Cryptoart

Random thoughts on happiness and fulfillment in life. Such complicated, elusive things. On paper, it seems so simple: focus your conscious thought on the present, develop a small handful of deep, meaningful connections with other people, find a muse or two to keep you creative and entertained as the years drift away ..

... perhaps have some offspring to help create a feeling of continuation when you finally pass. Obviously, all these things are only relevant once you have satisfied the basic needs such as food, shelter, etc.

The reality, however, is much more complicated. I have spent a lot of time pondering life. On a boat, you have a lot of time in a kind of flow state while sailing. Your mind is occupied for hours (sometimes days and weeks on a passage) with a complicated multi-sensory set of tasks ...

You do all this while the boat is moving at the speed of a marathon runner, so it's at a much more humanly intuitive level than driving a car, for example.  This flow state is when multiple different regions of the brain must communicate with one another in a synchronous way.

It reduces the mental chatter (aka daily distracting thoughts) in the frontal cortex, potentially contributing to increased higher thinking. If you're interested in this kind of thing, do some digging into synchronization theory within the context of the flow state.

So in all this time, these past six months, I have been perpetually feeling the weight of the opportunity cost of everything in life against this adventure we are on. The burden of the opportunity cost of less potential for investment in this crypto cycle versus spending the money being out here, ...

or the opportunity cost of not building up a business while in one location, or the opportunity cost of having taken the kids out of school and having to homeschool, of missing friends and family, etc. The perpetual feeling of living life X and missing out on life Y.

I have a perpetual feeling like I am going too slow; this last 6 months seems to epitomize that with all the issues we have had. Yet when you stand back and look objectively, we have travelled through 9 countries in 7 months while homeschooling 3 kids, retrofitting a sailboat,...

... and working in Web3 enough to keep the family fed. No one other than I would consider that slow, but true objectivity is only possible by an impartial observer, not the participant. How does one become an impartial observer of their own life while deeply embedded inside their own self-paradigm?

I am not sure if this is just the mid-life crisis stage of my life in my 40s, where you shift from those youthful perceptions of life being long, with space-time itself seeming like an infinite canvas of opportunity, ...

... to the feeling of life being like a game of Jenga where you get to take out so many pieces in the time you have on this planet before an abrupt end. We are all here just trying to make the most impressive, well-balanced, interesting tower, never really knowing when it’s going to collapse.

At the start, you can take out any of the pieces you like; the opportunity cost (in terms of taking another piece next to it) is limited, however towards the end, each piece must be carefully considered as it limits the options around the other pieces you can take.

Eventually, one can no longer take any more pieces and keep the tower standing. Simple phrases like "eat less, exercise more, meditate more, be kinder to people," etc., are meaningless long-term, to be honest. Life is a multidimensional network of biological and physical restraints.

Behaviour is rarely changed by catchphrases (and more often changed by situational surroundings). It's well-known in biology that if you want to change the behaviour of an organism, change its environmental inputs. In the end, we are just reactive organisms that respond to external stimulation like all the others.

What is the point of this post? Well, I was trying to talk about happiness and how one sustainably achieves it; or sustainably avoids depression. I still don't have that answer; I am still looking. Perhaps there is no answer, but that does not make the search futile.

... (feeling the wind, trimming sails accordingly, watching for waves, listening for noises which should not be there, avoiding hazards in the water such as boats and reefs, watching the weather, and making sure you're going in the right direction).