life

A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.

It is impossible to build one’s own happiness on the unhappiness of others.

I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.

Stop paying so much attention to what everyone else is doing and run your own race. How much time is spent reading other people's posts on social media, watching other people's exploits in the news, listening to other people's ideas on podcasts? Go have coffee with a friend. Go make something. Go outside. All those hours spent looking at someone else's life on a screen could be used to take action in your own life.

There is a Scandinavian saying which some of us might well take as a rallying cry for our lives: The north wind made the Vikings! Wherever did we get the idea that secure and pleasant living, the absence of difficulty, and the comfort of ease, ever of themselves made people either good or happy? Upon the contrary, people who pity themselves go on pitying themselves even when they are laid softly on a cushion, but always in history character and happiness have come to people in all sorts of circumstances, good, bad, and indifferent, when they shouldered their personal responsibility. So, repeatedly the north wind has made the Vikings.

Most people are metaphysically and spiritually dead by the time they hit middle age. Their curiosity is stifled by their day-to-day obligations. They know very little about the complex world they live in. Don't even care to know. They mistake their narrow little reality tunnel as "life."

They cling to certainties and belief systems and hardly ever take the time to read profound books that'll shake things up. They "believe" what they've been taught, what they've been conditioned to think.

They are the majority and the whimpering world we all inhabit reflects this.

We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within… By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.

In the end, I think that a single mountain range is enough exploration for an entire lifetime.

It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.

1. Weird teenage hobbies - Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.

2. Energy distortion field - If you meet with them when you're tired and defeated, you leave the room ready to run a marathon on a treadmill with max incline. Low agency people do the opposite.

3. Golden question - If you're in a 3rd world prison cell and had to call someone to get you out, who would you call? That's the highest agency person you know.

4. You can never guess their opinions - The boxer that writes poetry. The advertiser obsessed with the history of war. The beauty queen who reads Nietzsche. If their beliefs don't line up with their stereotypes, they've exercised agency.

5. Immigrant mentality - If they've moved from their hometown, that's a good sign. If they've moved from their home country, that's an even greater sign.

It takes agency to spot you're in the wrong place, resourcefulness to operationalise a move and a growth mindset to start from zero in a new location.

6. They send you niche content - Low agency people look at the social engagement of content before deeming its quality. High agency people just look at the content. They spot upcoming trends very early.

7. Mean to your face but nice behind your back - The social incentives are to be nice to people's faces and gossip behind their backs. To do the opposite requires agency because they're swimming against the social tide.