The Unserious Half

I have never really grown out of this. The costume changed and the sword got confiscated, but the operating principle has held.

Most of life is Tuesday

Not the bad Tuesday. The ordinary one, where nothing is wrong and nothing is especially interesting either, and you have somewhere to be at ten. Nobody warns you what the ratio is going to be. The extraordinary days are real and they are rare, and if you have built a life that only works on those, you have built something that is switched off almost all of the time.

So I have spent a while thinking about crumbs.

If you took every genuinely small good thing out of one unremarkable day, the first sip while it is still too hot, the song that arrives at exactly the right moment, the dog you were not expecting, somebody holding a door about two seconds longer than they had to, and you saved them the way you would save crumbs, then by the end of a year you would have something you could actually eat. A meal. Probably several. Nobody has one enormous meal a year. That is not how eating works, and I do not think it is how living works either.

The accounting version

Here is the version I actually believe, and I am going to use the only vocabulary I have, which is unfortunately finance.

Most people try to raise their happiness by increasing revenue. Bigger wins, better news, more of everything. That works, briefly, and it is expensive and deeply unreliable, because almost none of the revenue line is up to you.

The other side of the statement is entirely up to you. Happiness has operating expenses. The grudge you are still carrying. The comparison you keep running. The thing you have not said to somebody. The room you will not clean. Every one of those is a fixed cost draining the account every single day, quietly, whether or not anything good happens to you.

Take the costs out and the arithmetic changes completely. If your expenses sit near zero, then any revenue at all, however small, leaves you positive. You do not need a good day. You need a day with nothing subtracting from it, and then the crumbs are enough on their own.

Profit does not have to clear the bar for happiness. It only has to be greater than zero, and greater than zero is contentment, and contentment is available on a Tuesday.

I am not claiming this gets you to joy. Joy has a threshold and there are weeks you will not clear it and should not pretend to. But a house of contentment is something you build by removing things, not by acquiring them, and it stands up in weather that joy simply does not.

So, the crumbs, collected on purpose

I take an unreasonable number of selfies, for nobody in particular. I film short videos of completely ordinary afternoons, because a year from now the ordinary afternoon is precisely the thing I am going to want back and it is the only thing nobody thinks to record.

I talk to myself constantly, out loud, and I tell myself jokes, and I find them funny. This is either a warning sign or the cheapest entertainment ever devised and I have made my decision about which.

And once a day, every day, I send somebody a compliment. A real one. Specific, unprompted, to somebody who was not expecting anything from me that morning.

I want to be honest that this is not selfless. It is the highest-return thing I have ever found. If a good day is dessert for your mouth, this is dessert for the heart, and watching what a genuine compliment does to a person, the small recalibration, the way they hold themselves slightly differently for the next minute, is genuinely unmatched by anything I can buy. It costs nothing. It takes about eleven seconds. I have never once regretted sending one and I have sent a great many.

Keep the expenses near zero. Collect the crumbs on purpose. That is the whole method, and it has never let me down on a Tuesday.

Water and training

I surf El Porto most mornings before class and teach lessons there on weekends. I am training for the Santa Cruz Half Ironman and race HYROX in Anaheim this December. I play lacrosse at USC, ran track, and played four years of football.

None of which explains why the best hours of any summer are the ones on a lake with a rope in your hand and no particular plan.

The kitchen

I invent recipes and make my friends eat the failed ones. I hold strong and mostly unwelcome positions on bulgogi, on grilled cheese, and on the correct Arnold Palmer ratio, which is more lemonade than anyone will admit.

Making things nobody asked for

Stand-up comedy. Small films with no audience. A journal nobody has read. I document my life obsessively, mostly on a camera, and I will put my face through any hole in any painted board I encounter, without hesitation, every single time.

The people, mostly

If I am honest, almost none of the above is really the point. The point is who is standing next to you while it happens, which is the sort of thing you are supposed to work out much later than I did.

And away from here

Prague at sunset. A harbour in Catalina. A fire road above the ocean at the end of a day. I take the camera everywhere and I am not sorry about it.

Reading for the mechanism

I read pathology and nutrition research for fun, which is a strange thing to put in the fun section. What I am after is never the headline, it is the mechanism. Not that sleep matters, but what glymphatic clearance is and why eight hours are not four plus four. Same instinct that makes me read a deal and want to know what was actually bought.

Teams