Birthday Wisdom No One Asked For

But you're getting it anyway

Yayoi Kusama, Night (1989)

Last Tuesday, I turned 35.

Besides shifting to another demographic on marketing surveys (goodbye 28-34 selection), it also presents an opportunity to do one of those “X life lessons from turning X” posts.

Fortunately, you are not getting 35 life lessons. Actually, you are not getting life lessons at all—I am not sure my lessons would apply to you. However, I will share some beliefs, that even if applied unevenly in my life, I hold steadfast.

Don’t live on auto-pilot

This is the only “self-help” advice I dispense. I can’t tell you how to live your life. But I can tell you to actually start living it. I’ve been a prisoner of inertia, of golden handcuffs, of invisible expectations and ghostly judgments. I remember happily receiving my free meals, generous stock options, and watching my bank account rise like the sea at high tide. It all felt great…until it didn’t. I realized the satisfaction came from meeting expectations rather than pursuing what I actually wanted. It took stepping away from my corporate job a couple of years back to see that.

Some of these expectations are good; there are evolutionary reasons why being able to find sustenance (via having a job in modern times) is important. Yet, too often we are possessed by expectations and status games: You must have children. You must live a DINK lifestyle. You must renounce all your possessions and rent everything. You must buy the fancy bag along with an ugly-ass Labubu doll while eating a bar of Dubai chocolate. If you can articulate why these things are important to you, if you can be honest and arrive at an answer that you believe in, great. That’s it. Now you are living for yourself.

In my case, living on auto-pilot is what kept me away from writing in my 20s. The expectation of financial security and career success swallowed all creative energy. Now, I’m trying to chart my own path, finding my own balance between building the life I want for myself and my family while prioritizing my creative endeavors (sorry I don’t want to end up living in financial strife like Dostoevsky).

Multiple things are true at the same time

Milan Kundera said it best:

“Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire.”

Our yearning for binaries is the biggest reason why political discourse is eroding worldwide (it is not a uniquely American problem).

Here’s a maddening example of a couple of ideas that seem completely incompatible, but are both true at the same time:

Hamas is a vile terrorist group that has very little regard for the actual population it’s supposed to fight on behalf of and more about their self-preservation as a threat (like many guerrilla/insurgencies). At the same time, Israel’s Gaza campaign was brutal, disproportionate, and designed not to just get rid of Hamas, but to set the groundwork for a total take over of Gaza (and don’t even get me started on West Bank settlements).

The paragraph above will probably piss off everyone across the simplistic Palestine vs. Israel spectrum. It is a Rorschach test for the reality that you most readily believe. But my contention is that both realities are true—simultaneously. Unfortunately, most of us have seen too many Star Wars-type stories, too many tales of good vs. evil. But humans are not this simple (and yet we are, which is another apparent duality…dizzy yet?).

Embracing duality has helped me grapple with my personal anxieties; it has allowed me to surrender to what is and accept reality. For instance, I can be grateful for the life I have and all the comforts I’ve earned and/or I have the privilege to experience. At the same time, I can yearn for a version of myself and my circumstances that is wealthier (in the comprehensive sense of the word, not just money) than what I experience today.

Accepting that I don’t have to live in a binary invites me to either find the middle ground between two sides, or just surrender to the fact that this contradiction will not subside no matter how many spin cycles I put it through in my mind.

Happiness = Joy + Contentment

Let’s retire the word “happiness.” It’s been used and abused like a “welcome” door mat that hasn’t been changed for decades.¹

What does happiness mean? I wrote about it a while back, but I’ll give you the punchline—happiness really means two things:

Joy - Those spontaneous and brief moments that bring you delight. A kiss. A good meal. Morning coffee. Your favorite song coming on. A rainbow. A job promotion. Your sports team winning a game. Your child saying “I love you.” Your parent saying “I love you.” Your Trader Joe’s cashier saying “I love you.” Moments of joy can be mundane or transcendent, but they are usually ephemeral.

Contentment - It’s a sustained state. Consistent moments of joy will contribute to contentment, but its foundation is gratitude. Gratitude is an appreciation for your circumstances. It is an intentional acknowledgement of what you have. It's the act of seeing how full your cup is. Once you can practice gratitude consistently, you are more likely to reach a state of contentment. There are things you yearn for, yes, but in a state of contentment, your mood is not attached to them.

Believing in something greater than yourself is one of the most important things you can do

I’m not going to tell you what or who to believe in. My version of greater than yourself is the canonical representation of God that I learned in Catholic school.² That’s good enough for me. I don’t advocate for religious supremacy; the idea that MY God is the true God and your God is a false God. I believe that we are all worshipping the same God, just through different cultural contexts. My reasoning behind this is quite extensive and unlikely to please super religious people, but the best way I can sum it up is that God made us all in his image, and in His (or Her) infinite wisdom, gave us multiple paths towards establishing a relationship with Their divine presence.

Now, why does believing in something greater matter? Believing that there is nothing else but ourselves in this blue marble can lead to the “we are in this together” communal mindset that most Humanists subscribe to. The weakness in this worldview is that when people are constantly bombarded with crisis and suffering, it can easily breed cynicism and despair. If this harsh reality is all there is—no higher purpose, no cosmic justice, no redemption—why bother striving for a better world?

I’ve been pulled out of some of my darkest moments in the past couple of years through my faith in God. This doesn’t minimize the role that family, friends, and my own self-awareness have had in rescuing me from deep waters. But even those timely interventions, those words of affirmation when I needed them the most, those lucky breaks I was not counting on, I’d like to think those are acts of divinity, and beyond being just mere confirmation bias, they reaffirm my relationship and my responsibility to my Creator.

We become what we think. The story we tell ourselves is the script we play

“If you think you can or can’t, you are right.” - Henry Ford³

This bit of wisdom is the one that frustrates me the most. Because every time I think about this, I realize that my inner-critic (which long time readers will know as Camelo) is a fabrication that I have continued to indulge, despite knowing that he is telling me a story, and therefore a script, that leaves me frustrated, dejected, and anxious.

The most important skill we can learn is to have a healthy inner monologue, to change the polarity of our thoughts—to go from “what if this goes wrong?” to “how awesome could it be if this goes right?”

Just as your body needs to maintain a healthy pH balance—not too acidic, not too alkaline—your mind needs balance too. Chronic negative thoughts are like mental acidity: corrosive over time.⁴ You want to neutralize that acidity with positive thoughts to restore equilibrium.

If you are an overthinker like me, the process of changing the script so that you actually become the version of yourself that you envision feels like a Sisyphean task. But I can’t think of anything more important to practice daily than to change your script, line by line (yes, this is more important than keeping your Duolingo streak).

Attention is more valuable, and increasingly more scarce, than time

The general notion is that time is our most valuable asset. Time is valuable, but what is even more valuable is how you allocate that time. Attention dictates how you spend your time. It also dictates the inputs you give your mind that contribute to your sense of identity.

I experienced the pitfalls of time-wealth and attention-poverty. I’ve never had as much free time to pursue my passions as the past couple of years away from corporate life. However, for long stretches of time my attention has either been misplaced or diluted. The random argument with a Twitter troll, spending nearly three days doing an inventory of every piece of clothing I owned just to never look at that Airtable again, or writing six different pieces at the same time and publishing none of them.

This is not a criticism of wandering, of embracing divergence and letting your attention off-leash and hoping it doesn’t hurl itself towards a busy street. A big reason I feel more confident about how to navigate the world has come from these moments of wandering, of embracing the pathless path, per se.

But over the past year I’ve grown increasingly convinced that if I had 24 hours to do whatever I wanted, the value those hours have is highly dependent on what I give my attention to in those 24 hours. Giving that time to stupid Twitter takes, clickbaity news, comparison-ramas on Instagram, and TikTok reels that teach me things that I find interesting but cannot recall, is the equivalent of betting $100 on the Seattle Mariners winning the World Series.⁵

We live in a toxic environment for stillness, for creative emergence, for deep focus. A cloud of mercury poisons how we use our time, and the only way to pushback is to ask ourselves: what am I paying attention to? Is it worthwhile? And does focusing on this bring me fulfillment? Does it set me up for both joy and contentment?

We are silly little beings

From the book of “How to Find Love” by The School of Life:⁶

“We should learn to tolerate ourselves, not by believing we are wonderful, but via a secure realisation that everyone is both OK and sometimes a bit awful…Of course we are a bit weak, a bit sly and a bit foolish, to put it gently. But so is everyone. We are no more idiotic or wayward than the next person.”

We are all silly humans. Our communion is based on our imperfection, how irrational and fallible we are, how we live in a sea of contradictions and double standards. That’s all part of being a human.

The realization of our shared silliness brings levity. It highlights the absurdity of most of the things we do every day, not in the sense of “it’s all absurd, so nothing matters,” more in the vein of “it’s all absurd, so maybe just chill.”

All of you are silly little humans that just spent ten minutes reading this because you were hoping that a collection of words that I’ve put together here would either entertain you or make you think. I’m a silly little human that types away letter after letter trying to say things concisely and well, all in the hopes that maybe, something I wrote would be useful to you.

You are a silly human. I’m a silly human. Looks like I’m in good company.

1. One of the perks of being pedantic is that I tend to think about what words really mean.

2. Except my version does tend to look like the version of God from the Simpsons, which would have driven my third grade Religion teacher mad.

3. He was an asshole boss, by the way. Also, it was hard to find direct attribution to him for this quote, but the general consensus online seems that it was plausible he said something like this.

4. To round out the metaphor, I would consider alkaline thoughts to be the equivalent of toxic positivity—vapid and hollow.

5. I’m still heartbroken. I mean why on earth would you, in a Game 7, not let your best pitcher face Toronto’s most dangerous hitters?

6. I bought the book but the lesson has not yet arrived, alas.