Building A Better You

 What's AI Got That I Haven't? A better question might be: What do I have that AI doesn’t? I first thought about becoming a writer at about the same time ChatGPT became a thing. Great. I finally found something that I really enjoy, and might actually want to pursue seriously, and here comes AI to do the job. Lots of what I was reading seemed to confirm this, too. Writers talking about how it’s going to replace human writers, making our work obsolete. Being employed at a high school, it had a small glimmer of truth. Instantly, students were using it to write their essays, and it was challenging to spot the difference, especially since they could get the program to write at their usual writing level. No college level essays from a high school sophomore barely hanging on with a D. Well shit. It put me off of writing for quite a while. Why spend months writing a book when AI could do it in minutes? Why invest the time and energy to become a decent writer when any knucklehead can kn...

10 Things Better Than Staring at Your Phone What did we do with our downtime before we had phones? For one thing, there was actually downtime! Now, anytime I’m not actively working on something, I grab my phone and trick myself into thinking I’m being productive. I answer emails, research places to camp next year, I read the news. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but it’s not something I need to do, and honestly, it usually ends up stressing me out more than anything. Recently, I’ve been working on being more present, living in the now. Staring at my phone takes me out of the now, and puts me in the future, or the past, and I’m pretty much anything but present. What I have started doing instead, is finding things that keep me occupied, but don’t necessarily have some specific end-goal, and don’t stress me out. So, what can you do instead of mindless scrolling? Write Anything. Write in a journal, write a letter to a friend (when is the last time you did that?!), write ...

  It's Not Them, It's You It seems like there’s no end to it. I suppose there never will be- it’s been happening for thousands of years. “What’s wrong with the world?” “What has gotten into people?” “Why are things so bad?” In reality, things are, in many ways, better than they ever have been for people. Generally speaking, you are safer now than at pretty much any point in history. You are less likely to be the victim of abduction or physical violence. Full-blown wars are less frequent. No, the world is not perfect. Not by a long-shot. And, there are dangers unique to our time: nuclear proliferation, runaway climate change, etc. Day to day life for most of us, however, is better than ever. Yet, people frequently expound on how terrible the world is becoming. Which begs the question: Why? Are these people living in a different reality? The simple answer: Yes, they are. We all are. Our realities are constantly being created and recreated. We each have our own personal lens throu...

 Do Something Hard How comfortable is your life? Your day to day life, I mean. For many of us, I’d say our lives are rather comfortable: We wake up and get ready for the day, we go to work and put in our time, come home and have dinner, then settle in for an evening of reading, or binging a show before falling asleep to do it all over again tomorrow. Often, it feels like deciding what to eat for dinner is the hardest thing I do all day. Some people develop grit when they’re young and they struggle through things in school. I was fortunate enough to have a rather easy time in school. Things came easily to me. I rarely needed to study. It was great, until I got older and was faced with actual challenges. Rather than dive into them, I did my best to avoid them. If I wasn’t good at it initially, I had no interest in continuing to do it. That’s fine for some things. We don’t have to do  everything  that comes our way. I’m not great at organic chemistry? Fine, it’s honestly som...