Gooooood afternoon and happy Sunday from The Sentient Bean,
I am writing to you from Savannah, GA—week 2 of the Funga-tour.
Ghosts have been on my mind recently.
But not your typical ghost/ghoul, moreso nostalgia.
This is my ~5th time in Savannah and it’s familiarity feels both cool and weird.
I recognize certain places, streets, and even people — though it’s been many months to years between visits.
To see the effect of time, both weathering and renewing, is hard to describe. (The delay in release of this newsletter is due to me trying to figure out how to describe it!)
OK! here we go:
Think about coming home for the holidays after being away for years.
Seeing old friends, teachers, and family — the years shown on their bodies and faces, heard in their voices.
Visiting your ‘old haunts’ in your hometown or even college town.
Where the bones behind the new coat of paint, rearranged furniture, and green baristas still provoke the most vivid memories.
Now!
If you are still with me — take that feeling…and apply it to a place that is NOT home.
A place where you haven’t spent extended time.
A place where you haven’t built community.
A place where you have only ever been a transient — a ghost.
That’s what I’ve been feeling this week.
Anyway!
Hope you enjoy today’s Study!
on *clicking* (and people pleasing)
After my initial discovery of
, I dug deeper and found a couple more gems.Ant’s notes+quotes:
“I’ve come to understand that being on the same wavelength as someone is some combination of (1) admiring them, (2) sharing deep elements of yourselves (values, interests, principles, current inner context), and (3) being socially compatible (having similar ways that you like hanging out with one another). If you align on any of these, you’re going to connect. If you align on all three, you’re going to click.”
“But sometimes you really want something to work. You are convinced you should be there, it should feel good. But it doesn’t! You’re not finding your people, you are not feeling at home in yourself, you are struggling to self-express. You know you need to leave but for some reason, you really don’t want to. It feels like admitting defeat. So, you resist your nature. You try to ignore the inner signals telling you to go somewhere else.”
Ant’s notes+quotes:
“Because when your top value is pleasing others, you end up living a life designed to suit them instead of crafting a life in attunement with yourself.”
“That is the magic of boundaries: they can be whatever you want, and by making them, you give the people around you the opportunity to show you love by simply letting you uphold them. You send a clear signal, freeing yourself from expecting others to interpret your needs non-verbally. You tell them exactly what you need and in doing so: you invite them to support you in the process of you taking care of yourself.”
The second piece made me feel seen — and is a post I’ve been searching for/thinking about writing for a long long time. If any of my tidbits resonate or pique your interest, I highly recommend reading the full posts! You will not be disappointed.
Thanks, again, Isabel for sharing!
for my photo-friends
can someone please confirm that these nature photos are REAL?!?
book i’m reading
I just started Morgan Housel’s new book Same as Ever.
I’ve been flying through it — Housel’s writing is so easy and fun to read AND there are nuggets of wisdom on every other page.
Two ideas have been sticking with me:
We, along with everything we think we know, hang by a thread
“People like to say, ‘to know where we’re going, you have to know where we have been.’ But more realistic is admitting that if you know where we’ve been, you realize we have no idea where we’re going.
Events compound in unfathomable ways.”Housel shares examples from how declining a second ski run saved his life to how a change in wind direction altered the history of the Revolutionary War.
The first rule of happiness: low expectations
“There is no such thing as objective wealth—everything is relative and mostly relative to those around you…Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough.”
“Imagine a life where almost everything gets better but you never appreciate it because your expectations rise as fast as your circumstances. It’s terrifying, and almost as bad as a world where nothing gets better.”
“You think you want progress, both for yourself and for the world. But most of the time that’s not actually what you want. You want to feel the gap between what you expected and what actually happened. And the expectation side of that equation is not only important, but it’s often more in your control than managing your circumstances.”
(Housel does note that these are easier said than done — it’s often hard to separate high expectations from motivation and low expectations from giving up and minimizing your potential.)
quote i’m chewing
"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
— Theodore Roosevelt
thoughts in my head to delve into another time
why do we (I) think of Life as a test?
the feeling that we will get a grade at the end of our days, putting so much weight/stress on our decisions, paralyzing fear of ‘fuking up,’ etc.
sometimes I think to myself, “Man, I can’t wait for when I have enough money to go eff off in the woods, write, and make music”
immediate counterthought: You don’t need to be rich to (a) eff off in the woods (b) to write or make music
The following excerpt is from Jason Zweig’s piece on Charlie Munger’s life:
I asked what he might want for an epitaph of no more than 10 words.
His reply was immediate and full of epistemic humility: "I tried to be useful."
Not "I was useful." That would be for other people to judge. But "I tried." That much he knew.
A question I’ve been asking myself recently is, “if there were 1000 lives/iterations of Anthony…what would be true in 999 of them?”
The line, “I tried” resonated to the core of my being.
I have no idea what the future will hold. I have no idea what my purpose, calling or passions are (or what they would be in the 999 other parallel universe lives).
But I am confident, in my current life and other 999 lives, that I would try.
Try to be kind, try to learn, try to be useful.
Thanks to Sahil Bloom for sharing. I don’t have a WSJ subscription anymore, and I am so grateful he included the excerpt in his last NL.
To wrap as Sahil did:
We will fall short in various ways along the journey, but we can all strive for this goal.
Here's hoping that at the end of our days, we may all be able to proudly proclaim: "I tried."
As always, if you’ve made it this far, thank you.
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ML,
a park ant