Some are good. Some are dirty money grabs.

It seems like there are at least 90% of these books written by enterprising WASP-y looking white dudes with those round glasses (y'know the ones I'm talking about) that think that just because they worked at McKinsey for 3 years and like discussing post-modernism over IPAs that it gives them the right to write a book about creativity.

To hear them say it... Creativity is the panacea for everything from writing thank you notes to marriage problems to the systemic breakdown of American democracy.

These books usually give you all sorts of "exercises."

53 exercises to jump-start creativity. And then the exercise is something utterly banal. They’ll say something like “go out to a swamp and stare at a frog for 3 hours. Then, write down what you observe.”

And this is all well and good. I also dabble in these books. I go to hipster bookstores and I look at these books and think "hmm this would look wonderful on my nonexistent coffee table."

90% of creativity books are just fine. They're mid.

But that 10% of books about creativity that are actually good?? Man those are amazing. I love those books the most. They talk about how beautiful creativity can be. They talk about how it can be useful to solve problems but don't make it seem like it's the shortcut to a happy life. They sometimes give exercises, but they're well thought out and explained in depth.

If you have any interest, you should read these books today.

But they all boil down to a fundamental habit. Once you this habit, everything else follows.

The fundamental habit is related to a question I always get asked.

I've helped teach writing before. I've talked about creativity. I've read an insane amount of these books.

And I get some form of this question multiple times:

Question: “How can I be more creative?”

I answer: "Easy. Build a phone line to God."

This answer is great because it has the benefit of pissing off (hopefully in an endearing way) just about everyone who's asking.

The rationalists are confused because they hate the woo-woo and they're looking for ACTUAL writing advice.

The godly folks are confused because the fact that the almighty God is going to whisper what you should do to your character in Act 2 Scene 3 seems to go against the whole notion of an almighty God.

And the Genz are confused about what a phone line even is and why they can't just text God (I'm getting older so I need to start practicing my boomer humor)

Creating a phone line is learning to listen to life's cues. It's learning how to LISTEN in general. We're all so fucking terrible at listening. We hear what we want to hear. We respond to a partner's question only to hear back: "What are you talking about? That wasn't my question."

Most of the creativity, joy, and beauty in the world does not come from some superhuman effort. It comes from your ability to be open and listen and witness the joys around you.

Creating a phone line to God means dedicating some time of your day to sit around and listen to what life is trying to tell you.

What exactly does that look like in practice?

Julia Cameron suggests morning pages. it's an exercise where you write 3 pages long hand first thing in the morning.

Countless philosophers like Nietzsche liked long walks in nature where they didn't listen to podcasts or music or anything. They just walked and observed and thought whatever they thought.

Many directors have talked about how they get their best ideas when they're driving. They're listening to nothing, simply driving on roads they've driven before or don't require rapt attention. Then their mind wanders.

Salvador Dali used to sleep while holding something in his hands and when he'd doze off the object would drop and then he started painting.

And David Lynch does transcendental meditation.

This is the first step. Listening.

The second step is doing it at a similar time every day. This tells God when he should speak to you.

If you wait by the phone at random times of the day and wait for God to call you... maybe it's because you're missing his calls.

If you're free every day at 7 pm, then God knows when to call.

This is simple advice. I know. But I've found the most profound advice is the most deceptively simple.

The hard part is the consistency.

The hard part is the emotions.

The hard part is your own limiting beliefs.

To wait for a call to God requires a lot of waiting. It requires NOT being disappointed when He doesn't call. In fact, it's not expecting a call at all.

You have to meditate, drive, walk, journal, and listen because you want to do that in it of itself.

It'll feel "un-useful" but that's the point.

This is the hardest part.

Can you be brave enough to be un-useful? Can you quiet the workaholism and listen to what the demons inside of you are saying?

Eventually, you’ll experience life better. Deeper. You’ll be more alive.

But initially, when you start to listen, you may discover why you weren’t listening.

You may discover that you don’t listen to your partners because it’s easier to be bad listeners than realize that sometimes you get bored with your partners and them with you. It’s hard to realize that love requires sustenance and gardening. It’s hard to realize that even though we’re connected to them, we’ll never truly understand them or they us. And we’ll always be alone.

When you start to listen, all the unheard and unfelt parts of you will roar back. You’ll feel pain, sadness, and anger. You won’t know where it’s coming from. All the unloved parts will ask for love, and it’ll take you a while to realize how to love them.

This is God speaking through you.

As you clean out the debris and get better at listening, the creativity and aliveness will come too.

The deepest most nefarious mindset we have is that we believe we always have to be working hard, be useful, or be productive.

Let yourself be unproductive.

It's only when our need to be productive powers down, that our creative sides can power up.

Creativity is not productive. It's as random, chaotic, and as unexpected as life.

Anybody who's suffered loss can attest that grief attacks at the most inopportune times. You can never expect or predict grief. It strikes and you must surrender.

So it is with creativity.

Tell God you're ready to listen.

And then.

Surrender.

I wrote a collaboration essay with my friend Juan David (https://www.juandavidcampolargo.com). He’s a brilliant guy I would urge you to check out his essays and his work.

The essay was a conversation between me and Juan David on “How To Get What You Want.”

You can read the full essay here (https://pranav.site/how-to-get-what-you-want)

Here’s a preview…

How To Get What You Want

Hemmingway famously called Paris a moveable feast. His most famous book is called that.

I never read the book.

But the name stuck.

Since hearing the name, I’ve been trying to find my own moveable feast.

For Hemmingway, his memories of Paris were a feast. A feast that nourished him throughout his life... no matter how far he moved away from Paris. In the book’s foreword, it’s described this way:

A memory or even a state of being that had become a part of you, a thing that you could have always with you, no matter where you went or how you lived forever after, that you could never lose. An experience first fixed in time and space or a condition like happiness or love could be afterward moved or carried with you wherever you went in space and time.

I have no moveable feast. I’m still searching for mine.

There are a lot of problems in today’s world that we can point to. Climate change, increasing polarization, mental health problems, etc.

But at the end of all this to me lies a deeper, underlying problem.

None of us lived even a moment in our lives as deeply as Hemmingway lived his.

Why not?

None of us know where to start.

We’ve spent so much of our lives being trained to be sheep. To follow what society, our families, and marketers want us to do. We’ve forgotten how to ask the deeper questions and how to follow our own answers.

We trivialize ourselves with tranquility so as not to feel.

Ultimately, we’ve forgotten to even ask:

Who can I be?

What does nourishment mean to me?

What do I want?

We’ve instead tried to nourish ourselves with what we should do.

We could be Gods, and instead, we’ve become robots.

What do I want?

This is one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves.”

To read the full essay click here (https://pranav.site/how-to-get-what-you-want)

“To doubt yourself is to doubt God” - Tej Dosa

1/

You may have heard the phrase...

Want to make God laugh?

Make plans.

Most people misinterpret this...

It doesn’t mean stop making plans...Well, not exactly.

It means to start laughing with God.

It means to start laughing AS IF you are a God.

2/

In the classic movie Groundhog Day, the main character declares himself to be a God. He has lived the same day countless times and because of it, he knows everyone and everything that’s going to happen.

His justification for why he’s a God is interesting. He makes a statement about God that I find very profound:

“Well maybe the real God uses tricks, you know? Maybe he's not omnipotent. [Maybe] he's just been around so long he knows everything.”

This theme is repeated in various different movies, books, and comic books.

In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, the protagonist ends up being abducted by aliens called Tralfamadorians.

The Tralfmadorians have the ability to see in the fourth dimension.

“[For them] all moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. ... When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘so it goes.’”

I can go on with quotes forever. There are so many stories that repeat this theme. Needless to say, this idea is something that clearly resonates with us as human beings.

All these stories suggest something radical. They suggest that:

The only difference between us and God is that God can see in the fourth dimension.

3/

What does it mean to see in the 4th dimension?

It means seeing everything in your life as if it’s already happened. It means KNOWING that your life will turn out for the better no matter what happens. It means living a life of radical confidence in yourself, your luck, and your life.

To see in three dimensions means to be worried sick that you will not get a job you applied for.

To see in four dimensions is to realize that it doesn’t matter if you get the job or not, either way, you’ll be completely fine.

To see in three dimensions means you NEED the job to feel whole.

To see in four dimensions means you WANT the job, but whether or not you get it doesn’t affect your life.

To see in three dimensions means you overidentify with the worry that you feel about getting the job.

To see in four dimensions means you experience your worry, but you don’t identify with it. You experience worry, but are not attached to it.

It’s like that quote from the movie, Lunchbox:

When you see in the 4th dimension no matter the train, every station is the right one.

Does that make sense?

Probably not yet.

4/

Let me explain in another way

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor.

Part of this was because I was obsessed with a certain Bollywood actor.

But I wanted to be an actor for a deeper reason too.

I was a nervous kid. I felt afraid and restricted by life. Since we only have one life, we only have very little we get to experience.

To me, being an actor was the greatest thing ever.

Think about it.

As human beings, we only get to live one lifetime. And our life is full of pain, suffering, and struggle. We don’t often get the time to enjoy our lives.

As an actor, you get to live so many people’s lives. You get to experience all the feelings, wants, and stories of other people without any of the lasting impact.

You, the actor, are always safe even if the characters’ lives were tragic.

You, the actor, knew the character’s whole life and knew that even the moments that were difficult were only small moments of the character’s lives.

As I think about this fourth dimension idea, I realize that we can live the same way.

We are not our “characters.”

We are not our jobs, we are not our skills, we are not the contents of our wallets.

We are not our body, we are not our emotions or even our wants.

So what are we?

We experience emotions. We are not our emotions.

We experience wants. We are not our wants.

We experience physical sensations. We are not our physical sensations.

We are the experiencer. We are not our experiences

I’ll tell you what you really are.

You’re the “actor” that’s playing your “character”.

5/

Our conversation here reminds me of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence (this wouldn’t be my newsletter if I didn’t name-drop a pretentious philosopher).

Nietzsche believed that we must live our lives as if our lives were to eternally recur. As if we would have to live it again.

To Nietzsche, to live like this meant we have Amor Fati (love of fate).

To have Amor Fati is to realize that everything that happens in your life is necessary and good.

“To redeem the past and to transform every ‘It was’ into an ‘I wanted it thus!’ — that alone do I call redemption!” - Nietzsche

When you have Amor Fati, you can be a God.

Everything that has happened to you, has happened to you because you wanted it to happen. It happened because it was good and necessary to get you to where you are now.

And so, everything that will happen to you will be good as well. Because looking back from some point in the future, you’ll be able to recognize how good and necessary it all was.

6/

If you do indeed want to become a God…at a certain point, you have to jump.

You have to dare.

It’s only when you believe that you are a God, that you will magically become one.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that the ability to see in the fourth dimension and become antifragile is a superpower.

And if you are able to digest and apply what I’ve written you’ll become a superhero.

But ironically, you won’t know until you make the leap and struggle to apply the lessons from above.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite superhero movies, Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse.

In the movie, a young spiderman (Miles Morales) is bitten by a radioactive spider and he gains superpowers.

Except, he struggles to use his newfound powers.

He meets other “spider people” who are talented, smart, and capable.

And he feels out of place.

Why isn’t he naturally learning how to use his powers? What does it take for him to actually be a superhero?

Filled with doubt Miles asks a wiser more experienced spiderman (named Peter Parker) a question:

“When will I know I’m ready?”

Peter Parker’s answer is great:

“You won't.
It's a leap of faith.
That's all it is, Miles… A leap of faith.”

It’s a beguiling and frustrating answer.

But Miles takes Peter at his word.

At the climax of the movie,

"Miles walks to the edge of the roof, the wind buffeting ... and LEAPS!," the script says. "The camera is UPSIDE DOWN. Miles isn't falling through frame. He's RISING."

THAT is the moment when Miles becomes a superhero in our eyes…and even his own eyes.

It’s not when he gains his powers or when he puts on his costume.

It’s when he has FAITH.

It’s when he makes the leap.

That’s when he RISES to the occasion.

That’s when he truly becomes a superhero.

We will get to the how of becoming a God in a future newsletter, but before you get to the how, you must first make the leap just like Miles did.

7/

People misinterpret faith.

Faith isn’t for God, it’s for the believer.

God doesn’t change you through your faith.

You change yourself through your belief.

God doesn’t speak to us but within us.

Can you have faith?

Can you listen to the God within you?

Or will you live forever in doubt?

To become a God is a dangerous gamble.

It’s a leap of faith.

It’s daring to become who you are, rather than who you’ve been told to be.

So in the end, I only have one question:

Do you dare?

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water… Be water, my friend.” - Bruce

Want to get your dream life, find your dream job, and date your dream person?

Here’s the secret:

Empty your mind of bias and attachments. Instead, look for possibilities.

If you can do this, then no matter what situation life hands you, you’ll be able to alchemize it into gold.

Well, thanks for the horrible Buddhist koan you might say, but what does this all mean practically?

Here’s a practical example:

What do you do when somebody insults you?

There are two choices, right?

Choice 1: You either defend your honor:

insult them back, aggressively telling them they can say that to you, gear up for a fight.

You can defend your honor gracefully. You can be assertive and tell them that’s not cool.

Choice 2: Or you back down:

Walk away, try not to talk to that person again, or at worst supplicate to the person insulting you.

You can try backing down gracefully. You can ignore the person and move on to the next topic.

Here’s the million-dollar question though…What do you do when the graceful approach doesn’t work?

What if they insult you in front of a date, friends, or family? What if the person isn’t insulting you, but a loved one?

Are you stuck with the two choices of backing down or defending yourself?

No, of course not.

If you learn anything from me, my dear reader, learn this…Never accept the menu you’ve been given. There is ALWAYS a third choice (and a fourth, fifth, etc.)

Here is one thing you can do instead of backing down or defending yourself…You can learn to see the “insult” as a possibility.

Often we are insulted by what people say because we fear it to be true. If somebody said you were ugly, you might fear that is true and get defensive.

However, if somebody told you the sky is orange, you would respond differently.

You could respond with curiosity (“What do you mean by that?”) or by re-interpreting the situation as fun (“I don’t know what drugs you are on, but I want some”) or by playfully agreeing (“Get used to it. It’s only going to get more global warming from here”).

You can do this because you know IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.

You can do this because your attachments are not threatened.

You are not attached to convincing this person of anything. You know the sky isn’t orange and you don’t care if another person believes that. It says nothing negative about you that this person is saying this weird thing about the sky.

You can do this because your belief is stronger than their belief.

If you’re supremely confident and somebody calls you ugly, and you believe that’s a weird and ludicrous statement you would respond the same way as you would to someone saying “the sky is orange.”

You could respond with curiosity (“What makes you say that?”) or re-interpreting the situation as fun (“You don’t need to try to keep me humble, I already know I’m gorgeous”) or by playfully agreeing (“That’s not all, I’m also horrible at spelling”)

If you reinterpret an insult as a possibility you see it differently. You can ask:

In what ways can I learn from this?

In what ways can I make it fun for myself?

How can I use this as an opportunity for connection?

And once you have that attitude, the words don’t really matter.

You see we all think we’re constrained, stuck, shackled by life’s impositions.

But, life is all about possibility.

To have the life of our dreams, we have to become alchemists.

Can you see the possibility within the constraints?

The freedom within the shackles?

The gold within the lead?

The doing isn’t the hard part. It’s the seeing that is most difficult for us all.

Remember this:

It’s only when you are not attached to any particular outcome that all outcomes become possible.

I am alive and moved my newsletter to substack (cause it’s free). You signed up for my original newsletter if you no longer want to receive any emails from me, please unsubscribe below

If you do want to get this email, add me to your contacts. And make sure this bad boy doesn’t go to the spam folder.

About four months ago, I stopped writing without warning.

Here’s a quick summary of what happened: I quit my job and have been focusing on chronic health issues. Soon, I will be looking for a new job (probably in DTC or B2C marketing, content, or growth).

My old newsletter was self-therapy, it was full of thoughts that were stuck in my brain and had been begging to come out

Many of you enjoyed it, but when your friends would ask, “What’s Pranav’s newsletter about?” You wouldn't know how to answer.

In today's world, creators (like me) have to put themselves in a bit of a box. We have to find a “niche” and deliver “value” within that niche to get an audience and truly help people. At the same time, we have to be unique, authentic, and undefinable.

I’m still working on exactly what that niche is, but my current idea is that in a future newsletter project, I will be talking about… how to be honest, persuasive, and authentic in a world where we’ve all become marketers.

If you stay on this newsletter, I’ll update you when that new newsletter project comes out.

But I also wanted a continuation of the old newsletter where I just write about whatever is on my mind.

So I’ll be running two newsletters in tandem. The “honest marketing newsletter” will come out sometime in fall

….and….

this current newsletter (that I’m calling “Pranav’s thoughts”) which will start with this inaugural newsletter.

This newsletter will be my online journal where I write about whatever I’m thinking about in real-time. I’ll be writing without any obligation to deliver “value” or stay on topic.

If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, I understand. You can unsubscribe below.

If you want to stay, expect random, philosophical, playful, super short emails delivered in a Pranav-ian way.

Excited to be back. Hope you’re excited too.

-Pranav

👋, I'm Pranav. You're getting this email because you wanted to know How to Automate Your Life to Be More Alive. If you are receiving this by mistake, please unsubscribe at the bottom of this email.

This week I have a choose your adventure approach to this newsletter.

I've been writing a really short essay every day and posting it on twitter.

Here are the 3 best ones for the week. You can click on the link to read the tweet and the short essay.

Read the one that looks really interesting, or if you're really daring...read 'em all!

1. My favorite of the bunch and the most popular one. It's about the power of witnessing beauty. Read here.

2. A short summary of a great Paul Graham essay. It's about how to be more innovative. Read here.

3. If you're an OG Fan you've read most of this one before. It's about the power of my favorite type of writing. Read here.

Which essay did you read? Which essay was your favorite?

<3,

Pranav

I collect sentences.

Yes I know it's a little quirky, but it's also magical.

I collect sentences.

The best ones are ones that you can live in. They are ones in which the story is both contained on the page and yet somehow bleed out poetically into your world.

The best remind me of the moments in which as a child I used to put on my dad's shoes. My tiny feet in those big, long, clumsy shoes. I would walk around pretending.

I would wonder about this man, my father, and all the things I didn't know. And then years later as I would grow up, I would realize that he had a life of his own. He had already lived many lives that didn't involve me.

My favorite sentences are sentences you try on. Sentences that have lives of their own. Sentences that make you know things you can't explain and explain things you could never know.

See if you can try this sentence on:

And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought stay.”

This sentence is from Amy Hempel my sentence goddess. I've written about her before.

Her sentences are alive in ways I can't describe. They are electrical charges I feel every time I come across them.

Jhumpa Lahiri my other sentence goddess is much the same way. And like me she is obsessed with sentences:

Plenty [sentences] do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates. - Jhumpa Lahiri, My Life's Sentences

As I think about Jhumpa's comments about sentences and reflect on the sentences I love... I can't help but thinking a very cliche thought:

Reading is a remarkable thing isn't it?

Reading is the ultimate love affair.

Collecting bits of written work is like holding on to the objects that remind you of long lost loves.

We live in an age of abundance. We have news flying towards us faster than we can consume it. We are behind on TV Shows, have too many books on our to-read lists and among the hundreds of unread emails in our inbox are newsletters we've subscribed to and then promptly forgotten.

In a world where information is like a raging river, it feels good to be a sentence collector. When I collect a sentence, it feels as if I've captured something beautiful and true that I have a unique relationship to. It resonated with me and thus it must have meaning.

When I collect sentences, I am aware that I am choosing a sentence.

But I am also aware that in some weird magical way the sentence has chosen me.

I'm not sure how or why I've found my way to your inbox.

But recently, I started re-designing and re-thinking what my newsletter and online writing career is going to look like.

I am closely approaching the one year mark of writing this newsletter which is a crazy thing to think about.

So I wanted to say this:

Our love affair may have just started recently. Or it may have been there since the very beginning. It may last for many many more newsletters. Or it may not last much longer than this one. But, regardless, I want to point out how beautiful it is that I've chosen you and you've chosen me.

Choosing to let a writer hypnotize you is choosing to let yourself be sculpted by another. That is baffling and beautiful in equal parts.

As the writer in question, I feel the full weight enormous privilege and responsibility you've entrusted to me. It's the greatest gift.

Thank you.

-Pranav

I'm working on a piece on what we can learn from athletes to be more productive. So much of modern productivity advice is flawed or too intense and I want to help fix that.

The biggest thing I am learning is that athletes' real superpower is relaxation. The best athletes are able to de-compress and hit a level of deep relaxation that we can only dream of. They ping pong between high intensity and deep relaxation whereas we live our lives in a state of chronic stress.

If you want your life to drastically improve define what deep relaxation means for you (dancing, long walk, reading, napping, gardening, etc). FYI social media, multi-tasking doesn't count...it unfortunately is not relaxing for our brains.

Then go to your calendar and schedule pockets of deep relaxation into your day to day.

Learning how to be a better relax-er will make you better, stronger, and more productive in all aspects of your life.

Be More Alive

I wrote a review for a movie called Eat Drink Man Woman that I wanted to share this week:

Maybe I'm narcissistic, but I find the best movies are often a mirror. On the surface, they tell you what they are about, but if you look deeper they tell you what you are about

The emotions, the feelings, the things you cry at, the things you laugh at... to me it feels more real than any conversation I can have. To watch a deep movie with someone is to know someone. It's to share an intimate act.

The American in me is used to the love yous and thank yous and pleases that litter a conversation like a wall decor. An ornament we use so the conversation doesn't feel bare. But there is an extreme politeness, a fakeness, that most of these words carry. So we as Americans resort to the grand gesture in relationships when we really want to express our feelings...the prototypical boom box moment

The Asian in me is abhorrent of the grand gesture. It's too much, too rich, too forward. The Asian in me looks at the little moments, glances, gestures, the way your dad places the food on your plate. For the Asian in me, this is a surer sign of love than any grand gesture could be.

These days our attention spans are dying, social media is blowing up the world and we are only left with mass appeal spectacle movies that Martin Scorsese calls roller-coaster movies. Big explosions! Sweeping grand romance!

And I feel alone. Because I love these types of movies. Movies that are slow, small, elegiac.

If it's true what I said about movies being a mirror...if our movies define us if movies change how we feel if to watch a movie is to know ourselves then...

Who are you becoming?

What are your relationships turning into?

How are you sacrificing the little moments in your relationships for the daydreams of a grand gesture?

What does the mirror say about you? - Pranav's Review

That's it for this letter, see you next week,

Pranav

Have you felt the beautiful pain of heartbreak?

Most people my age and younger would answer with a triumphant, "No!"

And that's what I fear.

I fear the youth of today are so scared of any type of heartbreak that their hearts break a little every day. They don't strive in their career, in their relationships, in their personal life because what if … what if their hearts are broken?

They'll continue this way avoiding heartbreak until one day they get fired, in the middle of a divorce, half of their assets gone with a stroke of a pen.

But worst of all, they will realize that they have never truly lived.

The only way to prevent this is for me to warn you now. So let me get out my cane, put my dentures in and tell you what's wrong with the youth of today. Let me sing you the sweet song of heartbreak.

Is It Better To Have Loved And Lost Than To Never Have Loved At All?

Ask me 10 or even 5 years ago and I would have said it's better to have never loved at all. My emotions were so tempestuous, the sadness, anger, and fear, so strong that I thought they would bulldoze me. I felt as if I had no freewill. Like I was just a carrier of emotions.

So I turned them all off. I tried to not to feel any my emotions.

But in turning off the "bad" emotions, I turned off the good ones too.

I was trying to be even keeled, but instead ended up feeling bored, listless, and apathetic. I was living in an emotional flatline.

The only way I would engage my emotional highs and lows were through movies. And over time I noticed that the characters I admired the most were deeply emotional. They were emotional and yet somehow still rational, disciplined, and courageous.

I noticed that the people I was most attracted to were both lovers and fighters. That's when I knew I had to change. I had to stop fearing and start loving meaningful heartbreak.

Now I say give me meaningful heartbreak. Give me the most painful heartbreak. Because there is something sweet in that too. That means for however short, I dared to love.

But as my appetite for heartbreak has grown, the world's has gone down.

The modern world has (for good reasons) decreased the collective pain we all felt in society. Science and technology has improved our lifespan and our health span.

But now, it seems to be overcorrecting. We shouldn't decrease ALL pain, only the RIGHT one. We shouldn't create dopamine machines that capitalize on momentary feelings of pain or boredom. Instead of feeling difficult emotions we are all addicted to notifications and mindless scrolling.

Since we immediately turn to comfort when we feel a difficult emotion, we've forgotten how to process them.

Instead of making choices, the kids of today (including me) avoid real risks. They don't realize that not making a choice IS a choice.

We must examine our options and pick knowing that there is a good chance we'll make the "wrong" choice. A wrong choice is better that infinitely delaying any real decisions.

You must ask yourself: What is the meaningful heartbreak I've been avoiding?

Risk in the Modern World

The people we laud as risk takers in our society are not risk takers anymore. Founders just change the color of their messaging apps and use big VC money and marketing to sell it to us as different. Writers (like me) write another inane article that doesn't move the needle about how social media is bad.

Part of this is that nothing is new under the sun, but in the past creators remixed to create something new. Creators remixed to create something only they could have made. Now, they remix to find "value." Basically they remix just enough so they are putting as little work in to get as much money (or fans) as they can.

And it's not entirely their fault. Our appetite as audiences doesn't allow for risk. We are afraid of reading something original. Because trying something new means it might be bad. We don't watch original tv shows and watch The Office for the 100th time. We are afraid of heartbreak.

What really hurts is that our expectations aren't met. That the world isn't how we really envisioned it. Even in heartbreak that's so small.

We forget that our lives aren't meant to be productive all the time. We forget that waste and heartbreak are often the point. How can we dare to be great if we can't risk being terrible?

What Should I Do?

I've talked before about solutions to the emotional flatline you may find yourself in. I've talked about how you need to love your inner devil.

But perhaps it's better realizing that any choice we make in life is a fraught one.

“There is no perfection only life” - Milan Kundera

And remember not making choice is a choice.

If you decide to become alive and truly start playing this game of life it's going to be difficult. Your life will be full of pain, disappointment, and heartbreak.

But it will also full of the pleasures, great beauties, and meaning that you can never imagine.

This leads to an obvious question that Hunter S. Thompson puts beautifully:

“Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

The first of a series of choices begins now. Recognize that you (yes, you too, dear reader) are not pursuing what you want in life because of a deep, undefined fear of disappointment.

Are you going to seriously start playing the game of life? Or are you going to live in an emotional flatline for the rest of your life?

Don't answer those questions in your mind.

Answer those questions in how you live your life.

Here's to some more meaningful heartbreak,

Pranav

Imagine you are playing a video game.

Imagine it's one of those games where you get to create the character you will play the game with.

What character would you create?

How different is that character from you, today?

Now imagine you aren't playing a video game. You're living real life. Which character are you creating to go about in the world?

We don't realize it, but we are continually creating the character that is us. Many of us go about living our life without realizing that we can actually change the character we play with.

We can create the characters we want to become and then take the habits to become those characters. It's surprisingly easy in theory, and unsurprisingly takes hard work in practice.

So here's my question to you:

To be happy, successful, alive life... your answer should be both.

This is part 3 of my series on happiness. You can find part 1 here. And part 2 here.

Here are my last two ways to maximize your aliveness, happiness, and meaning. I am convinced that to reach our full potential in this world, we all have to simultaneously be lovers and fighters. I will be writing about both of these ideas in depth in future newsletters, but here's a synopsis.

1. The Way of the Warrior

"This is your path and you will pursue it with excellence. You face your fear because your goal demands it. That is the goddamn warrior spirit." - Alex Honnold, Free Solo

"A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control" - Jordan Peterson

Sometimes you have to be a fighter (or a warrior). In today's world warrior energy is demonized. As I said in my letter called Why You Should Embrace Your Inner Warrior:

We see bad people doing violent, aggressive things and assume it’s because of the “warrior energy”. But they aren’t true warriors.

Good conflict is necessary. Justified anger can create a revolution. Creative destruction is necessary to birth a better world.

We must define our values and fight against evil whenever we can. We can and must be courageous. A hidden life of courage is a noble one, even if nobody knows about it.

It's scientifically proven that an easy life is not a meaningful one. If we make our lives easier, we may gain some happiness in the short term, but we lose it in the long term.

To find meaning and long term happiness, be a warrior.

Take responsibility for your lives and make it better. Use the tools of a warrior namely courage, strength, and discipline to shape the reality around you.

We are living in a spiderweb world, each thing we do (or don't do) creates a small tingling that can be felt on the other sides of the web.

We all collectively do shape and will shape the world around us.

Learn to love the challenges. Learn to love meaningful difficulty.

2. The Life of a Lover

“Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.” -Rumi

"The art of seeing has to be learned.” - Marguerite Duras, The Lover

I've written about this incessantly in my post about Why Great Beauty is in the day to day and my post about the Great Beauty Journal.

To be a lover means to be a lover of life, but it also means to be a lover of people.

One of the biggest markers of happiness is how deep a person's relationships are with their friends and family.

How do you get deeper relationships?

Well, in today's world we all expect our parents, our siblings, and our significant others to save us. But love is about loving not about being loved. To be a lover, you have to share what's alive in you with others.

I talked about this all the way back in April in this post.

I read a book by Erich Fromm called the Art of Loving and it gave me a lot to think about.

Here are a couple quotes:

“Love is primarily giving, not receiving…Some make a virtue out of giving in the sense of a sacrifice….For them, the norm that it is better to give than to receive means that it is better to suffer deprivation than to experience joy. For the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning…Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of aliveness.”

“He gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness — of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other’s sense of aliveness by enchanting his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy.” - Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Next time you interact with someone, ask yourself are you expecting them to share their aliveness with you? Or are you enriching the other person by sharing your aliveness?

I will be writing more about warriors and lovers as I am trying to be both a lover and fighter in my own life.

I find that greatness is all about the when. To be great you have to know when to embody the lover and when to embody the warrior. You have to be a paradox capable of strength, courage, and daring but also capable of love, flow, and presence.

And this concludes my series of the secrets of happiness. Next week, we will be back to the shorter more focused posts.

But before then I wanted to ask:

Are there any secrets in your life that make you happier and more alive?

I would love to hear them.

Talk to you next week ,

Pranav

In last week’s newsletter, I talked about how currently most of happiness studies are focused on sculpting away unhappiness. I outlined the basic ways in which we can sculpt away unhappiness in that post.

The things I talked about in the last post (sleep, exercise, diet, awareness, and self-talk) are almost medicinal. They are great delayers. They are important because they delay health problems, both mental and physical. In doing so, your happiness span (like life span but for happiness) is increased.

While these things are very important, they are not the entire picture. Doctors, psychologists, and modern day self help only talk about delaying or removing unhappiness.

But I just don’t want to delay death, unhappiness, and health problems. I want to to be truly and fully alive now. But how? Well, each of these deserves a looongg newsletter post in itself, but I’ve tried to summarize them.

Today’s newsletter we’ll be talking about 2 of the things you can do to be happier and more alive.

1. Shake Your Shadow’s Hand

“Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow.” - Haruki Murakami

In psychology, the shadow is all the parts of ourselves that we don’t identify with ourselves. The shadow is all the parts we’ve denied because they feel weak, bad, or unallowable.

We all have things we try to repress in daily life.

In his book, Untethered Soul, Michael Singer calls these the inner thorns in our lives:

“Imagine that you have a thorn in your arm that directly touches a nerve. When the thorn is touched, it’s very painful. Because it hurts so much, the thorn is a serious problem. It’s difficult to sleep because you roll over on it. It’s hard to get close to people because they might touch it. It makes your daily life very difficult. You can’t even go for a walk in the woods because you might brush the thorn against the branches. This thorn is a constant source of disturbance, and to solve the problem you have two choices”

You can either create a life so your thorn will never be touched...

If you’re lonely, you must avoid going to places where couples tend to be. If you’re afraid of rejection, you must avoid getting too close to people,

If you decide you have to keep things from touching the thorn, then that becomes the work of a lifetime.

If you make the first choice, your hidden, repressed, and unexamined sides of your shadow will run your life. Most people live like this (sometimes without realizing it). Their thorns run their entire life.

“It affects all your decisions, including where you go, whom you’re comfortable with, and who’s comfortable with you. It determines where you’re allowed to work, what house you can live in, and what kind of bed you can sleep on at night. When it’s all said and done, that thorn is running every aspect of your life. It turns out that the life of protecting yourself form the problem becomes a perfect reflection of the problem itself.”

Or you can remove your inner thorn.

“You can look deep within yourself, to the core of your being, and decide that you don’t want the weakest part of you running your life. You want to be free of this.

You want to talk to people because you find them interesting, not because you’re lonely. You want to have relationships with people because you genuinely like them, not because you need for them to like you. You want to love because you truly love, not because you need to avoid your inner problems.”

We can remove the inner thorn by doing what I call “shaking the shadow’s hand.” First, we have to shine the light in our shadows. This can be difficult because often we are so scared of being open with our shadow.

The first step is to be aware and let yourself feel the full extent of your emotions, even the “negative” ones. Then ask yourself what messages are these feelings trying to send you? Remember, even feelings like envy have important messages.

You might repress these messages because they can be life changing. Maybe you realize you are dating the wrong person, or you’re in the wrong career, or something bigger! Once you listen to these messages, it’s your responsibility to explore whether they have any validity.

When we acknowledge, validate, and shake the hand of our hidden parts, we can integrate them. We can become fully developed people.

It’s important to remember that:

“A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control” - Jordan Peterson

You should develop and validate your fear, your danger, and your sadness.

As I put in my newsletter about your being most alive, befriending your shadow (or devil) is tremendously useful:

Once you learn to love the devil, you see through his occasional dumb advice and can see his good qualities. Sometimes he gives great profound advice. Sometimes he propels you to act where there is injustice. Sometimes he tells you to take time to grieve when you are suffering. Sometimes he shows you your childish, playful, rogue side.

If nothing else, remember this: There is no beauty without sadness and there is no courage without fear.

It is in the healing of our psychic wounds that we come to know ourselves. . . . In the evolution of consciousness, our greatest problem is always our richest opportunity. -Sheryl Paul, Wisdom of Anxiety

The difficult emotions you feel are part of the process. There can be no shadow without light. And no light without a shadow.

2. Dance to the Music

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” - Nietzsche

You know the drill by now; I had to sneak in a Nietzsche quote somewhere in this newsletter lol.

For a while I’ve been interested in great, charismatic, attractive people. There are some people in our world who seem to effortlessly glide through life. They are happy, gracious, successful, powerful, and wise.

I spent a lot of times codifying what they do differently than “normal” folk. What I found was that greatness is less about the what and more about the how.

These people I admire have all the admirable qualities they have because they’re more alive than other people.

Everybody hears music, eats food, who sway on the dance floor but they are alive few who really listen, who really savor, who really dance.

You too can be the type of person who is more alive.

It sounds cheesy, but it comes down to hearing life’s music and learning to dance to it.

I’ve talked before about creating a Great Beauty Journal. This is what I said:

Every evening write 1-3 things that happened that were moments of great beauty. At first, it’s hard. By writing that every evening you learn to lower the bar for what qualifies as a “Great Beauty moment”, but more importantly you notice great beauty more deeply in your life. To write in your journal, you become present and realize how awe-inspiring life can be. It’s still difficult, but I’ve found moments of beauty that put my problems in perspective and made me appreciate life more. For example, a certain guitar riff, an amused smile from a friend, and even a shade of sunlight can have Great Beauty.

Notice it.

It’s all around you.

What we regret most in our lives is not what we could have achieved, but how much we could have been alive in the moments in which we were sleepwalking through life.

First, endeavor to live and feel deeply even on the bad days.

Coming alive is becoming alert and aware to the thousands and thousands of blessings that we receive — even on a day on which we have to go to the dentist or on a day we are really sick. -David Steindl-Rast

Then, incorporate more play into your day-to-day life (my friend Ritesh is obsessed with this idea in his newsletter Playtime).

Where are moments in your life where you can laugh more, play more, dance more? Where are the moments you are in touch with your inner child?

I say you should fill life with more solo dance parties in your room! More singing in the shower, more time for fun.

If you do nothing else, next time you play some music, let go of your inhibitions. Let your body sway, dance, and gyrate. Who cares if it’s weird, learn to go beyond society’s orders. Find the beauty in the inhibition-less chaos.

As you get better at listening to life’s music and dancing to it, you’ll realize it requires a certain bravery too.

Playful chaos is a rebellion against the boxes society needs to fit us in. It’s a lust for the present that prevents us from feeling the wounds that companies need us to have so they can sell us more useless stuff.

To be truly alive means being different from the zombies that sleepwalk among us. The ones that are too scared to feel the unadulterated emotions of being alive.

As Nietzsche supposedly put it:

Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

My goal is for you to be so happy, so alive, so charismatic that you are thought to be insane by other people. You'll be insane because you're more alive than others...

because you integrate your shadow and remove your inner thorns.

because you see the great beauty they won't.

because you can hear the music.