I've gotten some new subscribers lately, so I thought I'd try to answer the age-old question: what is this newsletter about anyhow? If I'm being honest, it's simply the runoff for my thoughts on whatever I feel like writing about, but that does tend to gravitate towards certain themes: if I'm feeling fancy, I might say the central theme is devoted to the wise Greek adage "Know thyself". When I'm not feeling fancy, I admit it falls in the "self-help" genre. I don't really like that label, but there it is. I used to feel a little embarrassed of the self-help genre, but then when I look around at how much anxiety and depression and isolation everyone in modern day life seems to be experiencing—I feel like we need all of the help we can give ourselves!
I'm particularly interested with the idea that our own thoughts, and beliefs wind up structuring and building our reality. This idea has been called various things like New Thought or Magick or Buddhism even, but it's also true from a simple psychological viewpoint. Hence the name of this newsletter: You Create Your World.
Another name for this line of inquiry is philosophy. It is what happens when one sits around and tries to answer "how should one live?" That is the question I return to again and again, and it's an important question—the answer that we all give to it, is what ends up becoming the lives that we live.
The other thing that informs what I write about here is it tends to be whatever I'm personally working on at the moment. So, if I'm going off about meditation or cycling or how to cut down on screen time, and you ain't feeling it—just skip that newsletter and come back when I'm posting about something that resonates with you.
The main reason I write about this stuff is because I've come to recognize that I am the sort of person who, if I'm not careful—have the tendency to fall into all kinds of bad habits— and indulge in like; sitting around being lazy and depressed and doom-scrolling. (I know I'm not alone in that self-assessment.) But when I work at overcoming negative habits and tendencies, life readily blooms into a lush and magical experience. So, I write this newsletter as a sort of journal in the hopes that these notes are helpful for other humans who are wrestling with the same issues.
I have a friend who has been depressed for years. He reminds me of where I would be if I didn't work at it. Let's call him D. He has a lot of things going for him, he is highly intelligent, a skilled musician, artist, and software coder. He is physically a giant, like 6'4 or something but has a very soft and gentle personality. He has a charming and lovely partner, and he doesn't have to work because he inherited a chunk of money a few years back. On paper, if you rolled up these basic character stats on a Dungeons and Dragons sheet you'd say, these are fine attributes to work with. You could do anything with these stats! And that's true.
But every time I talk to D he is feeling down. We met up for burritos this past weekend, and when I asked what he was up to it was a familiar story: he was depressed, he was sitting around in his apartment, in his sweatpants, not really doing much of anything. He felt down. He didn't feel motivated to go do stuff, and then at night he would feel restless because he hadn't expended any energy during the day, so he would wake up and scroll his phone's feed for a couple hours every night.
I encouraged him to commit to a hobby (hobby is just a fun word for weekly habit) that he could do on the regular "you need something that you just absolutely go do, every week, to get you out of the house, like a yoga class."
D said "I used to yoga, I used to do a bunch more activities, but then I got depressed."
"Well, that's sort of a what came first? The chicken or the egg situation, right?"
"Yeah, that's a good point." D replied.
He was in a vicious cycle. Feeling down was sapping his energy to leave the house, and enjoy life, which was making him feel down etc. Creating a snake eating its own tail; a negative feedback loop, that he has been stuck in for years.
That's the thing about negative loops they are self-reinforcing. These are the modern dragons we must slay. I'm constantly noticing and making adjustments for navigating around and through negative loops. Just over the past weekend I found myself dealing with insomnia. After a sleepless night (from staying up too late and watching YouTube videos) I overslept the next day, and then it was that much easier to repeat the pattern the next day. In just the matter of one weekend, blue light screen-time started fucking up my circadian rhythm and making me stay up way too late and feel tired the next day—which then bled into other areas, I felt cranky and anxious, I skipped exercise because I felt tired etc.
Luckily, I was able to notice right away that I was falling into a negative loop trap - modern life with its "conveniences" is filled with so many little traps like this! And I went right back to a hard "no screen time for an hour before bed rule" and was able to get back to sleeping soundly.
The theme of this newsletter is that we are all responsible for weaving the tapestry that is our own life story, and we do that in many ways, starting with our inner world (thoughts, beliefs) but extending into the outer world; the loops, patterns, habits we choose, day by day. This is a newsletter on knitting the loops that weave together the tapestry your life.