I’m trying to learn more about ideological subversion, specifically the KGB-backed, bring-down-the-USA kind. Last week I linked to this NYT Op-Ed that serves as a kind of broad introduction to the concept. This week I read a post on Paul Orlando’s blog Unintended Consequences that gets into some more details. (The post is concise and illuminating, please click through and read.) Orlando summarizes the four stages of ideological subversion as outlined by ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov:
Category: Personal Updates Page 4 of 10
Recently I celebrated my birthday, in person, with dozens of vaccinated friends and family members. It was a joyful occasion and I felt and still feel deeply grateful.
But every new year of my life brings new questions. Here are just a few that I’m pondering at the moment:
- How do I co-raise a teenager? My daughter just turned 13. I recently had this breakthrough, but I have so many more questions.
- What’s the next step in my writing career? I have a novel coming out in September. I have two new novels in progress, one in second draft form, another with the first draft nearly complete. But I’m not sure I should even try to get them published yet. Maybe I should go back to short fiction first.
- What am I doing with music? I still co-own a record label, but we haven’t been very active lately. But I still enjoy making music with my friends, and intend to keep doing so. But how much time should I invest, and what are the opportunity costs?
- How do I best protect my health and health span in the coming years?
- What can I do to prevent my country from going down the drain? How do I best fight against voter suppression, corporate lobbyists, and opportunistic, hate-mongering agents of chaos like Donald Trump?
- What can I do to help reverse human-driven climate change? Or are we past the point of no return?
- What is the fastest way I can achieve financial freedom, which would allow me to travel more and work fewer hours?
I’m guessing 100% of the people who read this post will be asking themselves at least one of the questions above.
That’s all I have this week. No answers — just questions. Feel free to share your own questions and experiences in the comments.
Wow — what a decade.
For me it was a fast ten years. My forties whizzed by. Mostly good. A quick review:
Highlights
- Being a dad/watching my child grow up.
- Staying happily married.
- Developing a daily writing habit and improving my craft.
- Becoming a published science fiction author.
- Continuing to make music with my friends.
- Recovering my physical and mental health after some rough patches (gastritis, insomnia, anxiety-depression).
- Developing and implementing an investment plan and getting richer, achieving a level of financial security.
Self-knowledge/lessons learned
- For me, slow and steady is almost always the best approach. Occasional sprints are fine, but only with sufficient rest and relaxation in-between. Trying to maintain a “push” pace for extended amounts of time isn’t worth it for me, and just leads to chronic stress.
- I need a lot of exercise to feel my best. Multiple hours of walking every day, strength exercise almost every day, and ideally some kind of competitive sport at least once a week (the latter which I have sorely missed during pandemic).
- What feels to me like a minor expression of anger can read much larger/angrier to others, so I need to carefully control this (especially around my kid — big parenting lesson).
- Daily meditation, even for very short amounts of time, yields outsized results (in terms of emotional clarity, creative inspiration, and stress reduction).
- Creative expression (writing and/or music) is essential for my mental health, regardless of if those efforts lead to any kind of external success (getting published, sales, reviews, etc.).
What I’m aiming for this coming decade
- Being a good dad, husband, son, friend, and citizen (being loving, kind, empathetic, loyal, strong, helpful).
- Getting better at writing and making music.
- Creating one or more “hits” — creative work that deeply connects with a very large number of people.
- Getting physically stronger, improving my health.
- Achieving financial freedom (a level of wealth that enables more travel, majority of income from passive sources, ability to donate large amounts to favorite charitable causes, a few luxury items).
- Doing what I can to improve my country (less political corruption, more public wealth/investment, more critical thinking and evidence-based governance).
What about you, kind reader? What were the highlights of your last ten years? How will you make the next decade a great one?
Hello readers. Just a short post to let everyone know I am alive and how I am dealing with lockdown. Like 99% of the planet I am chilling at home looking at a lot of exponential graphs. In the Bay Area we are beginning to see a flattening of new COVID-19 cases which is cause for cautious optimism. But at this point it could still go either way. I am disheartened by the many failures of our global leaders, not only Trump for his willful ignorance but also China for information suppression. There is plenty of blame to go around.
Unrelated to the post, but Bumblebee was parked in front of my house yesterday.
I got back from my uncle’s funeral service a few hours ago. It was belated for various reasons — he died over a year ago — but the service was well-attended, in a beautiful location, and I feel as if we did right by him.
Both my father-in-law and my uncle passed away around the same time last year. For a few months my stress levels redlined and I had difficulty sleeping, but after I’d had a chance to grieve and the bulk of the end-of-life logistics were handled for both family members, I settled into a more reflective state. It’s been good to consider my own mortality, and the mortality of my friends and family. It’s easier to prioritize what’s important when I consider the relative imminence and unavoidability of death. I frequently let my family and friends know that I love them, I work on my big ideas, and I do the things I would regret not doing were my life to be cut short.
But I hope that my life continues for a very long time, because I’m enjoying it immensely. In terms of external life metrics such as finances and career, I’m doing fine, but what’s really making me happy are the following: