These are a few rules in my life I personally try to follow. I say “try” there because I’m a human and prone to error, but I try my best. I’m writing them here because they might be of some use to you. If not…IDK what to tell you. Your life is your life, these are just a few suggestions. It’s at least something to think about. The optimization of your life and brain, under whatever shitty circumstances you might have happened to be born into, is always something a person should be striving for IMHO. A man should never be completely content with where he is. Because once the struggle is over you get complacent, and then you’re just a piece of garbage waiting to be taken over by the next dude that wants your spot. It is better to have the mentality of being on the come up and feeling hungry instead of content with your accomplishments and patting yourself on the back. Even if you happen to be in a great mood in life generally speaking, I think it’s a lot better for your art and your work if you’re acting like you want to be considered a great talent in your field constantly. Satisfaction can be a curse if you’re not careful.
Anyway, I started rambling about something else there for a second. I could talk about that all day, but complacency is not the point of this piece. Here are the rules/ideas for success.
1. Caffeine.
I drink about a litre of coffee a day, spaced out throughout the 24 hours at different points when I feel I am losing energy. And black Yorkshire Tea in the afternoon. I think all that bullshit people say about too much coffee or caffeine being bad for you or whatever should be ignored. Everyone’s different, but for me I cannot ever get enough. Caffeine is an antidepressant on my whole system: physically and mentally. I say you should just drink as much coffee as you like, it doesn’t matter for me. The only limitation I instill for myself is: I stop all caffeine intake at 5PM exactly so I can try to get a good sleep.
2. Vitamins.
I have a stack of multivitamins that I take every day, and I honestly believe it makes a difference in my daily life. I don’t think it’s a placebo due to the fact that I first lived several years of my life without taking these vitamins, and after incorporating them I feel differently. I take about 15 or 16 different things every morning, I won’t list all of them. Stuff like lion’s mane, cordyceps, fish oil. The usual shit you’ve already heard of. That’s not the point of this, I’m not pretending to be some unique individual here who has discovered vitamins (Hulk Hogan was probably the first person to discover them). The point is that you should figure out your own regimen of multivitamins everyday and find out what works for your personal operating system. A lot of people still think vitamins are bullshit and marketing, but I’d say those folks are probably wrong: I mean, you’re putting stuff in your body, that’s definitely not nothing.
3. Exercise at least 5 times a week.
It doesn’t have to be heavy exercise, it just has to be a decent amount of activity that gets your blood flowing. Even walking around helps. Stupid and simple, but you gotta remember to do this. When the heart is pumping blood properly, the ideas flow as well. Everything works better when you’re healthier; body, mind, ideas, creativity, everything. As we’ve seen with this annoying ass virus that I won’t give the dignity of naming, everything is linked. Best place is to start with the heart.
4. Meditate Every Day.
Meditation requires dedication. You might not see results from it right away. If exercising is the main thing you’re doing for the heart, then meditation should be the main thing you’re doing for the mind. It takes time, but once you master the art of meditating daily you’ll feel calmer and make decisions better. When you meditate often what starts to happen is you’re able to observe your thoughts better in relation to your surroundings. You can think about things from a slight distance even when you’re right in the middle of chaos. It also just helps to remind yourself of the undercurrent of thought occurring in your daily existence regularly. It sounds stupid to remind you of this, but it’s still worth doing so because a lot of people forget they have brains and get lost in the natural flow of life and kinda become nothing. It’s crazy how so many people forget their capabilities. I think most people are probably not stupid, they just don’t put the time into mastering their machine. You can take a dullard, someone maybe 60% there mentally, and if he or she meditates, I’d be willing to bet they could turn that into maybe 75% intellect. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you have, it really is just what you do with it. It’s like the difference between a guy driving a shitty Honda Civic that he works on maintaining, or a guy driving a Rolls Royce he doesn’t give a fuck about. The Rolls is obviously better on the surface, but for how long? Work on your shitty brain by meditating, and believe me: even if you consider yourself dumb, it’ll become as reliable as an old Honda.
5. Always Be Working On a Project.
Woody Allen has always been one of my favourite artists (sorry if you’re offended by that), and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from his life as an artist it is the idea of constantly working on something. A lot of artists wait until inspiration strikes to get back to work on a certain project, but Woody’s approach has always been to complete work on one script or project, and then dive in immediately into the next one right after. No need for sentimentality or leafing through your old work, thinking about what you did smugly: just keep going and work on the next thing. Distraction is everything when it comes to getting work done or alleviating feelings of anxiety or depression. As anyone who has been following me and is familiar with my work might know: I have a very dark mind that can spiral downwards quite quickly if I’m not careful. One of the biggest strategies for me has been channelling that negative energy stuff and trying to redirect it into productive shit instead. My thing has always been to immerse myself in my work in order to distract myself from real problems in my life or things that are bothering me. Working on some kind of fictional creative project is great for that because I find I get concerned with the issues of balancing the plot and worrying about the characters’ lives instead of mine. It’s too much to think about your own life and be so invested in someone else’s at the same time, so if you pick the art world and fiction it’s better for your mental health overall. Too many young people in this society, I feel, are obsessed with the notion of going to therapy and trying to become a well-adjusted person, etc etc. These types are forgetting the fact that some of our greatest artists work with their flaws, and simply just get to work instead of talking to someone and giving them all your hard-earned money.
There are ways to get better at maintaining a continuous work output, and one of my favourites is to always be making notes for other shit while I’m working on the main thing. This way, by the time I’m done working on the first project, I have a whole collection of other ideas to work with. The gestation period for ideas can happen while you’re working on a larger project; all you have to do is make sure you don’t get lost in something else and stay focused and lost in the world of the first big project. Managing the chaos of one’s various mental illnesses and ideas is a great, highly beneficial skill to master.
6. Limit Your Phone/Internet/Social Media Usage.
Everyone is different. Depending on your popularity or your career’s needs, you might need to be on social media all day to promote something. Or you might need to be on Instagram constantly to be connected to people. I think it’s a good idea to come up with some rules for yourself regarding your own phone and internet use before you start using them, and make sure you follow those guidelines. For example, I am a bit crazy when it comes to getting certain projects done, and sometimes I will just simply deactivate something and not look at it for awhile if I feel it’s getting in the way of me doing other shit. Or I will have long periods of time in which I don’t allow myself to do a particular thing, like check my messages or whatever it is that’s distracting me. If I feel someone is being too negative I will block them from contacting me for 2 weeks. It’s fucked up to say, but at the end of the day it is my life and I don’t like the idea of everyone having access to me at all times as long as they have a phone and my social media information. Sometimes you have to put your foot down and make rules or nothing will ever get done.
7. Make Deadlines
Number 6 just reminded me of this one, so I’ll include it right here and now: make deadlines for yourself for any project you do. Whenever I feel stuck on a project this always helps me. In artists there is sometimes the tendency to feel like they must do something “organically” when they’re in the mood. While I don’t disagree with that feeling, and I have definitely created work like that in the past, sometimes when you’re in the middle of a project you haven’t worked on in awhile, the best thing to do is give yourself a deadline when it must be completed. I believe that sometimes ideas have a shelf life, and if you don’t continue to work on them and help them grow, they’ll just die an early death. If you make the deadline first, you decide when the idea will die.
The deadline rule is how I have managed to get novels and screenplays written. I’m not sure I would have been able to if I didn’t have a due date, my mind would just meander for too long and think about what the project could be instead of what it actually is.
8. Write Anxiety Lists
I’m not sure how I got into this habit or when I first started doing this, but this is something I have done for awhile now. No one told me to do this, I just sort of started doing it one day to feel better and it became a thing. (It’s kind of related to 14, but you’ll get there eventually). I’m sure when I die someday my room will probably look weird to the unfortunate person that has to go through my stuff: there are so many of these anxiety lists I’ve made over the years in various notebooks, and random pieces of paper, etc.
An “anxiety list” is simply a long list of the stuff currently bothering me at that point in my life. It might be due to the fact that I drink a litre of coffee a day, plus lots of other caffeinated tea, but sometimes the excess energy I get from that flows in a bad place. Instead of helping my energy for the better, it causes me to stress out about all the things I want to do and all the bad things that might happen. Having less caffeine is not an option for me because I have wicked bad allergies and must take diphenhydramine more often than not, which makes me hella tired.
So anyway, after all the caffeine has done the mean thing it sometimes does and turns on me, I write all the negativity down on a sheet of paper. Seeing a visual representation of it all is neater than just thinking about all of it in my mind and worrying about it. It’s like going to the top of a mountain and yelling at the top of your lungs or something cathartic of that nature. It feels so great to let it out all on paper instead of letting it pile up in your brain.
The list will usually look something like this:
Anxiety List
-Fill up gas tank
-Get haircut
-Reach out to ________
-Talk to _____ about _______
-Idea for project: ______
-Deadline for project: November 29
-Deadline for other project: Dec. 15
-Comedy bit: the stupid ass driver from the other day
-Comedy bit: “1000 dollars? Bitch, you must be out your mind!” (Needs further development).
There is no limit or rule for what can and cannot be on the list. It’s just whatever comes to my mind at that point in time and whatever I feel like I have to do. It’s sort of a to do list, but slightly different in that it could just be a thought that’s stressing me out like, “Stop worrying about ____.” The example I included above is being too kind; they often look much messier and filled with useless shit than that, but I don’t have all day here, haha.
9. Make Sure You Have Some Kind of Support System.
It’s fun to be alone, especially if you consider yourself an intelligent person and a philosopher. (As I’ve mentioned several times on this website: it is important to be on the fringes of existence if you’re any kind of free thinker). However, the thing I am finally learning as I enter my 30s is that constant loneliness is perhaps not the best or healthiest way to live. There are all these studies that now tell us loneliness can lead to stuff like Alzheimer’s. But the problem with that is: most people are too annoying to be around for too long. So the key to this issue is to try to find a healthy balance that makes sense for you personally. Ideally, if you’re anything like me, the best situation for friendship or companionship is to find someone or a group of people that understands you need to be alone from time to time. Too much contact with others is, in my opinion, just as unhealthy as no contact at all. (Why do you think I haven’t updated this website as often as I’d like? Because I live with my parents and I’m always in the position of having to take on other people’s bullshit and noise. It’s not even peaceful now: at the moment I am writing this, the phone is ringing and some moron we don’t even know is leaving a message (because my parents are boomers and still believe in using a landline phone for some reason), and the doorbell just rang. So much for an uninterrupted flow of work. By the end of a lot of my days there is very little creative energy left for me to work on stuff I’d really like to give my all to — and no, working on something while you’re tired is no way to create).
I got off track there ranting, but as I was saying: the more you invite others into your life, the more chaos you’re gonna have. That’s just how life naturally works — you can’t have the good without the bad, unfortunately. But you can’t live your life without people entirely, so find the balance that works for you.
10. Don’t Drink Alcohol.
This is pretty straightforward. If you’re under 25: have at it. Go ahead and make some dumb mistakes and memories. Drink alcohol until you’re throwing up on a public bus somewhere. Become an alcoholic for a good 2 or 3 months if you want, it’s good for your character. Ruin your life for a bit, if you’re young it doesn’t really matter because you can bounce back fairly easily and the experience of pain you endure will help you when you get older. But after a person turns 25, I think if they still drink alcohol they’re doing themselves a disservice intellectually speaking. I used to think people like Christopher Hitchens, who drank alcohol every day and still got work done, were cool. Now, as an adult, I just think those guys are all idiots: they could have probably stopped and gotten even better quality work done. Being the type of person always holding a lowball glass of scotch is a funny trait, but I don’t think most people are high-functioning, brilliant alcoholics like they enjoy imagining themselves as. What it really amounts to is just a dumb affectation that has stood the test of time due to good marketing, the stresses of life forcing people to want to take the edge off, and dumbasses who think they’re not doing anything bad to their bodies by drinking.
One of the biggest pieces of info that influenced this decision for me was learning that slave masters would often force their slaves to drink alcohol after a long day of slavery. The alcohol would numb them to the grim realities they faced on plantations, and get them to go back to work the next day without revolting. As anyone intelligent knows already: slavery hasn’t ended. We’re still living in it today, but it’s just a new and improved version in which we have Netflix. We are just slaves with wi-fi, but we’re still slaves. But the difference between us and real slaves of the past: we have the option of not numbing ourselves, and redirecting our energies to something fruitful.
11. Rules For Altering Your Consciousness
If you absolutely must alter your consciousness, limit yourself to no more than 2-3 times a week. Under no circumstance are you allowed to go over this 2-3 times a week quota. The reasons for this: to keep yourself productive and working while you’re still sober, and to keep your tolerance down. We now live in a society in which you have access to almost any drug you might want. There’s a big celebration of legalization, the smoking of weed, and a big push by all these corporations to keep selling you more of it. They want you numbing yourself to the realities around you. What this means is there’s a very slippery slope between experimenting/bettering yourself, and completely losing yourself. Before you even begin messing around with shit it’s best to create ground rules for yourself.
If you use substances too often they will actually have the opposite effect: they’ll stop working and simply make you dumber and just as boring to be around as a person who is sober every day and never thinking about life on a deeper level. It is important to be cognizant of this rule because it requires you be aware of your sober train of thought and who you really are as a person underneath all that other stuff; if you get lost, you might permanently forget who you really are. There’s no coming back from that shit.
Or you could end up making life-ruining decisions under another state of mind, and you might regret it later. That’s no fun. Whenever you do something, try to be aware of what it is you are doing to your brain on an intellectual level, otherwise it’s just a dumb, mindless endeavour. Remember: a big reason marijuana used to be illegal was because people were afraid it would make the average citizen a free thinker and drop out of society and all that stuff detrimental to capitalists. But then they realized it mostly just makes people too lazy about all that stuff they talked about doing. Don’t become one of the lazy ones: don’t alter your consciousness more than 2-3 times a week if you absolutely must. Pick a good ratio of sobriety to intoxication that is healthy and makes sense for your work. Inebriation, from any substance of any sort, is a state of mind one should visit, not one to live in forever.
12. Don’t Waste Money
Another very simple rule to follow. Financial irresponsibility can be very fun, but you do have to take stock of what it is you’re actually spending your money on. Never buy shit you can download. Don’t get fancy with your meals too often: eat tuna. Your shit will look the exact same if you eat an expensive meal or a can of tuna. All that matters is survival.
Don’t spend 9 million dollars you don’t have on some shit that isn’t really helping you in the long run. Capitalism is all about domination and subservience, and that isn’t your fault. It’s something to be mindful of at all times: are you being exploited or are you building your own thing? Are you spending money on something because you really need it? Is it going to help your life overall? If it’s not groceries, rent, or a donation to some kind of decent charity…more often than not the answer is that you don’t really need to purchase whatever it is you want, and you’ve got the big boot of capitalism on your neck guiding your decision.
13. 10 Day Rule / Waiting Period
This is a rule I’ve put in place for myself whenever I am seriously considering some kind of purchase or about to begin work on a big project. I will often impose a 10 day rule or some other kind of waiting period for myself before making a move. Sometimes the feeling of wanting whatever it is will go away after that period of time, and I can easily live without it. Other times, if I have a gut feeling that I am making a huge mistake by not buying whatever it is, or working on whatever project I’m thinking of, then I’ll bite the bullet and do it.
The way a lot of companies are set up now make it so there’s this pressure on you to make your purchases as soon as possible. You’ll often see stuff like, “Only 1 more in stock!” Or, “This item is now on sale! Hurry, it won’t last long!” This is all capitalist bullshit designed to tap into your insecurity that you might be missing out on some great deal. If it’s not a life or death matter, you can probably follow the waiting period rule.
14. No Therapy / Write An Abraham Lincoln Letter
This goes back to Number 12 (and Number 8). Everyone’s trauma is different, of course, and you might be the kind of person that needs therapy in order to adjust to regular life. I understand that. However, in the past decade I’ve seen this huge shift among younger folks especially to embrace therapy as if it’s the solution to all their problems. Young people in 2010 didn’t talk about therapy as much as young people in 2020, for example. This might be fucked up to say, but I believe there’s been a big influence by the weaker among our species to persuade others that don’t really need therapy to do it. And then we get a whole group of people who would’ve been fine without it walking around and telling everyone to go see a therapist and talk to someone, etc etc.
I’m not saying therapy doesn’t work. I’m just saying you probably don’t need it. What I like to do is go for long, silent walks and think about my life and what’s bothering me. Music can be good too, but that interferes with the natural flow of thought and I prefer not to listen to music when walking most days.
And the other big therapeutic thing I like to do sometimes is writing a long letter about my feeling on a particular matter, venting everything out, and then when it’s all over I rip it up and toss it in the garbage. Or if it happens to be on the computer, I’ll just delete it, but real paper has more of an emotional effect. This is a technique I learned from Abraham Lincoln: you can easily get your feelings out about something without actually having to act on any of them. There have been times in the past where I wrote out what I needed to, and still acted on whatever was bothering me in real life, but those cases called for it I think. Whenever a certain matter is important you’ll know when to not throw away the letter, trust me.
15. Audit Your Circle / Cut Shitty People Out
Do this regularly. A lot of the people you think are your friends now are nothing more than parasites and cocksuckers. It can be difficult to distinguish between a genuine friend and a toxic one, but you can feel it in your gut. If someone is always shitting on you and never supporting things you say or talking to you in a certain way, you can probably do without them. But if they’re shitting on you half the time, and being supportive the other half? That might be a valuable person to have in your life because they are honest and being real with you. It’s a tough balance to find people that mean well and aren’t harmful to your overall goals, but can also offer helpful criticism without being a dick. This is why real, genuine friendship is so hard: it’s very difficult to see what people’s true intentions are. I think the younger you are, the worse your friends probably are because you made them by circumstance and not by shared values, etc.
I guess that’s it for now. I’m sure I forgot a couple things, but I’ll include them as they come to me.