Learning how to move from my toddler:
If you have a toddler, I highly recommend considering them your movement teacher.
Children move very freely and effortlessly, without all the internal resistance and tension that we accumulate over a lifetime.
I notice this in particular when I watch our daughter pick up objects from the floor. Unlike me, who bends down forward to perform this action, she effortlessly squats down.
The squat, of course is the much more efficient and healthy way to do this, in fact it is one of the most essential movements and increasingly used as a measure of youthfulness by the longevity community.
It is just something we unlearn.
By playing with children we can slowly but surely regain our ability to move in an optimal way.
Frank Capra’s “It’s a wonderful life” is one of the most iconic movies of all time. One of its most remarkable scenes is when George Bailey finds out his bank is encountering “all the earmarks of […] a run”, his customers desperately trying to withdraw their balances.
“You’re thinking of this place all wrong… as if I have the money back in the safe. The money is not here. Your money is in Joe’s house that’s right next to yours […]”
We encountered such a run in March 2023 resulting in the collapse of Silicon Valley and Signature Bank. The run would have undoubtedly spread to other banks if the government had not intervened.
Of course, the consensus narrative is that a lot of banks are too big to fail and that governments should jump in to save them at all costs.
This effectively means that 1) we have invited banks to privatize profits and socialize losses leading to ever recurring cycles of unscrupulous profiteering and 2) the government is now our bank. Not exactly what had been advertised to us as the glorious creative destruction of capitalism.
The next shoe to drop is a run on our new bank, the government. Governments are ever more indebted and their creditors have started to decide that this is somewhat concerning.
Now, the government has already deemed itself too big to fail and is intervening by buying plenty of its own debt. This is when we know the end is near or at least that it is all downhill from here.
#Bitcoin, the ultimate schmuck insurance against government overspending, is trading at all time highs.
https://soirbleu.medium.com/a-wonderful-bank-run-8a4fef576de5
Frank Capra’s “It’s a wonderful life” is one of the most iconic movies of all time. One of its most remarkable scenes is when George Bailey finds out his bank is encountering “all the earmarks of […] a run”, his customers desperately trying to withdraw their balances.
“You’re thinking of this place all wrong… as if I have the money back in the safe. The money is not here. Your money is in Joe’s house that’s right next to yours […]”
We encountered such a run in March 2023 resulting in the collapse of Silicon Valley and Signature Bank. The run would have undoubtedly spread to other banks if the government had not intervened.
Of course, the consensus narrative is that a lot of banks are too big to fail and that governments should jump in to save them at all costs.
This effectively means that 1) we have invited banks to privatize profits and socialize losses leading to ever recurring cycles of unscrupulous profiteering and 2) the government is now our bank. Not exactly what had been advertised to us as the glorious creative destruction of capitalism.
The next shoe to drop is a run on our new bank, the government. Governments are ever more indebted and their creditors have started to decide that this is somewhat concerning.
Now, the government has already deemed itself too big to fail and is intervening by buying plenty of its own debt. This is when we know the end is near or at least that it is all downhill from here.
#Bitcoin, the ultimate schmuck insurance against government overspending, is trading at all time highs.
https://soirbleu.medium.com/a-wonderful-bank-run-8a4fef576de5I can’t handle Bitcoin’s recent volatility
This week I had the great privilege of attending a group session with Dick Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems (IFS) at Blue Spirit in Costa Rica. IFS is a form of therapy I have been fascinated with for a while because it so deeply resonates with some of my own meditation experiences.
In IFS you identify distinct parts of your mind that play different roles to help you manage your life. In many of us these parts are overburdened or excessive and they can often be confused with our identity leading to suffering and confusion.
IFS is a system of techniques to unburden these parts and live from Self-leadership, i.e. guided by our true nature.
The session I attended was an unburdening session in which a person from our group sat with Dick and he helped her unburden a real part she is encountering in her life. The session was powerful to say the least, both in its impact and the short time in which it was accomplished.
IFS is deeply complementary with the practice of meditation because both practices aim to recognize self-essence or awake awareness. The unburdening of parts is very beneficial to this project.
Pura Vida
… from Nosara airport
This is big! Kyrill Sokoloff, who is one of Wall Street’s most famous investment strategists and has some of the wealthiest individuals in the world in his client list, just doubled the weight of Bitcoin in his list of high conviction ideas.
At meditation retreats, the group naturally asks the teacher a lot of questions, usually about their experience or practice.
An interesting phenomenon is that what the typical answer to these questions boils down to is something along the lines of: “I think you need to be intimate with it”.
Sure, there are pointers and abstractions and an excellent teacher will have a tremendous impact on the student’s practice merely through their presence, but when it comes to gaining a deeper understanding, the only way is through one’s own contemplation.
Only through greater intimacy with whatever blocker we’re encountering can we make progress.
One teacher I have had would always say: “Don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself”.
I used to apologize a lot. It’s ok and important to apologize for doing something wrong. It’s not ok to apologize for being ourselves.
And yet that’s what we do a lot of the time, implicitly or explicitly. Our culture has conditioned us to be very worried to offend someone, hence a lot of us walk through life in a constant, pre-emptive posture of apology.
This is suffocating our ability to self-express… through art but even in day-to-day situations.
Think about how much more enriching your interactions could be if you weren’t so worried about offending someone… even in little ways. And then create a little bit of space for that possibility.
My comment under the FT’s most recent cope piece
This week I’m attending a meditation retreat in Costa Rica and in conversations with some older participants one thing that is becoming clear is that most of them wish they had practiced meditation earlier in their lives.
Why is that?
I believe it’s because there is no more important practice in life than becoming intimate with consciousness and experience.
Most of us think we can get what we want first… and then be happy.
That’s not how life works. If you are not a person that knows how to live a meaningful and fulfilled life now, money and success are not suddenly going to make you one.
On the contrary. If you have had to compromise your health, integrity and relationships in order to become successful, these capacities are awfully hard to restore later in life.
And if these capacities are compromised, familiarizing yourself with consciousness increasingly becomes an uphill battle.
What’s the price of #Bitcoin at which governments will step in one way or another?
Make no mistake, they can’t just let BTC go to 500k let alone higher.
Not one word from the Financial Times about the recent Bitcoin rally… shameful
It’s not what you think!
Sometimes we fall in love with music in a moment of susceptibility and it’s less the music and more the momentary susceptibility that’s responsible.
But when I heard Nothing Matters by British band Last Dinner Party for the first time, I immediately felt that this was music that stood out from the mediocre sludge our ears are mostly exposed to these days.
Now, I admit that my potential bias was unveiled soon after, when I read that Last Dinner Party works with James Ford the go-to producer of my favorite band Arctic Monkeys.
And yet, there is something new here: Last Dinner Party to me sound like a baroque blend of Queen, Abba and Arctic Monkeys with a pinch of feminist lyrics that somehow manage to charm rather than alienate the listener.
Later I found out that I was far from the only one who had heard something special: Last Dinner Party’s star is already on the rise, having been voted BBC Sound of the Year 2024 amongst other honours.
A lot more to come.
A famous Zen mantra is that you ought to practice “as if your hair is on fire”. The hope, of course, is to instill a sense of urgency in the student.
However, there is an insight here as well: Meditators including myself often think that they first need to accumulate a certain number of hours of practice before earning enlightenment.
This is not how meditation works. While practice can help improve concentration, it’s not what is actually needed for deeper consciousness. Deeper consciousness arises through true openness and intent.
Openness and intent are not practiced, they are qualities that are either here in this very moment or they are not.
If there is no urgency, we divert our attention to distractions and fantasies. If the house is on fire, we will try to save some parts of ourselves. If our hair is on fire, there is nothing left to save and all attention is on the project at hand.
I’m sitting in Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and there’s a couple next to me debating about the trajectory of interest rates. They look like pretty normal people.
Normal people are not supposed to have to talk about interest rates on a Friday evening as they’re heading into their weekend together. Nay, they are not supposed to have to talk about interest rates at all.
And yet our central bank is now forcing anyone who would like their savings to be protected to care about the yield curve and outcomes from the FOMC meeting.
Think about the absurdity of this for a second. It’s the reason why Elon Musk feels compelled to post tweets like this on a Friday afternoon:
X (formerly Twitter)
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on X
There’s a brighter future ahead.
Low Time Preference
Time preference is an economic term to describe the relative value of consuming a good or service today vs. in the future. A high time preference means that a large discount is placed on future consumption and therefore very little consumption is delayed.
One primary mediator of time preference is interest rates. The lower interest rates are the less we’re incentivized to delay consumption. Other mediators can be economic uncertainty or a society’s age.
Despite recent increases in interest rates we still live in a time of historically low rates. The result is a historically high time preference.
This is part of the reason why our society doesn’t value time. We are infamous for overconsumption, procrastination and indebtedness.
We over-consume because we don’t know whether our money will still allow us to consume the same amount in the future.
We procrastinate because it’s not clear that delayed gratification will pay off.
We indebt ourselves because debt is the only way to create economic value quickly enough to counterbalance monetary inflation.
If you are my age, it’s hard to remember a world of low time preference. A world where there were no obese people, where the products we bought were made to last, where leverage was not worn as a badge of honor.
I post here daily:
https://soirbleu.medium.com/low-time-preference-fe355efe1c91The Tibetan word for meditation translates roughly to “familiarize”. The project of meditation is not to achieve a certain blissful state. It’s to become conscious of our true nature and to then familiarize ourselves with it.
Usually the meditator, even if he has reached enlightenment, will still encounter situations or emotions that will trigger contraction and confusion, leading to suffering.
Familiarization allows him increasingly to avoid such regression. My teacher Loch Kelly uses the mantra: “train to remain and learn to return” to instill this intentionality in his students.
We walk around life with a solid and relatively continuous identity. This allows us to interact effectively with others and with our environment. I suspect that it is for this reason that we categorize as disorders patterns where an individual changes their identity frequently and dramatically.
Sometimes in life, the identity we have formed is increasingly less compatible with others and or a new environment it finds itself in. This causes suffering for the individual.
We typically seek self-help books or therapy to find out why this discrepancy is occuring.
Another approach is mindfulness or contemplation. These are methods where we step away from our intellectual problem solving mind and instead create space for new understanding to arise.
The space created through these practices allows our identity to shift into a more aligned configuration.
Often, after longer meditation retreats, I have experienced that slow but noticeable shifts in my identity occurred as space was created.
Peter Ralston calls this the lava syndrome: As the volcanic rock of our identities is heated up it is allowed to reshape itself. Later, as life cool down, a new identity is set in stone, hopefully aligned with a more fulfilling life.
