For Lent, I give up trying

a sun explodes

For Lent, I'm going to give up trying.

I'm going to give up trying to force myself into some kind of confined idea about what a human is supposed to be.

I'm going to give up trying to prevent myself from enjoying things.

I'm going to give up trying to make futile efforts work.

I'm going to give up trying to abstain.

Mindset

Living in a teepee with satellite internet...

inside the teepee at night, the light glows

I get in these moods. You know… the mood where you just want to cut all ties with society, give all your worldly belongings to Goodwill, chuck your phone off a cliff, and head off into the mountains to live off the land. Preferably in the nude.

C’mon, anybody been there?

Lifestyle

Interviewing The Minimalists

two guys become the world's greatest minimalists

The Minimalists are two guys who recently set out to change their lives. Read more of their story here.

1. Who are you?

We would love to joking respond with a pithy philosophical platitude, but we'll resist. The honest answer is we are a couple of guys who want to help people live a more meaningful life, a life that's filled with happiness, passion, and freedom.

2. In the most succinct way possible, tell me - what does everyone reading this need to do right now?

InterviewsMinimalism

Your Life is a Sunk Cost

locked in a prison of our own making

One of the biggest issues I have seen people have is a misunderstanding of the idea of sunk costs.

You've seen it - someone puts a massive amount of effort into something, and now they have to keep pursuing it, despite the fact that everyone around them sees how bad this thing is. They just keep thinking, "But I put so much effort into this! I can't throw it away now!"

You and I do the same thing on a daily basis. We pursue something that no longer makes sense, because we don't want to lose our investment. We all do it, and it's completely illogical.

Mindset

How to use Dropbox to untether your soul

image of a poppy against a blue blue sky

If you use a computer for more than checking email and facebook, you've got an issue: files. Files include everything from notes to photos to your school thesis. Some of these wouldn't bother you too much if they disappeared. Others would probably break your heart. Maybe your digital photos of your sisters wedding. Maybe your much-anticipated memoirs.

Tools

Picking a fight with Donald Miller (or, the creator DOES build on emotion)

the fire is poured, the hot tongs are held ready

Don Miller has been posting some insightful thoughts on creating lately. This one in particular struck me.

A Creator Doesn't Build On Emotion

I think it struck me because there is something very appealing about it, and something in it that I completely disagree with. A new friend of mine posted something similar on Twitter the other day:

Mindsetcreation

Owning things is just caching the world

small rodent scurrying from his home

In a computer, caches are everywhere. A cache helps speed things up by temporarily holding onto something you'd normally go out in the world to find.

For example, when you first visit a web page, your browser downloads all the images and text and fonts and colors that are on that page. But if the browser thinks that you might be coming back to that page soon, it caches some of those images, so that next time you go to the page, it doesn't have to re-download them. Instead, it can just pull them out of its cache, and save a lot of time.

MindsetMinimalism

BBC Human Planet

This is the video that sort of started it all. A few weeks ago, it catalyzed something that had been brewing in a lot of us for a long time.

For me, it captures something about what it means to be human - that humanity itself is fluid and dynamic, always changing, adapting itself to any environment that can be imagined, charting courses through the unknown with abandon, finding ways to create beauty in the common. We humans have adapted bodies meant for walking, to the cause of flight, we have taken hands meant for grasping, and made instruments of amazing precision, we have brought forth music from muscle, and culture from sensation, and glory from bones.

Videos

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