Tag: philosophy

Joyful, Anyway (short thoughts)

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(Joyful, Anyway has been my favorite book through the first half of 2026. It’s perfect for anyone who has felt loss, struggled, or breathes).

We have a gap in our lives. It’s not financial, though we try to close it with money. It’s not relational, though we try to solve it that way too. It’s not physical. The gap is internal and it can’t be named. *The name that can be named is not the eternal name.* 

We will call it the gap. 

We notice it in the feelings of disappointment, guilt, and desire. I was meeting a friend, and the trials and shenanigans of parenting came up. We shared and compared mishaps – and I felt it. Instead of talking about my kids should I be with my kids? My oldest was leaving for college in forty days, and I was here instead. There it was, there was the gap.  

I felt this parent / child gap a lot in 2025. One daughter is moving from high school to college. Another is driving and more independent. There were more moments of stillness, free of podcasts, to do lists, and notifications. Which is odd. Life can feel like being the person at the bottom of a slope in charge of emptying a (very important) bucket that’s constantly collecting water. Me versus the two infinite forces: gravity and time. We make life so full but it can sometimes feel so empty. That’s the gap.

So I acted, and begin to mark moments on a calendar. Graduation party. Marked. Project Hail Mary. Marked. Dinner out, coffee out, a ten minute hang out. All marked. Those narrow the gap. 

But nothing closes the gap. 

The gap, Kate Bowler calls it “the ache” in Joyful, Anyway, is permanent. It’s another infinite force, alongside gravity and time. Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.  Life is a chronic condition.

I picked up Joyful, Anyway on Ryan Holiday’s recommendation and was pleased to see the blurb by Oliver Burkeman of 4,000 Weeks, a book about acceptance. Stop trying to be more productive, Burkeman writes, and instead choose to be more focused. Do the important things. Like seeing Project Hail Mary with your kids and accept that not everything you think needs to be done needs to be done.

Joyful, Anyway does not offer a solution. The secret algorithm!? No. Well, not that I think about it, maybe it does.

Accept the Gap

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We have a gap in our lives. It’s not financial, though we try to close it with money. It’s not relational, though we try to solve it that way too. It’s not physical. The gap is internal and it can’t be named. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. But we will call it the gap.

We notice that gap in the feelings of disappointment, guilt, and desire. I was meeting a friend, and the trials and shenanigans of parenting came up. We shared and compared mishaps – and I felt it. Instead of talking about my kids should I be with my kids? My oldest was leaving for college in forty days, and I was here instead. There it was, there was the gap.

So we act.

I felt this parent / child gap a lot in 2025. There would be a moment of stillness, free of podcasts, to do lists, and notifications. Which is odd. Often I feel like the person at the bottom of a slope in charge of emptying a (very important) bucket that’s constantly collecting water. Me versus the two infinite forces of gravity and time. But while on bucket duty I felt the gap.

So I acted, and begin to mark moments on a calendar. Graduation party. Marked. Project Hail Mary. Marked. Dinner out, coffee out, a ten minute hang out. All marked. Those narrow the gap.
But nothing closes the gap.

The gap, Kate Bowler calls it “the ache” in Joyful, Anyway is permanent. It’s an infinite force, alongside gravity and time. “If what you have seems insufficient to you,” commented Seneca, “then though you posses the world, you will yet be miserable.” We are creatures who desire.

I picked up Joyful, Anyway on Ryan Holiday’s recommendation and was pleased to see the blurb by Oliver Burkeman of 4,000 Weeks, a book about acceptance of limitations. Stop trying to be more productive, Burkeman writes, and instead choose to be more focused. Do the important things. Like seeing Project Hail Mary with your kids.

Maybe Joyful, Anyway will have the solution to close the gap. The secret algorithm! Probably not. The secret might be acceptance and action. Accept that the gap will never fully close but take action to narrow the sucker.

Framing “Life Energy”

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From Your Money or Your Life

“Money is something you trade your life energy for. You sell your time for money. It doesn’t matter that Ned over there sells his time for a hundred dollars and you sell yours for twenty dollars an hour. Ned’s money is irrelevant to you. The only real asset you have is your time.”

Money is important and how someone thinks about money should be how you communicate about money.

  1. Money is something you trade your life energy for.
  2. Money makes progress in JTBD. How to talk with your rich friends about money.
  3. I live in the tribe, the tribe keeps me safe. Our tribe has a leader.
  4. Money is part of the system. ERE and Wheaton Scales.
  5. Money is about doing good things with good people and not too much friction. Should you buy a ski chalet?
  6. Money has external roles (saving, investing, spending, etc.) and internal roles (goals, FOMO, Jones’s, Always Buy Two New Cars). The Psychology of Money.

It’s wild the resources spent on money.

Did the internet need another post about money? Yet here we are.

But maybe what we’re really talking about is spirit. It’s philosophy. It’s spiritual. What am I supposed to do? What is a life well lived? Posing the easier question shifts the topic to money.

How to Talk About Money with Your Rich Friends

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We all have rich friends. The richest person you know, knows someone richer.

I meant to go running one Sunday but as soon as leaving the driveway I saw Brian and Rachel – two neighbors I hadn’t seen recently. Instead, I walked with them.

Brian and Rachel are rich friends. Their house is bigger and in a nicer section of the neighborhood. They drive a Mercedes, I have a Toyota Sienna. They eat at restaurants I’ve never heard of. They take day trips – via plane – to see their son in Philadelphia. They donate enough to the Orlando arts their name is in the program and they get valet parking. They’re richer than me.

I’ve got another friend not as rich as me. Before I talk about him, let’s define rich.

One of my high school students lives in our neighborhood – the regular big and decent part like me. He said I was rich. “You’re right” I replied, “And here’s how you can tell”.

Anyone who owns any piece of exercise equipment is rich. They have enough money and space to buy extra things and enough energy (or aspirations of) to work out for whatever reason. Non-concern about basic things like food and shelter comes when you’re rich. I have a bike. My student has a rower. We’re rich.

My not-as-rich friend Bobby (a different one) likes to talk about how expensive things are. Travel is expensive. Our HOA is expensive. Vehicles and food and kids are expensive. Listening to him costs me energy.

But our conversations aren’t about money. Life isn’t about money. It’s not even really about the things money leads to.

It’s not the dinner, it’s the company.

It’s not the hoa, it’s the safety of family and proximity of friends.

It’s not the place tickets, it’s seeing your Ohio cousins once a summer.

That’s what Bobby misses and what Rachel and Brian get.

When I talk to my rich friends I listen for that: How do they love their peoples? When I talk to my rich friends that’s what I say: Here’s how I love my peoples.

Four Thousand Weeks (book review)

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Likely one of the best books I’ll read this year.

I have soft spots. For movies it’s one last job. For books it’s This is Water.

There’s this thing that everyone talks about but everyone talks about it wrongly. That’s a soft spot.

That’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. According to author Oliver Burkeman, we are doing time management all wrong. We are swimming through water without really knowing what it is.

And water is a good analogy because water, like time, isn’t something we can grasp. It’s something we have to accept. We can scoop water. We can vacuum water. We can pour water – but these are on water’s terms. To paraphrase high school science: water does what water does.

That is also how to think about time. We act like we manage time, “time management”, but only in the same way we manage water: creating spaces for it to be.

You should read this book!

It’s difficult to review for the same reasons productivity feels important. We check things off a list. We progressed. We got-things-done. But are these the right metrics or just the easy ones?

Productivity isn’t the goal. Accomplishment isn’t either. Living. L-I-V-I-N (a similar book) is the goal.

How to live is a messy question relative to How to be productive.

But here’s a tip. An honest-to-goodness fact. This is as close to a guarantee as you’ll ever get.

Spend time with people. Optimize community. Aim for togetherness. Move from ‘me’ to unity. Move from ego to love. Less get more done, and more to-get-her.

Be that way. That’s a productivity hack.

3 Steps for Life

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Step 1: Pause

Pause in life. Stop. Take a moment. Life is busy, fast, cluttered, and chaotic. Life is Mario Kart at 1,000 cc. Think about it all. Relationships. Work. Hobbies. Books to read and podcasts to listen to. Points of friction. Surprises good and bad.

We have to pause. We’re uncoupled from reality. We yell at our spouse when it’s the person we love the most. We chase investment gains contrary to our investing plan. We get off-track on projects by being on-line.

Take a breath (or sigh). Sit in a church. Meditate.

Step 2: Accept

We must accept the world as it is. You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. No wish casting. No re-roll requests.

Who made you manager of the universe? Don’t think about control. Instead, accept and orient. You’re lost. We all are, only to different degrees at different times.

Step 3: Hope

This requires faith in the connection between past and present. Stocks go up over time, stocks are down now, but stocks will rise again. Consider your myopia, and find your glasses.

Hope is crucial because without hope we have no action. Enter a game you can’t win – how hard are you going to try? Instead, think about the rules of the game, the past turns, how others have played. Did someone win? Did someone not lose? There’s hope: the connection of past to future that leads to action.

Courage is Calling (review)

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For some things podcasts are better than books. I’d never read about their subjects but The Rest is History and Hardcore History podcasts are consistently great. 

But books aren’t bad. They’re different. Fiction is great for books. Non-fiction is harder to execute. Ryan Holiday’s book, Courage is Calling, is a different form of non-fiction. Part of the four stoic virtues series, Courage is a collection of vignettes and the mini-stories give the reader many hooks to hang onto. Appearing are philosophers, writers, officers, statesmen, stoics, men, women – they’re all here. It reads fast, which is a good thing! I took away four aspects for courage: 

Act now. Douglas McArthur summarized life’s failures as being too late. 

Don’t fear the imagined. Hurrying to make a rendezvous through the Texas countryside, Ulysses S. Grant remarked to a companion that there were many wolves about, maybe surrounding them. Pushing through the brush Grant and his companion eventually came upon the wolves. Only two, who scattered. Grand reflected later “there are always more before they are counted.” 

Courage and fear are required conditions. Fighting the Nazis and rallying the French, Charles de Gaulle wrote “The intervention of human will in the chain of events has something irrevocable about it.” The important stuff has weight. And that responsibility has “a moral element.” 

We grow. “The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life, “Joan Didion observed, “is the source from which self-respect springs.” 

Courage is Calling is not a quake book, it’s a wake book. It’s what to read instead of checking your phone first thing in the morning. It’s different non-fiction. It’s more holistic than linear. It’s a mental refresher. It’s a reminder from another version of yourself, a version that encourages courage.