[AKN #100] 100 Sentences For 100 Krappy Weeks
LAUGH: New Luxury Condo Advertisement, LOVE: Text Message Tones As Dance Moves
Sup homies?
Woo! 100 weeks!
I will get to that in a bit, but before I do I just wanted to share something I was thinking about in the wake of this ever assaulting media environment we find ourselves in.
We are primitive creatures living in a modern world. Like literally our nervous systems were designed for a far more deadly era of human history.
Take the sympathetic nervous system (SNS).
We don’t consciously control the SNS, but when it gets triggered it automatically prepares the body for high stress or intense physical activity. This system decides if we are going to fight, flight (run) or freeze (play dead).
Having a system which could so readily set this reaction in motion made a ton of sense when you were encountering lions, tigers, or bears in the wild. But it makes no fucking sense now that the hardest thing most of us do is get out of bed, recover from a hangover, or pretend to like our coworker. Why would you ever need to play dead in 2022 unless you were into some kinky shit?
Even when we need the SNS to act fast, we are so out of practice that we mostly get the choice wrong. Like the other day, my friend was driving me in his Subaru and we pulled up to a 2 way stop sign which he incorrectly interpreted as a 4 way stop sign. After a far too brief stop given traffic conditions, he pressed forward only to immediately realize his mistake. His SNS immediately snapped into action and…he slammed on the brake. There we sat right in the middle of the intersection. Completely stopped. Looking at the traffic coming square at us. Hell of a time to choose freeze, SNS! Thankfully we were still in our abundantly safe world. Like if this was the Serengeti, we would have surely been taken out by lions and tigers, but this was Santa Barbara so we instead got a bunch of exasperated hand gestures from Jaguars and Rams as my friend put it in reverse (it got worse!) to get us out of danger.
Now, given the prosperity of our times, the SNS should be a fun fact we tell at parties about a bygone biological adaptation — relegated to the same status as the appendix. However, it ends up we have found a way to keep our SNS activated ALL THE TIME.
In our silly complicated world, our primitive ass nervous system remains in a constant state of vigilance as it can’t tell the difference between real danger and fake first world danger. Whether we are stressing about hitting make believe deadlines at work, rage scrolling through Twitter, or suppressing that urge to tell our coworker he is an ass hat, we end up in a constant, frenetic state of SNS overdrive.
Stressed out. Over caffeinated. Under slept. Yet never in any real danger.
Always ready to fight or run, but never actually fighting or running.
And you know what that does to us? Wrecks havoc on our bodies.
We remain in a perpetual state of anxiety which slowly but surely breaks us down.
But rather than remedy the situation by sitting a few plays out, we instead wake up every morning and baptize ourselves in hot takes and headlines.
Did you see the COVID numbers? Did you see what the Supreme Court did? Did you see what Florida did? Did you see what happened in Ukraine? Did you see the latest Jan 6th committee bombshell? Did you see what Trump wrote on Truth Social?
Bombarding our SNS to the point of complete adrenal fatigue.
This isn’t good for our long term health.
So why not today for just 5-10 minutes we ask a different question:
Did you stop and breathe?
Because if you take 5-10 minutes to breathe deeply and engage your parasympathetic nervous system, you might feel relaxed for the first time in three years.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: 100 Sentences For 100 Krappy Weeks
I did it. 100 consecutive weeks of publishing this newsletter. Truly astounding.
I know you all want to know how I did it so allow me to put my thinkboi cap on and share with you my wisdom from doing something every single week for 100 weeks.
1. JUST START.
If you are interested in doing anything, you should just start doing it.
Don’t listen to your story about how you need to get your shit together or how you need to wait until you have time.
You’ll never have it together and you will never have enough time.
If you want to do it, just do it.
2. FIND YOUR WAY BY DOING.
You will learn what you like to do by…doing it.
Every artist/writer/musician/comedian/podcaster/OnlyFans star responsible for the content which got you inspired to create your own work discovered their path by doing.
They did not start with a perfect map.
They did not know exactly what to do every step of the way.
They were not guided by some divine force of nature.
They just kept doing something which they had a natural inclination towards doing for a long enough time until they were good enough to be recognized for it.
Do it over and over and over again and you will get good at it.
3. SEND IT TO PEOPLE TO GET FEEDBACK.
Show your work to people and listen to their feedback.
4. REALIZE MOST FEEDBACK SUCKS.
The value in getting feedback is psychological.
You prepared something, had the guts to send it to someone, and listened to how they received it.
Keep doing that over and over again and you will build confidence in yourself.
Conversely, if you want to lose confidence, insist on incorporating every piece of feedback.
No surer path to losing your confidence and starting to sound like everyone else.
5. ACCOUNTABILITY GROUPS ARE A WASTE OF TIME.
“I need a group of other people who are doing the exact same things as me to hold me accountable to doing this” is a stupid pre-condition to set for yourself before acting.
It is a complicated concern you are standing up so you can keep not doing the thing you are avoiding.
Plus if you need to sit on Zoom and have other people shame you into working, you won’t last long.
Accountability is important, but that’s why you are sending something out every week.
The accountability is with the audience.
6. MAKE FRIENDS WITH OTHER PEOPLE WHO DO THE THING YOU DO.
When I think about not sending this newsletter some weeks, I think about all my friends who did it that week and didn’t struggle at all.
Charlie. Matt. Nate. Billy. Greg.
I look at their work and it inspires me to keep going.
This is different than an accountability group where you are insisting on working together.
You are all working asynchronously and holding a standard for one another to follow.
7. FOLLOW YOUR EMOTIONS.
The path to sustainability in pursuits like writing begin and end with following your interests.
If you are not interested in the subject, you will not be able to continue it indefinitely.
How do you find what you are interested in?
Just start.
Experiment with different ideas.
Pay attention to how you feel about it as you go.
8. YOU MAKE THE RULES.
Stop looking for rules.
There are no rules.
You make them up as you go.
Like just because you promised 100 sentences in the headline, doesn’t actually mean that you need to provide 100 sentences.
LAUGH: New Luxury Condo Advertisement
Sometimes the Onion hits too close to home.
LOVE: Text Message Tones As Dance Moves
I know this premise sounds weird, but it is must see.
CLOSING TIME
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
To 100s More,
K.Rapp
Big congrats on 100 weeks!