Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

Somewhere around 3-3 or 4-3 in the first set (Federer having served first), I said aloud that I thought Nadal was going to win the match. It had been a physical match, Federer was struggling with his first serve, Nadal had had break-point chances in two of Federer’s service games already, and the heavy humidity was keeping the ball slow. And then suddenly Federer broke for 5-3 and quickly served out the set. From there he did just what we’d see him do against Nadal in Australia and at Indian Wells, just turn the pressure up and up and up, attack more and more and more, until finally Nadal broke against the relentless barrage.

To his credit, Nadal did change his tactics somewhat from what we saw at Indian Wells, which was wise given the completeness of the beat-down he suffered there. He brought a bit more firepower and variety to his serve, stood deeper on the service return to give himself a bit more time, and sometimes attacked the Federer forehand instead of just relentlessly attacking the backhand.

Unfortunately for him, on this particular day, the imprecision on the forehand side that Federer displayed during the final in Melbourne was completely absent. Federer is widely considered to have the best forehand of all time, and on this day he demonstrated it.

Ultimately, that seems to force Rafa (and everyone else) into a bit of a conundrum. If the improvements Federer has brought to the backhand mean you can no longer attack the backhand, and he’s got the forehand dialed in, meaning you can’t attack the forehand, what exactly does that leave you? Harsh language?

As we’ve seen so far this year, the answer appears to be little to nothing. Federer’s loss in Dubai was a strange blip; other than that, all he has done is win the Australian and both early-season Masters 1000 titles. Pretty impressive.

You don’t want to get too far ahead of yourself with these things, but it’s kind of hard not to. Coming off of last year’s injury-abbreviated season, Federer’s season thus far has already been remarkable. But I (and ten zillion other tennis fans) find ourselves wondering: are we witnessing a season for the ages?

Written before Sunday’s final

Do you remember that scene in The Matrix in which Neo is getting trained in martial arts (if that’s what you call having skills downloaded directly into his brain), and Morpheus is testing him by sparring against him, and Mouse runs to where everyone else is hanging out and exclaims, “Morpheus is fighting Neo!” and everyone immediately rushes to the monitors to watch? Watching this match felt a lot like that, like you wanted to rush into another room and exclaim, “Kyrgios is playing Federer!”

They both do things with the ball that no one should be able to do, totally Matrix-like things. Federer wraps imagination together with grace so perfectly that his play almost always seems effortless. Kyrgios couples imagination with raw power, playfulness, and a lot of flash to lead to a game full of stunning surprises, like the Federer drop half-volley he answered by rushing up and hitting a forward-facing tweener for a winner.

They fought, and fought, and fought. Federer saved two set points to win the first set. Kyrgios saved two match points to win the second set. Federer fought back from a mini-break in the third-set tiebreaker. Ultimately, someone had to win, because the rules demand it, but on this night the difference between them was but a hair’s breadth.

Nadal will have to bring a very different strategy to the final from what he brought to his match against Federer at Indian Wells, or else the real final will have been played Friday night, not Sunday afternoon.

Observation 7: To solve the overarching problem, we’re going to have to create a new way of engaging with each other both politically and personally. That means building on an understanding grounded in the flow of energy.

The foundation for creating a new way of engaging with each other begins with creating a new way of engaging with ourselves.

A general numbness to our lived experience is endemic among Americans. The evidence is so ubiquitous and so constant that it can be a challenge to even see it, because seeing it suggests that it could be different. One simple example: the proliferation of evidence that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. What do you think drives the appeal of constant, insidious distraction?

We choose distraction because actually getting present to what’s happening in the moment feels more and more fraught, more and more dangerous. Conveniently, technology allows us to escape the present more and more effectively. Why be here, now in this moment, when there are so many easy and entertaining ways to be anywhere else?

What’s more: numbness is a functional way (of sorts) of getting through life. Numbness creates a certain stability, and most people get along fine(-ish) just stumbling numbly through life. (If it were otherwise, breakdown would be a far more common experience than it is.) Furthermore, if you’ve practiced numbness for long enough, the idea that it could be otherwise seems foreign, utterly disconnected from your own experience: This is just who I am. Isn’t it?

Except: A life lived in numbness obviates the possibility of truly thriving in your life. Something will feel unsatisfactory. You’ll find yourself struggling to earn money, or you’ll find yourself struggling to stay healthy, or you’ll find yourself struggling to find work that matters to you, or you’ll just simply find yourself unhappy and be unable to explain exactly why. Whatever the problem is, you’ll experience it as a persistent knocking, right at the threshold of liminality. You’ll probably do your best to ignore it.

A lack of thriving is so built into our society and our system that it’s simply seen as the way things are. It seems like crystal-gazing hippie-speak to suggest that it could be otherwise, much less that thriving could be as simple as making a choice to thrive and from there committing to a series of actions, all of which are available to literally anyone and entirely under your own control.

Well, nothing shatters the smooth, shiny veneer of complacency like crisis. In the early drafts for this piece, I wrote that crisis is coming. But that’s wrong. Crisis is already here.

Crisis is what explains Donald Trump. Out of crisis come opportunities for demagogues and hideous men, people who offer facile answers and the anodyne promise that the problem is wholly outside of you. They offer the sweet lullaby-like promise of victimhood. Someone somewhere did this to you.

The thrust toward populist demagoguery succeeds because it offers change without any demands on its supporters. It is the last gasp claim that the system is fixable, that the difference between functioning and not functioning depends on who is in charge.

Ultimately, this thrust will fail. It will fail because it is a lie. The problem is not outside of you. You are the problem. So am I.

So when this thrust blows itself out–as it must, because it is false–and when the damage it causes ultimately brings everything to a standstill–and it will–then finally our illusions will be seen for what they are. We’ll be forced to ask, “Now what?” What does one do from a bottom?

Here I speak from my own experience. The only thing that I’ve found that brought any lasting change was to learn to get very, very intimate with the present moment. From a close attention to the present moment, deeper truths begin to emerge. If you follow the truth for long enough, then … well, then what?

Imagine what happens when you let go of constant, numb struggle and discover that you are finally–finally!–beginning to thrive.

Still in the midst of my little breather, I’ve been hunting around my brain, trying to find something simple to write today. Maybe a hot-take about the president? Kinda feels like it’s been done. Maybe a hot-take about the term hot-take and how it’s gone from inside-baseball journalist-speak to a term you hear mentioned all over the place, which usage flatters the audience into thinking they’re totally in-the-know, which thereby might be contributing to the general diminishment of any sense that there’s any kind of authority behind the mastheads of our various news sources? Hmmm, seems like I kinda just did.

I tried texting with Ima Radster to see if he had any ideas, but all he ever responded with was, “YO WHATTUP G-MONEY,” which didn’t really help.

So I therefore declare myself bereft of ideas.

Look: You try to keep it simple. But do you really want to revert to little self-referential in-jokes, just enough to amuse yourself a little and call them a piece and sign off for the day?

Well, you say, if I must.

Let’s take a moment to really consider the full significance of the Republican’s failure to pass a replacement for the ACA.

The Republicans have been unified in their opposition to the ACA since well before it was passed in 2010. They used that opposition to sweep into power on both the federal and state levels in the 2010 midterms. They currently have a strong majority in the House, a strong majority in the Senate, and their party holds the presidency. Their opposition to the ACA has been constant, unrelenting, and vociferous.

Furthermore, they have used their power at the state level to gerrymander as many Congressional districts as possible in order the assure safe Republican seats, meaning there’s almost no electoral pressure on most House Republicans.

The Republican party holds all the cards right now–and despite that, their Congressional leadership chose not to bring their replacement bill up for a vote, knowing that it was doomed and thereby avoiding the embarrassment of a quantified failure.

This is not merely a setback. This is an indication of a system so locked up in conflict that it’s essentially no longer functioning at all.

So last week was a pretty intense week around these parts. We started with a lengthy four-part essay reflecting on what I’ve learned from two years of publishing the Free Refills Project, and from there extrapolating into a forceful statement of intent. Then on Friday, I made a strong assertion about the as-I-see-it impending awakening to the reality of flow of energy in our lives as we deal with the fallout from the collapse of our political system, a collapse that’s well in progress by now, and soon will be very, very hard to deny.

And then yesterday I continued with a call to action. Like, I said, intense times.

So with all that in mind let’s take a bit of a breather for the rest of this week. We need a little space to let all of that sink in. (Not that I won’t be publishing. But just, you know: simple.)

Let us go then, you and I, on an adventure. Last week’s pieces set out something of a manifesto: Here is how I have worked. Here is how I am going to work. And I’m staking my future on it.

There comes a time when all the struggle, all the self-excoriating name-calling, gets a little old.

I’m done facing the dumb momentum of the old system, pursuing what I believe to be the better idea, and then somehow calling myself a coward. I’m done downplaying my abilities as a writer, as though anyone anywhere actually benefits from me shrugging and saying, “I’m pretty good, I guess.” I’ve put in the fucking work, thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of work–of practice–and through it I’ve earned the right to stand up straight, center myself, look the world in the eye, and tell it that I’m really good at what I do.

And that I’ve earned the right to get paid for it.

So pick up your sword and shield and join me. Together we march boldly into the future.

(No, this was not one of the original six observations/propositions. But in trying to follow the logic from O/P5: (“Hyper-partisanship is leading inexorably to the collapse of the current system.”) to the old O/P6 (“To solve the overarching problem, we’re going to have to create a new way of engaging with each other both politically and personally. That means building on an understanding grounded in flow of energy.”), I discovered a gap. What exactly is going to open us to the idea that bioenergetics, centering, flow, etc. are the path to the right answer? What’s going to bring about our awakening?)

The shift to hyper-partisanship isn’t something those people did. You’re a participant in it. So am I.

We can trace a massive cultural shift back to the fall of 1996 and the launch of the Fox News Channel. To people who wanted 24-hour news coverage but felt that CNN and MSNBC held a liberal bias, Fox News offered an alternative. Its meteoric ascent showed just how large that demographic really was.

Since that time, the proliferation of media outlets, along with the Internet’s evolution from a curiosity to a central position in our lives has radically accelerated the fragmentation of the population into carefully orchestrated media demographics. When you extrapolate from the ease of providing content to any niche audience you can imagine, it doesn’t take long before you end up with a situation as happened this election, in which people were so primed to believe things that fit their worldview that they stopped being concerned if those things were actually, you know, true.

The shift happened naturally enough. It results from tendencies within us that aren’t even something to especially decry. One of the core tenets of TTW is the cultivation of a state of ease in all things that we do, and from that perspective it’s clear why people would choose to consume media produced by people who share a similar worldview: it’s far more comfortable. Who wants to choose the discomfort of constantly experiencing the dissonance of dealing with people whose worldview does not match your own? Instead, at our current level of energetic development, we seek the comfortable consonance of “This affirms what I already think.”

Unfortunately, this is leading, pretty inexorably, to the hyper-partisanship that is destroying our society. So there are some downsides.

But as I’ve said before, if you practice centering with real regularity and are honest about what you experience, you will fairly quickly be forced to confront that your existence as an entity discrete from all these other entities is actually an illusion. The truth of our deep connection simply becomes undeniable. Which is not to say that your thinking will suddenly line up with that of people with whom you disagree. Rather, you will recognize that your thinking, and thus your participation in this culture of conflict, is built on a faulty foundation. Your thinking is built on a notion of “us versus them.” But there is no them. There is only us.

Thus for the awakened creator to properly survive in the digital age, supply must become binary. You see, the awakened creator recognizes that they cannot control their work once it is out there in digital form, that every attempt to do so will be foiled if someone wants to work hard enough, so the creator stops trying to demand that control.

This is what I mean when I say we have to think of supply as binary. For a digital good, the question is not how many copies exist. That’s a desperate holdover from a prior age, built on systems of control that no longer work. For a digital good, the question should be, Is there a copy at all? Does it exist, or not?

The contortions we’re going through, in order to continue to refuse to acknowledge that fact, and where it necessarily leads us–it all gets a little exhausting, don’t you think?

In the digital world, for digital goods, the only thing that makes sense is to pay the creator not for the work they’ve done, but that they keep working. You pay them because they have earned your trust: you have found what they produce valuable, and you see that they continue to produce.

In other words, you stop paying by the copy. You pay for the first copy. You pay to help bring it into existence.

It took me ten years, maybe more, to trust that insight enough to commit to it. That’s what you see here. It is, in part, what Free Refills means.

That insight tells me that I am not going to spend my day asking other people if I can have their permission to write something in exchange for money. I’m just going to write the fucking thing, and publish it, and then I get to point to it and say, “See? I wrote this. And it’s good. You like it too? You should pay me to write more things like this. Then everybody wins.”

I called myself a coward all those years ago for hating the fairly insane and deeply demoralizing act of querying for work. I watched myself work very hard to write something (the query letter) in which I promised that I have the ability to work very hard to write something really good on the topic that I am here in this letter already talking about. But in the Catch-22 that every freelance writer experiences, until you have the evidence to show you can keep your promise, in the form of pieces already published, most of the time the editor in question will say no.

So I took that asshole out of the equation. Who the fuck are you to tell me no?

I spent years calling myself a coward, but I’m not doing it anymore. Neither am I tilting at windmills and calling them giants. The old world is crumbling in part because of our stubborn, terrified refusal to acknowledge the new.

Two years ago today I tentatively put forth my first piece in the manner that I believed my long-ago insight demanded of me. And I’m staking my future on that belief.

And thus we come full circle to the promise I made that day. In those first, hesitant steps, I gave up on the stupid idea that it had to be perfect. Instead, I committed to the better idea: that something had to be. Every. Single. Fucking. Day.

I used to go to bookstores and peruse the magazines, looking for publications I could query to write for. I hated it. I just hated it, and I hated myself for hating it, called myself names like coward— but what I remember now is leaving the store and feeling physically sick, after having been swimming in a sea of random information. Just by itself that is a fairly dangerous and poisonous environment, but when you add in that all that information was supported by advertising, that is to say, the content existed primarily because someone thought they could sell something by strategically positioning that content next to their advertising, it became downright toxic. Swimming in late-stage all-needs-met-so-let’s-invent-needs capitalist advertising of which you might not even be the target demographic. Always a surreal experience.

I hated that feeling.

It seemed all the more stupid and futile because when I was doing this, back in the early 2000s, it was already clear that I was willfully participating in an anachronism. I’d recognized that the Internet was going to change everything during my sophomore year of college, back in 1994, when a friend of mine had showed me that it was possible to download music over the Internet. Right then, I understood that all the rules were going to change. It wouldn’t be long before everything was very, very different. (When I tell this story, I like to add that if I’d really understood just what this change portended, I would have immediately changed my major to C.S., and instead of Napster it would have been called Benster.)

So in the early days of what would be my sad, depressed, ineffectual freelance career, I was therefore struggling and perplexed by the issue that no one seemed to be willing to understand (or was it that they willfully refused to understand?), that in the digital age, for digital goods, there should no longer be such a thing as supply and demand, or not in the way we understood it in the past. When the marginal cost of another copy falls to zero–the ultimate fate of any digital good, no matter how large, because computers and networks just keep getting faster–then supply, in the traditional sense, becomes infinite. When infinite supply meets finite demand (and demand can only ever be finite), the correct price per copy simply has to be zero.

Of course, acknowledging that would be hugely disruptive to the current structure of our economic world.

And refusing to acknowledge that isn’t preventing that disruption. It is only barely–just barely–keeping the old system afloat.