I remember a surreal moment about twenty years ago, which felt like the beginning of something bad, and it was.

I was at a bowling alley with some friends, and a few people in our group were talking about Facebook. I knew what it was but had no interest in it. Then one of them turned to me and said, “There’s lots of pictures of you on Facebook!”

This kind of stunned me and I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t joined this website but somehow I was one of its features.

A year later all of us were using it. It was exciting at first, because it seemed to give us more access to the people in our lives. We could post photos, make plans, and stay connected to a wider circle of people.

I should note for younger readers that the term “people” at that time only referred to real, physical beings: persons with bodies that walked and drove around and did things. Having friends largely meant physically traveling to the same apartment, bowling alley, restaurant, or movie theater, positioning our bodies amongst each other in this physical space, and interacting using our faces and voices and hearts. The part of your life that consisted of this type of physical activity was called social life.

Social media was meant to facilitate this thing called social life. Facebook’s original purpose was to keep you in touch with people who would otherwise fall out of your social circle, namely people you went to school with.

It didn’t really do that. It mostly became a thing to do on your computer by yourself. Within a few years, social media came to be seen as a sort of processed-food version of social life: convenient, low-quality sustenance that should not make up most of your diet. It still seemed like food though, just crappy food.

I’ve been complaining about social media forever by this point, and so has everyone else. But a recent effort to actively rebuild my social life has revealed something about how these two things relate. Social media isn’t a cheap and inadequate facsimile of social life; it’s its exact opposite. It isn’t worse than social life at fostering personal connection, it undoes personal connection and reverses our social skills.

This is because social media doesn’t really allow you to interact with people. People are living beings with beating hearts and live emotions. Social life has always been about engaging in the immediate physical presence of such beings. Social media avoids exactly that part, while allowing you to exchange information and symbols of approval.

In a real social interaction, you’re entangled with the other person, physically and emotionally, in real time. Eyes are looking, faces are expressing, and emotions are humming, one hundred percent of the time. It’s nothing like browsing content or sending off messages — it’s much more akin to riding a horse. Moment-to-moment care is required. It can take you to all kinds of new places, but it has its hazards. You have to stay alert, watch your footing, and keep your heart open to this other living thing you’re entangled with. Doing it badly can lead to a nasty upset or even physical danger.

Online, you don’t interact with living beings. You interact with filtered bits of data issued by unseen, presumably living beings – messages, pictures, links, memes. Each party communicates like a paranoid medieval king, who sends out heralds to convey his latest position, then raises the drawbridge again.

Real interaction isn’t information exchange. It involves performing a host of specific, right-brained skills, all at once – how to get someone’s attention in a way agreeable to them, how to explore their preferred topic, how to take offense gracefully, where to put your eyes and your body, how to know when to unpack and when to summarize, and a lot more.

It all must be done live, with an audience. The human being is built for this sort of thing, but it still has to be learned by doing. The voice, face, body, and heart can work together the way a competent driver’s hands, feet, and eyes operate the steering wheel, gas pedal, turn signal, and mirror as though they’re one. When it’s really clicking, it’s a beautiful thing.

And none of it resembles in any way what you do when you thumb through an app. Social media is just a kind of solitary data processing game. You can exchange information while staying safe from the delicate challenges of real interaction. You can issue your opinions without the heat of real eyes looking at you. You can feel heard, and engage with “the world,” without ever having to account for the immediate presence of another person’s heart.

I think that’s why social media remains somewhat irresistible to many of us. The human being has powerful cravings for certain social rewards – approval, status, reassurance — but would like to have them without the hazards of real social life. Mucking up a real interaction is painful, and if your skills are poor, improving them is a major trial. Social media walls off all that trouble, while allowing some of the low-level rewards to come through, in the form of likes, stars, hearts, and other fake internet points. You can enjoy these scraps of approval while the wall shields you from the heat and danger of real-time entanglement with another human being.

These platforms now offer filters to make sure only the agreeable bits of other people come through. If someone gets annoying, you can mute them. You can filter out messages containing particular words. The algorithm will learn your intolerances, and show you only the parts of others that require less of your empathy and understanding. It’s no wonder that many people pride themselves on having zero tolerance for differences of political opinion — that degree of intolerance is actually possible now.

I’m sure some people have figured out how to use this technology to aid social life. But I think most of us have ended up using it unwittingly to the exact opposite effect, as protection against social life.

I guess what I’ve discovered, or re-discovered, is that social life was always a matter of physical action. It’s about getting your body into proximity with other bodies, of physically entering the voice- and heart-radius of other people. It involves things like dressing in front of a mirror, finding parking, entering buildings, shaking hands. It’s sitting across from people in living rooms, restaurants, and church basements. This sounds so obvious typing it out, but somehow I forgot for about twenty years.

***

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The human being is an enjoyment-seeking creature. There’s a reason people are always trying to restrain themselves from excessive eating, drinking, scrolling, and shopping. It’s perfectly normal to pursue these and other pleasures even to the point of serious problems and early death.

Even though we are born enjoyment-mongers, we tend to overlook the greatest and most reliable source of enjoyment, which is our ability to consciously enjoy the stuff that happens anyway. We barely even talk about it.

For example, you probably sit down in a chair or on a couch ten or fifteen times a day. You can easily enjoy each of these instances of sitting down, if you make a point of it. It can feel great to relax into any decent chair. But how many times do you sit down without relishing it even a bit?

The pleasure of relaxing into a chair isn’t as intense as the pleasure of chocolate-coated hazelnuts or rapid-fire video memes. But it’s still more than worthwhile, and it’s free. You don’t have to go out of your way to access this source of pleasure, and it doesn’t gradually kill you or make you depressed. (I suspect it does the opposite.)

As far as I can tell, virtually every moment offers many such sources of enjoyment, if you can learn to enjoy things consciously and voluntarily. You can, if you intend to, enjoy the dappled light on the breakfast table, the gentle hug of your socks on your feet, or your smoothly-running vehicle — any aspect of the moment you recognize as welcome, helpful, pleasant, or beautiful.

Indulging in these pleasures does not require a special sentimental mood, or the conditions of your life to feel favorable in general. They only require a moment of voluntary appreciation for a single good thing.

You already know how to do this: you know how to enjoy a good stretch, to bask in the sun, to savor the smell of fresh bread. But we don’t make great use of this talent, for some reason. I think there’s something about our modern consumer-brains that regards pleasure as a thing to be acquired and consumed, often in such concentrated doses that conscious intention isn’t needed. Chocolate cookies, social media notifications, and Scotch whisky are so intensely dopaminergic that they dominate your attention the moment they enter your experience. The pleasures offered by the other 99% of life – the gleaming sky, the softness of your mattress, the hug of your scarf – have to be attended to on purpose or they usually don’t register.

Sometimes life’s more subtle pleasures do force your attention this way, because of the circumstances of the moment. If you come in from the cold, and someone offers you a steaming cup of tea, it’s hard not to notice how great it is. Everything about it seems wonderful: the rich color, the scent of bergamot, the bloom of steam that warms your face when you take a sip.

A cup of tea always offers these same pleasures, but in most circumstances they won’t grab you by the lapels like that. In such a case, it only takes a small but conscious intention to look for its rich color and feel for the bloom of warmth rising up your face. The tea’s gifts are there already, awaiting your attention.

This sort of latent enjoyability often gets revealed whenever you slow down your consumption speed. I’ve remarked before on how elastic the enjoyability of food is, for example: if you eat at half the speed and pay more attention, you get far more enjoyment out of the same amount of food.

Enjoyment always requires attention. It’s just that some pleasures force your attention to them, and most don’t. Depending on these attention-forcing sources of pleasure leads to a preoccupation with the more intense ones, which tend to be sugary, intoxicating, mind-rotting, or costly in some other way.

Every moment offers pleasures

When you learn to cultivate enjoyment voluntarily, you don’t need to depend so much on those intense and costly pleasure sources. That’s because literally every moment offers many sources of enjoyment, if you’re looking for them.

Bare sense pleasures are a more obvious kind – the warmth in the room, the caress of clothing, the bright sky, the heat of fresh coffee. But you can also appreciate more subtle aspects of the moment in the same way: the presence of a person you trust, the great selection of books on your shelves, the full water bottle you have with you, your ability to read and write, your back being free of pain today. Even though they are subtle, they are concrete experiences that can be noticed and enjoyed, and they are abundant at all times.

How to enjoy things all day long

Here’s one reliable way to practice voluntary enjoyment. This was the most popular exercise in the recent Raptitude Field Trip group:

At any moment you can ask yourself: what is happening here and now that’s pleasant, beautiful, or helpful?

Don’t just identify it. Find the experience itself — the actual sight, sound or feeling, and consciously enjoy it.

This might sound like another dull gratitude exercise, but it’s not. You’re not just identifying a “positive” thing and telling yourself you’re lucky to have that. You’re locating the good feeling on offer in the present, and enjoying it on purpose.

Again, you already know how to do this. You know how to let the sunlight massage your skin. You know how to relish the feeling of pulling a blanket around your shoulders. You know how to appreciate the presence of a loved one.

You can do the same thing with ten thousand other things: your ability to stand up without pain, the multi-monitor setup that makes work so much easier, the walls keeping out the cold, the Zenlike presence of your cat, the incredible gang of smart colleagues in your Rolodex, a deep breath, a photograph on your wall, a window in your line of sight, and countless other gifts.

I reiterate that identifying these gifts is not enough. After you recognize one, you then consciously experience and enjoy it. You really can enjoy that you have a cup of water next to you. You can enjoy having clothes on your body. You can enjoy that you could text Jim any time and he’d try to help you.

Notice that your ability to appreciate these gifts does not depend on mood, or on any other condition being favorable in your life. You are always surrounded by countless favorable conditions that can be relished and enjoyed, regardless of the presence of unfavorable ones.

When you do this exercise, don’t try to appreciate every single favorable thing (not that you ever could). Just enjoy one or two of them and move on. It takes seconds.

But do it frequently. Become this more skillful kind of pleasure seeker, an enjoyer of the stuff that happens anyway. Never go to bed without properly basking in the glorious pleasure of lying in a bed under the covers. Everything is like that, all day long.

***

You can still join Raptitude Field Trip 2 if you want to learn this and other Raptitude exercises. The main group has finished but you can do it on your own. The forum is still open and some of us are always hanging around.

There should be a German compound word for the emotion you feel when you encounter a famous thing and realize you’d never actually seen it until that moment. (Ikonerwachen?)

I had seen a thousand images of the Sydney Opera House before my gaze landed on it unexpectedly as I was crossing the harbour bridge in 2010. I knew its iconic look from movies, travel websites, clipart collections, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego — but only at that moment did I realize I’d never seen it before.

This happened again with the planet Saturn. From Mauna Kea in Hawaii, I saw the ringed planet in perfect focus through a large reflecting telescope, and it was spectacular. Voyager 1 photographs and textbook diagrams did not prepare my heart to see a real, physical object, hanging there before my eyes in empty space.

When I visited New York I had no intention of seeing the Statue of Liberty, because I understood it to be the most overexposed tourist attraction in the USA. On a dreary day in Battery Park, my heart stopped when my eyes caught her unmistakable shape way out in the water. Only at that moment did I feel her actual charisma and meaning. Finally I was experiencing the reason I had absorbed so many ideas about her in the first place.

In none of these cases did I believe the thing in question was worth seeking out, which is why those encounters were all accidental. I really thought my ideas about them were enough to “get it.” But I didn’t get it at all until I saw the originals.

This is a shame, because it’s the most notable things that attract the most preconceptions. The more unique and meaningful an object is to human beings, the more likely it is that your first, second, and hundredth encounters with it will be bloodless depictions of that object. Over your life you’ll absorb countless views of the thing – opinions, caricatures, bad art, knowing jokes – before you experience the real reason all those views exist, if you ever do.

For example, you probably can’t listen to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik without thinking of commercials and bad comedy films using it to satirize rich households. With the best stuff, there’s always so much baggage, and the baggage arrives first.

Even when you do manage to access the original, it can be hard to disentangle it from your preconceptions. If you think classical music sounds snooty or pretentious, pay close attention to your thoughts as you listen. Images of fussy rich people don’t come from how the music sounds — they come from mental associations with other media that depict it that way. If you go to an orchestral performance, you will probably (1) not find it boring and stuffy, and (2) find yourself surrounded by middle class people wearing their second-best outfits.

It’s inevitable that the originals will get much less attention than ideas about them, but this problem is multiplying. The further we move into the information age, the more our sense of the world comes from content about notable things, and content about that content, rather than the notable things themselves. Jean Baudrillard predicted that culture would reach a point where everything is commentary about commentary and nobody even remembers what the original stuff was. (I mean, maybe he said that – I’ve never read any of his books.)

Imagine a dystopian world, conceived by Aldous Huxley, in which a citizen is not allowed to see a classic film without first completing a years-long curriculum of gushing and contrarian reviews, behind-the-scenes documentaries, exposés on its stars, homages, memes, satires, merchandise, satires of the merchandise, homages to the satires, and retrospective thinkpieces about the type of society we’d have to be to produce such a work today. Every great thing in this world is buried beneath sedimentary layers of commentary, telling what you will see and what you have seen, all from people who have never produced anything a fraction as good. 

This isn’t too far from our situation. The best and most notable stuff is usually understood backwards. First you encounter loads of commentary looking back on some universally renowned thing. Then, years later, you might get a chance to see what that thing is.

Note that the second part – seeing what’s really there – often doesn’t happen at all. I complain about news media all the time, and this is yet another reason to view it with great skepticism. The genre consists entirely of monetized depictions of things you are expected never to examine with your own senses: foreign conflicts, video clips with context added by partisan actors, bills and studies you will never read. You’re not meant to do the second part, and if you do, you will (I hope) lose all faith in the medium.

I’ll end my old man rant there. All of this is to say I strongly recommend seeking the originals. All the images and ideas that coalesce around notable things, those free-floating impressions that enter your head first, are lesser than the thing that inspired them. Anyone can make ideas and opinions; almost no one can make a cathedral, or a book that will be studied for centuries.

Go to the original. Seek out those things you’ve heard about all your life, especially if you think you know what their deal is.

When you do access an original, try to see the thing itself, as it might have looked in its time. Read the Declaration of Independence like it’s about to be angrily mailed to the king of England. Put on Revolver like it’s 1966 and the last Beatles song you remember is Ticket to Ride. Then think about that guy you know who says they’re overrated.

If you focus on the original, almost always you will find something profound, and it’s never quite what you’d guess. There’s a reason every great original has moved so many human hearts: it’s so good that pundits can’t convey its magic to you. If they could, they would have made it themselves.

***

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My cat refuses all medicine because she doesn’t understand the benefits. Nothing can make her see that having bitter liquid squirted into her mouth will prevent her from getting intestinal worms.

So I have to force the matter by wrapping her in a towel like a burrito, so that she can’t fight back. I’m sure she sees it as pointless cruelty.

Because of her erroneous views and suspicious nature, I have to trick her to make this happen. To get a cat who rejects modern medicine into a towel-burrito, experts say to lay the towel flat on the floor for a day or two, occasionally leaving a treat in the middle. The cat will soon start loitering around the towel, eventually laying on it, waiting for it to produce its magic bounty. Then you spring the trap.

Even after that, the cat will still worship this mysterious, treat-giving towel. It’s been two years since I’ve had to give my cat medicine, but she will still keep vigil, eyes hopeful, on any towel left laying flat somewhere. I’ve turned her into a sort of one-cat cargo cult.

Of course, I can see exactly how she misunderstands the situation. The light of my knowledge shines in places that are dark to her. I know I’m giving her vital medicine; she thinks I’m humiliating her for no reason.

In hindsight, it is possible that she’s right and I’m wrong. Maybe this dewormer stuff is snake oil, sold to me by a crooked veterinarian, and I’m just humiliating her out of a nonsense belief that cats get “worms” in their bodies if you don’t squirt this special formula into their mouths. Now who’s the cultist?

It’s true that I could have done some research to evaluate that possibility. I didn’t, because I already felt like I knew.

The job of a belief is to look like reality

If you try to remember the moment you came to “know” a given thing, you usually can’t pinpoint it. You might remember reading it somewhere, or hearing people say it. In any case, it’s unlikely you got it from an unassailable chain of logic and deduction.

If a new idea seems to jive with other things you’ve read or heard, it will probably become canonical to your worldview right there and then. Now it’s just another thing you “know,” whether or not it’s true.

Beliefs are tricky in that they’re just thoughts, but they blend into reality like chameleons. If you wake up on a Thursday and believe it’s Friday, you experience that day as a Friday like any other, until the moment you don’t believe it’s Friday anymore. The job of a belief is to stand in for truth, to look and feel exactly like it, whether or not it ultimately corresponds to reality.

Everyone is the one exception to the rule

To stay sane in the age of angry opinion-havers, it’s helpful to recognize that beliefs have this chameleon quality built right into them. They always look like truths, as long as they’re yours.

Think of beliefs like dollar bills, in a world where many or most dollar bills are counterfeit. They get passed around freely, most never come under real examination, and tons of them are bogus.

The crazy-making part is that each person regards each of their dollars as genuine currency. After all, if you thought one of your bills was counterfeit, you’d throw it away, so it wouldn’t be yours anymore.

This means that to you, all of your beliefs always appear right. Someone else might identify some of them as funny money, when you insist that sharks don’t get cancer, or when you share your solution to Israel-Palestine at the dinner table. Yet each person can’t help but regard all of their own current beliefs as the real deal, otherwise they wouldn’t believe them.

This is an extremely weird condition to be in, and we’re all in it. The only reason to think you’ve got things right, that the world you see is the real world, is that you’re you.

The worst hobby

Bad things happen when you combine the self-affirming nature of beliefs with a habit of consuming lots of morally-charged content.

Many people make a daily routine of consuming large quantities of highly partisan content about “what’s going on” in “the” “world.” Enthusiasts of this hobby call it “staying informed,” and insist it isn’t just a personal habit but a civic duty.

[See also: Nobody Knows What’s Going On]

This content consists of new beliefs (“news” for short) about what happened today or yesterday, presented with an authoritative tone and little moral ambiguity. They identify clear villains and clear implications. They often give instructions from hand-selected experts on how smart people should think about this.

The only filter on the consumer end is whether these new beliefs seem to jive with existing ones. They usually do, because most of those existing beliefs were gained the same way. The moral of every news story is, “You’re right again!”

A chronic side-effect of this hobby is righteous hatred for people not in accordance with your sense that you are right again, even when the issues are admittedly complex. Why can’t that guy have only non-counterfeit bills, like I do?! He believes a thing that isn’t true! What a bad person!

Political actors, who thrive on simple narratives and inter-class hatred, encourage this worst hobby.

A simple habit for staying sane

So what do we do, given that all of us carry lots of fake dollars, and they all look absolutely real?

Aside from taking frequent, long breaks from the worst hobby ever, one powerful defense against the “I’m the exception” problem was suggested by eccentric writer Robert Anton Wilson.

He recommended adding a habitual “maybe” to your inner and outer pronouncements, even if (or especially if) you don’t think it’s warranted.

• That policy is exactly what we need. Maybe.
• I can’t get anything done in the evenings. Maybe.
• Anyone who believes [blank] is an idiot. Maybe.
• There’s no good reason to vote for that person. Maybe.
• Astrology is total nonsense. Maybe.

This indiscriminate maybe doesn’t tell you which beliefs are right. But it reminds you that you don’t only possess true beliefs, and that your bad ones always look like good ones.

It also makes your statement more palatable to most people, and probably more true.

More importantly, it undermines hatred and fanaticism. It’s hard to imagine righteous violence sustaining itself in the presence of any amount of “maybe.”

***

Last call for Raptitude Field Trip!

There’s still time to sign up for Raptitude Field Trip 2.

Here’s how I described it before:

The Field Trip is a fun and lightweight mini-course for helping people discover the hidden riches in day-to-day life, which is what this blog is all about. I try to keep the whole program about as cheap as ordering a large pizza.

It starts officially on February 10 so don’t wait. (You can sneak in a little late but not too late.)

Sign up now

Why do we have Raptitude Field Trips? This post explains.

***

A longtime reader emails me every five years or so, to say that he still thinks of me every morning when he makes his bed. Back in 2009 I wrote a post about the psychological benefit of immediately making your bed when you wake up. (It’s an easy little mission that gets you shaping your day right away – a foolproof first move to carpe your diem.)

There’s a different reader I think of on a daily basis, one who invited me to visit him at his home in Norway. While I was there, he gave me an AeroPress coffeemaker and showed me his brewing method. After spilling hot coffee grounds all over his kitchen on my first attempt, I got the hang of it. I still think of him for a moment every single morning, when I stir the grounds with the bamboo stick he gave me.

When I’m at the car wash, I always think of my dad, because he once said, “Nothing gets clean without the foamy brush.” I always use the foamy brush and my car always comes out looking great. It’s a bit of my dad’s insight living on in me, among many other bits.

I like that things work this way. Ideas and ways of doing can zap between minds, and make a home in the new person. From there they can zap to other people’s minds and so on. After you die, someone may still be tying their shoes your way, or making chicken soup your way — maybe whole families of people, who knows.

Take my ideas, please

I publish blog posts here hoping that I can zap some of the best things I’ve discovered about being human into other people’s minds. I write weird posts about obscure mental practices because I want people to do them. If people do them, they might really get them, and if people get them, the ideas I’m trying to get across here can finally deliver their value.

I want people to do these odd practices because the cost is so low compared to the benefit. Playing the secret ally to strangers, for example, takes thirty seconds of your attention here or there, and can transform your relationship to public spaces, strangers, and society as a whole. Imagining the disappearance of your friends (or your socks) for ten seconds can make almost any ordinary moment feel like a gift. That’s a very good deal! I want people to be doing this stuff after I’m dead and gone.

Different people click with different ideas of course, but if you’re a regular reader, presumably you must believe there’s something actionable here for you, something you could pick up and make a part of your life.

Ideas don’t work as long as they remain ideas

Many readers say they print out their favorite Raptitude posts, presumably in the hope that doing so will turn the initial spark of recognition, the feeling of “Hey, I should do that!” into a thing they actually do in their lives. The reader in Norway showed me a binder he made of some of my posts. A few people have mailed me copies of bound books they made from their favorites.

I’m always printing out other people’s ideas too, hoping this will somehow make the epiphany permanent, that it will zap the idea into myself and make it a thing I do. If you do that too, you know that printing or highlighting some wise words doesn’t usually make them into a thing you actually do and live by. The books on my shelves are full of page tabs and underlined sentences that affected me when I read them, but few of them changed how I live.

An idea doesn’t do anything until it becomes actions. Printing an idea on paper makes it more tangible, but keeps it in idea form. Ultimately it has to leave the realm of words and get printed onto your motor neurons. If it doesn’t, the spark of insight fades and nothing comes of it.

In my experience, it works like this: if I act on an idea a few times – such as I have with Tolstoy’s do-your-25-miles-and-rest idea – and it pays off, there’s a good chance it will become a part of how I live. If I only read it and tape it to the wall, hoping to remember and act that way when it counts, it’s unlikely it will ever make it out of idea form.

Two ways to get past “ideas only” mode

With this in mind, I’ve been focusing on forming an active community around Raptitude. Instead of just broadcasting my ideas to the world, I’m getting people together to try them out in their lives, and talk about what happens when they do.

I wish I’d made this a priority earlier. As you might know, my last experiment birthed an ongoing “Renunciation Club”, where people give things up for a month, breaking habits and forming new ones. (Go here if want to try that.)

There’s also been a lot of interest in the upcoming Raptitude Field Trip 2, which is great, because these virtual field trips are most direct way to discover what I’m really getting at with this blog.

For those who missed the first one, it’s where a bunch of readers take Raptitude practices “into the field” (i.e. your life) to see what happens. I give you easy how-to instructions, you go and try them, and (if you wish) report how it went in the forum.

They’re all simple perceptual exercises, having to do with how you meet your day-to-day experience. Most of them take less than one minute at a time, but they can change the tone of your day, and if you do them regularly they can improve whole areas of your life, as they have with mine.

The Field Trip is a fun and lightweight mini-course for helping people discover the hidden riches in day-to-day life, which is what this blog is all about. I try to keep the whole program about as cheap as ordering a large pizza.

You also get to chat with your fellow readers, who are a keen and helpful bunch. And me, I’m there too.

Three things to know about Raptitude Field Trip 2

You can sign up for the new Field Trip today. A few things to know:

1. If you did participate in the previous Field Trip, this one is all-new. Same format, all new practices.

2. The official start date will be February 10, and you can do it at your own pace.

3. This isn’t a thing you need to schedule time for. The lessons are short and the practices take a minute or two here and there. You play with them when you’re out and about in the world.

Sign up now | How does it work?

[What people said about the first Raptitude Field Trip]

***

On the wall of my office I put up a Tolstoy quote in 32-point text:

A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’

I find it much more instructive than the standard “big things happen gradually” clichés: Rome wasn’t built in a day, a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step, how do you eat an elephant (one bite at a time), and the rest.

Tolstoy’s twenty-five miles is like the serious version of those throwaway adages. It’s for the person who genuinely wants (or needs) to cover a thousand miles, rather than just have another way to say “Oh well” after a disappointment. When someone says, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” it implies that Rome will get built eventually by the way you’re going about things now, but there’s no reason to believe it works like that. Romes don’t get built very often.

Covering twenty-five miles is a serious day’s effort, even though it’s only a tiny fraction of a thousand. It takes a real push, but it is doable, and days like that will add up to vast distances quickly. Note that Tolstoy was talking about hardened French soldiers crossing the Russian steppes; we can scale that twenty-five-mile march down to “A real effort you could achieve daily, but which you’ll only bother with if you’re serious about getting somewhere.”

We should consider bothering with it, because the thousand-mile trek is a thing humans have to do sometimes. They come to us both voluntarily and involuntarily. You might take on an ambitious project, like building an organization or writing a book. Or fate might plunk a long march in front you – cleaning up a huge mess, recovering from serious illness, or paying for some great mistake.

For each such trek, the twenty-five-mile day will be something different, but it’s always a day with a clear standard that requires a push to meet it. It might mean spending the first three hours of each weekday drumming up clients until you’re in the black. It might be yet another day of dutifully rehabbing your injury, achieving a caloric deficit, or staying sober.

To make those days happen one after another and eventually get to the end, you can’t stay fixated on the final destination, or you’ll go crazy. Compared to a thousand miles, twenty-five can seem like nothing. You trudged all day in the cold, and the city won’t even be on the horizon for another 960-some miles. Through great effort, you’ve gone an inch when you have to go a yard.

Considered on its own, such a day is really something though – forty of them gets you to a thousand miles. Those kinds of days (and not even that many of them) really do get the company going, get you to your target weight, or get you past a difficult chapter of life.

What Tolstoy is saying is that to have days like that, your focus must stay on this side of the horizon. The prize can’t be out of sight; it has to be reachable today. When your heart is set on a campfire and canned beans end of the day, you can make it. When it’s set on some unseen thing beyond the mountains, your moment-to-moment efforts will be mostly discouraging.

If you joined a gym in January, especially if it’s not for the first time, you may have already discovered this. You cannot sustain a consistent fitness regimen by thinking about how fit you’ll be six months from now. It might help you for the first session. But when it’s day four, and you’re on the treadmill, lungs burning, watching that red digital timer absolutely crawl from 23:00 down to 21:35, imagining some mythical lean version of you is not going to drive you through the next 21 minutes. It might just make you quit.

This is because from the long perspective, there aren’t only 21 minutes left, there are six months left. And nobody can run on a treadmill for six months, certainly not you.

When you make it your goal – i.e. the best thing you can do — to hit your (figurative) twenty-five miles and rest up, your goal becomes thing you can do. It takes effort, but it’s a choice, not a hope.

The ultimate, thousand-mile-away goal remains relevant, but it can mostly be treated as a map and compass, to keep you creating your twenty-five-mile days in the right direction. It’s not the thing you’re aiming at when you’re getting out of bed, or when it’s mile 15 and you want to quit. You’re trying to get to the next camp and enjoy those beans by the fire. You wouldn’t try to do six months of exercise at once with your body, so you shouldn’t try to do it with your mind.

When I focus on covering the day’s miles and resting up, I get somewhere. When I try to conquer my great personal challenges, I get nowhere. I think the difference is as simple as this: going twenty-five miles is a thing a person can get their mind around, and therefore choose to do, and going a thousand miles isn’t.

So instead of trying to eventually become the person who did the Big Thing, you can immediately become the person who makes their twenty-five miles and rests up for the night.

The rest at the end of the day feels good, but there’s also a hint of healthy disappointment in it. All that marching and your reward is a can of beans. But you can learn to love the can of beans and the sleeping bag, and having twenty-five more miles behind you, and if you do, you will make it to the city.

***

Are you a fan of Raptitude?

A few years ago I offered an online mini-course called Raptitude Field Trip.

This is where normal people like you try out some of the Raptitudey techniques I’ve described in classic Raptitude posts.

I choose easy practices that only take a few minutes, and you try them out for a bit in real life, then (optionally) discuss how it went, with me and other readers.

I’m about to run Raptitude Field Trip 2, with a brand-new selection of practices.

These Field Trips are fun and intended to bring some adventure and richness to day-to-day life, without taking much time. People really liked the first one.

More info coming soon. If you don’t want to miss it, make sure you’re on the list.

***

When I want a thrill, I walk to the corner store without my phone. Leaving the house like that, with only wallet and keys, feels physically strange and wrong, like I forgot to wear underwear.

Even though I didn’t have a mobile phone for the first half of my life, ten minutes without it somehow feels unsafe. If I need to call in an emergency or something – or, much more likely, if I want to ignore my surroundings and check email while I’m waiting in line – I will be utterly helpless.

This uneasy, lost-at-sea feeling isn’t caused by being without phone access for a few minutes. It’s just what it feels like to defy a powerful habit. After all, the more often I do the thing, the weaker that feeling gets.

The mind just doesn’t want you to deviate from habits, whether they’re good or bad ones. “You can’t do this to me!” it shouts, as you lock the door with your phone sitting on the kitchen table. “We had a deal!”

The mind is wrong about that. You can do a thing that feels weird, which will quickly make it feel less weird.

It feels weird because you’re turning off a kind of autopilot that’s been running for a long time. When you always do a thing a certain way, your whole life forms itself around that certain way, right down to your bodily movements and your thoughts. When your friend heads to the restroom, your hand just moves to the phone and begins thumbing through memes or sports scores whatever. The mind joins the body in this zombie ritual, hunting for novelty and Likes, for the ten thousandth time.

There is no deciding, no controlling, no piloting going on here. The system is executing its programmed routine, and the destination is whatever it is.

Whenever autopilot kicks off, it’s jarring, because you’re thrust suddenly into manual mode. Decisive action is required, immediately. The craft lurches, the yokes start tilting, and the whole thing drifts to the left. Yikes! Someone has to fly the plane!

But it’s your plane, this life of yours, and you’re the only one allowed in the cockpit.

The unpleasant moment when autopilot kicks off

I believe that we can benefit a lot from that moment of discombobulation, where you reach for the habitual thing and it’s not there. It turns your brain on and brings you into the moment. Inevitably, this is less comfortable than letting an automated program (a habit) handle the moment, but it’s also freeing. When you have to fly the plane yourself, you lose that sense of ease and comfort, but now you can actually decide where it’s going.

Especially for us cradle-of-civilization types, adult human lives are mostly guided by our many autopilot (i.e. habit) systems, but you can gain a lot by selectively disabling one of them for a little while. Taking manual control is nerve-wracking, but only because you tend to let the system handle most of it.

I mean, you are the pilot right?

What happens when you fly manual for a while

In November I started a discussion forum for readers who wanted to give something up for a month, in the spirit of fasting or renunciation, the kind voluntary doing-without many traditional cultures have practiced, for a variety of reasons.

In this group, each person chooses and shuts off a habit, an autopilot program — drinking alcohol, having sweets after dinner, doomscrolling, making sarcastic comments – some repeating pattern that seems to be taking them to the wrong destination. They keep it off for a month.

We’re on month two now, and more than a hundred people have reported their experiences. Most of them report a certain arc to their campaign:

1. They feel stuck or trapped by a habit and decide to change it. They don’t like where things are headed, so they renounce the habit temporarily. No more staying up past midnight. No more after-work cocktail. No more doomscrolling.

2. Doing the new thing is awkward and jarring at first. Eating a 600-calorie dinner when you normally have 1000 feels dissatisfying. Biting your tongue when you’d normally complain feels like you’re trying to submerge a beach ball.

3. They’re tempted to put autopilot back on. Flying the plane manually is stressful. It feels forced and unsustainable. It takes so much effort to do things this new way. Is this your life now? Dinner is disappointing forever?

4. The “forced” feeling weakens. After a week or so, the club soda and lime stops feeling so forced and lame. The whiskey seems less magnetic to the mind. In fact, it might even become a bit off-putting — people discover that their old habit had short-term costs they’re suddenly free of. Sleep is better. They’re saving money. At this point, the behavior still has to be managed, but it’s manageable now.

5. The direction and destination have changed. Soon, the plane is pointing in a better direction, it’s not so stressful to keep it pointed there, and there are new rewards happening that the person wants to keep. It no longer feels so effortful pick up a book instead of the phone, or end dinner without dessert. The mind is encoding new muscle-memories and thought habits, making the beginnings of a new autopilot program, this time to a better destination.

Depending on the habit, it might take longer than a month before the plane is fully flying itself to the new destination. But it’s encouraging to see how quickly you can change course if you endure that initial “Oh no, someone has to fly the plane!” moment.

Before seeing so many people describe the above pattern, I’ve often interpreted that moment of discombobulation, with its drifting dials and blinking caution lights, as proof that things are going wrong, that I’m taking too big a leap, that I need to prepare or study more before I try to fly the plane.

Now I see it as a feeling worth seeking, because it’s the feeling of taking control. I’ve been trying to recognize and embrace this feeling even in its micro-forms. Walking into a into a shop you don’t feel entirely comfortable in, for example, triggers a moment of disorientation, which quickly fades. Now you can go to that place. Same with trying a recipe that seems too tricky, or talking to someone you feel a bit intimidated by.

That “oh no” feeling is a good feeling, not in the sense that it’s pleasant, but that it’s good for you. It’s the feeling of learning to fly the plane to where you actually want it to go.

***

If you want to join the renunciation group, you can join the forum here.

I’ve been reading Lord of the Rings for two months and I’m just at the end of the first part. It’s not because I’m not enjoying it. It’s one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I can remember.

From the beginning, I’ve read the whole thing aloud. I’ve found reading aloud helpful for staying engaged — limiting myself to mouth-speed rather than eye-speed means I won’t rush, miss important details, and then lose interest, which has always been a problem for me.

At first I was anxious to read a 1,500-page book this way, because it would take so long. But, as someone pointed out to me, if I’m enjoying it, why would I want to be done with it sooner?

So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.

This leisurely pace made Middle-Earth blossom before my eyes. When I paused after each comma, and let each sentence ring for a small moment after the period, the events of the story reached me with more weight and strength. That extra time gave space for Tolkien’s images and moods to propagate in my mind, which they did automatically.

Some part of me still wanted to rush and get on with it, to make good time, to gloss over the songs and lore to get to Moria and Mount Doom and the other marquee moments of the story. But the more I ignored that impulse, the better the experience got.

By offering the book about triple the usual amount of attentiveness, I was getting about triple the storyness (i.e. meaning, engagement, literary pleasure). Whatever the thing is that I’m seeking when I pick up a novel in the first place, there’s much more of it available at this pace.

Eating Comprehension

This effect reminded me of a paradox around eating I recognized long ago. When you slow down your eating speed, say to half or a third your default speed, you get much more enjoyment out of a smaller amount of food. The extra attention given to each bite allows more of the “good stuff,” whatever that is exactly, to reach you.

What’s paradoxical is that it’s precisely the seeking of that “good stuff” that normally drives me to eat so quickly, and miss most of what I’m seeking. When you try to barrel ahead to access the good stuff quicker, you get less of it in the end. Slow down and much more of it is released.

And it’s released automatically, in both reading and eating. You don’t have to search it out. The good stuff (the meaning in the text, the pleasure in the eating) just rises up to meet you in that extra time you give it. Slowing down, and offering more time to the act of consumption, immediately increases reading comprehension (and eating comprehension).

Both are analogous to slowing down while you vacuum a carpet. If you pass the vacuum head too quickly, you miss half the dirt. Slow down, and you can hear how much more grit is sent skittering up the tube. The suction and bristles are working, but they need more time to do their work fully, to draw up the deeper-lying stuff.

Question the default settings

It seems that my default consumption speeds for reading and eating (and maybe everything else) reduce the rewards of those things significantly, undermining the point of doing either.

Part of it is my own impatience. But I also suspect that modern living, with its infinite supply of consumables, tends to push our rate-of-intake dials too high. I’m not going to run out of books, or snacks, or opportunities to learn something. There’s always more, so not every crust of bread or printed page needs to be appreciated fully.

Internally though, the mind is juggling like Lucy and Ethel on the conveyor belt at the chocolate factory. Our receptors for meaning and appreciation, like the vacuum head, need more time to do their full work, to make all the connections they’re designed to make.

It might sound like I’m just offering clichés – less is more, stop and smell the roses, take your time – and I guess I am. But clichés suffer the same issue: they are often profound insights, consumed and passed on too rapidly for their real meaning to register anymore. You really should stop and smell roses, as you know if you’re in the habit of doing that.

At least see what happens when you reduce your consumption speed – of anything, but especially books, information, and food – by a half, or two thirds. Notice that (1) something in you really wants to plow through at the highest viable setting, and (2) how much more of the reward is released when you slow down anyway.

As far as I can tell, almost everything becomes more satisfying when you give it more time and intention, even things like checking the mailbox or writing a shopping list.

Speed alters taste

Slowing down your rate of consumption will inevitably change what you want to consume. Reading throwaway news articles or AI slop with great care and attention is only going to show you how empty of value it is. Reading dense writing in inky old books, crafted for your mind by great masters, becomes easier without the rushed pace, and the meaning just blooms out of it.

Same with food. Try to savor a cheap, waxy “chocolate” bar, or a bag of store-brand cheese puffs, and you discover a harsh taste that you don’t want to look at too closely. Enjoy a homemade pastry with great attention, and discover there’s even more in it than you realized.

Mass production is good in so many ways, but the faster we tend to consume its fruits, the more we end up seeking things for their glossy, candied surfaces. The more we go for these surface-level rewards, the more the culture focuses on offering only that part – such as TikTok videos, processed food, CGI-forward movies, and public discourse in the form of unexamined talking points.

Who knows how far we’ve drifted from the best modes of consuming the things we value. Once something becomes a norm, it seems like an appropriate standard, no matter how much has been lost. Apparently, reading silently and alone was unusual until as late as the 18^th century. Certainly sit-down meals and cooking at home were.

I don’t mean to sound like a scold. Let’s say none of this is morally good or bad. It’s just that in so much of what we do, we could be getting much more of the part of it that we really seek — but it’s only available at slower speeds.

If you’re curious, try consuming things more slowly, so slowly it seems silly to others — say a third your habitual speed — and see what rises up to meet you.

***

Want to quit something in January?

Recently I opened a discussion forum for Raptitude readers who want to give something up for the month of December (alcohol, social media, snacks, etc).

It’s been a real success, and many people want to do something similar in January. If you want to quit something, or just give it up for a month, you’re invited to join.

Follow this link at the end of this post to get an invite.

The human being is the only animal that can say no to treats. That’s what makes us special.

A hungry dog, fish, sheep, centipede – none of them can have their favorite food in front of them and voluntarily refrain from gobbling it up, unless it’s dangerous to do so. A trained dog might hold back for a bit, but it’s really just angling for another reward (pleasing its master) and it knows it’s getting the treat anyway.

The human being can – but might not – simply refrain from gobbling the fudge-covered Oreo sitting in front of him, however it feels to do so.

He might do that because he prefers a competing reward, such as losing weight or not having to brush his teeth again tonight. But he also might do it solely to free himself from the Oreo’s dominance over him. If you can’t not gobble the Oreo, it owns you. It will turn you into its marionette, operating your arms and mouth, insinuating itself into your mind, and then your body.

This danger is why basically every culture has some sort of fasting or renunciation practice – some formalized way of refraining from doing a thing that attracts you like a magnet. People have done it with food, sex, entertainment, comfortable bedding, even idle chit-chat, so that those things don’t turn you into their marionette. The more you can move independently of the things that tempt and comfort you, the more you can live your actual values – whether or not those values include the occasional well-enjoyed cookie or bottle of wine.

The main exception is our own modern, you-do-you culture. Our age rejects any whiff of asceticism, while also offering an infinite buffet of food, sexual stimulation, news, gossip, and entertainment. A million thinkpieces have described the suffering caused by overindulgence in these things. People are dying of depression and addiction and nihilism, yet if you stop watching the news people will say you “have your head in the sand,” and if you skip a single meal people will assume you have an eating disorder.

I don’t suggest we all go and join monasteries. But there’s perhaps never been a culture that would benefit more than ours from small, manageable experiments in renunciation. We’re like withered desert plants that avoid water out of fear of drowning. The great fear of our age is “feeling deprived,” rather than the consequences of excess: addiction, despair, lack of focus, and early death.

The transformation isn’t in the not-having but in the not-taking

If you give up sweets or TikTok for a month, you’ll notice some benefits from simply not having that stuff in your system.

That’s not the main reason to do it though. In my experience, the real power is in the exercise of restraint itself, not just in avoiding the negative effects of the thing. You can feel a loosening, a new tier of agency, when you voluntarily defeat the Oreo in a standoff.

In other words, you’d gain much more from not watching TikTok voluntarily than you would if it were simply unavailable to you. You’re gaining the ability to stand apart from it under your own strength, and that newly strengthened will can be applied elsewhere in your life.

An experiment in renunciation

For the month of December, with the exception of Christmas Day, I will eat nothing before 6pm except plain oatmeal for breakfast, and soup with two boiled eggs for lunch. I also must eat raw, unseasoned vegetables with every meal.

I want to do this precisely because some part of me really doesn’t want to. A cowardly homunculus in my brain believes I am such a delicate being that I can bear nothing less than complete hedonistic freedom. To live at all, I need a guaranteed right to consume any random cookie or Lindt chocolate ball that passes through my sight.

That part of me either masters me or it is my master. It drives or I drive. I want to develop the strength to let that hypothetical fudge-covered Oreo sit uneaten on that plate — forever.

But first let’s see if I can eat oatmeal with nothing else it. If this strikes you as crazy or weird, I urge you to consider how weird it is to live in a culture that makes a taboo of denying yourself anything you might want.

Something like 98% of human lives were lived with nothing approaching a guarantee of three meals a day. People would cross deserts for a chance at the level of food security I am still going to enjoy this December. And many of them still practiced fasting and other forms of formal sacrifice, viewing it as a necessary measure to stay upright and focused on what’s important.

If you want to do something like this too

I invite those of you who like this idea to give something up for December. Take something that attracts you with some level of magnetism, and give it up completely:

• Deep fried food
• Speaking of others in their absence
• Caffeine
• Complaining
• A troublesome phone app, or a few
• Alcohol
• White lies
• Certain types of seedy websites
• Meat
• News
• Political content

It doesn’t have to be a thing you think you should never indulge in. It just needs to be troublesome in some way, a thing you battle or bargain with. You will sacrifice it for a month in the name of growing your inner strength against its influence on you. (If it’s hard to give up, it does have some power over you.)

And you do need to give it a hard no. It’s much better to choose an easier sacrifice and give it up completely, without compromise, all 31 days, than to pick a tougher thing only do it halfway.

Of course, you want to avoid replacing your renounced thing with something equally troublesome – Instagram for TikTok, sugary snacks for fried snacks. You want to feel the absence of the thing, and enjoy the higher but subtler pleasure of steadfastness and temperance.

A Raptitude Forum

For the first time, I’m going to open a discussion forum for this experiment, rather than just keep my own log. That way people can post about their own renunciation project and how it’s going. This is sort of an experiment in itself – if it works I’ll probably do all Raptitude experiments this way.

If you enter your email address at this page, I’ll sort it out over the next few days and email you with instructions on how to post in the forum.

Meanwhile, think about what you want to do without in December – the thing whose puppet-strings you want to free yourself from.

Timshel!

***

Imagine two very bored castaways on a desert island, who have food and shelter but nothing to do. They spend the day throwing coconuts at each other for fun.

One day a crate washes up, with its cargo intact: hundreds of classic paperbacks! Melville, Hugo, Tolkien, the Brontës, and more. The men celebrate, and immediately begin throwing the books at each other. They invent a game like Jenga, but with books instead of wooden blocks.

Life on the island does improve somewhat, with these new forms of throwing and stacking games.

Both men can read well enough, but they regard classics as too boring to bother with, and they’re already bored enough.

A month later, the novelty of book-Jenga having worn off, one of the men decides to focus his energies on working through The Lord of the Rings. He has to steel his attention repeatedly to get through the opening section on the domestic life of creatures called “hobbits.”

But by the time Gandalf tells Frodo about the ring, life is never the same for our castaway. He didn’t know that the inky paragraphs inside yellowed books could bring your mind into entirely new worlds, and make you feel things you’ve never felt.

The other man has by now invented new forms of book-Jenga and coconut-bowling, unaware of this utterly new dimension his friend has discovered. He sees no indication anywhere that a brick of paper can contain something like Middle-Earth. That would be like a coconut containing a rocket to space.

He’s sitting on buried treasure and doesn’t know it.

Worlds you’re meant to walk in

Each of us is both of these castaways.

There are dimensions of experience you know now that you once didn’t, and which remain hidden to others. Maybe you at some point “got” (i.e. entered the world of) distance running, classical music appreciation, or pastry making. Maybe you learned to code, or knit, or meditate, whereas before that thing looked like wizardry to you, and still does to others.

This new world became a part of you, and part of what life even is to you.

Yet at one point that part of you hadn’t been born yet. And it may have remained unborn, if you hadn’t found a way in.

There are still countless realms of experience that remain hidden to you. You may have admired people who play piano smoothly, grow spectacular gardens, or build thriving online communities, and you’ve wanted to do the same. But you still have no idea what it’s like to inhabit those abilities, to live inside them and feel the unique sorts of fulfillment they offer.

One of the most life-affirming things a person can do is discover and enter a new world of experience, one that fits their spirit, the way our island-dweller found out how to enter Middle-Earth (and Dune, and Camelot, and the pure heart of Jane Eyre).

When you do enter a new world, life really does expand. When you start to “get” photography, for example, you gain a whole new way of looking. The visual world becomes more striking and meaningful, forever. That might sound dramatic but it’s exactly what happens.

You already know where you ought to go

For each of us, there are worlds we know about and we want to enter them.

Some part of you knows you ought to make music, but you’re stuck forever noodling on the guitar and can’t play a whole song. You see others who have entered this world, but you remain outside it.

Ideally, you’d invest your energy in finding your way into the worlds that call you, or into deeper layers of the worlds you’ve already begun exploring.

But our instincts, and our society, point us away from going deeper. Between a natural aversion to discomfort and awkwardness, and devices that offer infinite novelty, we tend to go wider, rather than deeper. We keep grabbing at novel forms of the familiar and known, instead of entering new worlds. It’s just easier to flip to your news feeds, or put on another true crime podcast, than it is to try to read Aristotle or develop your singing voice.

How to enter a new world

You already know of some worlds you want to live in: that of the competent guitar player, the reader of thick history books, the baker of golden pastries, the speaker of conversational Spanish, whatever.

You might need to find instruction, but that’s not the hard part. Books, courses, and information abound.

It’s when you follow the instruction, when you start doing the thing itself, that the hard part happens. You encounter awkwardness, confusion, and tedium. The entrance to the new world does not allow for easy movement. It confronts you, with unresolved puzzles, awkward sensations, and frequent snags.

Meanwhile, the mind is always hunting for a smooth sense of progress and easy gratification. But those can’t be found in this new world yet, only in the old one. If you give in to this urge to grasp at ease — let’s play Wonderwall again, let’s play the Iron Man riff again – you just go wider instead of deeper, and never gain access.

These cravings for ease can be used as cue to go deep instead. You can pick your way through the thicket by applying a kind of slow and careful attention to the new world’s mental puzzles and physical demands.

For reading old books, that means slowing down your pace, and being satisfied with a few well-read pages at a time. That might mean reading aloud, and taking those winding Victorian sentences again when they lose you.

For playing guitar, it means carefully forming those awkward chord shapes, relaxing into the tension the best you can, and patiently working out each trouble spot.

Entering a new world requires repeated delves into its weeds and brambles, wielding that slow and careful attention as a tool, or a lantern. This kind of work is more than tolerable in short, regular sessions. But you have to make those sessions happen, and for their duration you have to deny the mind’s craving for quick and smooth progress.

The good news is that moving through any given brambly patch (e.g. a cramped chord position, the thick prose of Victorian novels) doesn’t take many “delves” to make it familiar, but each world is huge and there are a lot of places to go.

Never embarking – staying home in the Shire, so to speak – seems like the worst possible choice. Imagine the guitarist who lives and dies without ever learning to play, or the writer who never wrote a story. Maybe you don’t have to imagine.

We all have lifelong desires to enter certain worlds we think we belong in, and we know it’s possible. Which castaway has been at the helm?

What’s a world you’ve always wanted to enter?

***

Pick a world and go

If you want a guided journey into a world you’ve always dreamed of entering, there’s still time to join the winter One Big Win group.

Each participant designs a quest into a new world of their choosing, and makes small, manageable delves into it, until it’s a part of them. Repeat for other worlds as desired.