On Asceticism
From Blind Spots: A Riches to Rags Story — Chapter XII
“Next was places and things. After panic-wheeling the bar cart out of my apartment, I committed to a frantic pace of scrambling my brain and shaking up the mental etch-a-sketch as vigorously as possible in the grand effort to revamp my lifestyle. I began rapidly decluttering and downsizing, starting with the material possessions as I punted anything of value for cash. As the apartment grew less crowded and Savonarola’s bonfire grew larger, I realized that the less crap I owned the happier I was and the more peace I had in my own head. The ascetics have it right. I kept going, donating the rest to Goodwill in Riviera Beach and then moving into a tiny studio apartment. All I had left was a bed, couch, computer, television, about 300 paperbacks, and an old leather recliner that my dad used to read in.
Life became extremely simple. Government prosecution took up the majority of my days and nights, but otherwise, I was either writing, reading, working out, or swimming in the ocean. The combined annual cost of all those activities is near zero. I knew that money won’t make you happy, but what I didn’t expect to learn on the path from riches to rags is that a lack of money isn’t necessarily going to make you unhappy. The Hedonic treadmill operates in both directions. ‘It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out,’ wrote Orwell. ‘You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.’”
There is a quote attributed to Lao Tse: To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. He is right. I wrote that above paragraph for Blind Spots in 2021 and haven’t changed my mindset since. Perhaps it is an age thing, but I feel like it makes sense spending the first half of your life adding things — call it age zero to age 35 — and then from that point forward, I’m not saying you have to live in a barrel like Diogenes, but your focus should be on minimalism, reducing complexity and removing all but the necessary. I share this not to shape your opinion of me but because my life genuinely has gotten better and better with each reduction. This is an ongoing tally of things I’ve continued to remove:
Television
News
Politics
Sports
Social media
Alcohol, tobacco and drugs — not just illicit but prescription
I get a lot of pushback on some of these so let me explain.
All uses of your time should be benchmarked to reading books, meaning, “is xyz going to be a better use of my time than reading a book.” I put writing up there as well, and for years now have aimed at three hours of reading and one hour of writing every day — writing in the morning, reading in the evening. The only other things I feel meet this benchmark are family, friends, God, nature, physical exercise, meditation, and the bare minimum of work required to support your lifestyle. I phrase the last one that way because simplifying your lifestyle brings that bare minimum required lower and lower; it feels like every guy I know has found a way to simultaneously earn $500k a year yet be dead broke and miserable.
If you need book recommendations, I put some for you here. Reading means non-work-related reading. No news, no empty calories, no business reading, no self-help pop psychology nonsense, nothing. You can do that during the day, but it doesn’t count towards the goal. Read history, read philosophy, read autobios and bios and memoirs, the older the better, because you will realize that nothing ever really changes and that almost all of what you are being force-fed on a daily basis is garbage.
That mostly covers the removal of news. On a typical day, there is no new news; the world got a little bit better, some people were born, some people died, nothing really noteworthy took place. But there are still thousands of newspapers around the world that must be published every single day and stuffed to the brim with words, and there are still thousands of news channels that must have something to say, and so regardless of if there was real news or not there will be something manufactured to fill that void… because money. It will all have a decidedly negative bent and make you feel angry, because again, money. If something truly important happens, you will find out because everyone else is addicted to the news and they’ll let you know. For the most part, this logic covers politics as well. All the daily political news is manufactured, manipulated, mostly false, designed to make you angry and designed to sow division amongst people who otherwise would get along. Fox News, CNN, all of it is extremely toxic and turns you into a sheep incapable of critical thought as well as a generally unpleasant human to be around. Just leave it alone and trust that America has been designed in a way where our country will be great no matter how incompetent our elected officials are.
On television, you can safely remove the dummy box from your life, all the shows and Netflix series and mindlessness, these are completely empty calories and consumed by people who are interested in killing time. Please, please stop killing time. This is the favored phrase of the lost and soulless and mediocre and it is the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish here by cutting out all these activities. The same principle covers sports as well. The pushback you will get from people is that either sports gives their life meaning or it’s the only thing connecting them to a certain group of friends. The hard truths are as follows. If sports are what give your life meaning, you are living an empty life. Find a mission. Find God. Find something besides wasting away in front of the television. Please, please, please stop killing time. As far as the friendships, if all that connects you to someone is sports, what does that tell you about the friendship? If the only thing you have to talk about with someone is fantasy football or gambling, really, how deep is that relationship?
Two quick things to mention. One, when you choose to start living your life this way, like, just shut the hell up about it. Smile a lot, nod, prepare to reply with no, I hadn’t heard about that and pretend to be interested until you can physically remove yourself from the scene as fast as possible. There is no way to say that you don’t watch television or sports or news or politics without implying that you think you’re better than the other person. They will take it that way, and it’s really not about that at all, it’s more developing a complete apathy towards the way that the vast majority of people willingly choose to piss away their limited time on this earth, consuming brainless trash and being monetized. In one way, you’re moving further away from society, but you’re actually just moving away from the lowest common denominator. There is no need to keep having the same 100 completely banal conversations about news and sports and politics with the same 100 banal people. Do what is best for you and if they say that you’re boring or strange for not doing what everyone else is doing, that’s probably a good thing. Just don’t talk about any of it. Lead by example and let these lifestyle choices show up in your mind, body and soul, in the energy you give off, because with time they will. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.
On alcohol and drugs of all kinds, even the legal ones, I have words but I like David Goggins’ words better: “I want to make sure that every single thing I feel is real. I want no masking. I want nothing to mask my ability to feel fear and to overcome fear, whatever it may be. I’m not saying people who drink or do these different things are trying to hide. Some people just do it. For me, I think it’s almost a masking agent, so then your mind doesn’t have to work as hard. That means I’m losing.” This mindset means you have to punt not just the booze and illegal drugs, but the stimulants and mood stabilizers and antidepressants and all the other crutches people lean on to get them through life. It is a hard choice, a grueling one even, but once you make it through the first three to six months you will look back at how silly, pointless and weak it all was. Life is better when it’s real, when it’s felt head on and without all the masking. Once again, you cannot say any of this to people in real life because they will hate you and view you as a sanctimonious cocksucker who thinks he’s better than they are. And again, that really isn’t the case at all, you have to just develop a polite apathy towards the choices that everyone else is making and silently do what’s best for you. The stigma isn’t attached to the person drinking and getting high and taking pills. That’s the normal American. That’s the direction society pushes you in. The stigma is attached to the sober one, the weird person who isn’t doing what everyone else is doing. Get used to it and stop caring what other people think about you.
On social media, this was a no-brainer and one I wish I had done years ago. Every single minute in my entire life that I spent scrolling was a wasted one. Every single minute. That’s what killing time looks like. The only app that I still have left is X, and full disclosure, I’m grappling with the right way to go about it, which I will share in case it helps you in your quest to live a better life. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? On one hand, I’d like to remove X so I can be 100% clean of all scrolling. The best I think I can do is to boil down my use of the app to the bare minimum, because I write and publish a lot and Twitter has always been my outlet since 2013. Putting myself out there drastically changed my life back then and it continues to drastically change my life today, and so I think if one can be disciplined enough to use it as an output-only service, then it’s forgivable.
The removal of social media is part of an overarching goal to make my phone and email as quiet as possible, keeping the inner circle tight and telling all new people I meet to find me on X. This isn’t me trying to be selfish so much as realizing that when people have your phone number and your email address, each incoming text, each incoming email, those are all demands on your time. You can’t just not respond to a text without it being a subliminal sneak diss. They know you look at your phone and that you’re choosing to ignore them. Same for email. But if you limit all inbounds to X, then you can be real about the fact that, hey, I only check those direct messages a few times a week and I get a lot of them, I will do my best to get back to you in a timely manner, but if I don’t, please don’t take it personal. All of this helps set healthy boundaries in your life, it reduces the amount of meaningless bullshit you deal with each day, it frees up time for you, and it helps get you closer to the ultimate—and sadly, unreachable—goal of zero cell phone hours per day.
The toughest thing to remove from your life is people. I didn’t include it on that list above because like X, it’s one that’s still a work in progress on my end, and unlike X, it’s one where I doubt I will ever reach a comfortable end-state. But again, I will share where I’m at in case it helps you think about managing your own inner circle of relationships.
In the past, I had about 1,000 connections on these social media apps, followers, friends, whatever you want to call them. Around 500 of those are wood. They’re someone you met once at a conference, someone you did drugs with in a foreign country, a random girl you slept with, they’re not real connections. When you get arrested or end up in the funny papers for whatever reason, you can kiss another half of those connections goodbye. That got me down to say 200. In 2021, after I started cleaning up my life and removing all the activities I listed above, that number continued to dwindle. Relationships where all you did was send breaking news back and forth, or sports, or politics, or where drinking and drugs was the only tether, all those relationships will dissipate as they reveal themselves to be hollow. Remove things every day, attain wisdom. In 2022, when I self-surrendered to prison, I walked in with nothing but my dick and a piece of paper with the phone numbers and email addresses of 80 people. Crazy to think about. I kept in touch with all 80 of them for the first six months, but by the time I walked back out after two full years, the number had gotten winnowed down to 50. I still have the dick, though. I didn’t lose that. But we have chronologically arrived at my current dilemma, a relationship crossroads where I stand before you and humbly apologize that I only have questions for you here, brother, rather than answers.
I feel pretty good about those fifty friends. You spend the first half of your life adding things and adding people, but you’re blind at the time as to which of those relationships are actually worth a fuck. These fifty leads I’ve got, the Glengarry leads, I believe I have found the ones worth a fuck. There was something I read in a bio of Washington that clicked with me and I transcribed it below:
You don’t know which relationships are real until they go through the series of loyalty tests. We’re spilling over into the realm of On Friendship here, but this is terribly important stuff and I already know there will be a Part Deux and Trois to the friendship series.
Washington didn’t specify his preferred loyalty tests, but I will go ahead and say that anyone who rides with you through a multi-year Fed bid is a loyal friend, and there is nothing you can say that will convince me otherwise. That’s the Triple-A Goddamn Gold Standard of loyalty tests. I will never turn my back on any of these people, and if they say GB, I need you to take a bullet for me, there’s no why, there’s no when, like, I’m there and I’m Sonny at the tollbooth. There are laws of the universe that I am powerless to combat. This is one of them.
On the other hand, there’s the wisdom of the sages, and every time I’ve gone against them I’ve been wrong. Every time I’ve thought I was special, I wasn’t. And the consensus amongst the wise is that over the course of your entire life, you will have maybe one true friend, two if you’re incredibly lucky. If you think you have more than five, sorry pal, you are wrong. There was a Colombian guy I kicked it with in prison who was wise as fuck, clearly had spent many years on top of his game, ran shit, commanded respect from everyone around him, one of those OG’s or old heads; I struggle to find the correct terminology, but there’s just energy that some people give off where you know they have paid their dues in the game of life and are worth listening to. Especially on the nature of man, which you learn primarily through experience and observation rather than from books. And when it comes to friendship, he kept it straight to the point: more than a hand, you’re out of hand. Meaning that if you think you have more than five truly loyal friends — the amount you can count on one hand — you are WRONG, homeboy. You are out of hand. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here thinking that I have fifty, which almost certainly means that I’m wrong, but like I said, I’m up against ironclad and impenetrable universal laws of loyalty that I refuse to go against. So, I haven’t figured out how to square this circle, but rest assured there will be a post here when I get closer to figuring it out.
Bye for now, and remember, less is more.
GB
