
• DELTA
  • One.
    • Even when it’s against our own best interest we still have a tendency to be consistent with our prior actions and beliefs*. Many of our biases tend to enforce the notion of a consistent self. Like ‘Choice-supportive bias’: you’ll think that every major choice you’ve chosen is better than the option not picked, regardless of how true that is (Mather, Shafir, & Johnson 2000)*. Or, perhaps the most famous bias; ‘Confirmation bias’: you’re hard-wired to constantly look for, interpret, and recall information that affirms your previously held beliefs and belief-system(s) (a very well established bias, reviewed by Nickerson in 1998)*. And ‘Hindsight bias’: you’ll think you could predict events that have already happened, that you ‘knew it all along’ (Hoffrage 2003)*. Etc, etc.
  • Two.
    • Understanding exponential growth is perhaps the single most important concept if you have ambitions to achieve financial independence on a regular salary, see this excellent post (2012) for details.
  • Three.
    • Failure of vision is referencing an essay by Andrew Solomon (2015)* that explains the concept well.
• NON SERVIAM
  • One.
    • NON SERVIAM is latin and literally translates to ‘I will not serve’, spoken by Satan to God*.
    • The dynamic between oppression and the power we each holds over our own life is a recurrent theme in many of the plays of William Shakespeare, the choice between fighting oppression and ending it all is not, by any means, an easy one!
      • ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question:
        Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
        The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
        Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
        And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
        No more; and by a sleep to say we end
        The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks’
        — Hamlet by William Shakespeare
      • ‘But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
        Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
        If I know this, know all the world besides,
        That part of tyranny that I do bear
        I can shake off at pleasure.’
        — Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
  • Two.
    • ‘The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool’ is a quote by physicist Richard Feynman.
  • Three.
    • Dying before you die is a concept in buddhism later adapted by, among others, mindfulness advocate Jon Kabat-Zinn (see quote below) that holds the notion: if we are able to stop clinging, if we can detach from how we would like our life and our past and our future to be, then perhaps we can be free to live life and make the most of things as they are right now. That also applies to clinging to our own self-image.
    • Some of my favorite quotes on the topic of dying each day:
      • ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’ — Annie Dillard
      • ‘In yoga this posture we find ourselves in is called the ‘corpse pose’. There’s nothing particular morbid about it, in fact I find it useful to remind myself that: we are dying with each out-breath as we lie here and being born again to life and to this moment with every in-breath. And it’s also a convenient reminder that it might be valuable to die, at least metaphorically, to our obsessions with the past and the future and live ourselves into the present moment more fully. Which is the only moment we are actually ever alive in or for anyway. So as we lie here if you care to: reminding yourself that it’s possible to die right here to the future and to the past, and therefor wake up to the life expressing itself in us here and now. In this moment. With this breathe. We can, if we care to, intentionally evoke an attitude of dying inwardly to the ordinary preoccupations and obsessions of the mind and of the world. For a time at least. And open, over and over again, with every breath, in every moment, as we lie here, to the riches of this moment of life unfolding.’ — Jon Kabat-Zinn “Dying before you die” Guided Meditation Series 3 CD 2 *
      • ‘Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.’ — Seneca
      • ‘You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?’ — Friedrich Nietzsche
      • ‘But having to feel yourself die again, and again, and again — it makes you realize there is so much potential in being alive that we never tap into.’ — Claire Wineland*