Never Complain, Never Explain – The Daily Stoic – Part 17 of 366

Don’t allow yourself to be heard any longer griping about public life, not even with your own ears!

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.9

The burdens of responsibility are immense, and it is human nature to want to air your grievances about any given thing. The conventional wisdom even reinforces this: don’t bottle things up, get it off your chest, blow off steam.

How interesting it is then that we know, and have known clearly since Marcus’ time, that venting does no good. A recent study confirms that venting actually can be benign at best and counterproductive at its worst because it essentially elevates the problems in your mind and allows you to ruminate on them more deeply. Rumination is also deeply tied to mental health and depression.

This comes as a timely reminder for me, and it was one of the most important takeaways from Holiday’s The Obstacle Is The Way — it is easy to complain, make excuses and justifications, but it doesn’t do anything, it never lightens the load, and it does not remove the obstacles you face.

Negativity is like a cancer: it multiplies until it destroys the very being that gives it life if it is not stopped in its tracks.

The Strong Accept Responsibility – The Daily Stoic – Part 16 of 366

If we judge as good and evil only the things in the power of our own choice, then there is no room left for blaming the gods or being hostile to others.

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.41

In the world of business there is a key trait that is highlighted in just about every book on leadership and company culture: as a leader you take blame and give praise. Complaints go up the chain of command, not down. This doesn’t mean as a leader you don’t provide guidance, feedback, corrections, and so on, but you must internally learn to differentiate between what is venting and complaining and what is valuable, actionable feedback for your team and organization. The most successful leaders accept responsibility, often without praise and accolades.

Given this, I am always drawn back to a thought exercise I went through in business school which, while it has some eerie dystopian capitalist overtones, I think is useful for many people who have never thought of life this way. Imagine your life a business, and you as the CEO. You must make strategic decisions, and over your life you will likely command millions in revenue from salaries and other sources. You have to choose when and how to invest in your team (that’s you, and your partner if you have one), which opportunities to take and ignore, how to manage your cost structure, and figure out how to deal with the many obstacles that face your nascent enterprise.

You are the the CEO of your life. You are the top of the chain of command. The buck stops with you. It is your choices and actions that will guide the outcomes.

The responsibility is yours.

This Should Be Quick & Easy™

During a recent lunch conversation with my colleagues we discussed the idea that you often cannot easily see the world from another person’s perspective because you cannot unlearn what you know or remove your biases completely. In engineering this sometimes manifests with senior team members (including me, to my shame) sometimes saying, “Oh, this is will be quick and easy” without necessarily explaining why because the answer seems so obvious.

But it isn’t obvious. Not to everyone. And if you quickly chime in that a problem is trivial then you’ve potentially set off spurious thoughts in other team members that are unhelpful. Wait, why is that easy? It doesn’t seem easy. I must be missing something. Or maybe I just suck.

Obviously this is not the intent of the comment. In fact, we think we’re helping! We assume in a perfect world people will always ask questions and feel safe in doing so, but the senior team members have transferred the onus to the junior team members in this scenario. Worse still, they have potentially robbed them of a learning opportunity based on their personality and gumption.

The lesson here is a simple one, but it is still hard for me. That is why I have it on a sticky note on my monitor during video calls.

Listen more and speak less.

Provide intent, not instruction.

Don’t chart the course, but course correct.

Depression is a disease of civilization

Depression is hard. I have found it can be nearly impossible to explain and convey the gravity of it to people who have never experienced it themselves or with those they care about. For those unfamiliar it is easy to see laziness or apathy, but for those struggling its hard to explain why the simplest tasks are insurmountable. Why taking out the trash or going for a walk or checking the mail takes every ounce of power you can muster. You’re spent and you aren’t sure why. Everything little thing feels impossible.

I remember when I first watched this talk by Dr. Stephen Ilardi ten years ago, and as someone who was struggling with depression it really made me challenge my assumptions about my struggles. When he talked about depression being nearly non-existent in hunter gatherer societies even to this day it has to make you wonder as he did: why is that? How is that possible? Rates of mental health issues have increased dramatically over the last 50 years and show no signs of slowing, and yet we have more research than ever on the topic.

Everyone’s struggle is different and I suggest anyone who is struggling to seek help and connection, but I can say for myself that his hypothesis and advice was apropos. Modern life removes a lot of the struggles we are biologically adapted for, and that leaves us with mental and physical gaps to fill. If you don’t need to find your food yourself then your brain will start to equate that struggle with your DoorDash order. With so much spare time you turn your phone into a job with endless social media apps to scroll, notifications to read and clear, and numbers to make go up or down as your dopamine demands. Since the web is infinite you can do this endlessly, and you lose sleep in search of the next cat video that will make your brain tingle for 15 seconds. You become “busy” and don’t see your friends because you feel like crap and become overwhelmed. The cycle turns into a death spiral.

I don’t mean to trivialize, but these are modern invented problems only made possible by the advancements of civilization. Our biology isn’t adapted to spend 14 hours a day on a screen. You need the sun and nature. You are a social creature no matter how introverted you are. Your brain is wired for connection. Your brain needs challenging and creative work the way your muscles need movement. Without it you will atrophy.

I have spent the last few years working diligently on becoming the best version of myself, and the results have dramatically exceeded what I would have predicted when deep down in the depths of depression. If I could sum up my biased n=1 personal experiment it would largely follow Dr. Ilardi’s advice:

Sleep well
Move more
Challenge your brain
Prioritize social connection
Provide value to others
Play with the world

Put the screen away, go outside, and follow where your feet take you. That is where the world is.

Building A New Computer – Part 1

Once upon a time I would either build or help others build a new computer once or twice a year. These projects were always fun and interesting, and I normally enjoyed each step in the process. Trying to build with a budget in mind and get the best bang per buck, and ensuring compatibility and optimal performance in an era that predates PC Part Picker added an extra layer of nerdy challenge.

However, as time went on my friends and I stopped building as much. Getting older meant we had the opposite problem as our younger selves: more money but less time. This made buying pre-builts more appealing. Others (myself included) fell into another bucket: the gaming rig simply didn’t need upgrading.

I think young me really enjoyed more demanding games. I was still young in the nascent era of hyper-realistic first person shooters that started to require serious hardware to perform. But older me is putzing around in games like Stardew Valley, Guild of Dungeoneering, Dome Keeper, and Monster Hunter Rise. Although all impressive in their own ways, most are many years old and the only 3D title (Monster Hunter Rise) was built to run on the Nintendo Switch which had low specs even when it launched in 2017. None of these games are very demanding. In fact, I have yet to run into anything I want to play on the Steam Deck that it can’t handle in a way I find acceptable.

Truly I have become less discerning over time, but there is also simply so much more choice in what to play and lots of good games do not require that much computational horsepower. This has lead me to keeping Typhon, my main computer, for far longer than I ever expected.

Typhon was built in November 2011. Little did I know that the Intel i7-2600k (there were no i9’s in this era) would be a real champion. Over the 11 years of Typhon’s existence I have had numerous hardware failures: broken hard drives, dead RAM sticks, the NIC on the motherboard, and two GPUs. But the i7-2600k continues to perform to this day. I think it is clear that the processors Intel produces are very likely to outlive the components they slot into, and I worry the day will come that the ASUS P8Z68-V PRO motherboard will finally give out and not be cheaply replaced.

There have been hints of Typhon showing its age over time, but with some maintenance and modernization I’ve always managed to go further than expected. In 2011 when the machine was built you could get a 120GB SATA III SSD for $150. Over the course of three operating systems (Win7, Win 8, and Win10) this really turned out to be not enough. Now you can get 1TB for $70, or $100 if you want a DRAM cache included. As my GPUs died or became otherwise insufficient (I’m looking at you Witcher 3), it was always easy to upgrade and the difference in performance between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 for GPUs is basically non-existent. Last year during an unfortunately timed GPU replacement I was “forced” to buy a 1TB M.2 NVME SSD PCIe 4.0 drive as part of a Newegg Shuffle. Given that my rig was over 10 years old it had me thinking about upgrading, but it turns out there are very cheap PCIe 3.0 adapters for an M.2 drive, and this breathed a whole new life into my long lived gaming machine. Never before had I felt such speed and responsiveness, and it had nothing to do with my CPU.

Although Typhon continues to work admirably, the weight of a hundred small things have added up, and I was just waiting for a push into the upgrading camp. With the addition of the M.2 drive I thought upgrades would be a few more years out, and they could be. The only time I’d really maxed out the i7-2600k was when downloading games on Steam. With a gigabit WAN connection the CPU actually cannot process data fast enough to feed it from the NIC to the M.2 SSD. Strangely the storage and the network are now faster than the CPU during sustained max throughput. But even that I can live with. It is not necessary to download games at gigabit speeds. Ultimately, Microsoft and Windows 11 are my culprit. Typhon predates TPM 2.0 being released, and unless Microsoft relaxes this rule then Typhon will remain on Windows 10 forever (or something more drastic).

Separately from Typhon I also run a little Ubuntu server called Hermes. It was built to be an always-on box used for hosting game servers, software development, and other linuxy things. This computer too has started to show its age and wane in usefulness. Over time we migrated away from Ventrilo and Mumble servers to Discord. We’ve stopped playing the various Minecraft servers, but we may come back to them some day. And, somewhat to my surprise, the small hard drives and SSDs in this machine are actually not big enough to do some of the computing tasks I’m interested in doing. The only thing this server now runs is FoundryVTT, and that hardly warrants a separate machine running 24/7.

With the writing on the wall for both of these machines I started to reintegrate myself into the computer building hobby, and it was like reconnecting with an old friend. It was so great to catch up and see all of the changes that have been made over the past 5-10 years that I have not been paying particularly close attention to. PCIe 5.0 is here! These NVMEs really -are- that snappy! CPUs have so many cores now! Most computer cases don’t have 5.25″ bays anymore! There are motherboards that cost $1500!? And literally everything has RGB.

Of course I knew of these things, but using a Macbook Pro at work for the last 7 years and not upgrading my gaming rig really led me to have a shallow understanding of the space. And, honestly, that was nice. There is no reason to keep up with the computing hardware horse race if you are happy with what you have, and I think people throw out computers for more frequently than they should. In a world with so much e-waste we really should be more concerned about having a computer that meets our needs than having the latest and greatest every few years.

Now is also a unique moment in time. AMD just launched Zen5 CPUs, Intel is launching Raptor Lake CPUs in three days, PCIe 5.0 is rolling out, and there are new GPUs from Nvidia, Intel, and AMD all dropping right now during a period of low demand across the board.

It is finally time to build a new computer.

It’s Not The Thing, It’s What We Make Of It – The Daily Stoic – Part 15 of 366

When you are distressed by an external thing, it’s not the thing itself that troubles you, but only your judgement of it. And you can wipe this out at a moment’s notice.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.47

The book’s example after this quote is about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He spent his whole life dreaming and preparing for his career in politics, but at 39 he got polio. Did he let this horrible disease, an “external thing,” end his hopes and dreams of winning the presidency? We all know the answer given that FDR is widely regarded as one of the greatest political figures in American history.

This one also hits home for me. As we’ve touched on in the past, it is easy to feel like life was unfair in the hand it dealt you and then use that as fuel to generate a myriad of reasons why you don’t have what you want. My dad became disabled when I was in fourth grade. My mother got breast cancer a couple years later, and she died when I was in eleventh grade. My maternal grandfather died that same year. The knock on effects of these events were huge. Almost everything in life changed in some way. My entire childhood was defined by these events, and they were all outside of my control.

It took me a long time to make my peace. Ultimately the feelings of worry, anger, stress, disdain, and sadness were generated from within, and they were holding me back. Changing how I thought about these things very likely saved my life, and only now am I able to look back and see how fortunate I still was in so many ways.

The book ends with the line, “Let’s not confuse acceptance with passivity.” This is an important note. The idea is not to invalidate your feelings, to ignore things, or not to care. It is not about lack of agency, or abdicating your desires and ability (and responsibility) to act. From my view, you should experience the emotions as they come to you. It is good to be sad when sad things happen. But don’t get stuck and dwell on it for too long.

Time moves on, and so should you. Accept the things you cannot change.

Always The Same – The Daily Stoic – Part 14 of 366

Think by way of example on the times of Vespasian, and you’ll see all these things: marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying, wars, holiday feasts, commerce, farming, flattering, pretending, suspecting, scheming, praying that others die, grumbling over one’s lot, falling in love, amassing fortunes, lusting after office and power. Now that life of theirs is dead and gone… the times of Trajan, again the same…
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.32

It is easy to think we now live at the apex of human society, with our impressive technology and handful of accomplishments truly defining of our species. The Industrial Revolution. The invention of flight. The moon landing. The Internet.

But, truthfully, evolution takes a long time to occur. It takes a duration so long it is not easily comprehended by humans. Humans today are not appreciably different from humans 50, 100, or 1000 years ago. Sure, we have more technology and knowledge at our finger tips, but that largely does not change who and what we are. As Marcus Aurelius points out, we largely do what our ancestors did. Our ancestors will do largely what we do. Per the book, “With a few exceptions, things are the same as they’ve always been and always will be.”

We are all, for a brief time, passengers on the starship of Earth. It was here long before we were born, and it will be here long after we are gone. Radical change is not in the cards. Humans are humans, and they do what humans do. Make your peace with that and you improve your chances of a pleasant journey through the cosmos.

All Is Fluid – The Daily Stoic – Part 13 of 366

The universe is change. Life is opinion.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.3.4b

When our hair grows long we cut it. If our nails grow long we cut them. When our cells die they are replaced by new ones. The skin on your body is entirely different than the skin you had 27 days ago.

Are you still the same person? Or are you a new one? Strictly speaking the matter that makes up who you are is entirely new. And yet I think most would all agree we are still the same person; these molecular changes do not change who we are.

But what about your thoughts and memories? Those are constantly changing. What about your job? That is likely to change several times throughout your life. Where you live? Where you live now is probably different than where you grew up or went to college. How much do these things define who you, your family, and your friends are? How much do these things inform how you think and act?

The book notes that, “Our understanding of what something is is just a snapshot — an ephemeral opinion.” This is exactly right. How you view something today is based on so many different variables it is impossible to list them all. How you think about something tomorrow could be drastically different than how you thought about it today if something changes.

And it will. It always will. Change is the only constant.

It follows then that the more fluid and malleable you are in your thoughts, actions, and opinions, the smoother your journey through life will be. Being rigid should never be a point of pride as it shows a refusal to acknowledge the weight of the universe, and that is a losing battle.

Actors In A Play – The Daily Stoic – Part 12 of 366

Remember that you are an actor in a play, playing a character according to the will of the playwright — if a short play, then it’s short; if long, long. If he wishes you to play the beggar, play even that role well, just as you would if it were a cripple, a honcho, or an everyday person. For this is your duty, to perform well the character assigned you. That selection belongs to another.”
Epictetus, Enchiridion, 17

Play the hand you are dealt, and play it well. It is the only hand you get. This is the lesson the Epictetus is trying to impart. The book goes on to mention that accepting and fulfilling our part is not at odds with ambition which is not obvious at first glance. After all, if we are assigned a part then why try rising above our station? If we must play the beggar then how are we not locked into such a poor life?

There are many stories where the mighty fall, and there are many stories where the less fortunate rise. You may be assigned a part when you enter the story, but the story itself is not yet written. The question really is this: what do you want your story to be? If someone tells your tale, what will they say?

In order to change your story you must first accept and understand the role you have been tasked to play. You cannot change where the story starts or where it has already been, but once you are in control then your story will go wherever you wish.

How To Be Powerful – The Daily Stoic – Part 11 of 366

Don’t trust in your reputation, money, or position, but in the strength that is yours — namely, your judgements about the things that you control and don’t control. For this alone is what makes us free and unfettered, that picks us up by the neck from the depths and lifts us eye to eye with the rich and powerful.
Epictetus, Discourses, 3.26.34-35

The book talks about a story in which a philosopher stands eye to eye with Alexander the Great, unwilling to move out of the way of him and his army. When asked what he has accomplished compared to Alexander, he replies, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”

Reputation, money, position, fame, and so on can all be stripped away. They are things conferred unto us by other people and society. All humans desire these things to varying degrees. Unfortunately, they are not entirely within our realm of control.

This too is a hard lesson. Money truly seems very important, and when you don’t have enough life is indeed miserable. It is understandable why most people make such concessions to obtain it, even if they must do so at the expense of their individual freedoms. But I do think many (including myself) put perhaps too high a premium on it.

It doesn’t always feel like it, but you can always earn more money. It is worth making sure that you are not trading too much in return for it, both in terms of time, stress, and moral authority.

This is a timely and relevant passage. I don’t normally think of myself a kingdom builder, but I am more that than many I know. It has taken more deliberate action than I expected in passing the baton and handing over the keys to things I have spent five or more years building. Letting go is not easy for me. And yet I know that for the next cycle to begin I must learn to accept these things and cherish the chance to create an opportunities for others around me while I get out of the way.