#41 - Cutting Waste

Hello to all, I hope you all are doing well. I had a talk with a couple buddies today that I haven’t seen since high school. They workout at the gym I recently joined. They are both good people and it’s awesome to talk to people in my age range and see how they are doing. It seems we are all on our own path. It’s a beautiful thing.

I think as we get older, we shed more and more of the bullshit that comes with being young. Don’t get me wrong, I make plenty of mistakes to this day, but when I think back at the idiocy of the way I thought in my teens, it brings me joy knowing how far I have come.

I do believe our decisions matter, of course, but when I look back, there are some bad decisions that made me realize some things that I needed to change about myself.

Something that helped me was cutting out a lot of the wasteful things I was doing on a regular basis, including Netflix, TV, keeping up with sports, and always scrolling through social media. I had formed this identity online that was so far removed from who I actually am.

Something else that helped me was learning how to ask questions and truly being curious into what was going on with myself and even other people. I love having conversations with people about real things happening in their life currently and most importantly things that happened in their life that made them who they are up to the point we met.

Conversation is a beautiful thing really. After all, for the general population, we are given the ability to speak with our mouths, which is crazy enough to have a 3 hour conversation by itself.

My theory is that because it is so easy to talk for most of us, we are bound to mess it up on it’s own, let alone in 2020 with the technology we have now. It seems like with most things, there are positives and negatives, and we must experiment ourselves to see what works for us.

Thankfully, I actually enjoy these experiments that we can try to better ourselves. The way I look at it is we are going to die so we might as well try and maximize our experience while we are here. That is easier said than done, but no one is coming for us, so at the end of the day it seems to be our responsibility to figure it out.

Peace

Ben