Naval Ravikant:

“The most important relationship you have is with yourself, with this voice in your head that’s always chattering and never shuts up … If you want to see what the quality of your life actually is, put down the drink, put down the computer, put down the smart phone, put down the book, put down the headphones, and just sit by yourself doing nothing — and then you will know what the quality of your life actually is.”

“A few years ago I made a shift in my thinking about fitness — a shift from trying to get enough exercise to trying to fill my days with movement.” philipbrewer.net


The idea that ‘movement’ should take precedence over ‘exercise’. Just doing, instead of having to do.

“To realise that we live in an absurd culture where we are taught absurd things by absurd people and threatened with absurd consequences for defying all of it is to achieve a level of contentment.” michaelmalice.com 📚

I’ve written here before about grey hair and death dreams and regerts, but I must officially be old now that I’m mentioning my rising mild anxiety about my children having to come and clean out my house if I die. In Sweden there’s a kind of decluttering called döstädning which means “death cleaning.” And while I’m not ready yet for that to be what I’m doing, the upside is: my house and affairs are getting tidier by the day.

Further to the last. Everything operates subject to cause and effect. I may not have control over all the things, but I do have control over how I respond to all the things.

Accepting that most things are outside my control means detaching from them and focusing on the things I can control. The stoics and buddhists taught this.

Another election done and dusted and hopefully that’s the last we’ll see of Winston. Any discussions of his legacy will be brief.

The left will be happy Labour got enough votes to govern alone. The right will be less happy but the positive for them is that Labour’s majority keeps the Greens’ hands off the big shiny levers. Act did better than expected and their challenge will be to keep their new MPs in line.

Labour’s challenge will be that but for Covid they would have been judged more harshly on their lack of delivery. Now they must deliver.

The media have been big winners too and have firmly cemented themselves as part of the whole shoddy system.

An earthquake, then a blackbird flapping trapped in the laundry. Possibly related.

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig 📚

I finished reading my battered second-hand copy, what a strange book it is, full of deep and practical ideas that for me left dog-eared pages and pencilled-in margins in their wake, scraps of which I’m sure will linger in my mind for some time to come. There a lot of philosophy-type stuff in there and some of it is hard going, and some of it is quite tedious too. I liked the father-son journey stuff, it captures some of the crazy concerns and emotions that being a father of a boy can bring. I wonder how much of it is true.

One especially memorable bit talks about a ‘South Indian monkey trap’, which I’d never heard of, and which supposedly involves a hollowed out coconut with food placed inside and a hole just big enough to admit a monkey’s hand. The monkey sticks its hand in and grabs a fistful of food, and can’t escape when the trapper comes because it can’t release the food from its fist. All the monkey needs to do is open its fist, but it is simply unable to reevaluate the positive value of the fistful of food vs the negative value of being captured and losing its freedom. There’s nothing physically keeping it trapped… it just can’t let go. #fiction?

Took a walk on one of the local maunga. Nice to feel some sunshine.

Things I learned from five weeks working from home:

I don’t like working from home

My neighbour, who is Serbian, gave us a big piece of her daughter’s left-over birthday cake. It is Serbian too, and delicious, and now it is all gone. 🎂

“One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

On days 10-12 we watched Ozark, Leave No Trace, Ex Machina, and the police checkpoint in our street. 🍿

I think my boy and his mates have discovered group chat, there’s about five of them having a good old yarn over their phones together from their bedrooms and I haven’t heard that before.

The cross-party Covid-19 response committee is a good idea too, because we absolutely need to keep our government and our police accountable and under scrutiny right now. To this end we also need the media to do their jobs properly. It’s going to be an interesting 28 27 days.

At the supermarket just now: people wearing full face mask respirators and gloves, and no flour or porridge. One guy was very upset about the no porridge.