“As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.

- Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

Music That Moves Me:

In the Air ⁠— DMA’S

Something I’m Thinking About:

This Post Will Change Your Life by David Cain

Fellow human,

If you are receiving this message, that means you are alive. This is a wonderful thing. Please take a moment, and perhaps a deep breath, to congratulate yourself on your continued survival.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how, for most of our ancestors, survival alone probably wasn’t just enough, but a cause for celebration. I’ve been wondering: why do we need so much more than survival today to be content? I think it has something to do with these mental mechanisms that spur us along and to continue to grow, but wow, what a costly spur!

A fun, little mental teaser of a question for you to try to honestly answer:

What greater gift could be bestowed upon you today, than this day?

Sit with that for a moment. I don’t think we can help but realize that, hey, this day is a pretty great ass day, for we’d be nothing without it. Our human brains get caught up in solving problems and this constant strife to make life even better by dangling these false carrots in front of us saying, “If we just get that thing, then we’ll finally be there!” But the truth is we are here. And this is the thing. Today is a reason to celebrate and anything beyond it is but icing on the cake if you ask me.

The daily banquet, set, yet again! Go ice your cake and enjoy the sweetness, but remember to note the cake itself, for it’s the bulk of this grand thing and we seem to constantly forget and take it utterly granted.

I had a great July among the pines of Flagstaff. Similar to June, I spent the bulk of my days playing with strips of paper and index cards as I continue building the backbone of a book. I’ve been working to mine and distill vast swaths of information and written wisdom from many of the greatest mind’s to ever grace this world to meld with my own experiences, values, and thoughts, and must say, it’s great to have such people whispering in your mind’s ear so often. While we all intermingle and intertwine with each other out in the world, reality is largely a private experience for each of us. Investing time in conference with the finest thoughts of people like Joseph Campbell, Jack Gilbert, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Pirsig, and Ralph Waldo Emerson has been shaping my private experience in the most magnificent of ways.

I’m sure you’ve heard “we’re the sum of our influences,” or “the average of the five people we spend the most time with,” or any of those other ways of saying that we more or less become what we interact with. I am very much in agreement with this. Swimming in the words of these insightful, inspired humans for the past couple of months has most definitely shifted my awareness closer to theirs. It’s shown me gifts that sat previously undiscovered right under my nose and fanned the flames of that “inner life” that Joseph Campbell mused about on a Bill Moyer’s PBS Special where he proclaimed with clairvoyance, “the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”

Following this thread of thought: in an age of abundance, what we filter from our lives is just as important, if not more so, than what we let in. Three and a half years ago, I almost completely stopped watching television, largely because I wanted the ten years most people spend staring at a TV screen to trade on my own terms. What I didn’t realize then, but since have, is that I wasn’t just gaining time but also escaping psychological suppression. I cannot express how much cleaner and at ease I feel away from a television, beyond the reach of commercials. Commercials suck. I can’t believe I used to constantly subject myself to such catchy, dissatisfying things.

What I’m getting at here is that it’s becoming very clear to me that to curate your life is to curate yourself. And I think placing this idea of filtering life front and center of your cerebrum worth the entirety of our current correspondence. It feels of such benefit on my end.

So, my message to you this month is a simple one: swim in the quality, filter out the junk.

Speaking of quality, if any of you wonderful people will be in the Yellowstone area August 4th to 21st, hit the reply button and let’s see if we can’t meet up! I’ll be spending my final weeks of full-fledged freedom before beginning flight school in September out there, tramping up, down, and all around my happy place in the mountains just east of the world’s first national park.

Til next month!

With love & stoke,

Ethan

P.S. I’m doing this new thing where I will read you an article! Check out the one below. Atop the page, you’ll find a link that says, “Rather I read it to ya?” Click it, and I will.

This Month’s Articles:

How I Learned to Float Against the Tide

Last week, I was talking on the phone with my brother. Discussing my personal selling points for a book proposal I’m working on, he told me that whenever he describes me to someone whom I’ve never met he tells them:

“He does what he wants with his life and somehow seems to not feel the pressure that everyone else does to do certain things.”

Self-awareness is difficult. I never really thought of myself in such a way. My ego held onto the compliment like a pretty pebble from a stream, taking it from my figurative pocket and turning it over and over in my hand for it’s smooth, pleasant feel.

I do feel a lot less pressure to do “certain things” than I used to and suspect most people do. In reflecting upon it, I began to recall other instances of this curiosity.

Read On >

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