Good morning, Apexians. As you read this, my arctic cruise has set sail. I’m somewhere off the eastern coast of the U.K.
I’ve had a lot of people ask me why I’m doing this. Why am I taking a solo 23-day cruise? Largely, it’s an exercise in self-discovery. I’ve designated 2023 as “the year of me”, and I’m implementing that in a variety of ways. Over the past couple of months, I’ve come to realize that I’m tired of doing. I want to simply by for a while. This cruise is an opportunity for me to just be.
Today’s stories touch upon the relationship between doing and being…
The wisest person you know. [Money and Meaning] — “I swear to you, you’ll do more do more good in the world if you did nothing that if you did something. The only way this world could be better is if you operated with a clear definition of enough and stopped trying to achieve, accumulate, or acquire more than you actually need4: the second homes, the extra clothes, the nicer vacation. There is not outer solution for the interior problem. The disaster comes from inside.” [I &heart; this article.]
“Misconceptions I had about rural life.” [Frugalwoods] — “For [my husband] and me, the whole point of this lifestyle change was to let go of the city rat race, the external pressures and the societal expectations. We wanted to no longer work for other people and no longer constantly rush around. Rural life, for us, means joy, time, freedom and space.”
The parents saying “no” to smartphones. [The Free Press] — “For years, the risks have been clear as day among Silicon Valley’s brightest minds, including Bill Gates and Google’s Sundar Pichai, who famously kept smartphones away from their own kids, and Steve Jobs, who limited his children’s screen time altogether. But it has taken the Covid-19 pandemic for ordinary Americans to come to the same conclusion: that their kids had become dependent on their phones, and their school work suffered as a result.”
Today’s final story is a 13-minute video from the Einzelgänger YouTube channel. It’s about the Taoist art of “not trying”. The video takes a few minutes to get going, but at about the 3:30 mark it got interesting to me. (I found this video via the Money and Meaning article I linked above.)
Okay, that’s it for today. I’ll be back tomorrow with one final installment for this week. See you then.