LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 5 No. 4
Nick’s LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 5 No. 4
Celebrating being very close to finishing ST:TNG with my wife and FRIENDS
THIS IS AN INTRODUCTION
Hello again everyone. It's been a few weeks. Weeks filled with being back on the treadmill of life. Days that included going to the mall, shows, gaming nights and all sorts of things that made it feel like 2019.
You have never seen someone so excited to play a train game as this girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaFie3L0v6A. Prime moment at 1:29 when the title screen pops up. Bringing that big train energy.
If you were missing some sweet Pro Wrestlers vs. Robot action, here is a link to Orange Cassidy/Penelope Ford vs. Shockwave/Veda Scott. There are lessons to learn in this match that will help you defend against their eventual conquest of mankind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_qtNImSpnk
From the YOUR GIFT IS MY BURDEN DEPT: US man gets $450,000 after unwanted work birthday party triggered panic attack. Really hoping for that party at my workplace. Throw me a party so I never have to see you ever again.
Hell of an article in The Atlantic that summed up many of my feelings lately, Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid. Leaves me more terrified for the future. You're welcome...
LIFESTYLE favorite, GRAE, was picked as the Amazon Breakthrough Artist for April and they did a brief video and performance to celebrate. I check on the daily to see if she is coming to Minneapolis, so send some good LIFESTYLE energy from IP addresses in this state and maybe the algorithms will convince her to come.
THIS IS THE END OF THE INTRODUCTION.
3 THINGS THIS WEEK.
ITEM THE FIRST:
THE YEAR OF FEAR: Well done everyone that sent in some entries for the 2022 LIFESTYLE COMMUNITY PROJECT: Conquer your fear.
I had lots of good entries and conversations about the project. I hope by publicly sharing these we can all see WE ARE NOT ALONE. People want us to think we are more different than we are, but we are not. Reading over these submissions helped me to know you better and to see the commonalities of our fears.
A big thank you to everyone that put themselves out there and shared. I know this is not easy.
On to the fears:
My biggest fear?
I had to think about it. I'm not afraid of much. But, after the deaths of two people and two pets very close to me in less than 5 months, I have come to realize that I fear losing those I care about. I'm not afraid of death, I am afraid of being lonely. Of missing someone and never getting them back. I have a hard time letting go of past relationships completely; every single person I have loved I have said, and meant, "I will always love you." I have so much love for so many people. Sometimes people just take different paths and we lose touch. But I still love them deeply. It is the permanence of death that makes me scared. The permanent loss of someone that I will never get to hear their voice, hug them, or even just see their face.
I just fucking hate when someone I love dies. It is the worst feeling ever.
I know you are a compassionate person and I can feel you writing this. I think this is a common fear and I can honestly say I did not understand grief or the loss of someone in my life until 5 years ago. Logically and intellectually I did, but emotionally I was (probably still am) totally unprepared for the loneliness that comes with it. Thank you for sharing.
I want to conquer my fear of failing the people I care about.
Super big fear. I think a lot of us have this fear, but we have to remember the people we care about are probably the most understanding and won't quantify your failure the way you will. Give yourself the grace you give others. Thank you for sharing.
It’s been really hard to pick just one fear to focus on, since I feel like I’m pretty much afraid of everything! But I keep coming back to the thought of being afraid of what people think of me, so this year I think I’d like to shed that. I want to have a life where I can just be me, and if other people don’t like it, then fine. They won’t be my friends then. I know my friends love and accept me as I am, even if I make some bad decisions at times and do some stupid things. So I don’t know why I care so much about what randos on the street think of me.
EXACTLY. You can do this. We should all do better on this one. Thank you for sharing.
I'm afraid that the best thing I can give the people in my life is my absence. (Not from the planet in a suicide way, but I'm best when I'm thought about instead of being seen or heard.)
Fears are weird and irrational. I thoroughly enjoy the time we spend together and I'm always happy to be in your presence. I can relate too though, I often try to limit my exposure to people for their own sake. I'm pleasantly surprised the people I went on vacation with still talk with me. That includes my wife. Thank you for sharing.
The next one I got was incredibly personal and from someone I don't often have big emotional conversations with and that I think of as a rock, so it was surprising in a beautiful and vulnerable way. It made me very glad to be doing this project However, so much of it was impossible to anonymize so I took a fucking hatchet to it and boiled it down to this:
I want to conquer my fear of moving on and moving out. That is the polar plunge I need to do with my life.
This is one of the hardest ones too and I know some readers can INTENSELY relate to that difficulty of deciding if you should leave or stay the situation you are in. It basically defines my professional life. I've done both things (staying and going) and most times it has been an excruciating process that has never been as easy as I wished it would be. I know you are an incredible person and have all of our support in your polar plunge. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for offering this challenge, which has become a productive tool for me. Meaning you made me think about my fears, and as I have processed that in the back of my mind, I can now articulate them! I knew this stuff before but now it feels more practical and real. Thank you Nick
1: Watching recordings or listening to audio of myself. This is relevant because I do a lot of live speaking and some recorded speaking for my job. I like it and consider it a strength. I want to do more and get even better at it. Watching recordings of yourself is perhaps the #1 way to improve - who knows what weird/ineffective shit I'm doing that no one is telling me!? Yet I am loathe to do it.
2: Engaging social media. This includes posting some major accomplishments on LinkedIn and generally engaging with the word around my interests. I aspire to have a blog or newsletter or some format where I can share ideas and talk to others. For all the dystopian downsides social media has created, it also creates a pathway for people like me to have more rich discourse and relationships. But I've always been conservatively minimalist on social media and am afraid to jump in
Oh, I totally get these ones too. When I was a musician, listening back to my performances was always a painful endeavor and I know some of the other creatives in the LIFESTYLE have similar fears about looking at that mirror. Every few years an article pops up on my feed about why we hate our own voices, so this a pretty common thing with enough science (or media pseudo-science) floating around about it. I think more than anything though, just the intense playback of something personal is hard, and you will always find things and criticize yourself more than others.
I'm working on #2 as well. I keep telling myself I need to get a LinkedIn page, but I hate talking about myself and advertising myself. That may not be obvious since you are reading my dumb newsletter, but people enjoy it, so I've just stuck with it. I would love to see what you come up with! Thank you for sharing.
Again thanks to everyone who sent stuff in! Now...since we can all see what some of us are trying to conquer, if you have any advise you would like to pass on to anyone, send it in and I'll run it (or if you want me to privately relay things, I can anonymize it and send it)
We've got this.
ITEM THE SECOND:
THE TREADMILL OF LIFE: When I took my 10 days off of work in March, I put my out of office message up stating that all emails will be deleted when I get back and to email again that Monday if you truly need a reply (for you non-corporate types, basically when someone emails me, a message gets automatically sent back typically with contact information, other people to defer questions to, etc.). I walked into about 1300 emails of which about 600 were not generated from a system, did a select all and deleted when I got in that Monday. Nothing burned down, the company still made a lot of money, the world was fine with me being gone.
Monday was fine, pretty quiet actually, but then Tuesday hit like a train. Fires everywhere and I was back in it. It took me about 12 hours back at work until my heart rate quickened and the panic started. Normally that is about 0-15 minutes, so vacation did buy some time.
I was keeping track and at 8 days after I came back, I felt totally defeated again and I was back to the cycle of burn out, low sleep, panic attacks and hating everything from 7a-3p. Going from paradise to dealing with the same underfunded broken technology was a hard adjustment and I guess I should be glad I had those 7 days.
I've come to resent vacation a bit and I just end up working harder when I get back to make up for the time. This time (for the first time in many years), I did not have to work during vacation and my deleting email policy was good, but I felt so free and happy on vacation that snapping back to reality gets harder every time. This is why I'm pushing so hard to retire.
No big life lesson here, just wanted to share. Wait...there is a life lesson: Don't work for Thomson Reuters, it is a terrible, terrible place. (This is why I don't participate in OHI surveys...)
ITEM THE THIRD:
HEY. BEEN TRYING TO MEET YOU: My email has been annoying me lately, spam filters have not been able to protect me from the mild annoyances of digital life. I started the hunt for something better in the email space. I won't use Google products for personal reasons, so that ruled out Gmail. I wanted something more than just a big dumb email box that uses the same technology I've had for 25 years. I wanted something with privacy and that was like email, but not.
There are a few companies exploring this in various ways and most of them had trial periods, so I hopped around for the past month trialing things and learning new systems and workflows. My first contender was something that when it was announced I was sold. It was released by Basecamp, one of my favorite tech companies (and a dream company to work for), and is called Hey.
Needless to say, I wrote about a paragraph about email that I just deleted because I know you don't care about email like I care about email. Long story short it fixes a few of my issues:
THE SCREENER - I approve any new contact that emails me (this is after spam filtering happens), so if Andrew Yang sells my email address to come candidate in Louisiana, I can say "NO WAY BUDDY" and those emails don't get to me ever (super hypothetical situation...).
IMBOX/FEED/PAPER TRAIL - The main conceit of Hey is that I only care about some emails. These go in the Imbox (Important Box). Things like newsletters go into The Feed and I can browse them in a scrolling fashion like reddit or twitter when I have time. Nothing critical. The Paper Trail has receipts, order confirmations, etc. Things in The Feed are automatically deleted after 90 days and you can set all sorts of options around it. The Screener works with this so you can say "all emails from Substack or The Atlantic should go into The Feed" etc.
BLOCKING OF TRACKERS - It reveals and blocks all the tracking in email, so even things that might get through my pihole are blocked by Hey.
REPLY LATER AND SET ASIDE - Sometimes I don't have time to deal with something so I can save it for later OR I can set aside. If I save it for later, I can see a list of emails I need to focus on and reply to in one list, lined up so I can bang out emails continuously when I have time. If it is set aside, it just sits in a collapsible section in the UI that I can review when I have time. WORKFLOWS BABY.
The net benefit is that I really only see things I deem important when I look at my email. I'm only notified by contacts that I choose. It is very nice and works with my brain.
Of course the eternal struggle with my dumb brain is that this cost $99 a year. I would have jumped on this when it came about but it is so hard for me to rationalize paying $99/yr for email. After trying it for 14 days I was hooked. I tried all the other services, most were about half the price and about half as good. I tried to recreate similar functionality using rules and tagging, but it was a bit of a hack and it felt like it. I finally just hit the subscription button and decided to treat myself. Melonie got a new computer in April, I got a new email address. WIN-WIN.
If you want to talk more about Hey email, I could do this for hours, just let me know. I'm super excited about it and think it is a great product, if you are in the niche market for a very specific way of dealing with email and spending $99/yr.
On a related note - Please update your contact information to my new address: nick.lavely@hey.com. I'll let THE SCREENER know you are to be sent directly to my Imbox.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (please mark "ok to print"):
I wanted to comment on several things in your LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 5 No. 3.
First, when I next move, would you be available for hire as a mover? You can get sexy 25 year olds to move my things, but you need to direct these young pups.
Next, regarding the HIV vaccine. I am so utterly excited about this! It has been long overdue. Science is amazing, and medicine is good. But you make an excellent point about health insurance and the cost of health care in the United States. My health insurance went from a 10% to 20% coinsurance plan AND increased in cost this past year. As someone who does not make a large amount of money at the moment, this has begun causing me to avoid getting proper health care treatment for ailments due to the outrageous costs. Not only that, but the health care system is not good for everyone. Where I live now, the quality of hospitals and clinics is so poor, that I hate going to them at all.
Third, the book you mentioned, Bring Back the Beat: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, seems very intriguing, and I would love to read it. If you are interested, this documentary called, “Sisters with Transistors,” is amazing. Pauline Oliveros taught at RPI until she passed away. This documentary was so inspiring and made me want to make loops.
And finally, Danger Mouse’s Gray Album was so great, thanks for reminding me of it!
Literally, my dream job is working in a shipping facility. Getting a printout with an order, grabbing things from a shelf, packing them in a box and mailing them out, at about 1/10th the speed they force Amazon workers to do it at tho. SO YES, I'M HIRED!
Thank you so much for the documentary recommendation, I added it to the queue and I'll find a time to watch it. I'm sure my wife would be bored to sleep by it, so I'll have to do it in my private documentary time, which sounds far more exciting than it is. Super excited!
I also highly recommend I Dream of Wires, which is another documentary on analog synths. I have the extra long directors cut which is like four hours long, because of course I do.
GRATITUDES:
Maybe I'm a bit biased, but my wife. There are a lot of things behind the scenes at the Lavely household in motion right now and I am constantly amazed by her. Professionally, she is now a Creative Director and has people that work for her and she is hiring more. She's raced head first into interviewing and managing people since she has little support from her manager.
Personally, she is working so hard to be present and to improve herself, mostly through things that are not mine to share, but as I'm close to it, you'll just have to trust me. Also, she has to put up with me and the sad sack that I've been for more than three years now.
Praising my wife is not necessarily gratitude per se, but one of the things that attracted me to her is that she is willing to push herself to try new things and to conquer her fears. While we are all doing the work collectively, she's been doing it before it was cool.
Thank you for pushing yourself to be better. To me, it is your sexiest trait.
THE HOPE SPOT:
Great article in the WaPo: Is Finland really the happiest country in the world? Finns weigh in.
This might be one of my favorite quotes ever and very inline with my thoughts: “We have a saying in Finland: ‘If you’re happy, you should hide it’"
It is amazing what you can do when you have a societal safety net and don't have to worry about deciding between eating three meals a day, paying off student loans or paying off that x-ray.
Much like Japan, I think I would thrive more in a more subdued place and if I visit it, I may never come home.
Oh, and their Prime Minister is 36 and wears leather jackets to NATO meetings. BADASS.
Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson with her Finnish counterpart Sanna Marin.
FAVORITE THING TO GO IN MY EYEHOLES THIS WEEK:
GRAE's long awaited debut album, Whiplash is out. Listen to it on your favorite streaming service and buy it if you like it. It's fucking fantastic. LIFESTYLE BUMP PEOPLE.
THIS IS THE END OF THE NEWSLETTER
THE NIGHT OF THE FIGHT, YOU MAY FEEL A SLIGHT STING. THAT'S FEAR FUCKIN' WITH YOU.
FUCK FEAR. FEAR ONLY HURTS. IT NEVER HELPS. YOU FIGHT THROUGH THAT SHIT.
CAUSE A YEAR FROM NOW, WHEN YOU KICKIN' IT IN THE CARIBBEAN, YOU GONNA SAY TO YOURSELF "MARSELLUS WALLACE WAS RIGHT."
THAT IS ALL.