Category: Living simply

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Do we change?

I recently listened to a podcast with Joe Rogan and Sam Harris – they talk a lot about redemption and change. One of the questions is with regards to Liam Neeson and his recent confession about how he once stood outside a bar waiting to kill a black man – any black man for the rape of his friend. A completely unnecessary confession from a man that has a lot to lose. Without actually reading the confession or hearing the dialogue for myself, just from the quoted aspects of that interview with Liam Neeson it was obvious that the man thought it was abhorrent how he felt at that time. Obviously, I don’t think anybody actually read his interview and thought “Liam Neeson is a racist and needs to be banned from the world..” If there is somebody who thinks that, they probably have the intellect of a 10-year-old.

But Joe Rogan and Sam Harris spent a lot of time discussing the “outrage culture” that exists today in the media. Which I agree there is a ridiculous amount of “outrage” being spewed all over the place. We see it constantly on the internet – the main reason for the outrage culture, in my opinion, and its effects on modern journalism is because it creates clicks. Journalism today is more about creating headlines and getting clicks than it is about an actual story. It’s not unusual to click on an article only to realize that the content of that article is completely different from the clickbait title.

A lot of discussions and mental space is given to the likes of Twitter and Facebook – and my own idea is that we give too much weight to youtube and twitter comments. Are twitter comments a good gauge in how outraged somebody really is? Most of the time I think of twitter and youtube comments to be an exercise in verbal diarrhea. Yet entire news articles are written, complete with perceived opinion polls, based purely on how the Twitterverse reacts to the news. On top of this, any crowd, digital or not, are going to sink to the lowest common denominator – in other words, the crowd will always sink to the level of a festering pile of shit if given enough time and big enough platform.

I also get the impression that Sam Harris and Joe Rogan give too much weight to this. Maybe I am wrong, which I probably am, but I think people use social media as an outlet to spew their shit lives in. I don’t think somebody read that article with Liam Neeson and thinks “Liam is a racist and he needs to be removed from public life” rather what is really happening is this; “fuck my life sucks, school is too expensive, I have a shit job, my future reaks, my tax bill is too high.. so I’m just going to vomit this comment here and let somebody else experience my own shit life for an instant and become somebody else, somebody important”

Still the same person?

Now back to the title of this article: Do we change? There seems to be a movement on, again, social media about destroying peoples lives for shit they did 20 years ago, or posted on twitter 10 years ago. At what point do we just admit that the people digging up old skeletons and trying to make it an issue, are in essence, rotten and at the least, suspect with a very clear objective. I’m not talking about Bill Cosby skeletons, or R. Kelly style skeletons – those can never be forgotten.

I’m talking about the teenager who wrote something stupid on twitter 10 years ago and now as a young adult are running for Congress. Or being a film producer or any of the above. The stupid teenager now as an adult – yet still being judged by past fuck ups.

So am I the same person I was when I was 20? In some ways yes.. I considered myself an intellectual then as I do now. I wrote articles, even a few books that are on my hard drive still, I listened to a lot more music, my general politics have changed, but I still believe in the good of people. Looking through my own eyes I can barely see a difference, but when I take an outside looking in approach, I see a massive difference.

There is so little of the 20-year-old me left, the insecurities, the blind ideologies, the black and white view of issues and politics, my transgressions with women, drugs, and debauchery. I was a 20-year-old American house DJ living in Sweden. Of course I did stupid shit, an unending, relentless stream of bad ideas followed by more bad ideas. My life has changed so profoundly, my mind and mental state are years beyond the 20-year-old me.

I imagine I am not alone in this progression? I imagine most of us learn, grow and strive to become better people with each waking moment. At age 20 I thought I owned the world, and in my own little way, I did. But it didn’t make me happier, so with time, I vowed to change, to progress, to be thoughtful and thankful for the life I have. I dreamed of creating a better life and mind for myself. It’s something I strive for every day, to be better than the day I was before.

Jordan b. Peterson has a quote that I think fits good here:

“These kids want to change the world economic system, rebuild earth and create a new society. Yet they can’t even make their own beds. Start small, start with yourself and move up from there.”

Judging others

Yet, today there are literal movements to destroy people who did stupid shit when they were younger. My guess is that like most things, this movement is powered by people who wish not themselves be judged. I wouldn’t trust somebody who hasn’t done stupid shit in their lives and have grown up and moved on. Life is about experiences and if you haven’t done something incredibly stupid in your life, then you haven’t lived and you sure as hell can’t be a judge of others. Your fuck up’s simply haven’t come to pass yet, they will. And the truth about fucks up’s is that the older you get, the bigger your fuck-ups become. So fuck up when you’re young, because when you get older your fuck-ups affect a lot more people and tend to be a hell of a lot more expensive.

So do we judge negatively on Liam Neeson for the stupid shit he did at a younger age, or do we give a pat on the back for admitting his own stupidity and moving on? At what point do we accept an apology as sincere? And who are we to judge if an apology is sincere?

Start with yourself

In the end, the life we have is the life we have created for ourselves. The society we have is the society we have created. Do we really want to be a society built on outrage culture? Is banning speakers from universities a proper path forward? Virtue signaling, fake outrage, twitterrage, whatever.

Start with yourself, the next time you want to unleash a shitty comment on Twitter or vomit your ideas on Facebook, take a step back, breath and try imagining that the person on Twitter is real. The comment you are about to leave will be read by a real person. Interact with social media the way you would in real life. And remember that being angry or pissed off at somebody and carrying that around on your shoulders, is about the equivalent of drinking poison and waiting for that person to die.

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A reflection on backpacking

Some of my earliest memories in life are that of me and my family out camping – car camping of course as I was raised in the USA. I remember us driving around, setting up a tent, breaking out the coleman camping stove, grilling hot dogs, even remember the times our tarp was flooded out in Hawaii, or our car broken into in Utah while we slept in our tents. As I got older and in my teens, my camping trips started going towards shorter walks with tents, weed, beer and big ass bon fires. In my early twenties I moved to Sweden and my love for backpacking grew exponentially.

I bought my first tent in Sweden, my own personal tent when I was about 20. Before that I had just been borrowing tents. Me and my then girlfriend had this fantasy that we would travel around and sleep in a tent and explore Sweden. This worked for one time and the fantasy became mine alone and the misses stayed home. I soon realized that I didn’t have any hiking friends like I did in the USA, and out of necessity my love for solo hiking was discovered.

Throughout the years I have solo hiked thousands of miles, slept countless nights outdoors from Far above the arctic circle to deep in the Australian outback and everywhere in between. I have always loved solo hiking, I loved the deep contemplative beauty of it, the mental games of always questioning my own ability, or discovering a new idea. Solo backpacking is truly something I think everyone has to experience, I have grown as a person because of my solo hiking.

About 3 years ago I started to notice a change however, I started to find that I missed the comradery of hiking a trail together with a friend. Or discovering new friends along the trail. My solo adventures started to feel lonely and isolated. It wasn’t that I had nothing left to discover within myself, it was just that I wanted to discover other people and their loves or struggles. On my trek through Iceland in 2015, I felt a kind of loneliness that I hadn’t felt before, and it really took away from the total experience of hiking such an amazing landscape.

Maybe it was the birth of my son and the changes in the family dynamic after that, that made these other changes in me. Since my son was born, life seems so “solid” – love feels real, and my closeness to my wife has deepened in a way that is hard to explain. But on the flip side, my deeper meaning discussions with my wife have have been replaced by two word dialogs interrupted by a lovely boy that wants attention in one way or another. Perhaps his finger stinks because he picked his but and he wants us to smell, or maybe a meatball fell to the ground, or some other world shaking catastrophes that interrupts what little time my wife and I have for each other. So now we content ourselves with our little corners in the sofa with an ipad or iphone in hand and a TV on as background noise.

In other words, the isolation I so desired by hiking solo, has been filled by a 5 year old boy and an Ipad. So now, more than anything, I desire a grown up conversation about nothing, that is not interrupted in two word intervals. My love for isolation is now being or has been replaced, by a need to meet friends and new people. I’m not sure if there is anything better than just talking about nothing with a friend around a campfire. Last summer I made a pointed effort to meet somebody along the trail in Sarek and just hike with them. Ended up being one of the better trips I’ve had in a long time, and with that I made a new friend that I still meet up with from time to time here in Stockholm.

I keep trying to force myself to just go out and rekindle my love of sleeping in the outdoors by myself. I still go out 3-4 nights a month, and some of those nights are lovely, and others are less than optimal. But the best times are always with a friend or with my family. So instead of running away from this realization, it’s time to embrace it. Maybe I should start organizing little get together around Stockholm and around Sweden and everywhere else I happen to be travelling. Maybe little weekend groups here in Stockholm – I don’t know how this will take place, but I feel like it’s time to try something new. To embrace this new phase and need in my life, and I think it would be awesome to share that with new people!

 

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Uncopyright all my work

Uncopyright

This entire blog, and all my ebooks, are now uncopyrighted (as of Nov 4 2017).

That means I’ve put them in the public domain, and released my copyright on all these works.

There is no need to email me for permission — use my content however you want! Email it, share it, reprint it with or without credit. Change it around, put in a bunch of swear words and attribute them to me. It’s OK.

Attribution is appreciated but not required.

I’d prefer people buy my ebooks, but if they want to share with friends, they have every right to do so.

Why I’m releasing copyright

I’m not a big fan of copyright laws, especially as they’re being applied by corporations, used to crack down on the little guys so they can continue their large profits.

Copyrights are often said to protect the artist, but in most cases the artist gets very little while the corporations make most of the money.

I think, in most cases, the protectionism that is touted by “anti-piracy” campaigns and lawsuits and lobbying actually hurts the artist. Limiting distribution to protect profits isn’t a good thing.

The lack of copyright, and blatant copying by other artists and even businesses, never hurt Leonardo da Vinci when it comes to images such as the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, or the Vitruvian Man. It’s never hurt Shakespeare. I doubt that it’s ever really hurt any artist (although I might just be ignorant here).

And while I’m certainly not da Vinci or Shakespeare, copyright hasn’t helped me, and uncopyright probably won’t hurt me. If someone feels like sharing my content on their blog, or in any other form for that matter, that’s a good thing for me. If someone wanted to share my ebook with 100 friends, I don’t see how that hurts me. My work is being spread to many more people than I could do myself. That’s something to celebrate, as I see it.

And if someone wants to take my work and improve upon it, as artists have been doing for centuries, I think that’s a wonderful thing. If they can take my favorite posts and make something funny or inspiring or thought-provoking or even sad … I say more power to them. The creative community only benefits from derivations and inspirations.

This isn’t a new concept, of course, and I’m freely ripping ideas off here. Which is kinda the point.

Counter arguments

There are a number of objects that will likely be brought up to this idea, and here are a few of my responses:

1. Google rank will go down. My understanding is that Google penalizes pages that have exact duplicates on other sites, when it comes to PageRank. But in 4+ years of uncopyright, Zen habits has had no loss in PageRank. Anyway, SEO isn’t important to me.

2. You’ll lose ebook revenues. If people buy my ebook and then distribute it to 20 people, and each of those distributes it to 20 more, and those to 20 more … I’ve lost $76,000 in ebook revenues. Perhaps. That’s if you agree with the assumption that all those people would have bought the ebook if it hadn’t been freely distributed. I don’t buy that. In this example, thousands of people are reading my work (and learning about Zen Habits) who wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s good for any content creator.

3. Who knows what people will do with your work? Someone could take my work, turn it into a piece of crap, and put my name on it. They could translate it with all kinds of errors. They could … well, they could do just about anything. But that kind of thinking stems from a mind that wants to control content … while I am of the opinion that you can’t control it, and even if you can, it’s not a good thing. What if someone takes my work and turns it into something brilliant, and becomes the next James Joyce? Or more likely, what if they take the work and extend the concepts and make it even more useful, to even more people? Release control, and see what happens. People are wonderful, creative creatures. Let’s see what they can do.

4. What if someone publishes a book with all your content and makes a million dollars off it? I hope they at least give me credit. And my deepest desire is that they give some of that money to a good cause.

5. But … they’re stealing from you! You can’t steal what is given freely. I call this sharing, not piracy.

 

This post in fact is stolen from Leo over at Zen Habits – And why not? It’s a great post that I simply change to match my own needs with small changes.

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A little secret

I’m going to fill you in on a little secret, something that has been in progress for sometime and only now am I starting to accept it. It all started about 6 months ago and was cemented into place around 3 months ago. Since around 2014 I have been sick constantly, in fact somewhere around 2-3 times a month from anywhere between two days to weeks at a time; to say that is has been difficult to keep to a training regime is an understatement. I figured I wasn’t getting enough sleep, or my child was making me sick, or I became allergic to something. In any-case I figured it would go over soon enough so I never bothered with going to the doctors.

On top of always being sick I have had very little energy over the last couple of years. I figured it was part of getting older! However after finally getting sick of always being sick I decided it was time for a change. I was sick of being sick and tired!

Before I go any further let me roll back my timeline another two years about the first time I tried to get into running, it was after I read the phenomenal book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. It was this book that inspired me to start running, and with that I also learned that I couldn’t keep any routine as I kept getting sick all the time. I also figured that losing some weight and running more is probably a good idea considering my “adventurous” lifestyle.. or backpacking.

I kept giving it a shot, and whenever I needed some extra motivation I would go back to reading Born to run. Well, getting sick and being tired has a bad habit of sapping what little motivation I had to move and at the same time I started to get more fat than usual around my stomach and chest. Man boobs started to form and where I once had a slight visible muscle definition was now replaced with fat and mushyness. My thin muscular face has been replaced by a somewhat gooey one. To say I was aging bad, in my opinion was an understatement.

I had always followed the Paleo diet or carb free diet for most of my adult life, not religiously but it had definitely become my lifestyle. I preferred a steak a plate full of broccoli and sweat potatoes to a pizza. I believe that this kept me from getting overly fat, as the diet does work as a diet. I never thought that it was my diet that was leading to my sickness and getting fat. Then I watched a documentary called Forks over knifes a while ago, more like a year or so ago, and it stuck with me. So I decided to watch it again as well as read a few books on the subject of a whole foods plant based diet. To my amazement these are some of the absolute best researched books i’ve ever read of diet and nutrition such as the China Study and Whole by Colin t. Campbell. How not to die by Michael Greger and a few others. I also read Rich Rolls book on his similar journey from half dead to making a change; Finding Ultra.

After reading these books I realized that there was a very real possibility that it was my diet that was killing me and not some unknown infliction that came up from hell and has decided to plague me personally. So I figured that I could at-least give the idea of the whole food plant based diet a try for a short while and see if there is any difference. What is a whole food plant based diet? (WFPB diet = VEGAN) Or sort of, in reality vegan could be chips and coke cola, WFPB is a healthier alternative.

At about the same-time I started to make my progress over to a WFPB diet, I finally made my way to a doctor to get my blood work and so on done. The test results came back negative on finding any reason on why I am sick, but came back positive on that I will probably die a young and horrible death due to heart disease as my cholesterol levels where much higher than normal for my age. What did my doctor prescribe? Pills and lots of them or change my diet and start exercising more (this is Sweden, doctors are allowed to prescribe diet and exercise as their not yet completely owned corporate subsidies of the drug industry). I decided I would try diet instead.

My process has been slow, it has taken me several months to replace my typical meat recipes with WFPB alternatives, to empty my shelves of my meat and dairy recipe books, and to restock my fridge and cabinets with vegan goods.  When I got the test results from the doctor, my WFPB transition was more or less complete, with the test results pushing me over completely.

Disclaimer: I hate the term Vegan, when I think of the word vegan all sorts of strange shit pops into my head, the PETA people throwing paint on fur wearers, the hippy dread lock guys refusing to shower or wear shoes, or the creepy vegan gangs standing outside McDonalds terrorizing bystanders. With that said, I certainly think animals should be able to live their own lives, but It simply doesn’t sell me on being a vegan, I love bbq chicken wings and a lovely juicy cow on my plate.

No, my motivation for a WFPB diet is this: I don’t want to die a horrible slow death. I don’t want cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s or any other number of afflictions that can be attributed to the typical western diet. I would love to write a lot about the research done and used in the books I listed above, but I won’t. It’s just too much and I prefer everyone to do their own research before listening to me. There are studies of patients, hundreds of patient on their death beds with heart disease and diabetes who went over to a WFPB diet and within months their health improved so much that they didn’t need pills anymore. Many of them in the control groups lived an extra 20 years or more while the subject who continued their traditional diets and moved over to pills and operations died within the first year or two of the studies. I could go on and on, but I will leave that to you. You will know when the time is right, you will feel it in your bones and when you feel it, you will read these books and make the changes.

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Stopping to drink some cocunut water and eat a banana on a 70k bike ride

So what are the results so far? Since I converted over to a WFPB diet I have not been sick, not even close to being sick. My energy levels have increased ten fold – I feel like I’m 18 years old again. I have so much energy that in-order to not go crazy I have to get out the house and run! How much do I run? Hundreds of kilometers every month on top of several hundreds kilometers biking. I don’t get tired, I just keep moving. My muscles and bones are completely recovered from one day to the next. I’m sleeping better, I don’t get tired after eating and I’m losing a lot of weight. My energy levels increased so dramatically that I quit drinking coffee altogether – from a liter or so of coffee a day to nothing. To say that the side effects of eating a WFPB diet are far beyond my expectations is again and understatement. The new me is so addicting that the idea of ever going back to a traditional western diet with dairy and meat is simply not a possibility. Another plus side is that most restaurants only have one or two vegan dishes, AWESOME! I don’t have to spend time debating on which of the 20 different meals to choose from.

Left: Just finished the Stockholm tunnelrun 8k
Right: About to run my third competition for the year. 10k which I came in at 56 minutes.

I have no idea what my test results will show the next time around, but honestly, I’m not too worried about it. There is no doubt in my mind that my cholesterol will be radically reduced and my heart will be thumbing at full blast without interference for many years to come.

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My mousli banana crunch. A vegan breakfast that taste amazing

So heres to the new me, and my own continued progression, I am even thinking of making a simple VLOG to document my journey. I am also in the process of converting all my backpacking recipes to vegan alternatives and so on. With all this said I hope that you two will do the research and find the motivation to change. It will change your life and make you wonder what the fuck you where doing all these years killing yourself slowly, when you could have been living life to the fullest. Focused, energized and on fire.

Some tips for your own transition:

  1. Watch the documentaries Fork of knives, Food matters and the newest What the health
  2. Read some books The china study, Whole, How not to die
  3. Buy some new recipe books. Fork over knifes has a great app as well as recipe book. The plant power way is a good book. Green kitchen has a great book and App.
  4. Replace your favourite recipes with vegan alternatives. Experiment! you can’t be afraid to try new dishes when making the transition.
  5. Be patient and realistic, the transition is not going to happen overnight. Give it a month or so to take the first steps, then go all in! The feeling of being unstoppable and awesome is addicting.
  6. Remember: on a pure health basis if you want to avoid cancer and all the other diseases and sicknesses attributed to the western diet meat and dairy should not exceed 5% of your total consumption. So in other words, it’s perfectly ok to eat a little cheese now and then if you get the urge!
  7. You don’t need dread locks and wear hemp clothing just because your diet changes. But if you feel like it go for it!
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Minimalism and hobbies?

This one is difficult for me. To be honest, I have had many, many hobbies and I don’t mind buying stuff for my different hobbies. One major change I have made since becoming minimalist is limiting the amount of hobbies that I have. In fact, I am now working towards one hobby at a time with perhaps a longer life than my previous adventures. So instead of me having 5 different completely separate hobbies that I go at about 150% for 2 months at a time, I now try to limit myself to just one hobby that might have a few offshoots but still part of the whole.

An example of this would be do I choose photography or working on cars? While photography can certainly be a lone hobby, it tends to work well with my other hobby of backpacking. So cars will have to go. What more can be incorporated into my backpacking hobby? Photography, recipes (making food for the trail), traveling in general, writing and even MYOG (make own gear). However, if I were to pursue all of these separately with 100% focus they would be too large and expensive to accommodate for any other hobbies. Read More

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Consuming with a minimalist mindset

Less is more. More time, more money, more freedom. The less stuff we own, the less stuff to take care of, the less stuff to be stressed about and the less stuff to distract us from our calling in life. This is what we need to think about before every purchase: How will this make me achieve my goals? Will it help me achieve my goals? Do I need it now?

There are a few different minimalist online that even suggest waiting 30 days before any major purchases. I think this is a fairly good strategy as it really teaches discipline – which is undoubtedly missing in the first place. At least it is for me. I am a man of little discipline, granted more than probably most people from my generation, but not where I want to be. I find that when I have the urge to purchase something, I simply open my iphone calender, set a date for 30 days in the future, and put in the item there. Currently the items I have in this calender are: Read More

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Our delusional lives

To say that humans, much like oil, peanuts and gold is simply a commodity, is true in todays ”market” driven economy. To be used and discarded when the commodity is no longer profitable, is the way the new economy is built and works. At-least that is the impression given when most companies refuse to give a living wage in the USA, and if injured, most employees lose their jobs. (If non-professional). What am I getting at? Personally I think the market economy is wrong, I think we have gone too far in this utopian fantasy, our personalities have been replaced by marketing campaigns.

We all have the little movie playing in our heads, where we are the stars, were we are the ones playing in the leading roll in the Hollywood movie, or the professional boxer who just beat the best fighters in the world, or we just walked down the runway at a Victoria secret event. Whatever the fantasy, isn’t it strange that many of us live by these dreams? Often replacing our own realities with these far fetched fantasies? I have met many people who live in constant depression because they haven’t reached the dream status of the movie playing in their heads. This utopian vision of being complete only when we have the newest gear, or the newest and best car or grill. Our souls have been purposely erased and reprogrammed since birth by a highly motivated and successful marketing campaign. Read More