I started to research a couple of money-related topics, like investment, frugality or how can I make a passive income. I see the following patterns emerging:

It’s very important to think about investments in the long term. I can’t get a 50% profit in a day, it’s more likely that my funds will get a 5-10% percent increase in 25-50 years. If you’re making millions on stocks or something, it’s very likely that you had luck or it’s your job that you do all-day. For me, it’s more appealing when people take their time, research and understand their investments. I like this related Warren Buffett quote:

Never invest in a business you cannot understand.

I have to reconsider my relationship with money. It’s important to think about every purchase as an investment. Every asset/tool I buy has to have a job.

There is a need to stop the urge to buy new stuff constantly. If I always chase after new things, then I’ll miss the ones I already have. I want to invest more time into rediscovering what I have and sharpening my existing tools.

I have to make a habit of checking YNAB Trends on a weekly basis. It gives me the statistics required to know where my money went, so I can adjust my budget, but more importantly, I can reflect on how well my purchases serve me.

After 6 years in jail, Hossein Derakhshan gets familiar again with this new social network based web again. He was sentenced in 2008 when blogs were everywhere, now he is back into today’s internet where the mainstream is a centralized ad and surveillance machine.

Two paragraphs hit me really in this post. First about popularity and opinions:

Popularity is not wrong in and of itself, but it has its own perils. In a free-market economy, low-quality goods with the wrong prices are doomed to failure. Nobody gets upset when a quiet Brooklyn cafe with bad lattes and rude servers goes out of business. But opinions are not the same as material goods or services. They won’t disappear if they are unpopular or even bad. In fact, history has proven that most big ideas (and many bad ones) have been quite unpopular for a long time, and their marginal status has only strengthened them. Minority views are radicalized when they can’t be expressed and recognized.

This is one of the reasons why we see a decline in the quality of mainstream media. It’s prioritized by a centralized algorithm sorted by popularity which always just a thin layer of information that people are allowed to see. And the majority are okay with that. They’re losing their curiosity and the ability to deep dive into something. They are just scrolling mindlessly while the same time getting impatient. That’s why we see a lot of fake news spreading quickly. It’s not because false information is a new phenomenon, but because people are caring less.

In the blogging era, the key to discovery was the hyperlink which wasn’t organized into a convenient stream, but it was presented as a mesh of information where you were forced to take a deep dive. I love to take deep dives because that’s how I learn. A prioritized stream takes away this experience and makes the mesh into a one-dimensional line.

Nowadays a lot of people sign into Facebook and…

When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television.

You’re locked into a blurry information sphere which filters the outside view. You’re technically not alone, because a lot of spheres are sitting next to each other but you can’t really see what’s going in them. Blogs, on the other hand, are made and curated by people, not by algorithms. It makes them less convenient for mindless scrolling but this is their beauty. On the contrary, Facebook is just a fine-tuned bubble programmed to you by some artificial intelligence engine. It’s not social, it’s a fucking lonely experience…

I found a great article on Raptitude about the difference between making it go and letting it go:

All experiences do go, guaranteed, but you don’t make them go, you let them go.

This is what I actually have a problem with! I don’t let things go, I want to make them go away when I meditate.

I’m trying to understand the difference between letting things vs making things go. Making something go is when I explicitly try to force something to happen (I’m forcing it to disappear). Letting go means that I give up control and then watch what happens.

That watching part is what’s fucking hard. Control is so deeply integrated into my ego (and others’ ego), that it could cause a frustration when I meditate. Letting go is such a great power to have. When it happens, it’s really freeing, but there are no shortcuts to this power. I have to learn by doing it.

More about this:

Letting things go is a skill we can learn, but it’s easily confused with making things go, which is usually impossible.

I like the way John Yates, a meditation teacher and neuroscientist, makes it part of a longer phrase:

Let it come, let it be, let it go.

This phrase reflects a realistic understanding of how life actually happens. All experiences arise and fade, and that can be observed in real time. There’s no such thing as a permanent experience. Each one comes, is, and goes.

We need to stop and observe our experience carefully to really see that happening. This is the basic aim of mindfulness meditation.

If we develop sharp enough attention, we can see specifically what feelings and experiences we tend to cling to, or push away. Then we can consciously, gently refrain from pushing or pulling, and let the experience go. We can become free of the stress around a given experience, even while that experience is still happening.

Last year I had sleeping problems which caused by stress. I wanted to sleep, so I tried all kinds of tips which should have made me sleepy. I took a nice hot bath, I drank some kind of weird tea and so on. None of them worked because I wanted to make it happen, not let it happen.

After a couple of days (maybe weeks) trying to get a good night sleep, I gave up: if I’m gonna get some sleep, then fine, if not, well… then whatever. I had this freeing feeling when a thought risen in my mind: I don’t have to deal with it, it’ll go away and I can sleep when my mind wants it too. Basically, I gave up control and went into some kind of “fuck that” state. Things just came and went, which was life-changing.

I haven’t really found out how exactly I did gave up control, but I learned that doing it goes way deeper than simply saying I’m giving it up. If I’m still expecting something to happen, then I’m not giving up control (or letting it go), I’m just looking at it in my mind from the opposite side, but on the same level. I have to throw out the whole thing by leaving it there, not circling around it.