The biographer Robert Caro is famous for dressing up in a blazer and tie for his work at home, even on Sundays. It is interesting how the choice of clothes reflect how you perceive yourself and how you interface with the world.

Today I was wearing a cashmere button-up, a stretch cotton trouser, and Oxford shoes. The blazer had to be discarded in this jungle of a weather. Sorry, Robert Caro.

I am starting to dress up to honor the work I do, and to respect myself, even if no one is around to validate me or to account for. Today was meant to be one of those silent days where the work is still being done, quietly, without announcing.

Nevertheless, the workplace got some unannounced visitors. They found me writing a report in my private office. I was dressed up and ready to give them a tour of our workplace. I felt ready to go. We exchanged ideas. We had a productive conversation.

Funny how life rewards those who come prepared even in the safest and relaxed days.

Carl Jung asks:

What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.

I suppose for me it was building structures with a wooden geometric puzzle set when I was a toddler. I then discovered Legos at 6 years old, which spurred my imagination to build skyscrapers and then entire cities in my room. My dad, a lawyer, was building new rooms for a growing family, and so I was exposed to piles of masonry sand late in my childhood. I spent countless evenings building damns and digging interconnected tunnels. My confidence continued to grow and so in my pre-pubescent years I built scale models of the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. Then high school happened. And then college and then life.

If I retire early, or my current job/profession gets automated, I would certainly pursue an occupation honing my craft in building architectural models with all sorts of materials and intricacies that a 3D printer would not deliver. My dream job would involve spending countless of hours building neo-classical palaces at a place like Radii Inc. The models would be so intricately detailed with all sorts of cutaways, lighting schemes, and interactive elements. Something like the railroad tracks with the moving trains embedded to the actual rooms of the New-York Historical Society.

My earthly pursuits certainly involve world-building. Creating theatrics. Making things happen. Building things.

The entrepreneur and writer James Clear asked his readers in his Thursday’s 3-2-1 newsletter:

“Many of our habits and beliefs are learned from those who raised us. Which family story are you unconsciously repeating and reenacting? How can you rewrite the script to liberate yourself and the next generation?”

I really like introspective questions like these because it makes you realize we are all processes in constant change, responding to our environment and influencing them back. As much as we want it to be, we are not the drivers of our own lives. All our beliefs, values, and stories are the product of things that happened to us, not things that we made happen from our own volition.

It is as if all conscious creatures were like small interconnected streams, each influencing each other, in the larger river of life.

Today I tried swimming with a few members of the local swimming club in the afternoon. It was a nice break from the workday. One of the swimmers invited me to join an un-official practice session and offered to drive me to the local swimming pool. It was an Olympic sized pool, open air, in the Fairmount Park area of Philadelphia. The group of swimmers was older than me (I was the youngest by a few decades). I was surrounded by a slew of veteran swimmers who knew how the world worked.

How many years have they swum consistently? I was surprised how one or two swam at the same speed as I did. Granted, I was very tired, and I am not a sprinter –yet. But the technique that they have refined over the years clearly paid off. These were older swimmers who stuck together throughout the years, bonded by a common goal: just swimming. When relationships, family, and other commitments/ responsibilities take over your life as an adult, it is hard to keep those friendships. It makes me wonder if swimming, considered to be the most complete sport, is the healthiest way to make long-term friends that carry you to the last stretch of life.

Before swimming, I felt depleted. Before swimming, I felt unmotivated. Before swimming, I found myself doomscrolling. Before swimming, I was doing mindless work. Before swimming, I felt unfocused and distracted. Before swimming, I felt aimless. Before swimming, I sensed dread and doom looming over my head. Before swimming, I doubted my future here.

Swimming saved the day, and perhaps much more.

Our attention is increasingly controlled by predictive algorithms. These algorithms feed us with content that slowly but surely smooth out our little quirks and extravagant ideas. Those odd edges and turns that make us humans with personality. By slowly shaping what we think, they flatten and simplify complex and often paradoxical ideas that otherwise would have emerged in our minds.

Tribalism, rage, oversimplification, left vs right, us vs them, the formulation of an enemy. These all grab our eyeballs in the service of advertisements. If social media is free, it is because we are the product being sold.

The consequences to our public discourse are unsettling. Attitudes on transgender rights predict with high accuracy attitudes towards climate change –two completely unrelated issues. To acknowledge complexity and nuance, to listen to different points of views, to uphold the principle of charity — these are all skills that we are losing. And democracy cannot survive when we no longer listen to each other.

In the age of the surveillance capitalism, to develop habits of mind that make us adopt heterogeneous views makes us unpredictable. It confuses the algorithms. It restores the humanity in us. It makes us more free.

Today at swim practice my performance was not as good as last week. I suspect if the poor rest from the long Pride weekend in New York City had something to do with it. In any case, this was the main set (2x)

• 3 x 200 free consistently fast
• 50 easy
• 50 build
• 50 sprint
• 50 easy

The 200s were particularly challenging. At the beginning of the set one is confident it is easy. At the end of the second lap, one begins to regret not saving energy for the full 200. And then one gets to repeat it again, and again. The life lesson I draw from today’s experience is to be wary of over-confidence and to come up with a strategy to win the long-run, to allocate energy efficiently across multiple battles to win the war.

Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Today I am dealing with people that, despite my best intentions, they come across as confrontational and ill-willed. Alas, such is life. Carry on.

To kick-off the New York City gay marathon (aka Pride weekend), I went to a drag show at 3 Dollar Bill. The theme was Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” and it was organized by Luis Fernando. There were a few girls in the crowd who really knew how to dance.

But what makes a good dancer? I suppose someone who has lost the defeating self-consciousness to give way to a delusional, but confident, state of mind. A good dancer pulls a wide variety of tricks as the rhythm and energy of the room shifts. A good dancer opens up to their surroundings and tries it out with multiple people to see who resonates at a similar frequency. A good dancer is not afraid to be rejected, because after all, they are dancing for themselves. A good dancer brings the better version of their surroundings companions. A good dancer does not give a single consideration of what others may think. 

There was a time when the world went through open borders. Free trade. Free movement of people. New waves of immigration poured into the New World. As they flocked the major urban centers, these ethnic minorities were looked down upon. Discrimination on the base of nationality, what we now call xenophobia, was rampant. Then the greatest city in the world, in sharp contrast to the rest of the New World, elected someone from that minority as their new mayor. The son of a family of immigrants, he defied the corrupt establishment against all odds. His election would usher a major shift in American politics.

His name? Fiorello LaGuardia.